Category Archives: Fascism

Thousands march in defence of refugees in Dublin

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When the war in Ukraine broke out the Western powers rushed to supply weapons to the Ukrainian state, which became the purported bearer of freedom for the whole of Europe, if not the rest of the world because much of the rest of the world understood that the United States and Europe were not defenders of freedom.

In Ireland the government parties floated the idea of the state joining NATO so it too could supply weapons, but the rapid response by the Irish people showed that this idea was very unpopular and would require a lot more work to force through.  After an apparent slight from Volodymyr Zelensky about the Irish contribution to the Ukrainian cause the government parties proclaimed that their contribution would be to provide a refuge for Ukrainians fleeing the war.

Very quickly government ministers were predicting that as many as 200,000 Ukrainian refugees were to be supplied with accommodation, which on the face of it seemed incredible.  This was a government and state that had proved incapable of solving a homelessness problem of around 10,000, while massive house price increases had made buying one impossible for many, rents were astronomical, and much of the newly built housing stock was dangerous or becoming rapidly uninhabitable.

However an unprecedented propaganda campaign ensured that the cause of the Ukrainian state received much sympathy, and did so in Ireland, so much so that a state notorious for corruption and reactionary nationalism was embraced by almost everyone from right-wing governments to much of the left.  Ironically this left has just recalled thirty years since the massive anti-war demonstrations against the imminent invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain etc.  Today this left not only supports war but supports the US and Britain etc. supplying arms to ensure that the war continues to be fought, by a country that itself provided soldiers to occupy Iraq following the invasion.

Opposition to war has become support for war and opposition to western imperialism has become defence of western imperialism in its support for a state that wants to join its imperialist alliance.  From the cause of death and destruction and oppression, these powers are accepted as defenders against these calamities, and the massive drive to rearmament has left this left trailing behind, endorsing the supply of weapons to its new ally while stuck with a past politics that recognises western imperialism as a prime source of war and oppression in the world.  Of course, something will have to give here.

This is the first context to the refugee crisis in Ireland but one that was all but ignored by the demonstration in support of refugees in Dublin on Saturday, even though the massive increase in refugee numbers is mainly accounted for by Ukrainians.  Not one of the left leaflets distributed at the demonstration mentioned the war, or so much as mentioned Ukraine, and I saw only one makeshift flag in Ukrainian colours, with no identifiable Ukrainian contingent on the demonstration.

The second context is the crises in housing and health services and stress on the provision of state services more generally.  There is a valid argument that younger immigration will provide greater services than they will consume, but this will not immediately be the case and especially with so many Ukrainians being women with young children. Childcare costs can be extortionate in Ireland.  When we also consider that refugee provision has been placed in mainly working class areas or in small rural towns, but not in more affluent and middle class areas, we can see why it would cause resentment   Opinion polls have shown both support for refugees but also concern that the country has taken too many.  There are also widespread complaints of lack of consultation with local communities before placing refugees in accommodation.  Behind all this lies both valid complaints that there are inadequate services but also racism.

One reason why ‘war’ and ‘Ukraine’ was unmentioned at the demonstration is that the target of much racist invective, protest and attacks has been against non-Ukrainian asylum seekers.  This includes men from Georgia and Albania, who have been particularly targeted.  One can’t help but believe that were Georgia invaded by Russia or Albania by Serbia the Irish state would be proclaiming their needs and absolute requirement for emergency assistance.

The state and its governing parties have led the way into a crisis in which the far right and racist forces have mobilised in local areas to attack refugees and turn local people against them, with lurid stories of sexual harassment by refugees against Irish women and other racist tropes learnt from abroad.  Irish people and existing asylum seekers have seen their demand for accommodation grow, and their needs be unmet, only to witness the government parties proclaim emergency measures to accommodate Ukrainian refugees.

The prioritisation of Ukrainians and creation of double standards when it comes to treatment of those seeking refuge in Ireland has not prevented the state’s efforts to assist Ukrainians from staggering from crisis to crisis with no evidence of the ability to create the required capacity in the short term or existence of a longer-term plan.  This is not in the least surprising.  The Irish state has failed to provide adequate housing for the pre-existing population and its health services have continually been in crisis. It has been silent on complaints that large numbers of refugees will not help this situation while it has all but ignored the full needs it has created.

It has therefore opened the door to racist and xenophobic arguments and agitation and has now started to row in behind them.  It has promised to clamp down harder on asylum seekers while it proclaims the necessity to support more Ukrainian refugees, with the threat of more deportations of the former.  It makes claims of their cheating to be here in the first place as a result ”criminal gangs”’ and human “traffickers”; makes statements denying that single men are being placed in accommodation, as if they were indeed the threat proclaimed by racists, and the new Taoiseach Varadkar has now declared that immigration policy must become “firm and hard”.

The real failure of the state and government parties to provide adequate state services is being blamed on refugees by the far right, which has not targeted the largest group of arrivals–Ukrainians fleeing war–but instead refugees who are not so obviously white and ‘deserving’.  The state, on the other hand, has also declared these refugees uniquely deserving while it supports a war that has caused them to flee their homes in the first place, with continued support only promising more to follow.  This combination is one more reactionary consequence of a reactionary war.

The demonstration on Saturday was called after increasing anti-immigrant protests by the far right that have grown in number, particularly noticeable because of their previous absence and the naive and stupid notion that the Irish (of all people!) were immune from the racism that has grown across Europe.  I went down to it from Belfast to support it, see its size and its composition and because it was important to rebuff the mobilisations of the far right for whom control of the streets is a strategic objective.  A large demonstration would signal where it stood in terms of such mobilisation and the terms on which the whole argument could be waged.  A large demonstration of the left would not be enough to meet these requirements.

In the event the demonstration was larger than such a mobilisation, consisting of a wide cross-section of the population, from outside of the left or who it would normally be able to mobilise.  In this it was impressive and just about achieved its purpose.  It was not however, in my estimate and those of a couple of comrades, 50,000 strong, but perhaps just more than half that number.  It was largely Dublin-based and did not have the predominantly working class composition of the water charges demonstrations or of the very large demonstration against austerity that followed the crash of the Celtic Tiger.  It did however contain a significant number from ethnic minorities and from the left and some trade unions. These were predominantly its activists and not significant numbers from the trade union membership, which would have made it much larger.

The left has built itself an electoral base in Dublin and Cork and its grass-roots organisation should be well placed to defeat attempts by the far right to organise in local areas, but it is not quite as simple as that.  Building an electoral base is not the same as building a movement.  People before Profit seemed to be aware of this, as it faces defeat by Sinn Fein in the next elections, and its main message on the demonstration was for people to join it.  Unfortunately, it is not an organisation with the capacity to contain a mass membership and an electoral base is not an organisational one.  Its leaflet called for a left government and for everyone to support its legislative motion in the Dáil on housing, proposals that are hardly adequate.

Any left government will require a Sinn Fein leadership and its left credentials are threadbare, even if it may have the capacity and scope for some social-democratic measures.  What such a government could not be is a working class one – but then a ‘left’ government does not have to be working class, the term ‘left’ in an Irish context does not imply very much.  An organisation that thinks the role of working class activity is to support votes in parliament has got it arse about face.  Other left leaflets pointed to the need for working class unity and for it to organise and mobilise, but this requires challenging the bureaucratic character and leadership of the trade unions and these left organisations neither prioritise this nor have the capacity to be exemplars of healthy democratic organisation themselves.

It also requires the correct political approach, and too much of the demonstration was an expression of liberalism and not socialist politics.  Not so long ago the left exposed the inane character of abstract nouns, such as the ‘war on terror’ but now it appears not to object to the demand to oppose ‘hate’ or support ‘diversity’, as if there are not some things, such as racism, that should be hated.  Supporting ‘diversity’ is a bit like declaring your support for gravity, it doesn’t matter if you do or you don’t, it will still exist.  To paraphrase Terry Eagleton, a diverse number of racists would not be a step forward.  If you want the opposite of division it is called unity, and then you need to say who should unite and for what purpose.

The rise of the far right has been prepared by the failure for years of the Irish State and government parties to provide adequate state services for the majority of the Irish people, and for its similar failure in relation to those refugees it has, and has not, encouraged to come to Ireland.  Its policies have sewn the division between natives and refugees and between first class refugees who are white–and victims of a war it has supported–and those second class others seeking refuge who it has determined are a problem.

The crucial issues facing Irish workers, Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers are therefore the same with the same guilty forces responsible for their plight.  Their common need should be clear, as is the need for working class unity and for working class organisation to express it. Many organisations supported the demonstration in Dublin on Saturday.  Those with a commitment to the interests of the working class, including Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers, should form a united organisation that can provide a programme for further action at national and local level that offers not only opposition to the far right but an alternative.

Visiting Sachsenhausen

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When I visited Dachau concentration camp, I was shown round by a young Irishman.  When I visited Sachsenhausen I was given the tour by a German man in his sixties, who said he was among the first to have the story of the camps and the Nazis taught at school.  It should be remembered that Sachsenhausen was in the old German Democratic Republic.

The visitors to the camp on a dreary and damp day were made up of groups of tourists like myself and school parties of German teenagers; some of whom were having chats with their friends, but most of whom were in various states of interest, dismay and shock, while their teachers explained the exhibits and left them to wander round the various displays.

The camp had a small bookshop at the entrance, featuring ‘Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936 – 1945 Events and Developments’, which notes correctly that the buildings that survive in the camp do not divulge its history.

The short book quotes a Dutch camp survivor – Ab Nikolaas – that the camp was primarily screaming, stench, cramped conditions and the violence that existed in and around the prisoners.  Everyday life resembled a perpetual succession of exceptional circumstances, despite, or rather because of, the daily routine imposed by the SS guards, dictated by them to the smallest detail.  Total control and order was accompanied by arbitrary terror, torture and murder in a hierarchy within what was the “most extremely class-ridden society.” (Primo Levi)

It is therefore impossible to appreciate the horrors of the concentration camps by visiting them.  Even visitors at the time of their operation were met with blooming flowers and well-tended lawns, with one newly arrived prisoner admitting in 1939 that “I thought I was going to go mad over it.”

Inside the overcrowded barracks lay the reality of foul and diseased bodies, eating rotting food and throwing up in the process while still starving, leaving prisoners to steal food from each other.  In 1941, when a young French prisoner took two carrots from a sheep pen he was battered to death by the SS.  The alternative of starvation however, could lead to exhaustion, illness, disease, punishment and then death.

Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built less than 25 miles north of Berlin in Oranienburg in 1936 following visits to the site by Heinrich Himmler, the first of many such camps that also included Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen and Ravensbrück.  It came to rival that of Dachau as the new model for such camps, specifically built to function as sites of terror, and was originally planned to hold six thousand prisoners at a time when the entire existing system held less than five.

The camp also contained the infamous wrought-iron slogan “Work makes Free” on its gates, as in Dachau, Flossenbürg and Auschwitz, while the guards would taunt prisoners by pointing to the crematorium – “there is a path to freedom, but only through the chimney!”

While some Sachsenhausen camp prisoners would be released, some would never, especially including those infected with the “poison of Bolshevism.”  Some were former SS guards, fallen from grace, who were housed in relatively lenient conditions and who were often employed to attack other prisoners.

The camp was infamous for its death squad, made up of SS NCOs – block leaders who supervised prisoners in their barracks and in labour details.  Death came to one prisoner because he was too slow to greet a guard and to another because he stumbled, while others were killed because of who they were.  The Austrian state prosecutor Karl Tuppy, who had tried the Nazi killers of the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss in 1934, was beaten for twenty minutes until another prisoner was called in to drag him away – “His face was gone.  Just a piece of completely undefined meat, full of blood, cuts, the eyes completely swollen up.”

Another prisoner in 1939, a former union official, told his guards that he was previously a Prussian officer in the First World War who now had two sons fighting at the front.  He was battered for days, dying after only two weeks in the camp.

Along with Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen became a centre of violence following the invasion of Poland, an invasion the Nazis blamed on Poland itself, accusing the Poles of horrific war crimes – Hitler for example claimed that the Poles had butchered ethnic Germans “like animals”.

One Polish-born Jew from Berlin became incarcerated in Sachsenhausen after first managing to board a plane to London without a visa, arriving in the city only to be sent back by the British immigration authorities, and finding himself a prisoner in the camp only two weeks later.  He later became one of the last Jewish prisoners to be released by the Nazis, following the order from Himmler in March 1940 that no more could be released except those with valid visas who could emigrate by the end of April.

Many other Jews died in the camp within days or weeks of arrival.  Extermination of European Jews thus became a reality within the concentration camps before it became Nazi policy outside, although the camps at this time held only selected Jews and did not yet become the centre of anti-Jewish policy.

Mass murder became common just later, with the first coordinated killing across several of the camps in November 1940, when more than 200 Poles were murdered in Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and Auschwitz.

In July 1941 the Nazi occupiers of France repressed a mass strike of one hundred thousand in the Pas-de-Calais coalfield, as workers protested against poor working conditions, unpaid wages and starvation.  Of the 430 miners arrested, 244 were sent to Sachsenhausen with more than 100 of them failing to survive their incarceration.

The first Soviet prisoners of war arrived in early autumn 1941 following the German invasion, many dying in the trains that brought them to the camps from the East.  Their treatment, some of which came to public attention, was so bad that one SS boss thought it might sully the reputation of the SS among local public opinion.  For him the transports were unnecessary, since they were “going to die anyway”, as many of them did upon arrival.  So quickly that the SS did not even bother to register them.

The mass murder of the prisoners in Sachsenhausen, as usual justified by claims that German prisoners had been killed by the Soviets, was planned in August and required construction of a special killing chamber.  The first of these prisoners arrived on 31 August, disoriented, dishevelled and dirty, young and worn out.  The photographs taken for an SS publication ‘The Subhuman’ were published to show that their appalling condition was proof of their subhuman nature.

In the separated section of the camp the Soviet prisoners were told that they were to be medically examined, and therefore had to undress before being led individually to what looked like a doctor’s surgery, within which was an SS man dressed in a white coat.  After appearing to carry out some medical checks that were designed to discover any gold fillings, the prisoner was led to a smaller room with an upright length of wood fixed to the wall, which appeared to be used to measure height and to which the prisoner would stand with his back to the wall.

A small slit in the wall at the wooden pole was used to shoot the unsuspecting prisoner in the back of the neck, sometimes with a dum dum bullet, while a gramophone playing in the first room helped cover the noise of the shot in the execution room, which was itself sound-proofed. Within ten weeks in the autumn of 1941 over 10,000 had been shot.  The newly arrived prisoners rarely lived longer than a couple of days.

After two weeks, some SS bigwigs were shown the set-up in action; the new operation recommending itself to Himmler because the murderers did not have to look their victims in the eye.  However, the enthusiasm of the killers varied, with those less enthused branded as a ‘limp dick.’

Faced with growing labour shortages, Nazi policy moved away from these mass killings to using the prisoners as slave labour, although by this stage the capture of Soviet prisoners on the scale witnessed during the first months of the war was not to be repeated.

At this time, while death among the Polish and Jewish prisoners was common, there were no plans to kill all of them, while the opposite was the case for the Soviet POWs who arrived between September and November 1941. When gas chambers were introduced in 1943 the first victims were again Soviet prisoners.  The camp had come a long way since 1937 when in one month only one prisoner had died.

On May 2 1942 Sachsenhausen again became the site of mass execution, this time of 71 Dutch resistance fighters.  Two hundred and fifty Jews were also murdered between May 28 and 29, most having been taken from Berlin, while some were selected randomly from the prisoners inside the neck-shooting barracks built for the Soviet POWs.  A month later, during a visit to the camp, Himmler ordered that the remaining Jewish prisoners be deported from German soil.

Some however were retained because of their skills and were also freed from the worst treatment they could normally have expected being Jewish. A small group, employed to forge foreign banknotes and stamps, grew from 29 to more than 140, most of whom had arrived from Auschwitz.  The better treatment made them feel “as if I had come from hell onto heaven”, as one prisoner put it.   Since the project had to be kept secret, the SS considered Jews perfect for it since they could be killed as necessary.  The prisoners did however survive, as did their banknotes, which continued to circulate for years afterwards.

By this time Sachsenhausen had already provided prisoners for the construction in 1938 of what was planned to be the largest and most advanced brick factory in the world.  But this most advanced factory was built in the most primitive circumstances imaginable and in working conditions brutal even by concentration camp standards.  It was built and operated on the basis that the dead could easily be replaced.

In the end this massive SS project was a disaster and not a single usable brick was manufactured.  The SS covered up its incompetence by demolishing and rebuilding the factory and killing yet more prisoners in the process, even eventually producing usable bricks from clay pits described as “hell inside hell” by the prisoners forced to work in them, though never making near the original targeted quantity.

Those too ill to work or simply not employed were sometimes crammed into barracks where they had to stand all day, with just a brief break at lunch time; pressed like sardines, forbidden to move, talk, sit or lean against a wall, with no motion at all permitted and quickly punished if it was attempted.

From 1942 collaboration between the SS and capitalist industry accelerated as prisoners increasingly worked in factories outside the camps, in Dachau with BMW, and in Sachsenhausen with Heinkel.  The camp became a model of such cooperation, with capitalist enterprises such as AEG and Siemens involved. Prisoners were also increasingly employed in clearing bomb damage, building shelters and burying the dead outside the camp.  By summer 1943 however no more than perhaps thirty thousand, of two hundred thousand prisoners, were working in satellite camps engaged in war production or clearing war damage.

As Soviet forces drew near in 1945 the SS began to prepare evacuation of the camp with large groups of prisoners being brought to Sachsenhausen from the subsidiary camps, many dying on the way or being killed when they got there.  On 21 April, the first of over 33,000 were marched 20 to 40 kilometres a day from the main camp towards the Baltic sea on a ‘death march’ that many thousand did not survive.  Eventually the SS guards ran off and the remaining prisoners were found by units of the Soviet and US armies.  In the main camp 3,400 were found by Soviet and Polish troops, although even with medical care at least 300 did not survive.

Upon liberation the camp stayed open, as did others that were used by the Americans, British and French, although the new Stalinist regime kept Sachsenhausen open until 1950, to house those seen as posing a threat to the new regime, including not only Nazis but also some of their former opponents.  Neglect, indifference and ineptitude led to twenty-two thousand deaths among the one hundred thousand prisoners kept in three of the former concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen.

In 1961, the Stalinist regime erected its own memorial, built on the grounds of ‘Station Z’, the site of the crematorium ovens, gas chamber and firing squad area that had been built in 1942, and previously blown up by the East German authorities in 1952/53.  In erecting its memorial the authorities consolidated the foundations and remains of the ovens and erected a large monumental roof, which was demolished and replaced in 2004/05 due to its deterioration.  ‘Station Z’ was the cynical SS term for the site of a prisoner’s last moments of life.

Further photographs of my visit are on the Facebook page.

An exchange of views on the French Presidential election

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The following is a short exchange of views on Facebook on the French Presidential election which is taking place today:

LMcQ – See if you can guess which candidate’s leaflet has three explicitly racist pledges.  I’m struggling with this “they’re as bad as each other in the final analysis” line of argument.

Sráid Marx:  I don’t think that’s the argument being put. What about – how will Macron defend workers against fascism (or however one wants to characterise the FN) by implementing an austerity offensive against them, pushing them even further into the pursuit of bad alternatives (like FN)? And how will you explain to them that when you said they should vote for this offensive you didn’t actually mean you supported this offensive. I seem to remember we have been here before with a Le Pen and some geezer called Chirac and voting for the less worst alternative has just brought us to here. At what point, or how bad, would the lesser alternative have to be before you said – stop! The workers cannot lend support to those who simply prepare the way for the fascists and who you must at all times regard as your enemy. And if this is a frightening prospect to you that is only because your only defence ultimately is your own strength and this you cannot delegate – and certainly not to shits like Macron!

RM: Macron is an immediate short term defence against fascism simply because he is the only possible non-fascist outcome at this point. Everything starts from the present. The Chirac argument here is interesting. Yes, voting Chirac to defeat le Pen brought us to ‘now’ but that is surely a better option than to be looking back after 15 years of fascism in power!

Sráid Marx:  Everything starts from when it starts, which at any point in time is usually not the present. Today the weakness of the workers’ movement arises from its failure to successfully oppose austerity and build its own alternative political position in the past. This weakness is not addressed one iota by voting for Macron, in fact it is set back and will always be set back as long as the Macron’s of this world win and the likes of a Le Pen can be waived in front of us to get everyone to vote for the lesser evil. We know this because, as I said, it has happened before. An immediate defence against fascism? But the present passes into what we view now as the future and we will be weaker because we believed that Macron is some sort of defence. If he is one at the election then by definition his success is also a continuing defence, or do we only oppose and fight him unless there is an election. At what point do we say that workers must create their own alternative and cannot support the politicians and policies that brought us to this horrible choice? That is the political choice that we must take; that it is not on the ballot paper is more than unfortunate but that is the case nevertheless. Having our political choices determined by electoralism is not the way forward but is often a trap.

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SD: In an election which can only have one of two outcomes the alternative to the lesser evil is the greater evil.

Sráid Marx: Of course you are correct, but the question is whether the lesser EVIL is actually too high a price to pay.

F-CL: Well, if you don’t go with the lesser, surely the question is, is the greater evil too high a price to pay?

Sráid Marx:  Yes, a very good answer. But it still leaves you with the option of determining that both evils cannot be endorsed and that the elections leave you with no acceptable choice and to reject the choice given to you. Or do you believe that in all elections one must vote and endeavour to find the lesser evil?

F-CL:  It depends on circumstances … if there is a real, public abstain campaign and a refusal to vote can be seen to have meaning in the election then I think not voting could be the best option. And having “None of the above” on the voting paper – so you can actually show rejection of all – would be good (in fact, I think we should have a policy of including this option in all votes). But in my experience it is very rare for this to be the case, and going for “None of the above” would encourage people to not maximise the opposition to the greater evil, so even if “None” were an option I think I would usually come down in favour of lesser evil

The other alternative justifying not voting is for the candidates to be as close to as awful as each other to make any differentiation pointless. But this awfulness also involves assessment of the perceived consequences of who gets voted in. Even if Macron and Le Pen are close to each other (in fact I don’t think they are), Le Pen getting in would boost the far right far more than Macron would and you have to take that into account as well as the politics of the candidates

SD:  Surely the issue is about which outcome leaves the working class best placed to fight. In almost all circumstances the working class and the oppressed are going to be able to resist a lesser evil better than they could resist a greater evil, otherwise it wouldn’t be a greater evil.

Sráid Marx:  Not if they are disarmed politically by believing their class enemy is in any sense their protector against reaction. Workers must be taught again and again that they share interests as a class and not with liberals or other bourgeois figures.

SD: That’s quite a big if that you have inserted there. You think it is possible to convince people threatened by the rise of the FN to abstain, yet you don’t believe it possible to convince people that voting for a lesser evil still means they need to organise against that lesser evil?

Sráid Marx:  First I think that the threat that they will most likely face is Macron and his reactionary agenda and a vote for him is a statement that ‘it could be worse’! If such a view is justified in the election – why not afterwards? Fighting the FN is not the only issue in this election. In fact the rise of the FN is due to the policies now being pursued by Macron, policies that the FN say they have an alternative and a left that simply wants to fight the FN and votes for Macron and his policies makes their pretence all the stronger. The message for an active abstention is that you cannot rely on a simple vote to stop the FN, that the FN will get stronger if everyone else rows behind Macron and his reactionary policies and only the FN is seen to stand against them all the way. It’s a message that if you hate or fear the FN there is no solution but your own activity and a workers’ alternative to the policies that Macron will pursue, which the FN will feed off and attempt to continue to grow from.

SD: But “active abstentions” don’t actually exist, except in the heads of ultra lefts who try to comfort themselves that doing nothing out of sectarianism is a political act. Voting or not voting won’t make an iota of difference as to whether people fight back after the election. It just might be slightly harder to do so with an FN president.

Sráid Marx:  Let’s assume for one moment you are right – this would still not justify support for Macron, nor would it invalidate the objections to such support. But while living in Belfast I have seen a number of active abstention campaigns where leafleting, postering and canvassing were all carried out to encourage abstention. It is not even a merely ‘ultra-left’ notion – the greatest number of posters I ever saw in an election in West Belfast was when the Provos wanted an abstention when Bernadette McAliskey stood for the European parliament and the republicans still opposed participation in Brit elections. As to whether voting will affect how people will behave after the election, it must be clear that a working class vote for Macron will strengthen him. It would really be a sort of ultra-leftism to believe workers will vote for a bourgeois candidate but mobilise against him the day after, on the understanding that he is the lesser evil. Of course I have seen a similar view that they would immediately mobilise against a Le Pen victory dismissed, although you only claim it might be slightly harder.

 

 

Thoughts on the class struggle in Greece (part 2) – Towards a Revolution?

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As I remarked in the first post, the views of both sides in the debate over the way forward for socialists in Greece share the view that there exists in the country the potential for a workers’ revolution.  This is not one that I share and the Greek Marxists provide the evidence that this is so.

First, Andreas Kloke notes the temporary defeat of the movement resisting austerity.  The slogan “Elections Now” by the two biggest left parties Syriza and the KKE “represents a strategic failure.” No big change took place in these elections between the right and the left and the electoral majority for austerity “reflects the real balance of power between the main classes in Greek society.”  Austerity continues to intensify and the fascists of Golden Dawn have grown to represent a real force.  The Greek Marxists are keen to emphasise that no one voting for the fascists can be under any illusion any more about what they represent.  On the other hand the vote for the coalition of which these writers are a part collapsed.  In presenting the fascists and revolutionary socialists as being in a race, he says “the fascists clearly have a considerable head start.”

Syriza does not represent a growth in the collective strength of the working class movement but rather “a collective mood” of opposition to the two traditional parties.  The memorandum imposing austerity is opposed by two thirds of society but only about one third support the left.  There is thus plainly a crisis of a left alternative.  This is a simple reflection of the low level of class consciousness and weak organisation of the working class in no respect fundamentally different from that in many other countries including Ireland.

Manos Skoufoglou notes that the organisations of the Greek working class are not prepared for a radical alternative to the various options that the Greek capitalist class and the EU may choose from.  In the most significant observation he says that “the working class is not questioning directly its (capital’s) economic power.  Workers don’t yet see the left as the political branch of their own class struggle, but as a body on which they “invest” their hopes.”  The fundamental problem is therefore the consciousness of the working class but this also exposes the utter bankruptcy of those on the left who argue that the basic problem is one of working class “representation” and needing to build an electoral vehicle to solve this problem. In the later view the problem is creating a means to represent working class consciousness not in recognising the weakness of this consciousness in the first place.

The real problem is that we are not facing a possible Greek workers’ revolution because, as the Greek Marxists say, “the working class is not questioning directly capital’s economic power”.  Until it does this all talk of revolution is empty rhetoric, not to mention the basis for seriously wrong perspectives.  This is illustrated by a big majority not actually wanting new elections.  So while many wanted to vote for Syriza many didn’t want the only means to achieve this.   A class breaking its chains to achieve political power would never row in behind such anti-political conceptions.

Yet other commentators on the revolutionary left in the Fourth International make the mistake of believing that the basic problem is the need for the left to take the lead in the struggles of the working class with a political programme of breaking with capitalism, one that becomes credible in the eyes of the working class.  But as I pointed out in two earlier posts here and here, political struggles against austerity including general strikes have not led in the past to revolutions.  In fact the Greeks have a record of such strikes that dwarfs the experience of others.  In this post I reported on an academic study that looked at 16 countries including Ireland, which recorded 72 general strikes of which 33 occurred in Greece alone!  Clearly this is not enough to build the material foundations for a revolutionary working class.

And this is the problem.  It is not the weakness of the Marxist Left that is the issue, for this itself can only be explained by the political weakness of the working class but the commentators from the Fourth International have nothing to say about this.  The transformation of capitalism into a new society becomes a question of political struggle only and becomes narrowly focused on one event which acts as a magic wand.  This magic wand is called revolution.  The comrades have no real understanding of revolution as the culmination of a long struggle by the working class to build itself up as a countervailing force in society, in utter opposition to its current class rulers and their state, in which revolution is the final decisive act of rupture inexisting society and birth of the new.  Everything involved in this extended process becomes invested in a single event that is expected to achieve what only decades of struggle, organisation and advances in consciousness can achieve.

Thus for these organisations revolutionary politics becomes believing in the immediacy of revolution, even when it is not immediately on the cards.  Everything else is reformism, to be supported of course, but only in so far as it quickly can become exhausted.  Because socialist revolutions are only possible given a prior development of the working class, and the political situation more widely, their politics become sterile and redundant.  They either collapse into pitiful reformism while talking revolution to their new recruits or they become dogmatists insisting on the necessity of revolution, which isn’t untrue, but which in the form expressed only confirms that it must be 12 midnight before we can move into the new day.  Not much use the rest of the time.

This is the choice presented in this debate and as we saw in the first part it leads to the raising of political demands which are predicated on their being a revolutionary situation when there isn’t.  The demands raised, such as who shall form a government, are thereby either wrong ,by claiming certain political forces like Syriza are more politically advanced than they really are, or are too abstract because they reflect an unacknowledged recognition that the perspectives offered have little traction in reality.

Many on the Marxist left put forward demands such as general strikes as if these on their own will raise workers consciousness and lay the basis for revolution, but they fail in Greece to learn a very obvious lessons that these strikes teach us.   For example Marxists see general strikes as posing the question of who rules society, the workers or the capitalists.  Through stopping society by laying down their tools they challenge the power of the bosses and question their right to decide what happens. Since general strikes cannot stop everything from working they involve workers in deciding just what is allowed to continue to work and what doesn’t and on what terms things like hospitals, power, water, emergency and other services continue to operate.

Yet Greece has seen dozens of general strikes.  If these posed the question of power the question has been answered repeatedly in favour of the capitalists.  The strikes therefore on their own teach this lesson and become very large protests, and protests are not an alternative but merely an objection to what already exists.  The idea that a frontal assault on capitalism today in Greece could be successful seems to fly in the face of this experience but that does not mean revolutionary politics have no role to play.

The alternative perspective of building up the independent economic, social and political power of the working class while recognising that this power does not yet exists is today what revolutionary politics is about because it relies solely on the workers themselves and does not lapse into the short cuts demanded by the perspective of those who see revolution as the only immediate answer to everything.  This need for immediate global answers leads many who call themselves Marxists to demand that the capitalist state do what these Marxists know in their bones the workers are not yet ready to do.  So we have calls for nationalisation as if this were socialist instead of workers ownership and control because the former is seen as more practical and realistic.

This failure to build a real workers’ alternative bursts open when capitalist crises erupt and it is clear that the Marxist movement has no real material, as opposed to theoretical, alternative.  This is why we get incredible admissions of political and general programmatic nakedness such as the following from one of the Greek contributors to the debate.

“The transitional program we describe is a quite sufficient counterweight to reformist projects of the virtually and possibly actually “governing” parliamentary left. However, it is not yet concrete enough. In order to convince against “realistic” arguments, which SYRIZA seems already to succumb to, if not actively spreading itself – that a unilateral termination of the memorandum would lead to international isolation, that expropriation of banks would provoke partners in the government to withdraw their support – we have to prove that a revolutionary counterproposal could also be applicable in practice. We have to study further examples and historical experiences of revolutionary struggles of the oppressed and the exploited: revolutionary measures in Russia, Cuba or China, autogestion in Algeria and in Latin America etc, even progressive measures applied by Chavez.  If anything, so as to depict in our own conscience the real potential of utopia. How can international solidarity practically eliminate pressures inflicted by the international vindictiveness of bourgeois classes? How can we achieve expropriations with no compensation without the universe to collapse? What exactly is workers control and how does it work? Particularly this last question is a key in order to conceive which is the essential difference between a radical left government and a revolutionary workers’ government.”

If the Marxist left cannot prove that its revolutionary politics can be concrete and will work in practice then no wonder it does not have the confidence of the working class.  For the latter to exist the working class would have to prove it in practice to itself through successful example of workers ownership and workers control in the here and now, not promises of utopias tomorrow after the revolution.  Yet the idea of workers ownership and control prior to the revolution is routinely dismissed by many of the Marxist groups.

Manos Skoufoglou states that “The maturation of objective and, what’s more, subjective preconditions for a revolution is not accumulative.”  While the class struggle can rise and fall in favour of the working class which may have to retreat or advance as changing circumstances dictate this statement is surely wrong.  Marx believed that social systems are born, grow, mature and decline.  That this is accumulative proves that the germs of the alternative society must develop and mature within capitalism and appear more and more in its life.

The increasing socialisation of production within capitalism, the increasing specialisation of production forcing greater planning within and cooperation between enterprises, comes into contradiction with the private appropriation of this production.  This is an accumulative process pointing in the direction of the end of capitalism.  The increasing division of labour and the increasing need and actuality of its coordination is constantly upset and destroyed by the pursuit of private profit which leads to periodic economic crises.  The new society of planned production appears more and more in the life of the old capitalism.

But planning is not the essence of the new society but merely a description of the mechanism by which it must work.  The essence of the new society is its rule by the majority of that society and not by a minority ownership class.  In the new society the working class as the vast majority becomes the owners of the means of production and becomes the rulers of the new society.  Socialism is not a state of affairs defined by complete planning but is the movement of the vast majority of society in determining how the society works and achieves its collective goals.  For the new society to grow out of the old and not just be a utopian project this aspect of the new must be increasingly found in the old.  This is the importance of the growth of workers ownership and control in existing capitalism.

If this really were more and more the reality of capitalism then questions above, like how workers control would operate, whether Marxists had a real concrete alternative etc would not exist.  Instead revolution would be sought by the working class itself as the only means of securing and developing across the whole of society the advances in workers ownership and control already achieved.

It is clear therefore that the key to revolutionary politics today is building up this independent power of the workers and not in millennial pursuit of revolution for which the objective and subjective prerequisites are not present.  How this is done in Greece is primarily but not exclusively for Greek workers and Marxists to determine.

Visiting Dachau

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Some years ago I read a book ‘Against all Hope’, by Hermann Langbein, an Austrian who had fought in the Spanish civil war against the fascists.  It was the story of resistance in the Nazi concentration camps by one who had been prisoner, including in Dachau and Auschwitz.  I had anticipated being inspired by stories of this resistance but was instead humbled by the most common of all resistance activities – the struggle to survive.  So when I went on holiday to Germany I wanted to visit a concentration camp and did so by going on a guided tour to Dachau, just a short trip outside Munich.

There it was driven home that such was the indescribable oppression, for some survival was not the form of resistance taken.  Instead a number of prisoners ran onto the grass at the perimeter of the camp and were literally cut to pieces by heavy machine guns from the guard towers.  As our guide explained, this was not so much suicide as the one and only act of self-affirmation some prisoners felt they could take.  In every other respect they were crushed; ripped of dignity and of control of every aspect of their lives.  Every part of existence conspired against all hope.  For survivors this choice of their fellow captives was not an act of cowardice but an assertion of the only freedom they felt that they had left.

Our guide was a young Irishman who was serious and perceptive and through the numerous answers to our questions demonstrated a deep knowledge of not only the Dachau camp but the associated history, including that after liberation.  His intelligence was demonstrated not only in the questions he answered but those he did not.

He pointed out that the pictures on display were taken by the SS guards.  In these the viewer looks down on the prisoners who are in regular rows with adequate clothing.  We cannot see their eyes which are in shadow.  We see shaven heads.  As he later explained; when prisoners first arrived they took their clothes off, were doused in  often searing pesticide, had their hair cut by blunt shears so ineffective the prisoners doing the cutting often simply ripped the hair off.  Then they were shaved.  If they did not work quickly enough their hands would be tied behind their back and they would be hung from beams in the shower room. Only the location of the beams’ insertion into the wall is now still visible.  In this position their shoulders, elbows, wrists and arms would often break.  In a camp dedicated to work or death this, I imagine, could only have one outcome.

The new prisoners would then have to rush to grab clothing and clogs before leaving this area.  Our guide gave the example of one young prisoner who grabbed a jacket so small only one button could be closed, trousers too short by a distance and two clogs, one which was half the size of the correctly fitting one.  This prisoner described his clothing as continued torture throughout his captivity.  Worse, such circumstances increased the danger.  Anyone that stood out in any way; who attracted the notice of an SS man for any reason – an unfastened button or a new high number – risked the danger of deadly attention. This could, for example, mean an SS guard throwing a prisoner’s cap onto the grass and being ordered to retrieve it.  Stepping onto the grass meant machine-gunning from the guard tower while refusal to follow an order meant death.

He explained that we could not go into the guard towers because the survivors of the camp, responsible for its existence today, require that visitors cannot go anywhere prisoners could not go.  It would not be possible to view the camp from the viewpoint of the guards, not because the experience of prisoners in some way was to be recreated, but because no facility that would allow neo-Nazis to seek some sick thrill would be provided.

He told the story of the three hundred Luxembourg policemen who refused to swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler and who were sent to Dachau as punishment.  When they arrived they were ordered to do so again in the main square.  When they again refused seventeen were selected at random and executed.  The same ritual was held every year.

He told the story of Hans Beimler, the Communist Party member, who became a special prisoner held in the ‘Bunker’, one of the few remaining original buildings in the camp.  He escaped by killing his SA guard, putting on his uniform and walking out of the camp.  A few years later he died in the battle for Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

He told the story Johann Georg Elser, a religious worker who was a keen defender of workers’ rights who had voted for the Communist Party until 1933. In 1939 he planted a bomb in a Munich beer hall where Hitler was due to speak.  Hitler was due to fly back to Berlin that night but because of fog it was thought he should take the train so he left earlier than planned.  The bomb missed Hitler by 13 minutes.  Elser was caught, severely tortured by the Gestapo, and incarcerated in Dachau.  Hitler planned that when the war was won he would be put in front of a show trial and executed.  Just a few short weeks before the end of the war Hitler ordered the killing of Elser and he was shot in the bunker at Dachau.

Our guide did not sentimentalise the camp or its prisoners. He pointed out the hierarchy within the camp and the persistent policy of dividing the prisoners.  What was most new, to me at least, was the history of the camp since the end of the war.

This was symbolised by an art work in the camp showing the different symbols – pink , red or green triangles or two different coloured triangles overlapping each other so that they looked like the star of David, used to identify and mark the different categories of prisoner.  Our guide cautioned us not to regard the prisoners in this way or to take the view that this was in many ways an accurate categorisation, even in its own degenerate terms.  Unfortunately this art work has some missing coloured triangles because of current objections to their inclusion in the memorial.  I can’t claim to have a confident recollection of what these were but they may have included the black and green triangles of ‘asocial’ and criminal prisoners.

Our guide pointed out that the concentration camp was only a relatively small part of the whole and the much larger part was the SS training camp.  Today it is a training camp for the German police.  In 1972, for the Munich Olympic Games and because of the widespread media attention this would bring, the authorities knocked down parts of the site and built a mound between this training camp and the concentration camp.  In this way it would not be possible to view the training camp and it would perhaps not arouse questions.  This is now covered in grass and trees today.  A campaign involving survivors succeeded in getting part of this removed so that today you can see, but not enter, this camp, and see one of the original but otherwise unremarkable buildings still in existence.

At the far end of the concentration camp lie three churches as memorials to the victims.  Due to cold war politics the thousands of Soviet Union soldiers possibly murdered at the camp are represented by a Russian Orthodox church outside the perimeter.  The Jewish religious site is smallest and situated in the farthest corner from the entrance.  The Protestant one is in the other corner to the left, larger but low level and of a similar grey concrete colour as the foundations of the barracks in their two rows, which are all that is left of the original buildings.  The Catholic church is by far the largest, siting in the middle of the other two in a grass site with trees.  Our guide pointed out that plans were afoot at one time to cover the rest of the site with grass and trees but again campaigners stopped this.  While not explicitly expressing this, the contempt for this attempted simultaneous appropriation and erasure was clear.

The final part of the visit was to the new crematorium which contained a gas chamber.  Our guide stated that historians disagreed whether this chamber was actually used but that survivors affirm that is was used on a number of prisoners.  What is not in doubt is that so many were murdered in Dachau that the original policy of carrying many of the dead in trucks into Munich for burning could not be continued and new crematoria needed to be built to destroy the thousands killed.

Beside the gas chamber and crematoria was a memorial in three languages vowing never again.  As our guide thanked everyone for coming to visit Dachau he noted that in Bosnia it happened again.  For me the danger of it happening again is an inescapable potential within capitalism.

Holidays are a time to recharge the batteries.  There is more than one way of renewing the energy to continue the struggle for socialism and forever making never again a reality.