The labour and creativity of millions of workers creates wealth.

The Communist Manifesto: speaking to modern times

In the first of our series on Marx’s classics Jack Farmer looks at the Communist Manifesto

‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” So begins the most important political pamphlet ever written—The Communist Manifesto.

In it Karl Marx and Frederick Engels went further than anyone before them in formulating a critique of the capitalist system.

But they did more than that. They also showed, for the first time, that there was a force with the power to bring that system to a halt and create the basis for a radically different kind of society—the working class.

This was no idle daydream. As the first copies of the manifesto rolled off the press in 1848, Europe was aflame with rebellion.

For Marx and Engels, revolutions were the motor driving history forward.

But the revolutions of 1848 were not against capitalist bosses. They were an attempt to destroy the rotten old regimes of Europe—many of which were run by kings and dictators.

One of the biggest revolts happened in France, where the capitalist bourgeoisie had led a revolution against the king in 1789.

In 1848 many workers thought that the bourgeoisie would again lead the people against the old feudal regime. But it didn’t.

The bosses of the factories were more afraid of their own workers than of the vestiges of feudalism.

Something crucial had changed in society. A new class of capitalists was rapidly displacing the old feudal ruling class.

Their power was based on a new kind of exploitation. People were driven off the land and into factories and mines.

Ordinary people had no choice but to sell their labour power to the capitalists in return for a wage.

Capitalism was unleashing enormous productive potential. But it was inherently unstable, periodically crashing into crisis.

Many people today rightly recognise the Tories as being the ideological zealots of capitalism, and they can appear to be in complete control of society.

But Marx and Engels realised that even the capitalists were not able to control their own system: “Modern bourgeois society...is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

The necessity to accumulate profit “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe”. The process of competitive accumulation—competing in the market to acquire bigger and bigger profits—means that bosses are compelled to attack their workers in order to increase profits.

Innovation

If they don’t, more ruthless companies will force them out of business.

But Marx and Engels’s most crucial innovation was to identify the force that could overthrow this system and begin society anew. For the bourgeois sorcerer has a powerful apprentice—the proletariat.

When trying to justify attacks on our wages and conditions, politicians often say they have to appease the “wealth creators”—rich bosses and bankers—who they claim would otherwise move their assets abroad.

But these people are not the wealth creators—they are the parasites. The labour and creativity of millions of workers creates wealth.

And not only by those who produce physical goods but also those providing services—like firefighters and tube drivers.

This vast class of workers holds the key that can unlock the chains of exploitation.

The final words of the manifesto are a call to arms: “Workers of all countries, Unite!”

Bourgeois politicians rarely miss an opportunity to divide working people. They will use racism, sexism and homophobia to sow the seeds of prejudice.

Their aim is to disempower all workers, employed and unemployed, immigrant or not, making us feel compelled to cling to the edge of the system for fear that, if we don’t, life could get even harder.

But we are not peripheral to society. We work at capitalism’s dark heart—the point of production.

Not all of the Communist Manifesto is applicable today. After all, Marx and Engels were arguing in part against other socialist currents that no longer exist.

But the centre of their argument remains true—that workers themselves can transform society.

Let the Tories tremble!

The road to independent labor political action

Workers need labor party,
say socialist candidates


BY ANGEL LARISCY

NEW YORK—“Working people need to break from the Democrats and Republicans and form our own party—a labor party," said Dan Fein, Socialist Workers Party candidate for New York governor, while campaigning at a meeting entitled "Which Way for the Working Class? Elections 2010 and Beyond," held at Cooper Union here on September 24.

The event, sponsored by Working America and the AFL-CIO, featured AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, along with other guest speakers.

"I think the country is headed into a dark time," Herbert said in his remarks. "The scale of remedies Obama and the Democrats have come up with are not sufficient to the size of the problem." At the same time, he later told the audience, "I can't impress upon people how important it is to vote."

"We need to build an economy that works for everyone," said Trumka. "People are frustrated and angry and confused about who is to blame. Wall Street is to blame, not Obama."

The meeting was not organized to allow participation from the more than 400 in attendance. Instead, panelists chose questions from written cards.

"In my opinion the speakers offered no answers, just get out the vote for Democrats," Gerald Bollinger, a former member of Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, told Fein. "There was nothing on how to take action."

"The labor movement needs to take action," agreed Fein. "We need to mobilize in the face of unrelenting assaults by the employers and their parties—the Republicans and Democrats."

Fein pointed to some of the immediate measures the SWP is calling for along with demands that the labor movement needs to champion: unemployment payments for as long as a worker is without a job; a massive federal public works program to put millions to work; shorten the workweek with no cut in pay to provide more jobs; legalization of all undocumented workers.

"The billionaire families in this country constitute a dictatorship of capital; we need to replace it with workers power," said Fein, as Bollinger purchased a copy of the book Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, by Jack Barnes, and signed up for a Militant subscription.

A promotional article for the September 24 meeting raised the question, "Will the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins of the world exploit that justifiable anger at an economy that isn't working for all into a November election win? Or, will working-class voters see that a right-wing and Republican victory is an open door to the economic policies of the past that drove the economy in the ditch?"

In response to the discussion about why some workers and middle-class layers are attracted to the tea party and its candidates, Herbert said, "What drives the tea party is the economic crisis which faces the country. It's not racism."

Campaigning among the crowd, Sarah Robinett, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from New York, spoke to a man who used to work on Wall Street for Bank of America. He was laid off and now drives an Access-a-Ride van for those who are not able to take mass transportation. "This meeting didn't have anything to offer," he said.

"Many people turning out for events like the Glenn Beck rally have taken blows due to the economic crisis and are looking for answers. They don't see any strong working-class voice from the labor movement," Robinett said. "You can't make capitalism work better. The Socialist Workers Party campaign is about discussing how workers can organize to take power, and when we raise our ideas we find a response."

"The answer is not to vote for the lesser evil,” Robinett told a member of the Transport Workers Union. "I recommend you campaign for the SWP, but more than that, the socialist candidates urge workers to campaign for a labor party based on a fighting union movement."

Nothing but good times ahead

Yield Curve Indicates Rising Recession Odds, Cleveland Fed Says

By Daniel Kruger

Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The narrowing premium Treasury investors demand to hold longer-term government debt signals a rising chance the economy will slip into another recession, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

The probability the economy will begin contracting was 18.5 percent in August, compared with 12.4 percent in June, Joseph G. Haubrich, head of banking and financial institutions research at the Cleveland Fed, and Timothy Bianco, a researcher, wrote in a report published today. They cited a drop in the difference between 10-year note yields and 3-month bill rates to 2.45 percentage points in August from 3.17 percentage points in June.....

War on teachers unions & privatizing "public" edcuation

Documentary films ratchet up pressure on teachers unions

.....Political pressure on teachers unions has been mounting for months, with national attention focused on charter schools, merit pay and other approaches to education that unions generally hate.

Now the pressure is moving to the big screen in a manner sure to pervade the public consciousness in a whole new way. Three new documentary films explore public education, taking stances that have inflamed teachers unions and brought applause from organizations that support charter schools and other union-busting changes.

Our one-sided class war

Union-busting attorney tells West Michigan Policy Forum tips for turning Michigan into Right-to-Work state

....“It’s tough. What you’re telling the existing union movement: ‘We’re going to try to put you out of business.’ They’re going to spend a whole lot more money trying to stop you from doing that than you’re going to spend for it.”

Tough, but not impossible, Berman, of Washington, D.C., said. The labor and employment law attorney launched the Center for Union Facts in 2005, to trace union abuses and tactics.

Fewer than half of the states have right-to-work laws, most launched in the 1950s and 1960s. The latest of the 22 RTW states, Oklahoma, joined the movement in 2002.

Ending the dictatorship of capital

Why socialist revolution
in the U.S. is possible


Below is an excerpt Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible?—A Necessary Debate. The Spanish edition is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. The short book contains two talks by Mary-Alice Waters on this topic as part of a wide-ranging debate at the annual Venezuela book fairs in 2007 and 2008. Waters, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and president of Pathfinder Press, explains why a socialist revolution is not only possible but that revolutionary struggles by working people are inevitable, forced upon them by the employing class’s crisis-driven assaults on their living standards and job conditions—on their humanity. Copyright © 2008 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
What seemingly started as a capitalist crisis centered in credit and banking has now been revealed to be something of a very different dimension. As the de facto bankruptcy of General Motors bears witness, the deepest contraction of industrial production and employment since the opening decades of the last century is accelerating dramatically. And the inevitability of such a contraction has underlaid this worldwide crisis from the beginning.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the Great Depression of the 1930s was not the consequence of the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent banking crises alone. Its roots are found in the violently intensifying competition among capitalist powers in the years leading up to World War I—for colonial possessions, access to markets and raw materials, and inexpensive sources of labor to exploit—and the economic and social breakdowns and financial catastrophe that accompanied that interimperialist slaughter and its aftermath. And it took the global carnage of the Second World War, including its massive physical destruction of capital across Europe and Asia from 1939 to 1945, to lay the basis for the exploiting classes to pull out of that crisis.

That is important. As Lenin stressed, there is no hopeless situation for capitalism. The two decades from 1930 to 1950 showed once again that the finance capitalists, if they are not stopped beforehand, can dig themselves out of any crisis—by inflicting enough bloody defeats on the working classes and destroying enough of the world’s existing industrial capacity.

The only question is the price the toilers will be made to pay.

The only solution is taking the power to inflict these horrors—state power—out of their hands, once and for all.

Is that possible? That is, after all, the question we posed a year ago. And we made the point that revolutionary struggles by the toilers are not only inevitable, they will be initiated at first not by us, “but forced upon us by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied classes.”

The working class in massive numbers never enters on the road of revolutionary struggle lightly, or all at once. Workers sense the stakes, the sacrifices it will entail, the uncertainty. Our class in its majority exhausts other alternatives first, including alternatives to communist political leadership… .

Even before the new stage of the global retrenchment that is now accelerating, however, we have already seen, already been part of, the opening skirmishes of a fighting vanguard of the working class emerging in the United States. We saw this vanguard-in-becoming as millions of workers took to the streets of cities and towns across the country in 2006 and 2007 to demand the legalization of some 12 million immigrants whose documents the U.S. government does not recognize. They retook May Day as a fighting holiday of the working class.

We saw it earlier this year in the defiant response of workers across the Midwest—both immigrant and U.S.-born—to police raids on factories and homes, the roundups and deportations of thousands of workers, the criminal charges of “identity theft” brought against hundreds. That fighting response was captured most dramatically by the women, together with their children, who led the protest marches, proudly displaying the electronic police monitors shackled around their ankles. It was registered by the workers of all nationalities who joined them.

This is a working-class vanguard strengthened by its increasingly international character, by the traditions of struggle being added by workers from around the world to the longtime traditions of working-class battles in the United States itself. This is a working class that is slowly but surely learning in struggle the life-or-death necessity of fighting shoulder to shoulder—as well as how to do so.

The rapidly escalating economic and social crisis has only barely begun to be felt by working people, whether in the United States or internationally… .

Our job today is above all a political one. While the class battles ahead of us are inevitable, their outcome is not. That depends on us. On our capacity to unflinchingly face the truth and speak with clarity to fellow combatants, to learn to rely on our own increasing class solidarity and unity in struggle. To understand, and help other vanguard fighters to understand, that the driving force of all history since the dawn of recorded time has been class struggle, not conspiracies. That the poisons of Jew-hatred and racism rob us of our ability to see that the real problem is the capitalist system itself, and that the real enemy we must defeat is the propertied classes whose wealth and power depend on that system.

Working people the world over are in for decades of intertwined economic, military, social, and political crises, and accompanying explosive class battles. The period we are entering will be more akin to the years from the opening of the twentieth century through World War II than to anything any of us have lived through. The one thing we can be sure of is that our side, our class, will have more than one opportunity to alter the course of history in the only way we can—the way the workers and farmers of Cuba did it fifty years ago, and the way the working people of the tsarist empire did it four decades before them.

Every right to want James to be honored

Save the C.L.R. James library

Scott McLemee explains the legacy of writer and historian C.L.R. James--and
why people are challenging the renaming of the C.L.R. James Library in
London.

ONE OF the turning points in my life came in 1988, upon discovery of the
writings of C.L.R. James. The word "discovery" applies for a couple of
reasons. Much of his work was difficult to find, for one thing. But more
than that, it felt like exploring a new continent.

James was born in Trinidad in 1901, and he died in England in 1989. (I had
barely worked up the nerve to consider writing him a letter.) He had started
out as a man of letters, publishing short stories and a novel about life
among the poorest West Indians. He went on to write what still stands as the
definitive history of the Haitian slave revolt, The Black Jacobins (1938).
His play based on research for that book starred Paul Robeson as Toussaint
L'Ouverture.

In 1939, he went to Mexico to discuss politics with Leon Trotsky. A few
years later--and in part because of certain disagreements he'd had with
Trotsky--James and his associates in the United States brought out the first
English translation of Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844. (By the early 1960s, there would be a sort of cottage industry in
commentary on these texts, but James planted his flag in 1947.)

He was close friends with Richard Wright and spoke at Martin Luther King
Jr.'s church. At one point, the U.S. government imprisoned James on Ellis
Island as a dangerous subversive. While so detained, he drafted a book about
Herman Melville as prophet of 20th century totalitarianism--with the clear
implication that the U.S. was not immune to it.

Settled in Britain, he wrote a book on the history and meaning of cricket
called Beyond a Boundary (1963). By all accounts, it is one of the classics
of sports writing. Being both strenuously un-athletic and an American, I was
prepared to take this on faith. But having read some of it out of curiosity,
I found the book fascinating, even if the game itself remained
incomprehensible.

This is, of course, an extremely abbreviated survey of his life and work.
The man was a multitude. A few years ago, I tried to present a more
comprehensive sketch in this short magazine article [1], and edited a
selection of his hard-to-find writings [2] for the University Press of
Mississippi.

In the meantime, it has been good to see his name becoming much more widely
known than it was at the time of his death more than two decades ago.

This is particularly true among young people. They take much for granted
that a literary or political figure can be, as James was, transnational in
the strongest sense--thinking and writing and acting "beyond the boundary"
of any given national context. He lived and worked in the 20th century, of
course, but James is among the authors the 21st century will make its own.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SO IT is appalling to learn that the C.L.R. James Library [3] in Hackney (a
borough of London) is going to be renamed the Dalston Library and Archives,
after the neighborhood in which it is located. James was there when the
library was christened in his honor in 1985. The authorities insist [4]
that, in spite of the proposed change, they will continue to honor James.

But this seems half-hearted and unsatisfying. There is a petition against
the name change [5], which I hope readers of this column will sign and help
to circulate.

Some have denounced the name change as an insult, not just to James's
memory, but to the community in which the library is located, since Hackney
has a large Black population. I don't know enough to judge whether any
offense was intended, but the renaming has a significance going well beyond
local politics in North London.

C.L.R. James was a revolutionary; that he ended up imprisoned for a while
seems, all in all, par for the course. But he was also very much the product
of the cultural tradition he liked to call Western Civilization. He used
this expression without evident sarcasm--a remarkable thing, given that he
was a tireless anti-imperialist. Given his studies in the history of Africa
and the Caribbean, he might well have responded as Gandhi did when asked
what he thought of Western Civilization: "I think it would be a good idea."

As a child, James reread Thackeray's satirical novel Vanity Fair until he
had it almost memorized; this was, perhaps, his introduction to social
criticism. He traced his ideas about politics back to ancient Greece. James
treated the funeral oration of Pericles [6] as a key to understanding
Lenin's State and Revolution.

And there is a film clip that shows him speaking to an audience of British
students on Shakespeare--saying that he wrote "some of the finest plays I
know about the impossibility of being a king." As with James's
interpretation of Captain Ahab as a prototype of Stalin, this is a case of
criticism as transformative reading. It's eccentric, but it sticks with you.

Harold Bloom might not approve of what James did with the canon. And Allan
Bloom would have been horrified, no doubt about it. But it helps explain
some of James's discomfort about the emergence of African-American studies
as an academic discipline. He taught the subject for some time as a
professor at Federal City College, now called the University of the District
of Columbia--but not without misgivings.

"For myself," he said in a lecture in 1969, "I do not believe that there is
any such thing as Black studies. There are studies in which Black people and
Black history, so long neglected, can now get some of the attention they
deserve...I do not know, as a Marxist, Black studies as such. I only know
the struggle of people against tyranny and oppression in a certain political
setting, and, particularly, during the past 200 years. It's impossible for
me to separate Black studies from white studies in any theoretical point of
view."

James' argument here is perhaps too subtle for the Internet to propagate. (I
type his words with mild dread at the likely consequences.) But the
implications are important--and they apply with particular force to the
circumstance at hand, the move to rename the C.L.R. James Library in London.

People of Afro-Caribbean descent in England have every right to want James
to be honored. But no less outspoken, were he still alive, would be Martin
Glaberman--a white factory worker in Detroit who later became a professor of
social science at Wayne State University. (I think of him now because it was
Marty who was keeping many of James' books in print when I first became
interested in them.)

James was the nexus between activists and intellectuals in Europe, Africa
and the Americas, and his cosmopolitanism included a tireless effort to
connect cultural tradition to modern politics. To quote from the translation
he made of a poem by Aimé Cesaire: "No race holds the monopoly of beauty, of
intelligence, of strength, and there is a place for all at the rendezvous of
victory."

Having C.L.R. James's name on the library is an honor--to the library. To
remove it is an act of vandalism. Please sign the petition [7].

First published at Inside Higher Ed [8]

Go to www.ipetitions.com/petition/saveclrjameslibrary/ to sign the petition.