workers

FOR THE FORMATION OF A NEW WORLD PARTY OF SOCIALIST REVOLUTION - A FIFTH INTERNATIONAL

power

UK General Election
P2-3

International Womens Day

P6-7

Islamism in Africa
P8-9

Syrizas negotiated surrender

P10-11

MONTHLY REVIEW OF THE WORKERS POWER GROUP

ISSUE 382 MARCH 2015 1 / 2

Osborne devolution plans

threaten to break up the NHS
Plans to hand over NHS control to local authorities will destroy universal healthcare provision
DARA OCOgAIDHIN

he NHS ranks consistently among the top

three priorities voters care about. Yet a recent policy, which has barely showed on
the political radar of most electors outside
of Manchester, threatens to fragment and ultimately destroy the national character of the health
service.
Chancellor George Osborne intends to hand
Greater Manchester control of the regions 6 billion health and social care budget. This is the latest
and most significant step yet for so-called DevoManc: the devolution of powers to the Greater
Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) that
will also give the region control over transport,
planning, housing and policing.
No one in Manchester has ever voted for this.
On the contrary, when asked two years ago if they
wanted an elected Mayor with greater powers, the
2.7 million people of Greater Manchester said no.
It seems that because the referendum in Scotland
rejected the call for independence, this has ignited
a widespread demand for decentralisation.
This is the art of demagogy to link reactionary
solutions to real felt needs and problems, relying
on ignorance of their actual causes and covering
them up.
Of course there is anger over the growing northsouth divide, which has blighted cities like Manchester, not to mention the high-handed approach
of the Old Etonians at the core of the Tory party.
But devolution of public services without the national redistribution of wealth can only lead to further impoverishment of the poorer regions.
Havent Tory cuts to local government funding
already led to Labour councils, including Manchester, taking the responsibility for destroying
jobs and services since 2010? Indeed this is what
Osborne intends. The Northern Powerhouses he
talks about are more likely to become Northern
Workhouses. And Labour will take the blame and
the shame.

Cuts
The 10 councils on the GMCA are currently responsible for social care. From April 2016 they
will also control spending on public health, general

the National Health Service. The BMA has

warned that handing over health care budgets to
local councils risks creating a postcode lottery,
with differing priorities and levels of care between
different regions.

Labour

DEVO MANC IS THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE

practitioner services, mental health and acute services and community care.
Lord Peter Smith, chair of the GMCA, says the
plan will create an integrated plan approach that
is tailored to the needs of people in our area. But
bringing health and social care under GMCA management will not compensate for the massive cuts
imposed by the Con-Dem coalition.
Greater Manchester is already in the midst of a
highly controversial reconfiguration, in which four

to five hospitals are to lose their A&E departments

or other acute services. At the last count, the regions hospitals were running a deficit of 40 million. Its also expected that the GMCA must pool
its health budget with its much smaller social care
budget, which has been cut by 12 per cent in real
terms over the last four years.
Responding to Osbornes announcement, Anne
Athow of the British Medical Association (BMA)
accused the Tories of lobbing a wrecking ball at

Labours Andy Burnham argues the resultant danger is the creation of a two-tier NHS which destroys the principle of a universal and
comprehensive service. Posing as a defender of the
NHS, he said Labour would commit an extra 2.5
billion a year to the NHS. This falls well short of
the extra 20 billion a year that the Institute of Fiscal Studies estimates that the NHS needs to meet
patient demand.
Burnham has also pledged to repeal the Health
and Social Care Act that unleashed market competition into the health service. As with British Rail
20 years earlier, the Tories plan is to run the NHS
down, then parcel it up and sell it off cheap. While
socialists welcome Burnhams pledge to repeal the
Act, we also remember New Labour promised to
renationalise the railways before the 1997 general
election, then did nothing of the sort while in office
for 13 years.
We cant rely on the Labour leadership to save
the NHS. The major health service unions, Unison,
Unite and the GMB, must demand of the party they
fund that Labour offers a cast iron pledge to repeal
the Health and Social Care Act, to rip up the crippling Private Finance Initiative deals and other outsourcing contracts, and to tax the rich to pump 20
billion a year into the NHS.
If Labour will not do this, then the unions must
break from Labour and pool their funds to launch
a new working class party committed to socialism.
In order to press our demands on Labour and
to defend the NHS, whoever wins the election
local campaigns against cuts and closures should
link up with union branches now to build a mass
movement to coordinate protests and strikes.
Health workers need to organise in their unions,
forming rank and file networks, to decide what kind
of action is effective and make it happen if the
union bosses wont fight.

2 MARCH 2015 Workers Power

no. 382

What we
fight for

Workers Power is a revolutionary communist organisation whose politics are founded on the following principles
CAPITALISM is an anarchic and crisis-ridden
economic system based on production for profit.
We are for the expropriation of the capitalist class
and the abolition of capitalism. We are for its replacement by socialist production planned to satisfy human need. Only the socialist revolution and
the smashing of the capitalist state can achieve
this goal. Only the working class, led by a revolutionary vanguard party and organised into workers councils and workers militias can lead such
a revolution to victory and establish the rule of the
working class in society. There is no peaceful,
parliamentary road to socialism.
THE LABOUR PARTY is not a socialist party.
It is a bourgeois workers party pro-capitalist in
its politics and practice, but based on the working
class via the trade unions and supported by the
mass of workers at the polls. We are for the creation of a genuine workers party, based on a
programme for the overthrow of capitalism and
the implementation of socialism and workers
power.
THE TRADE UNIONS must be transformed by
a rank and file movement to put control of the
unions into the hands of the members. All officials
must be regularly elected and subject to instant
recall; they must earn the average wage of the
members they represent. We are for the building
of fighting organisations of the working class
factory committees, industrial unions, councils of
action and workers defence organisations.

ISSUE 16 SPRING 14/15 OUT NOW

OCTOBER 1917 The Russian revolution established a workers state. But Stalin destroyed
workers democracy and set about the reactionary and utopian project of building socialism
in one country. In the USSR and the other degenerate workers states that were established
from above, capitalism was destroyed but the
bureaucracy excluded the working class from
power, blocking the road to democratic planning
and socialism. The parasitic bureaucratic caste
led these states to crisis and destruction. Stalinism has consistently betrayed the working class.

The Stalinist Communist Parties strategy of alliances with the capitalists (popular fronts) and
their stages theory of revolution have inflicted terrible defeats on the working class worldwide.
These parties are reformist and offer no perspective for workers revolution.
SOCIAL OPPRESSION is an integral feature
of capitalism, which systematically oppresses
people on the basis of race, age, gender and
sexual orientation. We are for the liberation of
women and for the building of a working class
womens movement, not an all-class autonomous movement. We are for the liberation of
all the oppressed. We fight racism and fascism.
We oppose all immigration controls. We fight for
labour movement support for black self-defence
against racist and state attacks. We are for no
platform for fascists and for driving them out of
the unions.
IMPERIALISM is a world system, which oppresses nations and prevents economic development in the vast majority of third world
countries. We support the struggles of the oppressed nationalities or countries against imperialism. Against the politics of the bourgeois and
petit-bourgeois nationalists we fight for permanent revolution working class leadership of the
anti-imperialist struggle under the banner of socialism and internationalism. In conflicts between
imperialist and semi-colonial countries, we are for
the victory of those oppressed and exploited by
imperialism. We are for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops from Ireland and all other countries. We fight imperialist
war, not with pacifist pleas, but with militant class
struggle methods, including the forcible disarmament of our own bosses.
FIFTH INTERNATIONAL We stand in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky and the
revolutionary policies of the first four congresses
of the Third International. Workers Power is the
British Section of the League for the Fifth International. The L5I is pledged to refound a revolutionary communist International and build a new
world party of socialist revolution. If you are a
class-conscious fighter against capitalism, if you
are an internationalist join us!

Whose party is it?

Labours union paymasters need to get more
bang for their buck
JEREMY DEWAR

he latest figures for party funding in

the run-up to the election are revealing. Tory and Labour incomes are
fairly equal at 29 million and 26
million respectively in 2014.
Looking more closely at the last quarter,
when funding for all parties increased, in anticipation of the election campaign, the Tories
received 8 million and Labour 7 million.
Neck and neck, you might think. However,
their sources are different as chalk and cheese.
The Conservatives rely almost exclusively
on large donations from the big bourgeoisie
the capitalist A-listers. Their most generous
contributor last autumn gave half a million;
their third biggest donor, David Rowland,
coming in with a respectable 322,000, is a
property developer, who registered as living
abroad for many years as a tax dodger, er, I
mean exile.
Another large chunk of Tory partys recent
funding came from hedge fund managers: 2
million worth. Not a bad investment as
youd expect from people who make a living
from asset stripping and sacking whole workforces considering hedge funds received a
145 million tax break in 2013.
So what about Labour?
They received relatively little from private
donations. Most scandalously, the party accepted 400,000 in the form of writing off
staffing costs from accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers. As Margaret Hodge has
pointed out, PwC makes millions advising on
tax avoidance on an industrial scale. If
Labour cannot resist the allure of big money
in opposition, then what will it be like in office?
Others? Tony Blair gave 100,000 last
month. But he can afford it; hes amassed 70
million since leaving the Commons in 2010.
In reality, however, it is the unions who finance Labour. In particular, the big three:
Unite, Unison and the GMB, who gave 1
million each to the party at the end of the
year. It is certain that more will follow.
On top of that, thousands of union activists
will be pounding the streets canvassing
houses, staffing banks of telephones cold-calling voters and leafleting shoppers in High
Streets. Millions of union members will receive pro-Labour propaganda in union maga-

workers power

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zines and stalls in workplaces up and down

the country.
Even though Labour remains the biggest
party in Britain, with 190,000 members, its
paid up support is falling compared with radical newcomers to the big time like the

Greens, SNP and UKIP, who are all dramatically on the rise. So the mass of associate
members affiliated via their trade unions enormously increases the reach of Labour.
This is significant. It is why millions of
workers millions of the more class conscious workers continue to support Labour.
It is why Labour, even today, after the illegal
and immoral wars it propagated for British
imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq, after introducing Private Finance Initiative hospital
deals, free-standing Academy schools and student tuition fees, even after its pernicious decision to join with the Lib Dems and Tories in
a popular front campaign to save the union
despite all this, Labour remains for millions
of workers their party.
But what do working class people get from
their party? In particular, because it is
through the affiliated unions that this relationship is most clearly manifested, what do the
unions receive from Labour?
Not enough.
The anti-union laws, crafted by Thatcher
and Major, will remain in place. Council
housing, the most secure, most affordable and
most democratic way to resolve the housing
crisis, will not be revived. Every privatised industry, sector and company will be safely protected from the threat of renationalisation.
And the minimum wage will be pegged to the
floor, with the aspiration of a living wage lingering in the ether, just an aspiration.
Most damning of all, Labour repeats its
mantra: no reversal of any Tory cuts; stick to
Coalition spending limits for the first two
years.
The saying about whoever pays the piper
calls the tune certainly holds true for the Tories. But with Labour this does not hold true.
Those who pay the Tory piper get to call
Labours tune as well.
The Tory press continually attack Labour
because of its union paymasters. But what
do they actually get for their members millions? A repeal of the anti-union laws? Taxing
the rich to pay for the public services? Reversing the cuts and Privatisations? Upping
the minimum wage to a living wage?
You must be joking.

Workers Power MARCH 2015 3

Choices

election

War of words

An independent workers press could counter Tory media monopoly

EDITORIAL

ll the experts agree the 2015 general

election is the most unpredictable for
decades. New parties, like Ukip on the
right and resurgent parties like the Scottish Nationalists and Greens on the left, could hold
the two big parties to ransom as coalition partners.
Sections of the left have welcomed the rise of
the the Greens and even the SNP as alternatives to
a Labour Party that promises to keep to Osborne's
cuts agenda for two years and implement the rest
of it - only more slowly and humanely. It is true
that this has allowed the SNP and Greens to steal
Labour's old reformist clothes.
They can afford to; neither is about to form a
Westminster government. The SNP claim that they
have acted as a buffer to austerity in Holyrood. On
some issues they have but they have signally failed
to use their powers to vary income tax by 3p in the
pound to fund services and raise benefits. The
more devo max they are given, the more they
have to raise taxes on Scottish business to fund expenditure, so the more they will turn to austerity
themselves.
The SNP have passed on cuts where they are in
power at local government level. Dundee and
Glasgow SNP and Brighton Green controlled
councils have all passed cuts budgets and attacked
their own workforces, mirroring local Labour cuts.

They all resort to the dented shield argument

that 'we are fending of the worst blows': in reality
they are a sword in the hands of the Tories making
cuts for them.
Nowhere do they try to oppose cuts by mobilising working class people to strike, demonstrate and
occupy. Like Labour all they can do is pose their
own election, their own management of capitalism
as the solution.
As parties of reform, they are no better than
Labour - just further back down the road of power
that leads to inevitable sell-out. More importantly,
they have no organised roots in the trade unions,
no historic links to the struggle for independent
working class politics. Electing them will do nothing to overcome the main obstacle to a struggle
against the crisis of the capitalist system the leaders of the trade unions and Labour who will continue to lead the working class to defeat after defeat
until the working class creates a new party of its
own, based on a programme for the abolition of
class society and capitalism.
Simply replacing Labour with the SNP or
Greens would be step backward, towards middle
class radicalism. Even the idea of cross-breeding
Scottish nationalism with left reformist socialism
as much of the Scottish far left is trying to do
whilst openly rejoicing at the prospect of the SNP
smashing up Scottish Labour is preparing a
major defeat for the Scots workers.
Certainly we need to break the unions from Labour
but not from independent working class representation. We need to win the mass workers' organisations to militant, class i.e socialist politics. That
is why Workers Power is campaigning for a vote
for Left Unity and Trade Union and Socialist
Coalition candidates, to gather greater forces to the
project of a new fighting party of the working
class.
But wherever there are no TUSC or Left Unity
candidates, we call for a vote for Labour, to kick
out the Tories and the Lib-Dems and keep out all
the other openly capitalist parties from Ukip to the
SNP. At the same time we demand of Labour candidates that they break with all forms of austerity
and support the fightback against it, here and now
and if they get into government.

BERNIE MCADAM

Sex Lessons at Five Under Labour, Sick

Benefits 75% are Faking, Immigrant
Baby Boom Immigrant and Scrounging and so it goes on. Disgusting as it
is predictable, this is a sign of what to expect
from the Tory dominated press, as the election
campaign gathers pace.
And we should not underestimate its scale.
The Mail accounts for about a fifth of newspaper
sales nationally. Together with the other right
wing papers, around nearly three quarters of the
market is safely in the same camp, with the
mildly pro-Labour Daily Mirror and Daily
Record, and the liberal Guardian and Independent accounting only for a quarter of the market
between them.
So we can expect a continued barrage of attacks on Red Ed, Mr Weirdo and Ed the
Loser. But the Tory press are not joking. Ludicrous as the red label is, it helps stir up the reactionary middle class fear of the left and presses
the Tory Party to the right. It is noteworthy that
Cameron is not exactly a favourite of these rags
since he tried to play the liberal on social questions, like gay rights.
The othering of Miliband by the Mail started
back in September 2013, when it targeted Eds
father Ralph (a Jewish refugee who served three
years in the Royal Navy in the Second World
War) as The man who hated Britain. It went on
to inform us that, Red Ed's pledge to bring back
socialism is a homage to his Marxist father.

Lulling Gabour right

But there is another purpose to this red-baiting:
to shape the political landscape and recast
Labour's campaign promises. The media barons
and tabloid editors are past masters at manufacturing public opinion, whipping up a frenzy of
hysteria over certain issues, while remaining utterly silent on others.
On the NHS, the Mail has been quick to point
out the reservations that millionaire Labour
donor John Mills has about Labours policies.
Mills thinks it is wrong to fund the NHS from a
mansion tax, preferring privatisation. His
views go down well with the Mail and are given
prominence, the better to pressure Labour into
toning down its already timid opposition to Tory
reforms.
On immigration and race, there is same old
framing of public debate around smears and hysteria, with the Daily Express warning us that
more than a quarter of British Muslims sympathise with the Charlie Hebdo killers. This from
the paper that once informed us that, Muslims

tell us how to run our schools.

All these papers warned us last year of tidal
waves of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to
Britain something that never materialised, and
was never corrected.
This paranoid focus reinforces pre-existing
prejudices, sending the message that immigrants
and asylum seekers are a threat to our social fabric. It deliberately fuels anger and resentment,
thereby inciting racist hatred and violence. But
it is also a call on politicians, a mechanism to
bully apparently the out of touch.
How does Labour respond? By promising to
get tough on immigration, as they had got
things wrong in the past. Miliband even tried to
berate Cameron in parliament this month for not
meeting his own 2010 election pledge to cut net
migration to below 100,000. Again we see
Labour being pulled to the right, trying to pander
to the racist UKIP vote, while the media hype up
Farage.

Geft wing BBC

So where does that mighty champion of objectivity, the BBC, stand? The right wing press constantly accuse it of left wing bias. The Mail on
Sundays Peter Hitchens, for example, says that
the BBC is, morally, socially and culturally biased against conservative ideas.
But as Owen Jones has pointed out, the BBC
is stacked full of right wingers, especially at
the top, and this campaign by the privatelyowned print media allows the right to police the
BBC: to make the corporation fearful of crossing
certain lines, and to ensure that the right sets the
political agenda, while leaving liberal left journalists reluctant to return fire for fear they will
help to fatally undermine the BBC.
Prominent Tories at the BBC have recently included recent Chairperson Chris Patten, a former
Cabinet minister, political editor Nick Robinson,
a former chairman of the Young Conservatives,
plus George Osborne's special advisor Thea
Rogers and right wing journalist Andrew Neil,
former editor of The Sunday Times. A Cardiff
University report has found that Tory politicians
appear on BBC news programmes far more often
than their opponents.

Whose media
The media moguls are of course part of the capitalist class; they own and control profit-making
businesses. But they have an especially important role in the defence of capitalist society, as
the purveyors of pro-capitalist and pro-imperial-

workers power
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KD Tait
Editorial
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Letters
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Workers Power Britain 2015
Printed by Newsquest

ist ideology.
How then is it possible for some of the right
wing presss campaigns to appear to run against
the real needs of the bourgeoisie?
For example, most of the tabloids run down
the EU and are in favour of Britain getting out.
But the bosses trade union, the CBI, says eight
out of 10 employers support UKs membership,
and the City of London certainly wants Britain
to stay in.
Similarly, the pro-Tory media is hysterically
against mass immigration. Yet most serious capitalists understand that migrants play an important role, plugging gaps in the labour market
which otherwise might lead to a skills shortage,
and dampening down pay demands.
But here the media is deliberately scapegoating the Brussels bureaucracy and immigrants in
order to divide the working class against itself
and divert attention from the real causes of
falling wages, the housing shortage or the creaking NHS: the capitalist crisis, caused by the system.
Even if The Suns owner Rupert Murdoch and
Express Group proprietor Richard Desmond are
toying with the idea of backing the fruitcakes,
loonies and closet racists of UKIP, their real
purpose is to bolster Nigel Farages credentials
as some sort of spokesperson for the white
working class and to damage Labours standing.
What the ruling class and its media always
unite on though is their hostility to any expression of working class militancy and a common
front on essential Western interests. Hence the
unanimous backing from the most rabid reactionary to the fuzziest liberal on the war drive
against Russia.

Our media!
While the media remains under the ownership
and control of the capitalists there is little chance
of working class interests being advanced in it.
That goes as much for the Daily Mirror as it does
for the Tory press. The Daily Mirror may well
appear pro-Labour, standing up for the NHS, but
the Trinity Mirror Group is a capitalist corporation that stands in the tradition of union busting
and censorship, not to mention phone hacking.
As media unions at ITV vote for strike action
over pay, as Express Newspapers prepare for redundancies, it is clear that trade union organisation in the media must take a stance.
But this should also involve a fight for a veto
over what is published. A good example of this
happened in 2006, when the NUJ chapel at the
Daily Star heroically pulled a page that mocked
Islam, headlined the Daily Fatwa, replete with
crude jokes and a Burqa Babes page 3.
The organised working class needs its own
mass media, one that espouses an anti-capitalist
and socialist alternative. It should be funded by
the trade unions and run under the democratic
control of elected rank and file members.
Only this way can working peoples struggles
be represented and the bosses lies countered. A
workers paper, alongside social media, would
link up with international workers organisations
and expose the role of our imperialist ruling class
around the world.
But a crucial task is to take media ownership
out of the hands of the billionaires and make their
means of misinformation and manipulation serve
the democratic interests of their readers, listeners
and viewers. This will be a vital part of the socialist revolution and transformation of society.

4 MARCH 2015 Workers Power

britain

Scandal or business as usual?

Nationalisation is the only solution to endemic corruption in the banking system

hose customers include drug

barons, arms dealers, dictators,
terrorists and blood diamond
dealers? Why, a bank of course.
Leaked documents from an ex-employee
show that HSBC made huge profits for years
through handling secret accounts for criminal,
even murderous (but always wealthy) customers.
HSBC may be the one in the dock at the moment, but make no mistake; all banks have remarkably similar client lists, in spite of reams of
international anti-money laundering and Know
Your Customer regulations.
The irony is that HSBC certainly does know
these customers, as its Swiss private banking
arm bent over backwards helping them dodge
taxes and launder cash.
An employee of HSBCs private bank in
Switzerland, Herv Falciani, realised the bank
he was working for was operating a massive and
illegal tax evasion and money laundering service
for the super-rich. He started collecting the data
in 2009 and handed it over to the Swiss authorities, who did nothing, then the French.
Recently The Guardian and Le Monde journalists analysed a portion of the data. The 30,000
accounts they looked at contained over $130 billion. Correspondence details how officials not
only advised and assisted clients in evading
taxes, but even handed over bricks of cash so
that they could spend their ill-gotten gains without leaving a paper or electronic trail.
British tax officials identified 1,100 UK-based
tax evaders from the HSBC files they received
in 2010. While they have recovered 135 million
owed taxes, however, only one person has been
prosecuted to date.
Yet the chair of HSBC from 2006 to 2010,
Lord Green, was marked out by the Tory government for promotion to trade minister. Green
only resigned without showing the slightest
glimmer of remorse or self-awareness, when
he was forced to.
Similarly, Douglas Flint, current HSBC boss,
was adamant in front of the House of Commons
committee that while he believed in personal
accountability and that people should be held
responsible for what they have direct oversight
over, he didnt feel that proximate to what was
happening in the private bank.
Amazingly such weasel words can keep the
cream of capitalist talent out of the dock. As
Labour MP Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public
Accounts Committee, quipped, If it had been a
benefit cheat it would have been up for court
years ago.

Market manipulation
Although it appeared as if HSBC had made it
through the banking crisis in 2007-08 relatively
intact, it certainly hasnt escaped the numerous
market misconduct scandals that followed.
In November, five global banks HSBC,
along with Citi, JP Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS were fined a total of $3 billion
by UK and US financial watchdogs for manipulating the $5 trillion a day foreign exchange market. (Barclays is also incriminated but has yet to
agree a settlement.)
The FX probe revealed that a number of
traders from different banks colluded together in
online chat rooms, which they named the Car-

JOY MACREADY
claimant trying to survive on 53-79.15 per
week, who can have their meagre dole stopped if
they miss an interview or refuse to take a zerohours contract job. If prosecuted for benefit fraud,
for example because they took on a little extra
work to try to make ends meet, they either have
to pay it all back, see their homes and possessions
confiscated or spend up to 10 years in prison.
Diamond, Goodwin and their cronies havent
paid back a penny of their ill-gotten gains and
continue living quite comfortably in their mansions, with their Jags and yachts.

The answer

TOO BIG TO FAIL, TOO BIG TO JAIL?

tel, the Bandits and the Mafia. They passed
on confidential information to move the FX market in their banks favour, an activity called
front running a trade.
Even the Bank of England has been pulled
into the fray, as files show its former chief FX
dealer had been aware that front running was a
common (not to mention illegal) practice as
early as 2006.
The FX scandal kicked off just as the furore
over manipulation of the London interbank offered rate (Libor) had begun to die down. Libor,
which is the benchmark rate at which banks lend
to each other in the short-term, underpins approximately $350 trillion in financial derivative
products.
Again bank collusion came to light. As a result, Barclays had to pay out more than $500
million, Swiss bank UBS paid $1.5 billion and
Lloyds $370 million in fines, while Citi, RBS,
JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank paid lesser
amounts. (Some paid much less because they
had grassed the others up). All have set aside
millions for future manipulation settlements.
Many senior banking executives have used
this opportunity to settle old scores and toss a
few scapegoats to the regulatory wolves; however, it is clear to see that this behaviour was
sanctioned even promoted by senior management. It was not just a case of a few bad apples but the whole banking system that is rotten
to the core.

The role of banks

Under capitalism, banks play a specific role in
the circulation of money, injecting liquidity
into the markets. Finance capital is held by the
banks and lent out to individual capitalists to invest in expanding their business productive capacity but this comes at a price (i.e. interest).
In this way, money appears to generate more
money on its own, particularly when the banks
engage in speculative activities.
Taking a real economy example, in order to
lend out money and get more in return a
banker must be certain that the loan can be paid
back. To decide which companies to invest in,
they scrutinise companies accounts and business plans and sit on company boards. Consequently, they have intimate knowledge of the

inner workings of any industry and take decisions as to what areas of industry deserve investment based on an expected rate of return.
By extending credit, financial institutions also
increase the speed at which money is invested in
production and then re-circulated into other areas
of the economy.
But they also engage in highly speculative activities, such as the FX market that runs the
gamut from corporate payments for supplies or
wages in other currencies to high frequency
traders trying to extract revenue from the smallest pip in currency movements.
It is this quest for ever-greater rates of return
turning money into more money that also
drives banks to bend their own rules and manipulate the free market. What is most telling
about these investigations is that it wasnt just
one investment bank that allowed its traders free
rein, but all the top global institutions. Even
though they compete against one another, they
colluded to cheat their clients and boost their
profits.

Individual prosecution
The regulators are only now beginning to pursue
individuals for their role in market manipulation.
There have been a few arrests and even fewer trials to date, but there are also many traders that
are still sitting at their desks and making money
for their bank.
These traders may not have benefitted directly
from market manipulation, but as the investment
banks profits soared so did their bonuses. Many
received more than three times their salary in
bonuses.
However, the real winners were the upper echelons of the banks, with their golden handshakes,
platinum goodbyes and diamond retention packages.
Barclays ex-CEO Bob Diamond walked away
with 120 million during the five years following
the credit crunch. He resigned in disgrace (but
not in poverty) after it emerged that under his supervision Barclays had manipulated Libor.
The government allows crooks like Diamond
and RBS Fred the Shred Goodwin to walk
away scot-free and take their money with them.
This is where the real fraud lies in society, not in
working class neighbourhoods.
Compare their treatment with a benefit

The capitalists answer to the banking scandals is

to increase regulations governing the banks, effectively forcing them to reduce their leverage
ratio, even the playing field by curbing the excesses and making bankers adhere to codes of
conduct.
The UK government, for example, has implemented powers to claw back bonuses and make
misconduct a prison term offence of up to seven
years.
Effectively what they are trying to do is give
banking a makeover, making it appear well regulated and innocuous, so it can play its part in a
budding economic recovery.
But finance capital has no morality. Its only
aim is to increase its profits, and it will do that by
any means necessary. Even if it cant openly manipulate the market as it has done recently remember, front running has always been illegal
it will find other ways of increasing the rate of
return on money, such as returning to the collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) they sold in the
run up to the crisis.
But we have a very different answer. We dont
believe that the banking system can be reformed.
Instead we call for the nationalisation of all the
banks and for them to be merged together under
one roof and under working class control.
This is very different from the nationalisation of RBS, which effectively nationalised the
debt for the taxpayers to bear, while allowing the
bank's top executives to walk away with ever increasing remuneration packets. It is sickening
that a bank, which is 80 per cent owned by UK
taxpayers, paid out 421 million in bonuses last
year at the same time reporting a 3 billion loss
and 14,000 job cuts.
Since 2009 RBS has lost the taxpayer 49.4
billion and shed 48,000 jobs.
We demand that all bankers bonuses should
be immediately revoked. In addition, all the
money that the banks owe in fines should be redistributed to provide decent homes, healthcare
and social services to hard-hit working class
communities across the country.
But we must combine the fight to take over the
banks with the fight to open the books of the crisis-ridden corporations, and to reveal the networks and deals that finance capital keeps hidden
and to force the rich to pay back their evaded and
avoided taxes in full.
We must go further and fight for the overthrow
of capitalism, which is an anarchic system of exploitation and crisis, and replace it with a democratically planned economy one that will
expropriate the ruling class and take state power.
To do this, we need to build a revolutionary party
of the working class.

Workers Power MARCH 2015 5

world

Saudi Arabias unholy war

Is the desert kingdom responsible for the rise of Islamic State?

ur rulers routinely present the beheadings of hostages carried out by the Islamic State (IS) as proof of their need
to send their military forces into a region whose past experience of Western bombing,
invasion and occupation created the very forces
that they are fighting against today. But there is a
state in the region that beheads dozens of people
every year, many of them poor foreign migrants
sentenced without even the semblance of a fair
trial, that will not be the target of Western bombings or sanctions any time soon.
That state, Saudi Arabia, just happens to have
the worlds second largest oil reserves, about a
fifth of the total, and is the worlds second-largest
oil producer after Russia, with about 13 per cent
of world production. It is, today, a key part of the
unholy coalition of states ranged against IS, taking part in airstrikes against IS targets in Syria in
September 2014, and building a 600-mile long
fortified wall to separate it from regions of Iraq
now under IS control.
Saudi Arabias official ideology is Wahhabism, a particularly intolerant sub-sect of
Salafism that it shares with IS, and which it made
its mission to export to the rest of the Arab and
Muslim world.
What is less well known is that Wahhabis form
only between a fifth and a quarter of Saudis,
roughly the same size as Saudi Arabias Shia

MARCUS HALABY
Muslim minority, the latter treated as secondclass citizens despite forming a majority of the
population in most of the oil-producing eastern
half of the country. This leaves ordinary nonWahhabi Sunni Muslims at just over half of
Saudis - and about two-thirds of Saudi Sunnis.
Moreover, the form of Wahhabism promoted
by the Saudi state is strongly opposed to participation in politics, making it a highly convenient
ideology for an absolutist monarchy whose ruling
dynasty claims a divine right to rule. This puts it
at odds - politically, as well as theologically - with
mainstream Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, and in particular with the explicitly political Islamism associated with the
ideas of Sayyid Qutb, as well as with Wahhabi
and Salafist movements beyond its borders who
reject the Al Saud dynastys claims to rule. IS
leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadis declaration in
June 2014 that he was now Caliph Ibrahim, the
religious and political leader of a global Muslim
caliphate, was a direct challenge to the Saudi
states legitimacy.
These factors make the Saudi monarchy particularly vulnerable to the rise of the Brotherhood
and its imitators like Turkeys Justice and Development Party (AKP), especially when their programmes espouse proposals for political reform
or constitutional government. This in turn helps
to explain the Saudi states visceral hostility to

movements that most outsiders might assume

would be its natural allies, supporting secular
dictators like Egypts Abdel Fattah el-Sisi or
Libyas Khalifa Haftar against their Islamist opponents, supporting the secular nationalist Fatah
against Hamas, the Brotherhoods Palestinian offshoot, and helping to establish Zahran Alloushs
Salafist Army of Islam in Syria precisely to oppose IS and its rival, Jabhat al-Nusra.
For its part, IS is probably the Sunni Islamist
formation in Syria and Iraq least dependent on
Saudi and other foreign sources of funding. In its
origins in Iraq under the US-led occupation after
2003, it was able to establish a business model
of revenues extracted locally through tribute, extortion and ransom, which it took with it to Syria
after 2012, in the process developing a relatively
sophisticated bureaucracy by the standards of its
rivals. Its seizure of oil fields and refineries in
Raqqa and Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria gave it a
further source of independent revenue, an experience since repeated in Iraq following its seizure
of Mosul. This ironically turned its nominal
enemy into one of its biggest sponsors, as the
Assad regime provided it with revenues to protect
the pipelines that enabled Syrias oil, to continue
to reach the world market.
It is not coincidental that the Western powers
moved towards a direct confrontation with IS
after its seizure of Mosul and Tikrit in June 2014.

And here their concerns were not for the protection of the Kurds or the Yazidis, but to prevent
Iraqi Kurdistans large oil reserves from falling
into ISs hands.
The US-allied Saudi state might not have
funded IS - although many of its citizens, including a part of its ruling class certainly did. But
it does bear the responsibility for creating the ideological climate within which movements like it,
many of them now hostile to the Saud dynasty,
could acquire legitimacy.
Most infamously, Saudi Arabia poured billions
into supporting the US-backed Islamist insurgency against Afghanistans pro-Soviet government in the 1980s, in the process launching the
career of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda
movement, from whose offshoot in Iraq IS originally emerged. And Saudi Arabia remains the
godfather of an ultra-reactionary religious sectarianism across the region.
It has been helped in this by an equally virulent
Shia sectarian politics promoted by the Iranian
theocratic regime, whose proxy militias in Iraq
have a record of massacres of Sunnis every bit as
grim as ISs massacres of Shias and Kurds. That
this receives less attention in our media is in part
due to the fact that these sectarian militias are on
our side, having helped stabilise the US-led occupation and propping up Iraqs Western-supported and pro-Iranian regime since.

Hawks v doves

Ukraine ceasefire exposes tensions between United States and the European Union

he surrender of government forces surrounded in the town of Debaltsevo has

brought some respite for the population
of the Donbas but the Kiev regime is
unable to stem the imminent economic collapse
provoked by its punishing enslavement to the
IMF.
The ceasefire arranged at the Minsk 2 talks
between Germany, Ukraine, France and Russia,
was the result of efforts by France and Germany
to achieve a settlement with Putin. The peace
talks excluded the United States and Britain because a lasting peace conflicts with their pretext
for maintaining an economic and military blockade around Russia.
Preserving the Russian menace and the option
of renewing the war in the east is key to the survival of a regime resting on the twin pillars of a
Ukrainian-nationalist ideology and a state apparatus infiltrated by fascists. Without this the
grotesque mismanagement of every aspect of
economic and political life would soon undermine its social base and likely lead to its overthrow.
The Anglo-American bloc is determined that
the ceasefire should be maintained only for long
as is necessary for the Kiev government to regroup its forces for a fresh offensive. Why else

DAVE STOCKTON
would they greet the ceasefire with a new round
of sanctions and violate the clause calling for the
removal of foreign troops by immediately dispatching hundreds of military advisors?
For all the propaganda about a Russian invasion of Ukraine - which the German security
service, the BND, dismissed as just that - it is
clear that Putin has pressured and even replaced
the leadership of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics. Though far less powerful than his Western enemies he is the head of an imperialist
power. His objective is to block the US and EUs
attempt to absorb Ukraine into Nato and the EU
and to increase the economic and military
squeeze on Russia.
So also he has sent weaponry and volunteers
into east Ukraine, so that Kiev could not successfully crush the resistance, he has also done
all he can to limit their independence. In short
he only wants to maintain the two republics as
bargaining chips in the conflict with the EUNato bloc. If Russia could agree a satisfactory
arrangement with Germany and France, then it
would sacrifice them without hesitation.
However the very existence of peoples republics whose defence still rests largely on militias of local workers, and whose leadership is
obliged to make demagogic attacks on the oli-

garchs and who positively reference the social

gains working people secured in the USSR, is
not a scenario Putin wants to give legitimacy to.
Coopting and ensuring that the compliant leaders who are prepared to work with the patronage
networks of Ukrainian oligarchs established in
the east amongst the local state, government and
security forces is important.
The struggle by the forces of Donetsk and Lugansk remains a justified defence of the democratic rights of the people of the region not to be
forcibly retained in a state run by fascists and nationalists. This remains a progressive fight independent of the Great Russian nationalist and
socially reactionary politics of the leaders of the
DPR and LPR.
The biggest fly in the ointment for Washingtons plans to turn Ukraine into a US protectorate
greater than a regime of kleptocrats whose
armed forces cannot defeat a greatly outnumbered and less well armed militia - is Ukraines
collapsing economy. It can hardly rely on Germany and the EU states in the middle of the
Greek crisis to bail out and sustain Ukraine - a
country with four times the latters population.
The economic reforms demanded by the EU
and the IMF spell disaster for Ukraine, east and
west. Debt bondage, privatization and closures,

the takeover of Ukraines best agricultural land

by the likes of Monsanto, will mean increased
misery. For this reason a united movement
against the pillage of the country needs to be
built up which can expose the mirage of European prosperity and drive the Maidan fraudsters
like Nulands appointee Yatsenyuk from power
and heal the rifts in the Ukrainian working class.
The dire and deteriorating economic conditions require a united workers' movement to
fight for economic social and political rights; a
movement whose goal should be a workers' government. Such a regime, based on workers'
councils, could expropriate the oligarchs, disarm
and crush the fascist gangs, meet the masses' urgent needs for jobs and a living income, and
reach out the hand of solidarity to the workers
of Russia and the European Union alike.
There is one major obstacle to this; if
Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk are able, with US assistance, to renew the offensive against Donetsk.
Therefore - whilst doing all in their power to
reach out to their western sisters and brothers the working class of the East must hang on to
their weapons.
(1) [Link]

6 MARCH 2015 Workers Power

women

We need to talk about

abortion differently

Review: Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights,Picador, 2014, pp258, $25
JOY MACREADY

We need to talk about

ending a pregnancy as a
common, even normal,
event in the reproductive
lives of womenWe need
to see abortion as an
urgent practical decision
that is just as moral as the
decision to have another
child indeed sometimes
even more moral.

inally, someone has had the courage to

reject the almost universal depiction of
abortion as a tragedy for every single
woman at any given point in her life.
For many women, ending a pregnancy can be
akin to a life-saving act, one of self-preservation. But it is also so much more than that.
As Katha Pollitt writes, Legal abortion presents the issue of womens emancipation in particularly stark form. It takes a womans body
out of the public realm and puts her, not men
and not children, at the centre of her own life.
Through her book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion
Rights, Pollitt attempts to reframe the debate
around abortion, rejecting the commonly held
view that it is a bad thing, about which we
shake our heads sadly and then debate its precise degree of badness, preening ourselves on
our judiciousness and moral seriousness as we
argue about this or that restriction on this or that
kind of woman.
Abortions happen whether they are legal,
performed by medical professionals and covered by national health care insurance, or illegal, performed in dirty clinics or dangerous
back streets.
Millions of women worldwide are forced to
break the law to end a pregnancy. Just recently
the body of a young Brazilian woman, Jandyra
Magdalena, was found mutilated beyond recognition the day after she went for an abortion, a
ghastly reminder of the life-threatening risks
women take to end a pregnancy.
From the very beginning of the book, Pollitt
goes to the heart of the material need for abortions, exposing the scarcity of resources for single mothers and even two-parent families, and
the contradictory pressures on young women to
be simultaneously sexually alluring and withholding hot virgins.
Her main argument is that abortion needs to
be a normal part of healthcare for women, not
just in a biological and physical context but also
a social context. As she explains,
access to legal abortion is a good thing
for society and helping a woman obtain one is
a good deed. Instead of shaming women for
ending a pregnancy, we should acknowledge
their realism and self-knowledgeSociety benefits when women can commit to education and
work and dreams without having at the back of

their mind a concern that maybe its all provisional, because at any money an accidental
pregnancy could derail them for life. Its good
for people to have sexual experiences and not
fear birth control failure.
Pollitt rightly challenges the awfulisation of
abortion, where even pro-choicers use negative language: sad, tragic, thorny, vexed, complex, difficult, etc. There is a general acceptance
that abortion is a terrible tragedy and no woman
could do it with a clear conscience.
Ending a pregnancy needs to be seen as a
choice like all other choices in our lives, she argues. it can at times be difficult but for
many women, but abortion is an incredibly
good thing and allows them to go on to lead
productive lives, instead of being chained to the
home.
She calls for free abortion on demand, arguing that it is central to womens emancipation
to have control over their own fertility, when
and if to have a family. Without this right, its
as if motherhood is the default setting for every
woman from first period to menopause, and
needs to say yes to every zygote that knocks on
her door. She also demands better sex education and birth control.

US reactionary tide
As an American feminist, Pollitt writes predominantly about the situation in the US, which
recently saw the Republicans (now in control
of both the House and Senate) drop its most recent attempt to ban abortions after 20 weeks,
instead settling for permanently banning federal
money from going to pay for abortions on the
42nd anniversary of Roe versus Wade.
Even the 1973 landmark decision by the US
Supreme Court gave women the right to abort
only until viability. The decision effectively
gave a foetus limited rights around the time of
viability, or 24 weeks. However, what it did
give American women was a choice.
As Pollitt says, Legalising abortion doesnt
just save women from death and injury and fear
of arrest, and it didnt just make it possible for
women to commit to education and work, and
free them from shotgun marriages and too
many kids. It changed how women saw themselves: as mothers by choice, not fate.
Today, the reactionary anti-abortionist movement is gaining ground in the US, led by the
Republicans and the religious right. Between
2011 and 2013 US states enacted 205 new restrictions on abortion availability.
This includes waiting periods counselling
and 24 hour cooling down periods; inaccurate
scripts that doctors must read to patients, i.e.
abortion causes breast cancer, mental illness
suicide; bans on state Medicaid payments; restrictions on insurance cover; and parental notification and consent laws.
At least 73 clinics have closed down or
stopped performing abortions during the same
period.
Working class and poor women are the most
affected by these new limitations to abortion,

which means that clinics are too far away, too

expensive, too encumbered by restrictions, regulations and humiliations.
As of May 2014, 23 states had passed laws
regulating ultrasound scans before abortion;
three states require that it must be shown to the
pregnant woman, while others must offer to
show it. Many state legislatures have tabled
personhood amendments to state constitutions, which proposed that the terms people
and person should apply to every human
being at any state of development but these
have failed at the ballot box.
Last summer, the Supreme Court exempted
the Hobby Lobby crafts store chain from providing IUDs and certain emergency contraception under insurance cover under
Obamacare because the CEO believes they are
abortifacients which infringes his religious
beliefs. So a boss has more rights and control
over a womans body and her fertility than she
does.

Abortion is a class issue

Pollitt argues that denying women the right
to end a pregnancy is effectively opposing
womens independence and full participation in
society. Reproductive rights are an economic
issue, she says, and without the ability to limit
and time their pregnancies, women will always
be disadvantaged at work and subordinate to
men.
A man who accidentally impregnates a
woman isnt forced to drop everything; he isnt
expelled from school, shamed for being promiscuous, and forced to accept a life of difficulties
and dimmed hopes in order to co-parent.
Rightly, Pollitt identifies that the origin of
womens oppression lies in the home. She exposes how the whole world runs on womens
unpaid or grossly underpaid labour. When that
work is an extension of female domestic roles

If women rejected
labour within the family,
society would have to
pay enormous sums
to replace it

caring for children or elderly, preparing food,

cleaning houses it is ill paid, low skilled and
low status, she writes. And yet, if women rejected labour within the family, society would
have to pay enormous sums to replace it.
But she doesnt make the link to the overarching economic system in which social norms
are constructed. Capitalism is based on private
property and the appropriation by the capitalist
class of surplus value produced by workers.
As soon as human society developed to
where a surplus was created, i.e. more means of
subsistence than were required for immediate
consumption, someone had to control the surplus, marking the origin of class society. Private
property underpins womens subordination in

that it is essential to ensure to pass on the surplus (wealth) to legitimate heirs. Therefore
womens fertility and sexuality has to be tightly
controlled within the patriarchal monogamous
family structure.
Industrial capitalism, which revolutionised
the nature of human production, maintained the

Society benefits when

women can commit
to education
and work
and dreams
family structure and womens private role in the
home, providing free labour to reproduce the
next generation of workers and labour power.
Hence it is only through the overthrow of
capitalism and the class system that women will
truly be liberated. However, without a class
analysis, Pollitts answer is solely to build a
stronger pro-choice movement through feminist, pro-choice and reproductive justice organisations, coupled with community activism. She
reports a pushback on the legislative front, with
51 pieces of pro-choice legislation passed in 14
states in 2014.
But without a political alternative to capitalism, this is destined to be a labour of Sisyphus
with the pro-choice movement making some
gains that are then rolled back as the reactionary
right recovers power in an age of austerity.
Therefore, in line with theme of Pollitts
book, we have to reframe the debate around
what our society should look like. We need to
create a society based on need, not greed; where
women will have equal access to jobs and education, housing and healthcare, and the ability
to decide whether or not to have children based
on their desires, not under economic or societal
pressure. Consequently our aim should be the
overthrow of capitalism and replace it with a
socialist system.
For that to happen, we need working class organisations to take up the fight for womens liberation and for the liberation of the working
class as a whole against the exploitative capitalist class.
The weakness in Pollitts argument, even
though she talks about poor, working class and
women of colour, she doesnt mention self-organisation along class lines. She doesnt argue
for the trade union movement to take up such a
vital issue for their members both women and
men and to take strike action to force Hobby
Lobbys CEO to back down, instead of letting
a bourgeois court decide the fate of women
workers.
In order to effect change, we need build a
working class womens movement that fights
together hand-in-hand with working class men,
and together we can truly challenge womens
oppression in all spheres of our lives and smash
the system of oppression that keeps all of humanity under its tyranny.

Workers Power MARCH 2015 7

women

Not mourning, but rebelling!

SVENJA ZHENOT

n Turkey, mass protests in response to a

racist murder is a sign of the changing situation of women and opens the possibility
of organising a working class womens
movement against the sexism and exploitation
inherent to capitalism.
The corpse of the young Kurdish Alevi,
zgecan Aslan, was found on 11 February, in a
river in Mersin, a city in southeast Turkey. She
had been first stabbed to death and then burned
because she tried to defend herself against a
rapist.
The main culprit has vanished, but some men
from his family, who were also involved in the
crime, have already confessed. They have a history among the Turkish fascists, the Grey
Wolves. On Facebook they reported watching a
Turkish series that begins with the rape of a
young woman.

Violence against women

zgecan was on her way home, sitting at the
back of a minibus, when the driver attacked her.
Because of her ethnic background, she was, as
an individual, socially disadvantaged. But hers
is not an isolated case and we have to address
the issue of the frequency of brutal violence
against women in Turkey.
Since the Justice and Development Party
(AKP) government came into office in 2002, violence against women has increased rapidly. By
2009, the number of registered cases had in-

creased by 1,400 per cent!

The AKP is a conservative Islamist party. Its
policies stand against equality between men and
women, against non-Muslims and against ethnic
minorities, and have been enforced with authoritarian methods; but it has strong support in the
heavily religious and economically backward
rural population.
At the very beginning of his political career,
the former mayor of Istanbul and current Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared:
Democracy is just the train on which we travel
until we reach our goal. The mosques are our
barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the domes
our helmets and the faithful our soldiers.
Since then, rising unemployment has been
blamed on women seeking paid work. Instead,
it is said, they should stay at home, where there
is enough to do looking after the house and
bringing up children.
According to Erdogan, every woman should
have at least three children and pregnant women
should not leave the house. For him, too much
equality would harm the cohesion of the family;
he says that violence against women has not in
fact increased - people just think it has.
Thus, not only women, but also the debate
about their oppression, should be banished from
public life. In a new legislative programme,
penalties for violence against women have been
reduced, while at a general level they are proposing widespread introduction of the death
penalty.

Resistance stirs
After zgecans death, thousands of women
in many cities took to the streets, with the slogan
We arent mourning, were rebelling! This is
the right approach.
Of course, the event itself is so unbelievably
awful that anyone should be saddened by it, but
compassion alone will not help the many
women who continue to suffer from such violence.
Rather, the current anger and mobilisation
should be the starting point for a strong
womens movement that fights against their
structural oppression.
In Turkey, where the institution of the family
continues to play a very important role, the right
of women to organise politically is the first
major hurdle that must be overcome. In the trade
unions, for example, the proportion of women
is very low, many men do not understand why
they should organise together with women, especially not when they supposedly compete with
them for jobs. We have to counter this reactionary consciousness that hides behind a tradition that is beyond criticism.
A new womens movement should be understood from the outset as part of the labour movement, as a working class womens movement.
The current struggles of the unions do provide
a starting point for joint action but it is clear that
such a movement must address chauvinism, sexism and reactionary ideas and behaviour not

only in society at large, but also among workers

themselves.
That is why it is fundamentally important that
women can meet each other, talk about their oppression and learn to defend themselves. zgecan tried to defend herself with pepper spray, but
she was alone and had no chance. Especially in
rural areas, it is important that women create
self-defence organisations.
The recent demonstrations have repeatedly
emphasised that the government itself must take
the blame for increasing violence against
women, the fact that offenders are not convicted
and that it appears as normal that women are humiliated and oppressed.
The increase in violence against women and
the reactionary attacks from the government and
the extreme right are also a response to a change
in the society, which is also reflected in the
protests. Women are being drawn into production, into economic life. Although this often
goes hand-in-hand with the dual burden of doing
housework and childcare alongside working for
lower wages, it also undermines their traditional
subordinate role in the patriarchal family.
The slogan Were not mourning, were rebelling! expresses the fact that many women
no longer accept their roles as servants and oppressed victims. This can be the foundation
stone for the emergence of a new working class
womens movement that locates the roots of
womens oppression in the foundations of capitalist class society.

A new voice for women

JOY MACREADY

n the backroom of a Cardiff pub, a small

group of radical women from diverse political backgrounds came together to do something daringly different launch a magazine
focused on working class women, to give our
struggles and our fighting spirit a voice.
The main discussion centred on what we
wanted the publication to be. Some said it should
be a feminist publication from a socialist perspective; others stressed that it should be a place
where we can discuss a wide range of topics,
from violence against women to class issues,
such as the housing crisis and how women are
fighting back against austerity.
All agreed the publication should be open to
independent socialists, members of different organisations and none across the left. We want
to involve LGBT+ activists and those involved
in combating oppression generally.
The publication will be as open and accessible
as possible, so working class women and other
people interested in getting involved can have a
place to speak up and express their views. It
needs to be inclusive and comprehensible to people to new politics.

Origins
It was almost a year to the day since the first
meeting of the We Want a Womens Mag collec-

tive. The idea was born out of the need for an independent working class womens perspective on
how to fight against austerity, but also how to
fight sexism in society and within the left. Many
women active on the left felt politically discouraged in the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandals
that tore through the two largest socialist groups
in Britain.
Since then, members of the editorial board got
a website off the ground (see below) and started
posting articles, reports and reviews. But the project needed a boost to attract a wider group of
women to contribute, whether through submitting articles, artwork, photos, short reports,
poems, podcasts, etc.
In Cardiff, we decided that it should be a campaigning, lively magazine that is not just about
how difficult life under austerity is, but broadcasts the courageous, resourceful and inspired
fightback that women are leading across the UK
and internationally we can learn so much from
each other.
The mothers of the Focus E1 successfully
campaigned against evictions by occupying vacant flats in Newham last year, after being told
they would be rehoused outside of London.
But we shouldnt be afraid of getting our hands
dirty either in some weighty theoretical work. It
is important that we progress our theoretical
knowledge and development with new theories

not just about womens issues, but on a wide

range of topics. We can use the pages of the magazine to engage with different ideas and openly
debate them in a comradely fashion.
Crucially, we can use the publication to rally
working class women to a socialist perspective.
We can use it to pull together the multitude of different campaigns and activists, and to launch a
united fight against a common enemy: the bosses,
the landlords, the bankers and loan sharks, and
the bourgeois politicians that are slashing benefits
and privatising everything that moves hand-inhand with big business the capitalist class.
A working class womens publication would
be the scaffold, as Lenin called it, which we
can build a working class womens movement
around a movement to pull together working
women and students, unemployed women and
pensioners into a fighting force that could truly
roll back the austerity measurers that this government and most likely the next is ramming
down our throats.
Workers Power believes a working class
womens movement is vital for two reasons.
First, the oppression of women is alive and kicking very hard. The labour and trade union
movement, led overwhelmingly by men, often
merely pays lip service to the fight for womens
rights and demands: for example the recent sellouts of (mainly) women workers in the NHS and

local government.
A womens organisation is needed to place our
demands centre stage and, along with militant
male workers, seize control of our own disputes.

Get involved!
We have some great ideas to start off with, including using the website to myth-bust slanderous lies in the mainstream media. We may
produce an election special, not in the sense of
who to vote for but in terms of what the big issues
are facing working class women and what socialists should be arguing for.
But we are also looking for contributions from
every arena of class struggle: reports from
protests and other activities, interviews, film and
book reviews, etc. Why not submit an article on
a subject you care passionately about.
The next meeting of the We Want a Womens
Mag collective will be held from 12 5pm on
Saturday 18 April in London at the Cock Tavern,
23 Phoenix Road, Euston NW1 1HB. At that
meeting we will be deciding when to produce the
print run of the magazine, commissioning more
articles, discussing ideas and also deciding on the
NAME of the publication!
[Link]
wewantawomensmag@[Link]

8 MARCH 2015 Workers Power

africa

Order reigns in Tobruk

The fate of libyas revolution will be decided in Tunis and Tahrir square, not Tripoli
Marcus Halaby

hose on the left who supported Muammar Gaddafis dictatorship against its
own people in 2011 regularly cite the
chaos and confusion in Libya today as
proof that his dictatorship was a necessary evil,
and that his overthrow would inevitably lead to
Libyas becoming another Somalia, a fragmented failed state. Some even suggest that
the West wanted this outcome.
In fact, the Western imperialists strategic objective was not to create a disorderly shambles,
but to maintain a stable regime in Libya that
could keep its oil supplies flowing to a Europe
heavily dependent on them. Indeed they only
turned against Gaddafi after the popular uprising
against him in February 2011, having been
caught supporting the losing side in both the
Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions a few weeks
earlier.
Only when it seemed clear that his regime had
lost its ability to maintain order did they turn
against him. For over a decade they had been his
major customers, and British, French and Italian
politicians all had flattered and fawned on
Gaddafi and his sons.

town of Sirte, between Benghazi and the region

around Tripoli and Misrata. They are rumoured
to consist of Libyans who fought alongside the
rebel forces in Syria, although conspiracy theories abound that many are actually Gaddafis old
defeated loyalists in new, Islamic garb.

Working class

Two parliaments
Their difficulty, four years after the dictators
overthrow, is that the USA and its EU allies
have found few if any reliable candidates for
the job of imposing order. Indeed these candidates attempts to do so only seem to increase
the instability that they fear so much.
Today, for example, there are two rival governments and parliaments in Libya, each controlling no more than a fifth of the country.
The Tobruk-based government recognised by
the United Nations (UN), and dominated by military strongman Khalifa Haftar, a Gaddafi-era
general turned sometime US agent, is supported
by the USA, Egypts military dictatorship, the
United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia.
It controls the far east of the country, along the
coastline close to the Egyptian border. However,
eastern Libyas main city, Benghazi, is divided
between the control of this government and the
conservative Islamist Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries. And this pro-Western
regime is so lacking in popular support that it
notoriously had to hold meetings of its parliament, the Council of Deputies, on a Greek car
ferry moored off the coast of Tobruk.
Through its militia allies like the Zintan
Brigades and the Gaddafi regimes former special forces unit al-Saiqa, it has however managed
to assert control of much of the oil production in
the countrys eastern interior, raising oil production from 200 to 800 thousand barrels a per day,
as compared to the pre-revolution figure of
1,600.
Haftars major rival is a moderate Islamist
government in the capital Tripoli, occasionally
called Libya Dawn, resting on the rump of the
General National Congress (GNC) elected in
July 2012. In similar a line-up to the one in
Egypt before the military coup that overthrew
President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, Turkey
and Qatar are both supporting it. Its military defence is conducted mainly by the Libya Shield
Force and by the Libya Revolutionaries Opera-

THE BALANCE OF FORCES IN REVOLUTIONARY LIBYA

tions Room, both coalitions of militias that

fought on the anti-Gaddafi side in 2011, which
had been recognised and funded by the post-revolutionary government prior to the current crisis.
This crisis began in December 2013, when the
GNC unilaterally extended its mandate following a stormy relationship with its prime minister
Ali Zeidan, who had hoped to disarm the former
anti-Gaddafi militias with whom many of the
GNCs deputies were aligned. An abortive coup
attempt by Haftar in February 2014, aimed at
forcibly dissolving the GNC and holding new
elections, was followed by a slow coup, consisting of a political campaign to secure the support of current and former military officers
against the militias.
Zeidans dismissal by the GNC in March
2014 brought him openly into Haftars camp,
which launched Operation Dignity in May
2014, a combined heavy weapons and air assault
on Libyas second-largest city Benghazi, which
remains divided today, with thousands of its residents displaced. This bloody assault was justified to the Libyan public and to the outside
world as an anti-terrorist operation, in particular directed against Ansar al-Sharia, the Salafi
Islamist movement held responsible for the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi in September 2012, in which US Ambassador J.
Christopher Stevens was killed.
By declaring the whole of Libyas Islamist
spectrum to be terrorists who had the choice
of leaving the country, being killed or being arrested, Haftar succeeded in uniting most of
Libyas fractious Islamist camp against him.
The siege of Benghazi was followed by elec-

tions in June 2014 to the new Council of

Deputies, in which there was only an 18 per cent
turnout, as compared to the 60 per cent that
elected the GNC in July 2012. Unable to convene in Benghazi, this new pro-Haftar parliament set itself up in little Tobruk instead, resting
on support from Egypt and the UAE.
Haftars attempt to seize Tripoli and dissolve
the GNC in June 2014 created a constitutional
crisis, as the Supreme Constitutional Court,
under Haftars pressure, refused to recognise the
GNCs dismissal of Zeidan's successor as caretaker prime minister Abdullah al-Thani, who
then also defected to the pro-Haftar camp, taking
many secular GNC deputies with him. The
following month, an uprising dubbed Operation Dawn led by militias supporting the rump
GNC seized Tripolis airport and asserted control over Libyas third-largest city Misrata, the
industrial city whose militia played a key role in
the liberation of Tripoli from the Gaddafi
regime.
The Supreme Constitutional Court, now
under the pressure of the militias, then declared
Haftars parliament unlawful in November
2014, setting the stage for the current stand-off,
with UN-brokered talks foundering on an insistence by the Tobruk regime that it be recognised
as the sole government of the country.
The Egyptian regime has since bombed and
invaded the port of Derna, between Tobruk and
Benghazi, in February this year, using the pretext of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians
by an Islamic State-aligned militia there. This
militia and others like it, like the much larger
Ansar al-Sharia, now have their main base of
support in the region around Gaddafis home

Libyas difficulty is one shared by Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states: that as an oil rentier
state, it lacks a large native working class of its
own, having recruited the majority of its workforce from abroad. Lacking permanent rights of
residence, let alone political rights, that might
give it a visible stake in the political future of the
country, this working classs natural reaction to
the chaos of revolution and civil war has been
to flee the country and then return after things
have calmed down, rather than to intervene in
events as a force in its own right.
Nor have the multi-class forces thrown into
struggle by the revolution against Gaddafi made
any serious attempt to appeal to Libyas migrant
working class as a potential ally in their own
struggles; indeed, black African migrants in particular were the targets of racist pogroms by insurgent forces in 2011, in the belief that they
were the Gaddafi regimes mercenaries.
So while Libya in February 2011 might have
responded to the experience of successful popular uprisings either side of it (in Egypt and
Tunisia) with a genuine popular uprising of its
own, it did not take long for the post-revolutionary process opened by this uprising to become
dominated by the inter-tribal and localist rivalries that were only partly hidden from view
under four decades of what was a highly personal dictatorship.
Haftar, resting on the parts of Libyas middle
classes who were appalled by the lawlessness of
the militias, and who had hoped for a return to
business as usual after the overthrow of Gaddafi,
succeeded in building a movement around him
that could intimidate the more responsible
(that is, imperialist-aligned) politicians to join
him, and pose to the imperialist powers as restoring the rule of law over the law of the jungle.
But he could do that only by deepening
Libyas divisions further, in particular by alienating those for whom their self-sacrifice during
the 2011 revolution created a social and political
debt of blood whose repayment the militias
stood as a guarantee for.
His opponents, however, possess a democratic mandate for their rule only marginally
more credible than his and, moreover, espouse
a reactionary social programme that can only
alienate those for whom the state-promoted (if
often superficial) secularism of pre-revolutionary Libyan society represented a genuine social gain.
It follows that Libyas fate, without a working
class with a political voice and a consciousness
of its own, will continue to be decided from outside. And this in turn means that the outcome of
Libyas post-revolutionary crisis will be decided,
one way or another, by the fate of working class
struggles elsewhere in the region, beginning
with Egypt and Tunisia.

Workers Power MARCH 2015 9

africa

The forgotten Islamic State

like its infamous cousin, Nigerias boko Haram is a legacy of imperialism

JErEMy DEWar

n oil rich nation, once a colony, now

exploited by Western multinationals. A
corrupt political elite systematically excluding the vast majority from any
share in the countrys natural wealth. Beset by sectarian divisions encouraged by the ruling class, and
now subject to a brutal jihadist insurgency with a
thoroughly retrogressive Wahhabi interpretation of
Islam.
Sounds familiar? Most will immediately think
of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. But this
description fits just as well for Boko Haram in
Nigeria.
Boko Haram shot to infamy in April 2014, when
it kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Chibok, a largely
Christian city in the north-eastern state of Borno.
Its leader Abubakar Shekau revealed the full brutality of his movement's misogyny when he ranted
on video:
I am going to marry out any woman who is
twelve years old, and if she is younger, I will marry
her out at the age of nine. You are all in danger. I
am the one who captured all those girls and will
sell all of them. Slavery is allowed in my religion.
A Twitter campaign went viral when Michelle
Obama lent her support to #BringBackOurGirls.
Even a startled David Cameron held up a placard for the camera. And as ineffective as it was,
this is probably the USA and UKs most visible
show of concern to date for what is happening in
Nigeria today.
Boko Haram has been active as a paramilitary
force since 2009, launching devastating attacks on
the United Nations headquarters in the capital
Abuja in August 2011. It controls much of Borno
state and parts of neighbouring Yobe state, and its
activities cross over into Cameroon, Chad and
Niger.
Around 130 towns and villages have fallen to it,
with tens of thousands of civilians killed and close
to a million displaced. It has experienced both victories and defeats, taking and then losing Chibok
in November 2014. Chadian fighter planes and
Cameroonian troops have fought it alongside a
poorly resourced, underpaid and grossly demoralised Nigerian army. Early this month Nigeria,
Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Benin formed a
Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) against
it.
But Boko Haram's most remarkable defeats
have been inflicted on it by self-defence groups,
as in Baga and Mubi in northern Borno, where
some of the heaviest fighting has been. Nevertheless, it has strengthened enormously over the last
18 months, probably more than doubling in size to
around 12,000 fighters.

What is Boko Haram?

Founded in 2002 in Borno's capital Maiduguri by
Mohammed Yusuf, with a name that translates as
People Committed to the Prophets Teachings for
Propagation and Jihad, it initially recruited
madrassa and university students. It was in this period that the group earned its unofficial title, Boko
Haram (Western education is forbidden).
Yusufs outpourings are far-fetched to say the
least and are seemingly oblivious to Islams long
association with scientific enquiry. As well as rejecting the theory of evolution and a spherical
Earth, Yusuf even questioned the water cycle, saying, We believe it [rain] is a creation of God rather
than an evaporation caused by the sun that con-

BOKO HARAM BIDS FOR THE ISLAMIC STATE FRANCHISE

denses and becomes rain.

Nigeria's northern states provided Yusuf with rich
pickings. After military rule ended in 1999, many
northern oligarchs turned to Islam to gain a social
base. Twelve northern states have declared Sharia
Law as the basis of their legal system, despite sizeable non-Muslim minorities.
The northern ruling elite at first turned a blind
eye to Boko Harams excesses, with some even
funding it as a bargaining chip with the Christian
dominated south. Divisions between a mainly
Hausa-speaking Muslim north and a Yorubaspeaking Christian south were encouraged under
British colonial rule and benefit the ruling class in
both parts of this vast, 176 million-strong country.
The capitalists of one community typically react
to an election defeat by trying to make the country
ungovernable for their opponents.
It was only when the charismatic Yusuf began
to appeal to disaffected and unemployed young
men in his regular television appearances that the
authorities started to worry. In 2009, Yusuf was arrested in Maiduguri. He was then recaptured after
an alleged escape attempt and summarily executed in public. Hundreds were killed in the fierce
fighting that followed his death.
But if the police, notorious for extrajudicial
killings, thought this would cut the head off his
movement, then they were proved wrong. Shekau
soon emerged as Boko Harams new leader and
launched a bloody military offensive. Unemployed
youths provided him with a flow of recruits.
Ideologically, the group seems not to be that
well defined. It has been linked to al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in the past and corresponded with Osama bin Laden. More recently, it
has declared its affiliation to IS's global
Caliphate, although it is far from clear that this
move has been or will be reciprocated.
In substance, however, Boko Haram has more
in common with al-Shabaab in Somalia and the
Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria, and has
benefited from the flow of weapons into the region
from mercenaries fleeing Libya after Gaddafis defeat. In short, it may well be inspired by jihadist
Islamism in south-west Asia, but it is very much a
product of Africa.

Poverty and inequality

Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer and a full
member of OPEC. Yet this wealth has had little,
or even a negative impact on the lives of millions,
especially the further one travels from the former

capital Lagos and the more developed south-west.

An indicator of Nigeria's under-development is
that it has practically no oil refineries; petrol has
to be re-imported and is subsidised from oil revenues for sale in garage forecourts. Its energy industry is plagued by corruption and tax evasion.
When former central bank chief Lamido Sanusi
claimed in February 2014 that state oil company
revenues worth $20 billion had gone missing,
President Goodluck Jonathan sacked him.
Theft by syphoning off oil from pipelines is
rampant, accounting for as much as 20 per cent of
production. This has its corollary in the growth of
piracy and in the degradation of the land, something that provoked mass protests in the 1980s, and
which has gotten even worse.
In the north, however, there is no sign of these
huge riches. According to The Economist:
Nowhere else in the world are more children
out of school. Fewer than 5 per cent of women in
some parts can read or write. Estimates put three
out of four residents in the northeast below the
poverty line, around twice as many as at the southern end of the country.
No wonder Boko Haram can recruit more
quickly than the army can kill its fighters. But this
alone does not explain why the army is losing to
it.
Nigeria's officer caste developed its present taste
for wealth, power and corruption during the Biafran war in 1967-70, with several coups and
counter-coups since. Few people believe much of
the $4 billion annual military budget reaches its intended target, and the recent $1 billion additional
military spending appears to have disappeared
without trace. As a result, soldiers often go without
pay for months on end, leading them to set up apparently official checkpoints with the sole purpose of extracting bribes from civilians.
As for Sunni Muslims in today's Iraq, there
seems to be little to choose for the local population
between the corrupt and murderous Nigerian army
and Boko Haram. Nor is there much faith in the
countrys politicians. Nigerian senators are paid $1
million a year, the biggest pay packet of any group
of politicians in the world.

What can be done?

The roots of Nigerias social, economic, political
and now military problems have to be located in
its exploitation by Western imperialism in conjunction with the local bourgeoisie.
The USA only declared Boko Haram a terrorist

organisation in 2013, four years after its insurgency began. It has done very little to combat it
since. Why? Because imperialism is solely interested in Nigeria's booming south, where GDP
growth is on course for 7 per cent a year, potentially taking Nigeria into the top 20 world
economies.
So oil majors like Chevron, ExxonMobil and
Shell invest billions in the oil sector, massively
boosted by trade with China, but northern states
like Borno can go hang, as far as Obama, Cameron
and Xi Jinping are concerned.
The only force capable of and willing to stand
up to Boko Haram is the Nigerian working class,
allied to the peasants, nomads and fisher folk of
the north-east. Their patience and belief in the government, army and international agencies to come
to their aid has long run out.
Meanwhile, there have been numerous examples of villages and towns arming themselves and
taking on Boko Haram, sometimes successfully.
What they lack is weapons. While Boko Haram
has stolen tanks and armoured personnel carriers,
the self-defence groups have only machetes and
clubs. They should demand weapons from the
government, fraternise with the soldiers and if necessary raid barracks so they can defend their communities.
As many men and women as possible need
to be organised, armed and trained. The sooner
Boko Haram's raw recruits meet their match
among the villagers, the sooner their morale will
crack.
The remnants of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign continue to picket government offices, often
attacked by the police in a blatant attempt to silence them. They must not be silenced, but link up
with councils of workers and peasants in the towns
and villages, and appeal to the wider labour movement for support.
The Nigerian Labour Congress and Trade
Union Congress launched a successful general
strike three years ago against massive hikes in
petrol prices. Millions heeded its call. Yet both organisations and the small reformist Nigerian
Labour Party have effectively been silent over the
war.
The Democratic Socialist Movement, the
Nigerian sister party of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, has called for solidarity against
Boko Haram's advance, but has largely confined
its demands to calling for regular payment of and
arms for the rank and file soldiers. Scandalously,
it extends this call to the corrupt and hated police.
But the soldiers don't just need to be paid; they
also need to be won to the side of the workers and
the peasants and away from their officers. Socialists should demand the election of all officers and
the dismissal of those guilty of corruption and brutality: for the right of soldiers to hold political
meetings, to strike and to join political organisations.
There have been widespread reports of mutinies
and even shootings of officers. These spontaneous
acts of rebellion need to be made more conscious
and linked to the goals and organisations of the
working class and poor peasants.
If Nigerian socialists can over the coming
months argue for these goals and link them to the
wider goal of working class control of the oil sector and the banks, then the crisis caused by Boko
Haram can become a launch-pad for the fight for
revolutionary socialism.

0 ARMH 20F5 Workers Power

greece

Syrizas negotiated surrender

The fight is on to force the government to carry out its promise to break with austerity

KD TAIT

yrizas failure to secure concessions on

Greeces loan repayments shows the
weakness of a strategy based on exploiting divisions within Europes ruling class. The priority now is to halt the retreat,
and to prepare the working class to take all
measures necessary to defy the Eurozone and
carry out Syrizas electoral programme.
Fresh from masterminding Syrizas humiliation
at the hands of the Troika, Greeces Finance
Minister Yanis Varoufakis has pledged to
squeeze blood out of stone to repay IMF
debts due this month.
The 20 February agreement between Greece
and the Eurozone ministers is a betrayal of
Syrizas promises to end austerity, to make no
more sacrifices for the euro, and to put the interests of workers before those of the bosses.
From campaigning for a write-off of the debt,
Greece has committed to complete fully and
swiftly all of its financial obligations towards
its partners.
The four-month extension to the second
bailout was made conditional on Syriza running
a budget surplus, that is, continuing with austerity. Instead of appealing to the working class
of Greece and Europe to mobilise against this
blackmail, Varoufakis, who describes himself
as an erratic Marxist, revealed himself to be
a charlatan in the service of capital.
Presented as a necessary compromise, Varoufakis suggests that the extension allows Syriza
to carry out 20 per cent of its anti-austerity
measures. But the only thing it actually guarantees is that the 1.8 billion due to the IMF in
March will be paid on the dot and to the last
cent.
The seven-page document that outlined the
concessions that Syriza negotiated in return
for a little more rope is a damning list of attacks
that Syriza was elected to oppose.
In short, Syriza has promised to repay all of the
debt that it once rightly denounced as illegitimate and made all measures to improve the situation of working and poor people subject to
approval by the same Institutions that it promised to kick out.

ro en promises
Syriza promised to restore the monthly minimum wage from 580 to 751. This has been
replaced with a promise to raise it over time,
in a manner that safeguards competitiveness
and productivity, alongside labour market reforms deemed necessary to create a better
business environment.
Worse, the scope and timing of changes to
the minimum wage will be made in consultation with social partners and the European and
international institutions. Syriza has effectively issued the working class an undated
cheque, one that has to be signed by the same
people that have cut the paychecks of many
Greeks by up to 50 per cent.
Gone too is the promise to create 300,000
new jobs and rehire 10,000 civil servants illegally sacked by the last government a victim
of Syrizas new promise to identify cost-saving measures through a thorough review of
spending by every ministry.
One area where they could save costs and
carry out their programme is the promise to dis-

qe

ill s ueeye zlood

out of stone

FINANCE MINISTER YANIS VAROUFAKIS EXPLAINS HOW HE PLANS TO REPAY IMF LOANS DUE THIS MONTH

band the riot squads, and to merge the special

DIAS, ZIRA and DELTA squads. It seems that
here too, reforms have been kicked into the
long grass.
Syriza pledged unequivocally to halt privatisations of ports, airports and energy utilities.
This is now hamstrung by a commitment not to
roll back privatisations that have been completed, and that where the tender process has
been launched the government will respect the
process, according to the law.
Because this concession has roused the most
opposition within Syriza, indeed within the cabinet, Varoufakis now has to juggle with words,
talking of creative ambiguities in the terms of
the agreement. He states:
The law gives the government possibilities
to both change the terms of the procedure and
at some point to check the legality of this procedure. [...] Our position is very simple. The
sell-off of family silver at rock-bottom prices
and in a way that doesn't lead to development
for the economy must stop.
Economy Minister George Stathakis, is
bolder still: We will cancel the privatisation of
the Piraeus Port. It will remain permanently
under state majority holding. [] The deal for
the sale of the Greek airports will have to be
drastically revised. It all goes to one company.
There is no way it will get through the Greek
parliament.
The Institutions will certainly try to enforce
the letter of this agreement, but opposition
within Syriza will push the government to bargain for the best deal. This is better than abject surrender, but it is not enough.
Workers facing the threat of privatisation
should not put their trust in the diplomatic word
games and manoeuvres of Syriza ministers but
in their own collective strength. If the government wont stop privatisations and renationalise
industries, then occupations, and opening the
accounts to public scrutiny should be used to
force the government to choose sides.

ad che ues
Despite the government's retreat Syriza can still
rely on a huge reservoir of goodwill amongst a
population enthused by a government that has
taken, if only rhetorically, a tough line in negotiations. The reforms outlined in the proposals
accepted by the Eurogroup are limited, but the
extent to which they will make an immediate
improvement to the terrible conditions of thousands should not be dismissed lightly.
Free electricity for 300,000 households under
the poverty line and food subsidies for the same
number of families with no income have been
maintained. Pledges to provide free medical
care for those without insurance or jobs and a

ban on repossessions for those in mortgage arrears have not yet been reneged on.
Syrizas problem is that it has not set out how
these measures will be funded. Syriza has committed to ensuring relief measures have no
negative fiscal effect, that is, that all increases
in spending will be compensated by cuts elsewhere. This means that the only way it can fund
them is through extra income derived from reforms to the tax system, anti-corruption measures and the collection of unpaid taxes. Paul
Mason, Channel 4 News economics editor, sums
up this dilemma neatly:
There are no costings for the Greek programme, and therefore no way of calculating
how much 'fiscal space' Greece has won from the
former troika. 'Fiscal space' in the Greek crisis is
the codeword for non-austerity: how much relief
from austerity did the Greek electorate gain by
putting the Syriza-ANEL coalition into power?

We wont know the answer until a crucial

blank space is filled in. Greece is supposed to
run a primary surplus on its budget i.e. the opposite of a deficit to the tune of 4 per cent of
GDP. As the economy is tanking due to uncertainty, and tax receipts dried up in the last two
months of the old government, that is impossible and to achieve it would only require even
further cuts to public spending. 1
Enter Finance Minister Varoufakis, who has
a cunning plan. Since the agreement contains
no specific figures, there is apparently room for
interpretation. In the words of Varoufakis:
What we all did was to find common ground.
And the way you find common ground when
you start from quite disparate positions is by
using terms that allow for multiple interpretations in order to create room for disagreement.2
The response of German Finance Ministry
spokeswoman Marianne Kothe, insisted that
any concessions were made only for 2015:
That means that the target agreed in the program the figure of 4.5 percent of gross domestic product is important here still goes.
Summoning all his creative powers, Varoufakis
replied: This is not my understanding of what
we agreed to.
Here one is reminded of an exchange in
Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking Glass:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in
rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I
choose it to meanneither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can
make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty,

"which is to be masterthat's all."
Does professor Varoufakis really believe he
can out-interpret the ECB, the IMF or the German government? Or is he just trying to quiet
the growing alarm of Syrizas supporters? In
any case it is sure that the Institutions will
sooner rather than later show him who is to
be master.

bla ed strategw
The strategy of the Syriza leadership was to
court the political class of Europe, themselves
under pressure from electorates opposed to austerity, and persuade them that it was in their interests to abandon austerity in favour of a
Keynesian growth programme.
They severely miscalculated both the ability
and the willingness of the political elites to
abandon a strategy that every party of government has been wedded to since the onset of the
Great Recession.
Worse, in their tour of European capitals,
Syriza met in secret negotiations with the chief
representatives of the ruling class but spurned
the organisations and campaigns of the labour
movement, the only forces to express unconditional solidarity with their declared aims.
It is true that Syriza's negotiating team was
blackmailed by the ECBs decision to restrict
access to liquidity for Greek banks. It is true
that the German government demanded unconditional surrender backed by threats to kick
Greece out of the Eurozone.
But it was no secret that Germany, as the
hegemonic force in Europe, commanded the
unflinching support of not only Finland and the
Netherlands, but also Spain and other countries
whose governments were embroiled in inflicting the same poisonous medicine of austerity
on their own peoples. All were desperate to see
the hope of an anti-austerity government strangled at birth.
Syriza hoped that separate bilateral negotiations with each EU government would allow it
to divide its opponents. But this was never
likely to sway the hard faced bankers, bureaucrats and politicians who imposed technocratic regimes on Italy and Greece when they
proved unable to pass austerity budgets.
Syriza opened negotiations by abandoning its
strongest cards. It refused to go over the heads
of pro-capitalist presidents and unelected
bankers to appeal directly to their working
classes to rally in support of the first government elected on a programme of ending austerity. By publishing the secret agreements and
negotiations it could have exposed the extent to
which Germany and the Troika have blackmailed and extorted the Greek people.
It even ditched its demand for a European
debt conference to discuss a common reduction
or write-down of national debt. Its insistence on
remaining in the Eurozone suggested that it
would do so at any cost.
Syrizas capitulation was not merely that of
a naive new government being taken to the
cleaners by experienced political operators. It
was the logical outcome of the strategy of a political current that claims to stand for socialism and Marxism, but that rejects the idea
that the working class can organise to advance

Workers Power

ARMH 20F5

greece

a revolutionary alternative to the crisis of the

capitalist system.
Or, in the words of Varoufakis:
[T]he question that arises for radicals is this:
should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a
better system? Or should we be so worried
about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising European capitalism?
To me, the answer is clear. Europes crisis is
far less likely to give birth to a better alternative
to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously
regressive forces that have the capacity to cause
a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing
the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come.3
It is true that without forces willing to organise the struggle for a better alternative (socialism), then a humanitarian bloodbath
(barbarism) will doubtless ensue. The working
class of Greece and Europe must become the
intransigent opponents of Varoufakiss project
of saving capitalism from itself.
As long as the Syriza leadership remains
committed to acting within the limits of capitalism, limits enforced by the imperialist muscle
of the Institutions, then only austerity and social catastrophe await the people of Greece.
The urgent task now is therefore to prevent
the potential embodied by Syrizas mandate for
radical anti-austerity measures from being
squandered by a leadership that has no confidence in the power of the working class.
This means organising a vigorous campaign
within the party and within the wider labour
movement in Greece and Europe to implement
Syrizas programme in full, and to defend it
from the sabotage and attacks of its class enemies at home and abroad, and thus to open up a
struggle not just against austerity and its neoliberal political advocates but against capitalism
itself.

Beft opposition
Syriza has several organised currents critical of
the majority line. The biggest is the Left Platform, whose role is significant both in terms of
its size and its lack of a credible alternative
strategy.
At a meeting of the Syriza parliamentary
fraction on 25 February, debate raged for
twelve hours as MPs criticised the deal presented by Tsipras. In a non-binding vote,
around a third of MPs present voted against
or abstained, demonstrating that opposition
extends beyond the Left Platform's ranks.
The party's Central Committee met over the
weekend of 28 February to discuss a proposal
from the pro-Tsipras majority to ratify the
Agreement. A critical amendment from the
Left Platform opposed the deal and called on
the party to take the initiative of implementing steadily and as a matter of priority its
commitments and the content of its programmatic governmental statement, and to do this
despite the agreements of the Eurogroup.
It called on the party to rely on workers'
and popular struggles, to contribute to their
revitalisation, and to the continuous expansion of popular support in order to resist to
any form of blackmail.
This amendment was defeated by 92 votes
to 68, with 6 blank votes or abstentions. This
nevertheless represents a growth in opposition
to the majority line, confirmed by the 64 votes
secured by Left Platform candidate for party
secretary Alekos Kalyvis, against 102 for
Tsipras's candidate Tasos Koronakis.
But a major weakness in the Left Platforms
amendment is that it did not spell out any concrete proposals for mobilising workers, party
members and the left outside Syriza, to carry
out Syrizas programme. The acid test now
will be whether they break ranks and vote for
the Communist Party (KKE) bill in parliament, which calls for the scrapping of past

bight or flightT

MASS PRESSURE NEEDED TO FORCE SYRIZA TO CARRY OUT ITS PROGRAMME

loan agreements and the repeal of all regressive laws passed as part of previous memoranda. And they should do so, paving the way
for a united front of the working class and the
left to reject austerity measures in their entirety.

1he drachma panacea

Tsiprass setback at the hands of the Eurogroup and Varoufakiss admission that a further bailout may be necessary has put wind in
the sails of those who advocate withdrawal
from the Euro.
The academics Stathis Kouvelakis, reader in
political theory at King's College London, and
Costas Lapavitsas, professor of economics at
SOAS are two prominent advocates of this
perspective.
According to Kouvelakis, a member of
Syrizas central committee, defeat was
inevitable and marks the end of the strategy
of a positive solution inside the euro, or to
be more accurate a positive solution at all
costs inside the euro.4
He explains that:
In the Left Platforms view, the government
has to break out of the confines of the accords that it has signed and implement some
of its key policies without first seeking permission from the institutions. And with an
eye to Junes negotiations, it has proposed an
alternative plan that doesnt shy away
from taking unilateral measures, including
if there is any more blackmail over the
countrys financing breaking from the
euro framework.5

Lapavitsas, now a Syriza member of the

Greek parliament, also insists, The most
vital step is to realise that the strategy of
hoping to achieve radical change within the
institutional framework of the common currency has come to an end.6
The success or failure of the strategy that
Syriza pursues in the months ahead wont be
determined solely by internal party struggles,
nor by clever diplomatic manoeuvres, let
alone through the exploitation of creative
ambiguity. It depends ultimately on the attitude the mass of workers and unemployed.

A poll for the Syriza-affiliated Avgi newspaper, published on 25 February, shows the
majority of Greeks are under no illusions
about how dependent Greece is on Europe:
Some 76 per cent of respondents had a positive view of the euro, with 75 per cent considering exit from the euro not possible. In
a referendum on the euro, 73 per cent would
vote for retaining it, while just 18 per cent
considered a return to the drachma to be a
positive step. And 61 per cent had a positive view of the EU, while 43 per cent
thought the EU should be Greeces main ally,
with Russia a distant second on 13 per cent.7
It is clear from the popular support for
Syrizas negotiations and its rise in the polls
that a major mobilisation could be organised
to demand that Syriza be permitted to carry
through its programme, within the Eurozone
and against the wishes of the EU leaders.
It should be clear that any attempt to impose Syrizas programme courts the risk of
Greeces expulsion from the Eurozone. However to conclude, as the Left Platform does,
that Greece should simply exit the Euro on
its own terms would be a major tactical mistake.
It would place all the responsibility for the
consequences of Grexit on Syriza itself, letting the eurocrats off the hook. It would also
alienate the mass of people who dont want
to be the guinea pigs for a left-nationalist experiment in economic autarky.
A new currency the drachma or other
would plummet against the euro, wiping out
savings and devaluing wages and pensions.
Interest rates and bankruptcies would rocket.
Greece's dependence on imports would force
the rationing of food, medicine and basic
goods.
A policy of national autarky or alliance with
other imperialist powers also presupposes the
abandonment of Syrizas programme. Russia or
China might be willing to bankroll some social
reforms in the short term, but only if they were
sure of recouping their pound of flesh with interest.
An independent Greek state that doesnt break
with capitalism could only compete in the world
market (and therefore grow its economy and deliver on its promises of future repayment) if the
rate of exploitation of its working class was sufficient to make its industries competitive. And
the state would have to become the tool for enforcing this, meaning either that Syriza would
have to do away with its programme, or that the
state would do away with Syriza.

Syriza won the election with the message

that it wanted an exit from austerity and not
from the European Union and that it
wanted this for all the working people of Europe and not just for Greece. This message
was a rallying point for the European working class. The bullying of the Institutions and
of German capitalism exposed the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the European Union.
The left in Syriza and in Greece should
point out that the real enemy is not merely
the neoliberal policy of European capital, but
the dictatorship of the capitalist class itself,
which tramples on formal democratic rights
whenever they present an obstacle to its class
interests.
The Left Platform is right to insist that the
government needs to be forced to carry out
its Thessaloniki programme in full, and to
warn that confronting the EU means preparing for the EU to cut off credit to the countrys banks and start the process of kicking
it out of the Eurozone.
The only way to counter these moves is to
prepare the working class now to take the
necessary measures of self-defence against
capital. How? By the expropriation of the
banks, by imposing a monopoly on foreign
trade and by putting power into the hands of
working class assemblies and a popular militia.
By these measures, Syriza and the working
class of Greece would be demonstrating the
way forward for all of Europes workers. Just
as there is no progressive solution for the
workers of Greece in an independent capitalist Greece, so they will need to appeal to
the European working class to carry out similar measures against their own governments
to stop them sabotaging Greece.
This perspective, which insists on the ability of the working class to seize the moment
of capitalisms historic crisis to be the agents
of its own emancipation is infinitely preferable to the cynical lie that we are not
ready. After all, if not now, when?
The best defence against capital if offense.
This means creating fighting bodies that can
organise millions in this struggle: assemblies, strike committees and action committees to coordinate it. It means the total
disbanding of the brutal police squads and
their replacement by workers defence
guards. It means the nationalisation under
workers control of all privatised industries
and the banks, to prevent capital flight and
sabotage. In short, it means a workers government that can fight against Greek and foreign capital.
The weeks and months to come are full of
potential. If the Greek workers lead the way
in imposing their power on rapacious European capital, then this can lead workers
across the continent to begin a revolutionary
refoundation of the entire European project,
one that breaks with capitalism and that
unites hundreds of millions of workers in the
construction of a radical new future, a socialist united states of Europe.
(1) [Link]

rogroup-syriza-varoufakis-grexit/3439

(2) [Link]
ticles_wsite2_1_01/03/2015_547763

(3) [Link]

eb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
(4) [Link]

iza-greece-eurogroup-kouvelakis/

(5) [Link]
ece-syriza-eurogroup-tsipras-varoufakis/

(6) [Link]
02/austerity-greece-euro-currency-syriza

(7) [Link]

apragmateusi-sto-87-i-dimotikotita-tsipras

1 MARCH 2015 Workers Power

workers

power

[Link] @workerspowerL5i contact@[Link]

Nato escalation risks Russia war

The antiwar movement must act now to stop Natos reckless military build-up in eastern Europe
DAVE STOCKTON

fter 15 years of war in Afghanistan,

Nato chiefs have signalled they have no
intention of acquiescing to war-weariness and beating their swords into
ploughshares.
An existential Russian threat to European order
and stability is being conjured up in order to
bounce politicians into ramping up arms spending
and deploying troops to Europe's eastern frontiers.
The pretext is the year-old civil war in Ukraine,
presented as an act of naked Russian aggression.
This is despite the fact that the conflict is indisputably the result of the Western imperialisms'
own attempt to drag that unhappy country into
their orbit through a colour revolution, with
American and German funded NGOs as their conduits.
The revolution was in fact a coup carried out
with fascist muscle, which ousted the elected proRussian president and replaced his regime with
personnel handpicked by US Assistant Secretary
of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland. Far from being hatched in the Kremlin,
the conflict in Ukraine was hatched in the White
House and the Pentagon, with Berlin providing the
democratic veneer of European democracy.
The scenario according to Nato is simple.
Putin's little green men are poised to infiltrate
the states of Eastern Europe from the Black Sea to
the Baltic. Since the existence of large ethnic Russian populations in these states apparently provides
a pretext for Russian invasion, these minorities
must be regarded with the utmost suspicion.
Supreme commander of Nato, US General
Philip Breedlove is planning an advanced deployment of weaponry and forces along the borders of
Russia, with a major deployment in Poland ready
to mobilise at a moment's notice.
As a statement of intent, Nato forces from the
US, UK, Holland and others staged a provocative
military parade through Narva, Estonia, just yards
from the Russian border posts.
It is no accident that Narva has an 87 per cent Russophone population, and that 37 per cent of its residents are Russian citizens. It is the easternmost
town in Estonia, only 85 miles from Saint Petersburg.

Natos new strategy

At the September 2014 Nato Summit in Newport,
South Wales, a new cold war strategy was thrashed
out. This was followed by a February 2015 meeting of Nato defence ministers, which created a
spearhead force, dubbed the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), for the existing Nato
Response Force.
This will initially consist of 5,000 troops backed
by air, maritime and special operations units. Two
further brigades will be on standby to reinforce it;
in total the enhanced Nato Response Force will
total around 30,000 troops.
The ostensible purpose of this rigmarole is to
deter the supposed threat from Putin's Russia. The
number of manoeuvres on the eastern flank of the
world's biggest military alliance has increased,
with more than 3,000 air sorties in 2014, compared
to just 200 by Russia.
The rationales provided by our political leaders
would not win prizes for sophistication of analysis.
In a speech to Nato's political leaders last September, David Cameron likened Putin to Hitler: We

proven adept at drawing its allies into its conflicts,

even against their own interests, as with Germany
and Japan, who have good reasons to pursue closer
economic ties with Russia and China respectively.

The main enemy

NATO FLAUNTS THE STARS AND STRIPES ON THE RUSSIAN BORDER

run the risk of repeating the mistakes made in Munich in '38. We cannot know what will happen
next. This time we cannot meet Putin's demands.
He has already taken Crimea and we cannot allow
him to take the whole country.
Michael Fallon, UK Defence Secretary, has said
that there is a real and present danger that Putin
will launch a campaign to destabilise the Baltic
states. Consequently Nato must be prepared to
repel Russian aggression in whatever form it
takes.
A parade of senior military figures have been
wheeled out in the media to warn of the dangers
we face. Just as turkeys don't vote for Christmas,
so generals don't have a tendency to talk up
prospects for peace. So we get Deputy Supreme
commander of Nato, General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, claiming that in an era of constant competition with Russia the latter represented an
obvious existential threat to our whole being.
Air Commodore Andrew Lambert told the
Daily Mail that the Royal Air Force would likely
be overwhelmed by sheer numbers in the event of
a Russian attack. Sir Michael Graydon, a former
Chief of the Air Staff, thinks They have got us
more or less at their mercy.
Any credible journalist should of course dismiss
these ludicrous claims as the hyperbole of people
who still think they're fighting the USSR. Yet the
BBC, Channel 4, the Daily Mail, The Times, The
Economist, The Guardian and The Independent
parrot this line without demur.
It is the absolute unanimity of the propaganda
war that indicates that a serious and fundamental
change in the policy of the Western imperialist
bloc has taken place.

A new bipolarity
The financial crisis of 2008 and the long recession
since have altered the economic balance of world
forces against the USA and the European Union.
As a result, we are now witnessing a long march
to conflict between the two real superpowers: the
USA and China. Although by far the world's hegemonic economic and military power, the preeminence of the USA is beginning to wane and its
rulers know it.
China's dynamism has obliged the USA to de-

clare South East Asia its priority strategic region,

in what has come to be called the Pivot to Asia.
Military bases in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia are now more carefully maintained than ever before. Japan has been
encouraged to upgrade its military and adopt a
more aggressive stance.
In response, China's president Xi Jinping announced a strategic change of course in November
2014. China no longer considers relations with the
United States and Europe a priority. That position
is to be replaced by a reorientation to the BRIC
states, especially Russia, and to neighbouring
Asian countries, as well as to Africa.
At a time when Russia is beset by Western economic sanctions and the slump in oil prices enginerred by US ally Saudi Arabia, China has
concluded several gigantic energy contracts with
Russia's state-owned Gazprom and Rosneft. In
time, these can compensate for the threatened loss
of exports to Europe. The two countries are building two new gas pipelines together, and increased
use of the yuan in bilateral trade is likely to stabilise the beleaguered rouble.
If China is the USA's long term rival for domination of the global economy in the 21st century,
then Russia is its short term obstacle to preserving
its hegemony in key areas like Europe, Central
Asia and the Middle East. When Russia recovered
from its prostration at the hands of Yeltsin and
Western imperialism in the 1990s, and emerged
under Putin as a new imperialist power, it inherited
certain assets remaining from the Soviet Union.
Amongst these were its nuclear deterrent and its
veto on the UN Security Council, but also strategic
allies in the Middle East.
Through its alliances with Syria and Iran, and
through the latter, Iraq, Russia poses a major obstacle to US hegemony over the Middle East. Russia's military power, its UN veto and its nuclear
capabilities make it the most powerful regional
military opponent of the US empire. The shift in
the relative balance of military force in the region
has even provoked restiveness amongst the USA's
oldest allies there: Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt.
Nevertheless, the world's largest superpower
can still impose its will on its Nato and Seato allies.
This gives it a greater ability to intervene globally
than any other military power. In addition it has

The phoney character of the USA's Russian

threat narrative is revealed in a recent interview
given by US President Barack Obama, in which
he argued that we don't have a peer in terms of a
state that's going to attack us and bait us. The closest we have, obviously, is Russia, with its nuclear
arsenal, but generally speaking they can't project
the way we can around the world. China can't, either. We spend more on our military than the next
10 countries combined.
And in any case, as Obama said in his State of
the Union speech in January, Russia is isolated
with its economy in tatters, due to sanctions.
He is right. Russia, as a much weaker imperialist
power, remains at the mercy of the USA's influence over world markets, and is confined in its ambitions effectively to the surrounding parts of the
Eurasian land mass. It is not seeking to dominate
or conquer Europe (it couldn't), but to ally itself
with a German-led European Union to its west, as
well as to build links with the economic powerhouse of China to its east.
Or at least it was until recently. Thwarting a
resurgent Russia and reining in Germanys appetite for trade and investment openings to the east
via Russia are the real driving forces behind the
USA's intervention in Ukraine, and behind its policy of reviving Nato as a cold war instrument
needed to protect Europe from the consequences
of Nato's own provocations.
Of course, the USA's allies have their own
agenda, and they do not always willingly submit
to policies whose consequences would hurt them
far more than they would the USA. As Obama
stated: we occasionally have to twist the arms of
countries that wouldn't do what we need them to
do if it weren't for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we
had if we didn't have that dose of realism, we
wouldn't get anything done, either.
Such aggressive talk, reinforced by the real
threat of actual aggression does not come from a
positions of unassailable strength, such as the USA
enjoyed in 1945. Instead it is the bravado overlaid
with arrogance that is symptomatic of a declining
power. But this does not make the USA's new cold
war any less dangerous, but more so, since it is
forced to take ever greater risks to maintain its position.
It is the duty of socialists to expose the plans of
our own imperialist rulers as plans prepared and
enacted to defend the interests of our ruling capitalist class at home and its allies abroad. These
plans, if unchecked, will lead to more regional
wars as in Ukraine, Iraq and Syria today. They will
lead ultimately to a world war, as the major powers
are drawn into defending their own regional allies
and proxies.
In Britain, the USA, Germany, France and Russia we need to rally opposition to our rulers' war
drive by raising the slogan of the German Communist Karl Liebknecht and the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin: the main enemy is in our
own country.