(We have translated the following article from the February 7 issue of the Belgian revolutionary-socialist weekly La Gauche.]
As everyone knows, we are living in a "democracy." Everybody is free to say what he wants. Political oppositions exist and can express themselves. Trade-union, cooperative, and collective organizations operate freely. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
But this "democracy" has its economic foundations. It is founded on the capitalist system. The means of production, the land on and beneath the surface, the factories, the machines, and the raw materials belong, in fact, to a social class.
The workers do not have free access to the means of production. They do not own either stocks of food or sufficient financial reserves. They are therefore forced to sell their labor power to the bosses month after month, week after week, day after day. Not because they adore working for a boss, or because they are inspired by a boundless love for "their" job or "their" factory. They would starve to death if they did not sell their labor power.
Formerly these workers were nothing. Today, having built powerful organizations, they have become something. Everybody knows that too. Their wages have increased. They have social security. They have achieved a modest standing.
But in exchange for these concessions, which are after all very small since the bourgeoisie has enriched itself in the meantime beyond all imagination, the capitalists have succeeded in transforming the same workers organizations that won these reforms from representatives of labor against capital into conciliators, intermediaries between capital and labor. Moreover, the most cynical and corrupt, or the most consistent (that is, consistently reformist), of these labor leaders cannot help sometimes func- 148
tioning as the representatives of capital against labor.
In a capitalist "democracy," recessions are inevitable. During recessions workers are fired. In such conditions there are regularly 200,000 to 250,- 000 "officially" unemployed workers in Belgium (besides this, some unemployed workers are no longer counted thanks to Van Acker; it looks better in the statistics!). You shrug your shoulders. Nothing can be done. It's God's will. Excuse me! It's the inexorable consequence of "free enterprise."
But under the capitalist system fat years follow thin ones. The workers who are condemned to suffer in the time of the thin cows try to make up for it in the time of the fat ones. When there is a drop in unemployment, or even a labor shortage, the "laws of the market" favor the sellers of labor power.
In two years' time, from 1967 to 1969, capitalist profits increased by 50 percent in this capitalist paradise which Belgium still is. The workers naïvely wanted their "slice of the pie." More naively still, these same workers believed in capitalist "democracy." Wasn't the right to strike recognized? Didn't they have the right not to work? So, the Limbourg workers stopped working.
Too bad for them. To use Karl Marx's apt phrase, all the demons of private interest, the most sordid thing in the world, were loosed against them.
What? Go out on a "wildcat" strike? Do you deny that the workers exist so that the unions can do their conciliating for them, instead of the unions existing to fight for the workers? Demand the right to set up pickets? Stick to your original demands? Hang on to your initial slogans because you think they are right and just? Are you actually going to let that kind of sincerity and bullheaded honesty replace compromise and the cultiva- • tion of a chummy understanding in cocktail parties and backroom discussions?
Why, these people are spoilsports!
They're threatening to upset everything. They're impossible people, if not downright "lawless"! And Mr. Schepmans, who everyone thoughtwas more intelligent and less two-faced than that, raised the cry this week in Pourquoi Pas? -"The backers and organizers of this strike, especially the JGS Jeunes Gardes Socialistes - Socialist Young Guard, a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International] are 'specialists in subversion.
You can hardly believe your eyes. So, organizing strikes and pickets, aiding striking workers is supposed to be subversive activity, the same thing as throwing bombs or plotting a coup d'etat? You would think we were back in the good old days of the economic royalists when all the potentates in the little world of capital had in fact established that principle.
Later the potentates of the workers organizations broke into this cozy circle, which, then, very reluctantly, had to change its language (not much really but still something).
But all it takes is for the workers to get angry, to fight back with their weapons of the class struggle against the permanent, uninterrupted class struggle conducted by big capital, and the old economic royalists surface again. From Libre Belgique and the Meuse of December 1960-January 1961 (the dates of the Belgian general strike] to Pourquoi Pas? of January 1970, the same theme has reappeared with a vengeance - to strike is subversive! Strike pickets are subversive! Solidarity with the strikers is subversive!
Gentlemen, you capitalists are more dangerous when you play the hypocrite's role than when you dish it out straight from the shoulder. We a thousand times over prefer a capitalist or a bourgeois scribbler who says what he thinks about strikes to a hypocrite who gives a Judas kiss to unionism and the workers, all the while thinking that he will "get them" in the next turn in the economic situation.
So, we thank these gentlemen of Pourquoi Pas?, as we thanked the gentlemen on Libre Belgique in 1960-61. We call on the advanced workers to spread around tens of thousands of these quotations in their areas: From the standpoint of the bosses and the reaction in this country, to strike, to set up pickets, to aid strikers is subversive. Naturally, it is not subversive to democracy because democracy is the masses, the miners; but it is subversive, without any doubt, to the capitalist system. These gentlemen are 100 percent right.
But when two million subversives in this country get organized like the Limbourg miners, no force in the world will be able to prevent them from carrying their subversion all the waythat is, to the overthrow of the capitalist system. The editors of Pourquoi Pas? will be able to sleep with a clear conscience then because they will have made their own little contribution to this beneficial work with their nineteenth-century prose.
If the miners were confronted only with the "thoughts" of Schepmans and Co., they would win in a few minutes. But capital has far more potent weapons than reactionary ideas. It employs hunger and the police. All its power is based on this.
When the Social Democrats say that reforms must be introduced, that they "cannot be delayed," I do not doubt that some of them are sincere. When they say that these urgent reforms require socialist participation in the government, there is no doubt that, alongside the careerists and the lovers of leather couches and places in ministerial cabinets, * there are some reformists who feel a real devotion to the workers and the little people of their city, neighborhood, or village.
But whatever their intentions are, whether their hearts are as pure as the driven snow or as foul as cesspools, they have no choice but to do their master's bidding.
The state is an instrument for defending the interests of the ruling class. The ruling class is the bourgeoisie. Its interests require defending private property and profit. As long as nothing but talk is involved, we are all brothers in one big socialist family. But when we come to serious thingswhen 50,000 workers come to serious things - then socialist fraternity comes to an abrupt halt, along with the Sunday speeches and midweek editorials. "Law and order must be maintained." Achille Van Acker raised this cry in 1961 (he had already practiced it in 1945 against the post-office employees and in 1957 against the metalworkers; but, altogether too generous, the workers forget so quickly!). Today, Harmegnies, Cools, Leburton, and Major are imitating him (and in the meantime there was Vranckx with two miners killed in Zwartberg). The ministers send police to crack the skulls of their striking "fellow" workers.
There are no more hypocritical, more "manipulative," more deceitful words than these six, "law and order must be maintained." In the daily papers, day in and day out, on radio and television on the hour, these words soften everyone up. Of course "law and order must be maintained." Only monsters could doubt it. Don't you have to let firemen put out fires? Don't you have to stop motorists from running over old people? Or degenerates from raping little girls? And don't you have to guarantee electricity for every home so that everyone can see at night and keep warm in the winter?
But if you don't let scoundrels or imbeciles pull the wool over your eyes, you can see very well that this is not what the cops are doing in Limbourg under the authority of their supreme commander, Citizen Harmegnies. They are protecting not firemen but strikebreakers. They are defending not little girls but the men who are starving them. They are maintaining not the flow of traffic but capitalist exploitation.
On its side, capital has money, power, international connections, and - unfortunately - the help of most of the brains (you have to live comfortably, so you have to do the dirty work of those with money). The individual workers are stripped and helpless in the face of these powerful means of control.
But they have a secret weapon - the strength of numbers, the capacity for collective organization, the power of mass solidarity.
To condemn the workers to "go on strike" one by one against capital would doom them to complete impotence. To deny them the right to organize, to form pickets, to block access to the factories would tie them hand and foot. "Law and order must be maintained" has a very concrete and precise meaning. It means maintaining the law and order of the capitalists against the workers, the law and order of the exploiters against the exploited, the law and order of greed and profit against the law and order of collective solidarity. "Law and order must be maintained" means that labor must be stigmatized and crushed by capital if it dares to try defend its own interests.
Leburton and Major are "maintaining" capitalist law and order in their own way. This is nothing new. The Liège workers have had them pegged for a long time.
But what about Citizen Harmegnies? Not long ago we stood at his side at the "Broken Gun" demonstration of La Louvière. Now his police are trying to outdo one another in clubbing the same Jeunes Gardes Socialistes who organized this demonstration. The violent denunciation of the police budget which he delivered on the floor of parliament still resounds in our ears. Poor Harmegnies - would he have believed us if we had told him that the day would come when he would command these same police in breaking strikes and arresting Jeunes Gardes? The logicis inexorable. Why didn't he have the decency to resign? Are you reformists in favor of participating in the government? You will end up becoming strikebreakers! You cannot be a minister in a capitalist regime without having to "defend the law and order" of the capitalists. And you cannot do this without having to break strikes from time to time. Let Ernest Glinne remember that...
After the cop's billy club comes the bishop's crozier. In the January 28 issue of Le Peuple Léo Collard lectured us gravely that while the Limbourg miners were right to want "their share of the abundance," it "would be regrettable and dangerous" if their movement became a precedent and an example. It would, in fact, be "a serious error to consider the tradeunion organizations 'integrated' into the neocapitalist system and to oppose both without discriminating between them."
We did not need Léo Collard to tell us that the trade-union organizations must not be equated with the capitalist system. The Jeunes Gardes did not need to be told either. Since the strike began they have successfully blocked the antiunion tendencies which a peculiar united front of Volksunie [an ultrarightist Flemish nationalist group] and the Maoists have tried to spread among the strikers.
But the fact that you cannot equate the union organizations and the union bureaucracies is something that Collard, like a good reformist, will not and cannot understand. As he sees it, any attack against a union leadership, no matter how obvious and despicable its bankruptcy, is automatically an attack on the unions. Without realizing it, he is giving grist to the mill of the antiunion tendencies this way. Because if, in fact, the unions could only be defended on the basis of their present leaders, nothing would stand more discredited in the eyes of the workers than the unions!
Let's look at the picture then. For weeks the mine union leaders conducted an all-out campaign for "a 15 percent raise now." They explained that this was possible and necessary. They aroused the workers. They prepared everyone for battle.
Then, overnight, without consulting the rank and file, without calling a single membership meeting, the leaders changed their tune. You have to be satisfied with 6 percent now (the rest will come later). They discovered that the 15 percent raise was neither necessary nor even possible and in fact that it would ruin the country. They cheerfully "imposed" this point of view against the feelings of the great majority of their members.
And when their members went out on strike anyway, the leaders cheerfully cut off strike benefits. They refused to give the miners - an absolute majority of whom are on strike- the money that belonged to them and that was collected for this express purpose. And all this was topped off by the "unionist" Major who said cynically that the miners must not be paid the end-of-the-year bonuses due them bemoney would be "wasted"
cause the in buying food...
Can you imagine a more upsetting, spectacle in the a more scandalous eyes of a mine worker?
If the bosses had wanted to hold an antiunionism contest, they would have had to give the first, second, and third prizes, as well as honorable mention, to these "unionists."
No one in this country has worked against the interests of the unions as systematically, as effectively, as cunningly as the leaders of the mine workers union and Louis Major have been doing for a month now. They are the ones Collard should have indicted, and not the Limbourg strikers and the students who are supporting them.
Another pernicious argument being 150
spread by the real enemies of unionism is that the strike is detrimental to the interests of the Limbourg coalfields and is endangering employment there.
This is the classical argument of the boss. "The strike is helping my competitors." According to the same logic, we would have to conclude that the Belgian bosses and workers "profited" two years ago from the French, Italian, German, and English strikes before suffering in their turn from the Belgian strikes. This would only be a fair turnabout. These people want to replace solidarity among the workers with competition among the workers, each worker being loyal to "his" boss. This would set us back a hundred years.
The day the rank and file reestablish their control over the unions, the day when general assemblies, with decision-making power are held regularly, the day when all steps toward compulsory union membership (such as bonuses for union members alone) are ruthlessly abolished and unionism is backed by the enthusiatic support of tens of thousands of union activists, that day the future of socialism in this country will be assured. It will become a rock on which all its enemies will break their teeth.
Every precedent and every example that brings that day closer-- and the Limbourg strike is one- will be written in gold letters in the history of unionism in this country. This was the case of the 1960-61 strike. It is true of the strikes in Flanders today.
I will not go back over the history of the 1960-61 strike, which until now constituted the highest point reached by the class struggle in Belgium. Let me say only that for historical reasons (a lag in industrialization, firmer control by a still reactionary Catholic church, a more right-wing tendency on the part of the union leaders), that strike was less firm, less "revolutionary," and less widespread in Flanders than in Wallonia.
Those who had drawn the conclusion that this kind of strike was finished in Belgium, that it belonged to the past, that it was a product of the "old" and not the "new" working class, were fundamentally mistaken. We said so at the time. Today history has proved us right.
As a Fleming, I salute with great pride the combativity of the Limbourg miners, the Genk and Antwerp automobile workers, the "new" working class — if it is one. As an internationalist, it is with great pride that I salute the small workers international that has come into being in Limbourg, where Flemings and Walloons, Greeks and Turks, and Italians and Spaniards are fighting shoulder to shoulder in fraternal unity, where my comrades of the JGS are distributing material in six languages, where working-class organizers have sprung from the mass of these six nationalities and are learning to fight together. Here, as in May 1968 in Paris, is the Europe of tomorrow in birth, the socialist Europe of Sovereign Labor.
But as a member of the Belgian workers movement, I want to address myself to my Walloon trade-union comrades of yesterday and today. I want to tell them: Do not miss this chance. We would have won everything in 1960-61 if the Flemish workers had fought at our side as the workers in Liège, Charleroi, and the Borinage did. The Flemish workers could not do that then. Today, they are learning how, and quickly.
1960-61 pickets in front of
Your Cockerill, in front of the Haine-Saint- Pierre station and in front of Boël are reappearing today in Waterschei, in Genk, and in Antwerp. They are as as yours were. They are being solid attacked by the police as brutally as yours were. And thanks to the legislation on maintaining law and order passed by the traitors, the police are better armed today and the workers less.
If you let yourselves be taken in, if you remain indifferent, if you let strikes be broken, if you let the police hold the factory gates, then your own future is a very dark one. Not only for a long time to come will the Flemish and Walloon workers again lose a chance to wage a common struggle against capital, their common enemy, not only will your industry decline still further; but tomorrow they will break your strikes the way they are trying to break those of your Flemish brothers today. Tomorrow your picket lines will be smashed; tomorrow your unions will have to bow like the Flemish unions today.
Seize the chance that history has unexpectedly offered you! Defend the right to strike without any limitations whatever. Defend the pickets in Limbourg and Antwerp. Provide the Limbourg miners and their wives and children, whom the bosses are trying to starve out, with a flow of solidarity that no one can stop. And then, as long as you maintain a solid front, at least in Liège and Charleroi, a new and formidable power can combine with it, the might of hundreds of thousands of Flemish workers. Today these workers are being educated in your tradition of struggle and not that of the Majors. Everything now becomes possible in the struggle against capital and the unitary bourgeois state.*
* In view of the national divisions and uneven economic development of the coun try, the highly centralized form of government in Belgium has been a sore point. - IP
regime, or provoking a new round of war that would allow them to administer another smashing defeat to the bourgeois Arab states. One of the principal motives of this jingoistic policy is to pressure the Arab governments into putting new restrictions on the Palestinian guerrillas— a policy that has borne fruit in Jordan in recent weeks.
Although Moshe Dayan has suggested that the slaughter at Abu Zabal on February 12 might have been a "technical error," the bombing was fully
Escalation of Israeli Aggression
The Bombing and Napalming of Abu Zabal
The Israeli pilots, flying Americanmade Phantom jet bombers, who killed seventy Egyptian workers and wounded ninety more at a scrap metal plant at Abu Zabal on the outskirts of Cairo February 12 succeeded in gravely intensifying the crisis in the Middle East.
The hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who thronged the streets of Cairo the next day shouting, "We will fight!" and "Revenge!" were eloquent testimony to this fact.
This was the first time since the June 1967 war that the Israeli government has bombed civilian targets. According to press reports, many of the deaths were caused by napalm, although fragmentation bombs - some of them timed to explode hours after the raid - caused most of the physical damage.
"Today's air strike," Washington Post correspondent Jesse W. Lewis Jr. reported from Abou Zabal on February 12, "the latest in a series of Israeli raids near the Egyptian capital, is seen here as an escalation of the Arab- Israeli conflict. ...
"Bombs hit the factory's repair shop, where most of the killed and injured were, and destroyed the power plant. A hospital official said some of the dead looked as if they had been burned to death by napalm.
"The walls and roof of the repair shop were caved in and factory officials said they expected to find more bodies in the rubble. However, recovery operations stopped when several unexploded bombs, which apparently had time fuses, were discovered."
Raymond H. Anderson, writing from February 23, 1970
the scene, described the carnage in the February 13 New York Times:
"This correspondent visited the plant and saw the damage, bodies and wounded persons in a hospital.
"Blood-covered and burned bodies were piled high in two large rooms of a building beside the hospital. Rooms along a long corridor of the hospital were filled with wounded men, bandaged, burned and their clothing stained with blood. Many were receiving blood transfusions. Weeping wives and children were beside some of the victims.
....
"Visitors who drove to the plant found it surrounded by irrigated fields and villages. There was no evidence of military targets in the vicinity." (Emphasis added.)
After the raid was over, Israeli authorities announced that the strikes were accurate. It was only in the afternoon (the raid took place at 8:15 a.m.), after a worldwide protest had begun, that Israeli army spokesmen issued a statement saying, "... it appears possible that one plane may have dropped bombs, as a result of technical error, outside the target area." It was only then that Moshe Dayan deigned to call United Nations officials in the area to warn them that one 1,000 pound bomb had been dropped with a delayed action ise, timed to explode twenty-four hours after the original raid. At least three time bombs were defused by Egyptian technicians.
For months the Israeli authorities have escalated their assaults on the United Arab Republic in the hope of discrediting and toppling the Nasser consistent with the Israeli policy of indiscriminate reprisals against civilians - first and foremost Palestinians, but also Jordanians, Syrians, and Egyptians. During the June 1967 blitzkrieg, Israeli pilots poured napalm on Palestinian refugee camps, incinerating thousands of civilians. News reports of the latest atrocity do not suggest anything accidental about the escalation of Israeli aggression.
More Dismissals in Okinawa
U.S. authorities in Okinawa announced February 2 that 555 more Okinawan workers would be dismissed from American installations, bringing the total for the fiscal year of 1970 to 1,738. Zengunro [All-Okinawa Military Workers Union] voted the same day to call a third strike late in February to protest the dismissals. The union carried out two previous strikes, January 8-9 and 19-23.
Zengunro executives endorsed the new strike call in a joint meeting with representatives of Kenrokyo [Okina-
Prefectural Council of Labor wa Union], Fukkikyo [Okinawa Conference for Return to the Homeland], and Kyoshokuin-kai [Okinawa Teachers Association).
The new cutback, according to the February 7 Japan Times Weekly, "was double the predicted figure in the Dec. 4 announcement in which U.S. military authorities put the dismissal figure for the third phase at about 240.
"Zengunro noted that the announcement came about three or four months earlier than expected and, moreover, it was made just when the union was negotiating with the U.S. on the discharge plan."
Bad Horoscope for Marcos
Manila Crowd Protests Government Witch-hunt
At least 20,000 students and workers demonstrated in Manila's Plaza Miranda February 12 to protest the Marcos regime's witch-hunt against hundreds of persons charged with "sedition" for participating in a January 30 demonstration at Malacañang, the presidential palace.
Philippines President Ferdinand E. Marcos failed in an attempt to have the February 12 demonstration called off. He met with representatives of the National Association of Trade Unions the day before the rally, and reportedly made significant concessions to their demands in exchange for the association withdrawing from the Plaza Miranda meeting. It was expected that the meeting would fall through without union support, but the size of the crowd was an indication of the depth of the popular anger at the government. Marcos has not been forgiven for the killing of four students and the wounding of hundreds by police gunfire during the January 30 action. That action, involving more than 50,000 persons, was staged following disclosures of corruption in government, including vote-buying in the previous election.
Marcos exacerbated the public outrage by blaming the students for the brutality of the police. In a January 31 television address he branded the previous day's demonstration "a revolt by local Maoist communists" who planned, he claimed, to take over or destroy Malacañang.
"According to the Chief Executive," the February 1 Manila Sunday Times reported, "the rioters the other night were not a student mob or simple arsonists but insurrectionists who, he said, acted in accordance with a wellorganized and well-thought-out plan. . . .
"According to Marcos, he had been receiving intelligence reports during the past few months of plots, one by Communist elements and the other non-Communist, to take over Malacañang."
Marcos did not disclose the source of these reports, but Stanley Karnow, writing from Manila in the February 152
9 Washington Post, suggested they might have come from very esoteric sources indeed -from a crystal ball in fact:
"In the opinion of several Philippine and Western analysts, he (Marcos] now has an opportunity to make major impact by coming out personally and publicly in favor of dramatic reforms. ...
"During the past week, however, Marcos has clung to his heavily guarded palace, evidently relying for advice on a small circle of courtiers and his wife Imelda ... who is being increasingly compared to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Ngo Dinh Nnu and the late Eva Peron.
"One of Marcos's prime motives for remaining in his palace is his fear of assassination, which is based on the prophesies of assorted fortunetellers. Among others, the American soothsayer Peter Hurkos reportedly gave Marcos a pessimistic forecast during a visit to Manila in December."
At any rate, it has not been reforms that Marcos has been dispensing since the brutal police action. In his January 31 speech, he ordered the local police to be reinforced with regular soldiers, especially in Manila. According to the February 1 Manila Sunday Times, "Malacañang yesterday appeared like a military camp with the presence of many soldiers deployed around the Palace grounds and army vehicles with mounted machine guns. It was reported that groups of soldiers were also deployed in strategic places in Greater Manila."
The presidential helicopter has been ordered on twenty-four-hour a day standby, in case the president feels the urge to make a quick getaway.
In addition to these preparations, the police have cracked down hard on the students arrested during the demonstration. The Philippine Constabulary Criminal Investigation Service confirmed February 1 that it would bring "sedition and rebellion" charges against 293 persons, including a thirteen-year-old student and a fiftyfive-year-old schoolteacher. Some 130 of the prisoners are students. They were permitted to seek bail, but except for a few students of exclusive Manila schools, most could not raise the money. They are being held at the Philippines Constabulary gymnasium at Camp Crame, outside the capital.
The four students confirmed as killed were Feliciano Singh Roldan, 21; Ricardo Alcantara, 18; Fernando Catabay, 17; and Bernado Tausa, 16. A fifth student, Samuel Carreon, 28, was said to have been killed, but this has not been established. At least two of the victims were bystanders who had not even taken part in the demonstration.
Most of the newspapers took the government's side in the witch-hunt, suggesting that the youths fighting for democratic reforms were the tools of outside agitators. Teodoro F. Valencia put it crudely in his February 1 column in the Sunday Times:
"It must be obvious to all that those who egg on violence or secretly finance subversive movements sleep well in their air-conditioned mansions."
One exception was the comment by Ernesto O. Granada, who ridiculed the army in the february 2 Manila Chronicle.
"Armed with nothing heavier than machine guns and armored cars," he said, "and outnumbering the students but only two to one, the soldiers and police bravely marched into the ranks of the demonstrators, defying placards, pebbles and insults as they cracked skulls where they did not shoot pointblank at the children.
"And the courage and the patriotism of the soldiers and the police were not lost on the grateful President. Not only is there not a single investigation of [a] single soldier or policeman for alleged brutality. Praising the soldiery's momentous victory over schoolchildren, the President gave a battlefield promotion to Col. Ordoñez, the Metrocom chief, who is now brigadier general."
According to Reuters, an Israeli military court sentenced an Arab barber in the village of Yaita February 7 to one year in prison for giving four alleged guerrillas shaves and haircuts.
Notes
* Semiformal bodies composed of the head of a ministry and his advisers. - IP February 23, 1970