Overthrowing capitalism in the twenty-first century

CPI General Secretary, Eugene McCarten, at the Communist University, London

Comrades,

Thank you very much for the invitation to speak at this year’s Communist University here in London. The title of this rally, “Overthrowing capitalism in the twenty-first century,” is certainly a challenging one but a most important one.

If there was one simple answer we would long since have found it. But, as we know, life does not always offer simple or easy solutions; it does not offer pain-free solutions. It is the question of who the pain is inflected upon, and for what outcome.

We are certainly gathering at an extremely important point in history, particularly as events are now unfolding in Europe. What appeared unstoppable and solid three decades ago, two decades ago or even five years ago, and was perceived by millions as the natural order of things, is now very fluid. People are beginning to question things that they once solidly believed in. Not alone is monopoly capitalism in deep crisis but we are also on the possible edge of a global environmental catastrophe.

The European Union is now in a “state of chassis,” as Seán O’Casey’s character called it. There is a clear division and a redivision of power and influence now under way within the EU. The old order of France and Germany deciding and the rest following is now being changed, with Germany deciding and the rest awaiting word from the Chancellery in Berlin. The ECB disagrees with the Commission, while the EU Parliament continues to play at being a parliament and maintaining that façade and still attempting to fool the gullible.

The crisis is deepening and is exposing deep fractures in the system as well as inter-imperialist tensions and rivalries. The recent G20 summit came and went and delivered nothing. The EU heads of government appear to be in permanent crisis session. Like constipated bull-frogs, they croak without any relief from the trapped wind from all the hot air generated, as each meeting is presented as the most important since the last most important one. The continuing and deepening crisis within the EU, centred on the euro and debt, and the imposition of socialised corporate debt on working people, appears to be their only answer. After each EU, euro-zone, G8 or G20 summit the politicians, media and “experts” all tell us we will have to wait to see how the markets respond. Clearly a case of the tail wagging the dog.

The growing crisis of the euro and what they call the “sovereign” debt crisis has all the hallmarks of being beyond them. They have now constructed a structured debt relationship between the core states and the heavily indebted peripheral countries, which will result in massive transfers of wealth from the periphery to the centre. Germany is attempting to extract maximum political advantage from the situation, demanding further rigid controls of the fiscal and budgetary governance of member-states by EU institutions, including the EU Commission and the European Central Bank. Clearly they are attempting to close off any potential alternative economic and social strategy by the people.

The austerity measures being imposed by the external EU-ECB-IMF “troika,” in co-operation with the internal troika of Fine Gael, the Labour Party, and Fianna Fáil, is imposing massive cuts in public spending: $3.5 billion this year, €3.7 billion next year. There are cuts in children’s allowance and unemployment benefit, hospital closures, levies, and an increase in value-added tax, which always affects poor people and workers most. In Ireland and all the peripheral countries there is a massive fire-sale of public companies, and public services will be privatised, narrowing the space and role of public capital so as to create areas into which private, corporate capital can expand, and control and exploit. Yet the rich and powerful remain aloof from the crisis; their life-styles, their villas remain untouched.

The French elite want the peripheral countries to pay back their debts to French banks at whatever cost to the people of those countries while demanding that the Germans bail out the rest of the French banking system in the form of euro debt bonds. German monopoly capital does not want the noose of debt hung around its neck, which would be the case if the euro debt bonds were created. This is the nature of the present divisions within the EU.

The European banking system is in deep trouble, which began in the periphery and has now moved into the core countries. Each solution gives temporary relief, to be followed by further crisis and a further turning of the screw on the people. The crisis of the system is being used by national governments and monopoly capitalism to drive back the rights of workers and their families, to take back much of what we gained in the last half of the twentieth century in our wages and our terms and conditions.

In Ireland we await the budget—it hasn’t been sent from Germany yet—from a coalition government not yet a year in office and already bankrupt of ideas. They will carry on the same policies as the previous government, stamped with the seal of the EU and marked “non-negotiable.” Because that is what they have been told to do, and it is also in their own class interests.

But we know that this is not necessarily the case—that things can be changed. The Greek government also said things were non-negotiable, but, through great resistance and against great odds, the Greek working class have resisted and forced the social democrats to scurry back to Brussels, looking for concessions and a cut in interest rates etc. Their resistance created conflict and tension at the heart of the EU.

When Papandreou ran out of road, in a vain hope of placating enough of the people and stabilising the situation, he decided in a last throw of the dice that he would consult the people in a referendum on the austerity pact. This was the final straw that broke the patience of his political masters in Berlin and Paris and the ruling class in Greece. Papandreou had to go, and he went, in the first of two virtual coups d’état, to be replaced by what is euphemistically called “technocratic” government.

This was quickly followed by a coup against Italian democracy and the replacement of the Italian government with a new one with not a single elected member. The assaults on the democratic will of the Greek and Italian people are among the first public manifestations and a real expression of the EU corporatist state now under construction. The reality that bourgeois democracy will be truncated to meet the needs of capital when in crisis is becoming more open and visible.

European monopoly capitalism is using the crisis to further tighten its grip. If they succeed in further eroding the ability of peoples and member-states to take independent decisions in relation to economic and social policies, and that budgets must first be cleared through Brussels, this will in effect turn elected governments into mere lobbyists, looking for concessions here and there, one set of lobbyists among more powerful lobby groups.

Since the bourgeoisie took power and established their state institutions and governance, they have carefully constructed a consciousness and belief among people that democracy and capitalism are inseparable, indeed synonymous: that no other social and economic organisation of society was or could be democratic. Yet we have two governments removed in as many weeks, replaced by quisling governments. They loudly proclaim that the crisis in each country is different and that we must prevent “contagion,” yet they impose similar cures for what they claim are different illnesses.

We believe capitalism is incompatible with democracy: capitalism insists that social control is undesirable, bad, and impossible.

Comrades,

We are living in a period when many myths are exploding and are ceasing to have an influence on how the people see the world around them.

Myth 1: That the independent state is redundant in the era of globalisation. False! The first port of call when the situation moved into crisis was the resources of the state to bail it out, in Ireland to the tune of €140 billion—that is, nearly €40,000 per person.

Myth 2: That the EU is a union of equals. Since the crisis it has been a case of the weakest having to go to the wall.

Myth 3: That monopoly capitalism has overcome its contradictions of boom and slump.

Myth 4: That democracy and capitalism go hand in hand. Clearly not true. What we have in the EU is a form of corporate state, one becoming more reactionary as the crisis deepens.

Myth 5: That there is no alternative either to capitalism or to the solutions being imposed to get it out of this crisis.

We clearly need a strategy for building and strengthening working-class solidarity throughout Europe, to find unity on shared goals and demands.

Decades of revisionism and opportunist influences, a non-class approach, a non-anti-imperialist approach to central economic and political questions among sections of the communist movement in Europe have left a deep legacy of confusion and division within the ranks of working-class forces. It has left the working class in some countries leaderless. It has left the working class confused and lacking in clarity about the nature of the crisis, about the class character and the role of the EU, thereby hindering the building of resistance and presenting clear anti-monopoly demands and strategies for a way out of the crisis on working-class terms.

But we see around us the small shoots of resistance beginning to develop, in the form of the Occupy movements around the world. Yes, they display anti-communist, anti-left, anti-trade-union features; but nothing will emerge from the swamp of the capitalist system fully developed or without the scars of the system affecting how they see the world. The working class is beginning to resist, as we witness in the growing number of strikes by workers throughout Europe, including here in Britain and back home in Ireland.

The gravediggers of the system are slowly awakening from the decades of Cold War propaganda freezer. The leaders of imperialism wish that the spring that gives birth to new life to the people’s struggles will be confined to places far from their own doorsteps, a spring that will give them new opportunities to exploit and dominate, while at home they hope they can keep the people under control with a daily diet of manufactured fear about the ATM machines running out of money, or people losing their homes, so as to manufacture their consent to having what generations struggled for taken away, because that is what is needed to get “us” out of the crisis.

The question facing us all is, How do we turn the economic crisis of the system into a political crisis of the system?

Our struggle is both national and international. It is is a struggle against imperialist domination and control.

On the European level it is clear that we need greater co-operation. We have many shared demands: No to privatisation, No to the debt burden, No to the imposed austerity schemes of the EU, ECB, and IMF, and actions of solidarity with workers when they are on strike.

At the national level we need to harness the people’s anger at not having any control or influence over events affecting and shaping their lives.

In many ways it is the crisis of the system that is exposing the nature and the limitations of the system itself. We have to take advantage of this and try to create greater ideological space for us to present a people’s alternative way forward.

Their lack of democracy and their efforts to corral and to narrow the people’s options are their Achilles heel. This means leading people from the straitjacket of bourgeois democracy, where workers and citizens have no real democratic control, to real democracy, where there is full social control over politics, society, and the economy.

We communists want to empower working people to democratise all areas of life.

Democracy, which is centred on working people, is the fertile ground that we have to cultivate and develop. It is about the democratic control of capital, about democratic control over the means of production.

Once again the hammer and sickle can be seen in their thousands on the streets of cities around Europe. They thought they had exorcised the spectre, but they have not.

This is not a time for pessimism or defeatism but rather for optimism and resistance. The twenty-first century belongs to the forces of democracy and socialism.