The European Workers Movement After Poland
By Ernest Mandel
The class struggle in capitalist Europe has recently been marked by sevimportant developments. The outstanding are the twenty-four-hour general strike in southern Italy and the revolving general strikes in Belgium following the twentyfour-hour national general strike of
But the Italian and Belgian strikes are only the high points in a panorama that includes the railway strike in Britain; the general strike in Portugal (partially a failure); the mobilizations of the Dutch workers against the coalition government's planned cuts in health insurance; the strikes in France against wage cuts in connection with the reduction of the legal workweek and in defense of jobs; and the growth of a movement for a political strike against the bourgeois coalition in Sweden, which is attacking the long established social gains of the
This issue of International Viewpoint offers a more detailed look at a number
Mobilization of a significant part of the European workers movement in defense of the Polish workers, union rights were attacked by the militarybureaucratic crackdown of December 13, 1981, and the differentiation of the workers movement this impelled, fit into the general context of the struggle of the workers of capitalist Europe against the austerity and remilitarization drives of
This context has some very contradictory features. On the one hand, while the working class is fighting back against the capitalist offensive, the bosses are continuing to score points. Such successes include the partial failure of the general strike in Portgual; the shameful acceptance of a contract offering wage increases below the level of inflation by the West German steelworkers union, l. G. Metall; and the acceptance by the British miners (against the calls of the trade-union left and the miners union president Scargill) of a wage agreement of the same ilk.
Such capitalist victories are explained essentially by the combination of two
One is the weight of more and more serious and long-term unemployment. The other is the lack of a strategy for a concerted counterattack on the part of the reformist leaderships of the organized workers movement.
On the other hand, the unexpected successes of the general strikes in southem Italy and the Walloon country in Belgium reflect another phenomenon that will doubtless be seen in other countries. It is the changing effect of unemployment Ion the militancy and mentality of workers, depending on what layers it hits, how long it lasts, and what the perspectives
At first, unemployment had scarcely any impact on the combativity of the European working class or on the strength of its mass organizations. That is, during the whole initial phase of the crisis (notably during the 1974-75 recession) unployment only came down hard on the weakest strata of the working class, who were left without effective defense by the workers movement as a whole--immigrants, women, youth, part-time workers, unskilled laborers.
In the second phase, which began in 1979-80, unemployment struck hard at the best organized "heavy batalions" of the class--adult male workers without children, of average, or better than average, skills. These strata had been poorly prepared for this by trade-union leaderships that did not foresee the crisis, and still less how serious and prolonged it would be. In fact, these leaderships let themselves be pulled still further into the blind alley of class collaboration. For left reformists such as the Edmond Maire leadership of the French CFDT or the leadership of I.G. Metall in West Germany, this meant a sharp turn to the right: As a result, the "heavy batalions" of the class were caught badly off balance by blows of unemployment that fell suddenly
The bosses and the bourgeois state took advantage of this disarray to try to crack or break some of the main fortresses of the European working class that these heavy batalions created during the preceeding long period of full employment and the big workers struggles of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.
Attacks were launched against Fiat in Turin, British Leyland, the steel industry in French Lorraine, Cockerill-Ougree in the Walloon country, the Ruhr steel industry in Germany, and so on. These assaults achieved partial success, although it is not likely to prove lasting.
The recenf events seem to indicate that a third phase is beginning. Layer by layer, the working class has come to understand that the present unemployment is not a temporary but a structural thing.
The workers know now that they are in danger of losing their jobs not just for a brief period, but that after a certain age they can lose them forever, at least in the field they are trained for. So, they are beginning to react force-
This is, of course, a violence of desperation. But it is not the violence of despair, that is, a hopeless violence that can lead to nothing.
Quite the contrary, this resurgence working-class militancy can lead to a resumption of large-scale workers struggles against the economic crisis and the remili-
That is, it can if the organized workers movement, or at least its dynamic wing, give the class as a whole the impression that they know where they are going and that they have a coherent economic alternative to the bourgeois or bourgeois-reformist "administration" of
Such an alternative could not be credible if it remained purely defensive, that is, if it were limited to defending buying power, social benefits (indirect wages), or even to defending jobs by the fight for a 35-hour workweek now. These objectives are obviously essential, and revolutionists will be among those fighting hardest in the trade-union movement to get the unions to take up the struggle for these goals and to win ther by effective methods.
However, given the objective and subjective effects of the economic crisis (including the results achieved by the bourgeoisie's ideological offensive), the fight for such defensive objectives cannot by itself mobilize all of the class. it can only do so if it is linked to a clearly anticapitalist working-class plan for
Such a plan must include nationalization without compensation and under workers control of all the key industries, of all enterprises that receive state subsidies, and of all enterprises that shut down or carry out massive layoffs. clude also nationalization of the entire credit sector. It has to include the development of a plan for meeting the needs of the masses and the elimination of all the pockets of poverty that are rapidly growing.
Such a plan has to be applied on the basis of massive public investments, under the supervision of rank-and-file committees in the plants and neighborhoods and without the proliferation of state bureau-
Everywhere the revolutionary Marxists are the tendency in the workers movement that is highlighting the structural, that is capitalist, character of the economic crisis. But they are not limiting themselves to carrying out general socialist propaganda. They are proposing a program of transitional demands that can mobilize the masses in actions that will develop in an anticapitalist direction, based on the masses' own immediate con-
The revolutionary Marxists link this program to political objectives that are credible in the eyes of the masses and which lead them toward the taking of power, which prepare them to confront Inot just the bosses but the bourgeois govemment and the bourgeois state.