Revolution in the 21st Century...

R is for Revolution is the 21st century
(transcript of talk i gave)

When socialists talk about the possibility of revolution happening in the 21st century it’s not about a mere desire for revolution on our part, an ’ideal’ that popped into someone’s ’enlightened’ head which then inspires them to go off and one by one recruit people to change the world, or about trying to impose some such view that revolution will occur, its about deducing from reality itself those trends that inevitably push towards revolutionary situations whether we choose them or not.

In other words, to ask what is the nature of the capitalist economy? What kind of contradictions does it engender, does it create? And what kinds of actions does an anarchic economy of this sort constantly push people towards whatever they subjectively believe?
The Capitalist system as a whole is now in the midst of a severe crisis. In 2009 banks worldwide collapsed, the Irish government nationalised Anglo Irish Bank lumbering every household in the country with an extra 20,000 euro in debt.They raided the National Pensions Reserve Fund’s 17 or so Billion and handed half over to the banks.
The crash had been overdue for a long time, with rates of profit over the last two decades never recovering to their levels during the postwar ’golden age’ of capitalism which ended in the mid 70’s. This low rate of profit leading inevitably to Capitalists chasing profitable ventures, from dot com bubbles to the over inflated housing market. Neoliberalism since the mid to late 70’s has been a 30 year assault on the conditions of the international working class with the share of societies product going to profits constantly increasing at the expense of wages. Workers produce far more yet, in relation to their product, see returned far less.
So constant cuts were declared from the seat of every government while, at the same time political generalisation has been taking place on a massive scale in the last few years, in response, not only to the economic crisis, but has been developing since the mass mobilisations against the War on Iraq in 2003, and now, the protests against the slaughter in Gaza and the threat of economic collapse.

The threat of war looms constantly on the international horizon as capitalist states are ever more tempted to open up markets or solve economic problems militarily. We see U.S. ships parked in the Black Sea after the Georgian conflict pushing close to Russia and we see the Russian navy placing ships off the coast of Venezuela. The US army is positioned right across the Middle East. As recessions deepen war becomes an attractive way to grab another country’s resources and to stifle opposition to policy at home.
How will people respond? We can make the answer more concrete by lookin at how they have responded time and time again in periods of crisis in the past.


Worker’s democracy

In Paris in 1871, Russia 1905 and again in 1917, Hungary and Germany in1918,Limerick in 1919, Italy in1920 Spain in 1936, Hungary in 1956, Chile in 73, Portugal in 1974, Iran in 79 and Poland in 1980 we saw a form of self organisation emerge amongst the working class in response to various crisis - the workers circle,called a ’soviet’ in Russia, or ’condone’ in Chile, a ’Shora’ in Iran, a form of organic direct democracy.
At a certain point in every severe crisis the coordination of working class strikes and protests and the absolute necessity of self regulation of working class communities sees these community and workplace circles emerge as a direct outgrowth and natural continuation of the struggle. These forms of self organisation weren’t the creation of any marxist brain but time and time again are formed by the working class’s instinctive need for unity and for organisation in a time of massive crisis.

For example -The Commune of Paris in 1871 was a response to the betrayal of the Parisian workers into the hands of the Prussian army under Bismarck by the cowardly French Ruling class under the infamous Theirs. If the french ruling classes weren’t prepared to defend the city the workers decided that they would. They elected delegates from each area of Paris instantly recallable and mandated to follow the instructions of their electors, placed on the average wage to prevent corruption, they seperated the church and state declaring religion to be a private matter, they elected their judges, armed the population for self defence, food distribution was organised. They eventually suffered defeat as they couldnt spread the revolt to other towns. But those 2 months demonstrated the capability of the working class to self organise and it was from this that Marx generalised and worked out the developed form of his theory of the state.

Russia in 1905 and again during the revolution of 1917 saw Soviets arise. The first Soviet arose as a vehicle through which the workers could negotiate with the tsarist goverment but took on more and more the running of the daily lives of working class people until there arose a situation of dual power. The self governing working class alongside the institutions of the old power. The movement of 1905 was ultimately defeated but the Russian working class had taken on board lessons they would re-apply in 1917. Alongside parliament organs of working class self government superior in every way to the old power emerged once again after the February Revolution 1917. Lenin, in april, called for a challenge for power. ’All power to the soviets’ was his cry and it wasn’t until October that this slogan was fulfilled, with even Menshevik rivals of Lenin’s Bolsheviks declaring- ”what we have before us is nothing other than a rising of the working class”.


Dual Power

Two societies sit side by side during a crisis, one of slave owners the other of those who refuse to be slaves, the working class develops an urgent need, a need for a society of it’s own. When things reach this state, of Dual Power, then the choice has never been between the continuation of the movement from below and the old system, it becomes a choice between the fight to defend the organs of working class and community democracy against the rage and fury of the ruling class who will not accept any challenge to their economic dictatorship over the workers and society at large. So in 1917, for example, it was never a choice between Soviets and the official Constituent Assembly but between Soviets and reaction, the Assembly a cover for the forces of General Kornilov and others of his ilk to organise behind until they felt strong enough to destroy and root out all traces of worker’s democracy.
Trotsky once remarked that if the Russian Revolution hadn’t moved towards the seizure of power by the workers in October 1917 then fascism would have had a Russian name as opposed to an Italian. Fascism would have been born in Russia 1917 as opposed to Italy in the 20’s.

The same dynamic has developed again and again - in Chile in 1973, where the election of Salvador Allende backed by a strong workers movement in the workplaces was too much to bear for the likes of General Pinochet, the Chilean ruling class and their rotten friends in Washington. Here though workers never challenged for power to be transferred to their own organs, the cordones, but put their faith in the capitalist state. Time and time again a movement that puts it’s trust in the state has been crushed, the state is a weapon of the ruling class – judges, the civil service, the police, prisons etc are tools of oppression and Allende and the Chilean working people paid a terrible price to gain this knowledge with over 30,000 deaths. The defeat of the movement in Germany many years before saw humanity pay an even dearer price for failure to challenge the state, which ultimately, unleashed Nazi barbarism, first upon the worker’s movement and then, upon the Jews.


The 21st century

Can 21st century workers overthrow capitalism though? ’People have too much stuff’ is one of the arguments thrown back at socialists, but the question of the need for socialism isn’t just a quantitative question, that is a question of higher wages or a question of more things, its about the quality of life people have under capitalism, no matter how many TV sets a working class family acquire they still, as individuals when they go to work every single day, have absolutely no control over their lives. The 5 biggest corporations in the world are run by about 40 people employ hundreds of thousands of workers and have an output greater than the Middle East and Africa combined. Working class people have absolutely no say in the running of these or any enterprise that their labour builds. These giant corporations, which grow from the soil of competition as during every recession some firms go bankrupt and others buy them up thereby growing bigger, are completely unaccountable to the concerns of the thousands of lives they shape. Work is a dictatorship with a heirarchy of foots soldiers, managers and, at the top, the handful of ’generals’(who themselves are nothing but slaves to the blind forces of the market).

Anyway you can have two TVs in your house and still weep with fear when the bills arrive and fret over your children. You can have an iPod and still be so filled with hopelessness instilled in you by an absolute lack of prospects that you go out and commit acts of vandalism. Or you can internalise all this pressure and alienation and get stress related cancer when you hit middle age. This is the reality of working class life under capitalism in the ’best’ of times. Their booms never last though and all they seem to bring in hindsight are higher rents, higher food prices and stress from overwork.
But even from the point of view of standard of living we can see right now that the once common expectation that every working family could own a home is being stripped away with repossesions in Ireland (and the U.S. and U.K.) reaching record highs. There are 53,000 families on the housing waiting lists while 300,000 properties lie empty. The minimum expectations of most working class people can not now be fulfilled. Can they be sure that their children will have a better standard of living than they acquired? Not anymore.

The working class has always evolved and changed but the central aspect of working class existence, the fact that we have nothing to sell except our labour power, has not changed.
Once you’ve spent the share of your wages that goes on immediate consumption i.e. food, rent, bills and then maybe saved a little (which will now be impossible!) you are forced to return to work the next week and start the whole process again. Workers are still slaves to the economic necessity of returning to work, the choice is never ’will I work for a capitalist or not’ but ’which capitalist, out of necessity, must i work for’.
White collar workers work in conditions which more and more resemble the factory of old. Inputing numbers all day long. They too have nothin to sell except labour power. In fact yesterdays ’skilled’ workers have always been ’proletarianised’, engineers in the 1800’s were strangely seen at the time as a ’priveleged’ layer amongst workers but 30 or 40 years later they were at the forefront of union activity and worker’s struggles.


Conclusion

Women have entered the workforce in huge numbers in the last few years and have transformed society in the process as they no longer could accept the hold of the church over decisions relating to control of their own bodies and sexual attitudes. More people right across the face of this planet are working class than ever before. The working class of south Korea alone is bigger than the entire working class at the time Marx wrote. Units of Capital of massive dimensions and more concentrated then ever before exist now across state lines and borders linking people into a gigantic social productive process which need not be all in the name of the blind accumulation of profit, these enormous resources, unimagined in any previous age, if harnessed for social need could liberate humanity from so much unnecessary strife.

We have means of communication never before imagined, we can web chat instantly with people on the ground in warzones, we can relate news of struggle in a second to every single corner of the globe. Never has humanity’s bright future been so close to our grasp.
’The emancipation of the working class is the act of working class’ but we have seen that in the course of every massive movement from below a dual power situation arises. Protests, mass strikes, movements in the communities, on the streets, in workplaces get to the point where the goverment will attack from fear of losing control. We have to respond by defending our own forms of popular democracy, the revolution is a defence of the organic forms of working class self organisation that emerge in the course of every struggle.
Not only is revolution objectively possible but absolutely necessary as we balance on the brink of environmental collapse, permanent war and deep crisis in the economy.
21st century revolution not a fantasy….it is daily becoming a living breathing reality.