Reviews and Views
Volume Two
Nasser Paydar
6.”Night watchers” and day capital creators!!
The Paris “Nights of Standing” brought a new wave of analysis, descriptions and praise, and many characteristics were listed for it. “It is a movement in which parties are not officially present, it is not willing to accept unions and unions that are willing to make and lose with governments, the audience of its appeals is the masses of workers and toilers. It is working to organize itself, but it rejects party and union organizations. It has an anti-media nature and announces its beginning with the slogan of turning off the televisions and pouring into the streets. It is not dependent on the hierarchy in decision-making, and no one is the spokesperson for others. It makes the free distribution of food, books, cultural products and reliance on the poor a mechanism of cohesion and unity. It does not put forward any specific demands and sees itself as protesting the existence of capitalism as a whole.”
The above points about the “Paris Standing Nights” campaign are sometimes true and sometimes not true at all, but the problem is not to distinguish the truth from the falsehood of these formulations, the important issue is the analyses and illusions that have been launched about this campaign. The passive-aggressive, philosophically and Selling prestige, repetition of the misguided praise that was previously launched about similar movements of the “anti-globalization”, “ninety percent”, anti-environmental pollution and very large gatherings such as Porto Alegre, Seattle, Genoa, Wall Street and for a long time became an attractive subject of gossip, gatherings and reputation-selling. Movements boil from the depths of human working and living conditions and the campaigns under discussion are undoubtedly a cry of protest from the inhabitants of the world and above all the working masses against the status quo but let us not forget that not every criticism and protest against this situation is an example of the rise of the workers’ anti-capitalist movement. The entire world is filled with the intensity of exploitation, brutality and barbarity of capitalism. Poverty, hunger, displacement, catastrophic sexual discrimination, prostitution, addiction, child labour, environmental pollution, lack of water, lack of sanitation, sleeping boxes, dictatorship, a tsunami of religious, national and racial fascism, war, unemployment and all forms of misery and misery born of capitalism and being reproduced moment by moment by capital, have reached the galaxies. More than 5 billion inhabitants of the planet are workers, and all these misfortunes are falling on this population in incalculable dimensions. The daily life of the working masses of the world is pregnant with the greatest rebellions, and the system of wage slavery has exploded after the most terrible historical deadlocks. This is the current situation in the world, and in the midst of these conditions, the spread of a wave of workers’ protest in every corner of the world, in various forms, radical or reformist, including in the form of the ” Nights of the Paris Standers”, is the most natural everyday event.
Let us consider other current practices. It has been a long time since the scandalous pan of party formations, union formations, and the hanging of the working masses on the organizations and mechanisms of capitalist reform or the establishment of another type of economic, political, civil, and legal planning of the wage slavery system has fallen from the roof to the ground. Its stench is everywhere, parties are reduced to ruins, and unions are losing millions and millions of their members. For some time now, even the reactionary oppositions of the bourgeoisie have not seen the establishment of parties and unions as a suitable tool for their oppositions. Let us look at this situation from the other side. It is not only the terrible pressure of capital exploitation, poverty, hunger, displacement, sleeping rough, unemployment, and the disease-producing effects of this system that have destroyed the humanity of workers and toilers. Civilization, rights, democracy, government, law, contract, culture and values produced by capital and the instruments of power of the bourgeoisie, whether ruling or seeking to rule, have also become much more terrifying and crushing than before, entangling human existence and preventing it from breathing. The capitalist world has pushed the intensity of wearing out, ruining, abolishing existence and the uncontrolled destruction of the exploited beyond possible limits. All that the labour movement once imposed on the bourgeoisie with its struggle in a part of the world and the bourgeoisie used as a mechanism for the burial of the labour movement in the cemetery of the surplus value production system, all the “right to organize”, “the right to vote”, “freedom of speech and the press”, “separation of religion from the state”, “rights and rights and rights”!!, have all become more than ever a noose for the workers and have become disgraceful before the working masses.
Let’s look at another aspect of this situation. A significant percentage of the global working class, despite having to endure two-shift workdays and sometimes more, are unable to use the weapon of strike and shutdown of the production wheel. This section of workers is unemployed, students and schoolchildren of working families. Street vendors are on the streets, subways and back alleys. Instead of working in factories, in their dark and gloomy huts, without any unemployment insurance, medicine or the possibility of annual or weekly leave and deprived of everything, they assemble mobile phones, iPads, computers and various electronic devices for the owners of the largest international financial and industrial trusts. Women have houses and give birth to raise and market the labour force needed by capital. The list of this group can be added as far as the eye can see. They are unable to strike and in the darkness of the horror and terror of their working conditions and exploitation, they do not have the opportunity to use this weapon.
In the twists and turns of the situation where the capitalist system has dominated the lives of the working masses with a multitude of determining factors, the formation of movements of the type we mentioned above and street demonstrations like those in Seattle and Wall Street and now the Paris Nightstands are all too common. The serious and important question is whether the turn of the working masses in this or that part of the world or this or that part of the working class to this form of protest, with the real and unreal coordinates described at the beginning of the article, is a sign of the rise of a true anti-capitalist movement!!! Is the prevalence of these types of uprisings, as some people think and suggest, evidence of the emergence of a new level of growth in the anti-capitalist struggle of the working masses?!! Do the huge campaigns of several million people and even nationwide and international 99% yesterday, the few thousand people of the Paris Nightstands today or other similar examples in Genoa and Gothenburg herald the beginning of a new round of rebellion and anti-capitalist demonstrations of the global labour movement?!! A positive answer to these questions is nothing more than an attempt to add a new delusion to the existing delusions before the workers. Escaping party-building and union-building, escaping from the centralized, hierarchical democracy of Leninist parties, and leaning towards collective soviet decision-making, turning to the working masses instead of the upper echelons, and the like, are certainly good and valuable directions, but the mere consensus of these features in a workers’ campaign still does not give any clear indication of the anti-capitalist expression of this campaign. Uprisings at this level and with these indicators are considered symbols of a planned anti-capitalist uprising of the workers only for those who consider the very essence of anti-partyism, anti-unionism, and de-ideologizing to be the entire length and breadth of the proletariat’s class struggle against capital, and who mistake the elimination of capitalism with the dismantling of the party and the union and the abolition of the ideological dominance of this or that trend. Very fundamental and fateful shortcomings separate the current “Night Watch” campaign or similar widespread uprisings, including the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, from a real and radical anti-capitalist upheaval. The most important of these shortcomings are:
1. The basic prerequisite for any labour movement to be anti-capitalist is its direct attack on the artery of capital’s existence, on the cycle of surplus value production, on the structure of the political, civil, legal order, state, and capital’s power. A movement that is not like that. A campaign that does not disrupt the profit-making process and the articulation of the economic and social order of capital, a movement that is not the living skeleton of an alternative to capitalism, this movement lacks the most essential indicator of anti-capitalism. The very act of non-partisanship, non-syndicalism, and escape from ideological domination, in the absence of this prerequisite, can at best be a passive, doctrinal, and reform-seeking reaction to the savagery of capitalism on the one hand and the deviations of the various forms of popular and bourgeois communism to date. A leap at this level and with this nature is still nothing significant and describing it as a living anti-capitalist movement is pure illusion. Let us imagine for a moment that all the workers of the world would spend their days in factories and other centres of work and production for the capitalists, and in the evenings and nights they would all join hands in the streets and shout slogans against capital and against any kind of party game and union formation!! The hooves would sing about the necessity of forming councils and creating miracles of the council movement and would carry their cry of capitalist barbarity to the galaxy. What would happen? Nothing would change. Not a drop of the ocean of surplus values produced by the same billion-strong working class rebelling against capital and against the party and union would be diminished. There would be no disruption in the cycle of capital’s organization, and the structure of order and power of capital would not suffer any damage. An event that we have witnessed on various occasions in recent years. At the beginning of the so-called Occupy Wall Street movement, tens of millions of people marched in big and even small cities around the world and chanted anti-capitalist slogans, but not a single riyal was deducted from the profits of any capitalist and no disruption occurred anywhere in the capitalist order of any country.
The class struggle of the proletariat manifests itself even in its most primitive embryonic state and embryonic emergence in blocking the artery of surplus value production and disrupting the productive and social order of capital. Without this attack on the flow of profit production and the life cycle of capital, there would have been no struggle that would have involved the discussion of anti-capitalism or its lack of opposition to capital. All workers around the world can spend all their free time and holidays in street demonstrations. The system of wage slavery has no obligation to listen to such protests and expressions of dissatisfaction, and it does not see the need to react until it is threatened by danger. It should be emphasized that when we talk about paralyzing the cycle of profit production and the order of capital, we are not referring to the cycle of surplus value production alone. It is not just the closure of large and small industrial production centres that throws capitalism into the abyss of disruption and paralysis. It is enough for truck drivers transporting goods from one point to another in the existing world to stop working for a few days and nights to witness a gross disruption of the order of capital throughout a country. The same can be done by workers in education, communications, and other fields. The class that creates capital, no matter how much it exerts its power against capital, will be equally capable of paralyzing the economic, civil, political, and social order of capital. What is important here is to direct this power and shoot it at the very heart of the capitalist existence and power structure. Simply taking to the streets, holding sit-ins in the squares, and organizing marches, especially in a situation where global capital has declared the need for any reaction to these actions to be over, is not an attack against wage slavery, but a misleading alternative to the forms of the proletariat’s real war against this system. Movements like the Paris Nightstands and the occupation of the space around Wall Street are far behind in terms of their real anti-capitalist burden even from the daily struggles of the working masses in some parts of the world. This is a reality that is denied by the spectrum of bourgeois communist circles and is instilled in the minds of workers in an inverted manner. The Iranian, Bengali, African, Latin American worker, despite his low level of consciousness, without organization, but without being frozen in a union and attached to a party, takes up the weapon of stopping the production cycle and brings his collective power into the field to impose his initial demands on the capitalist class and its state. At this level, he fights against capital, exercises power against capital and imposes his will on capital. However, the movement of the standing nights in its current form lacks any degree of playing this role. The first is a manifestation of the spontaneous and embryonic anti-capitalism of wage slaves, but the second does not display the same capacity.
2. Movements like the “standing nights in Paris” and “occupation” are much more a manifestation of the disillusionment of a discontented and confused generation than they are a reflection of the radical orientation of a number of workers fighting to improve their existing situation, to a conscious anti-capitalist uprising. They are a manifestation of the disillusionment of a discontented and confused generation and bear no resemblance to the anti-capitalist movement of the working class. The proletariat determined to fight against wage slavery at every level of its struggle embodies a movement whose process of growth, the process of blossoming, is the real class and historical alternative to capitalism. It is a force of transformation that, in proportion to the growth of its power, threatens and weakens the existence of the wage slavery system. In various spheres of social life, it challenges the existence of capital and makes its fighting power an alternative to the domination of capital. If it fights for an increase in wages, it does not just demand higher wages. It sees its current struggle as a struggle to push capital back from the present boundary between necessary and surplus labour and to expand this boundary further into the area of surplus labour. It puts its entire separation from labour, the means of labour, and the product of labour under the pressure of its organized class violence. The anti-capitalist workers’ movement pursues the same task in all other spheres of social life. In the field of the struggle against sexual, ethnic, racial discrimination, and environmental pollution, it does not content itself with empty street arguments. Class power presents itself as an alternative to the laws, decrees, traditions, rights, civilization, and customs of capital. This movement knows that misogyny, ethnocentrism, Sharia law, the poisoning of all food, clothing, air, soil, sea, and everything human are mechanisms of capital to increase profits, and the way to confront these barbarities is not through fruitless sloganeering in the field, but by concentrating organized forces in councils to crush the process of profit production and the structure of order and power that protects this process. The point to emphasize is that the anti-capitalist proletariat, by doing these things and advancing these campaigns, is everywhere proud, growing and going as a conscious class power that is an alternative to the existence of capitalism, to achieve all the capacity and conditions necessary to dig up the grave of wage slavery and establish a new society.
Such is the anti-capitalist movement of the proletariat, and its existence is the living embodiment of a real alternative growing, flourishing, and maturing to the old existing society. Many, especially in recent decades, have delved into Marx’s works to discover his clear picture of the alternative to capitalism and to adorn the results of this exploration in their philosophical and academic works. The research of scholars like “Hudis” is valuable in this passage, but they forget one thing. The real alternative to capitalism in Marx’s calculations is not an abstract economic plan and socialist political structure, but essentially the conscious, horizon-oriented, solid, council, radical, and anti-capitalist movement of the working class itself. A movement that grows in the depths of the darkness of wage slavery with the banner of struggle against capital and the declaration of war against all aspects of capital’s existence, makes capitalist exploitation, the state, political order, civilization, rights, law, and the order of this system the target of radical struggle, takes sexual, ethnic, and racial discrimination, deadly environmental disasters, child labour, unsanitary conditions, sleeping rough, uneducated, homeless, unmedicated, and all its crimes against humanity under the crushing blows of its class power. In all these campaigns, it lines up power against power and uses this power directly, organized, and consciously against the dynamics of profit production and the hierarchy of order and power of capital. With this very nature and character and in the twists and turns of this struggle, it becomes more united, more organized, more councillor, more aware, and stronger, it uses crises and all conditions for this growth. It narrows the land and time for the existence of capital, overthrows the bourgeois state from the throne of sovereignty, and replaces the current situation with itself, which is the true radical alternative to the planning of labour and socialist production and a society without wage labour, classes, and the state. The anti-capitalist movement of the proletariat has this nature and characteristics. The “Nights of Standing” campaign and the “Occupy” movement before it and their kind nowhere show a promising approach to becoming such an uprising. These campaigns can certainly become such, but we are talking about what is going on and not about predicting what could happen. In this regard, the hasty insistence of some people to describe such campaigns as a model of a real anti-capitalist movement!! Just because of its non-partisan nature, is very misleading. What they say is clear evidence of the fact that their own anti-capitalism is nothing more than a bunch of sighs and groans for the democratization of capitalism.
3. The Nights of Standing campaign has not raised any specific demand up to now, and some have considered this as a clear sign of the campaign’s worker and class radicalism and have discussed it in praise!! The reason for these people is apparently that avoiding putting forward a specific demand means challenging the entire system!!! The basis of this argument is rigid and shabby. The working masses are not averse to putting forward their concrete daily demands, and in principle they do not begin a campaign without doing so. As far as demands are concerned, what distinguishes the real anti-capitalist movement of the proletariat from various forms of reformism is not the avoidance of putting forward demands, but quite the opposite, the transformation of each concrete demand into a bulwark of the war against capital. The issue is very clear. Workers formulate their demands in two essentially distinct forms and strive to realize them. The first form is the familiar tradition of reformism. Right-syndicalist reformism calls on the working masses to pursue their demands within the framework of accepting wage slavery and obedience to law and order, the state, and the rule of capital, and ties their realization to the burial of their class struggle in the graveyard of the enduring interests of this system. Left-wing communist reformism essentially says and does the same, but at the same time calls on the workers to line up behind its party and help the party implement its own version of the economic and political order of the relationship of buying and selling labour power. The second form is the path taken by the anti-capitalist movement for the abolition of wage labour. Here, the struggle to achieve any daily demand of the working class or the protest of this class against any existing form of injustice, oppression and barbarity is intertwined and linked with the general struggle for the destruction of capitalism and the elimination of homogeneous wage labour. The struggle to impose the demands of the day on the bourgeoisie becomes a link in the chain of class war against the foundation of the existence of capital. The “Nights of Standing” campaign, by escaping from the presentation of the demands of the day, does not acquire an anti-capitalist character; on the contrary, it falls into the abyss of a kind of confused reformism.
4. The Paris Nights of Standing has not yet put forward the very misleading slogans of the “Wall Street” type campaigns, but it has not made anything contrary and contradictory to them its own characteristic. In all the aforementioned campaigns, there was a lot of misleading. Speaking of the “99 percent and the 1 percent,” the focus of all so-called “awareness” propaganda on the role of a few giant banks and financial institutions, and the like, almost completely drowned out the entire mass of marches and protests. Under the banner of anti-capitalism, what was not the target of any anger, rage, or struggle was the existence of capital and the capitalist system. Capital, as the relationship of buying and selling labour power, the relationship of separating the worker from his work and his means of labour, the social relationship that is the foundation of capitalist society, was removed from the reach of any protest, criticism, war, or struggle. Classes were denied and gave way to the one percent and the ninety-nine percent!! Poverty, misery, homelessness, sleeping boxes, lack of water, lack of sanitation, hunger, misogyny, child prostitution, addiction, prostitution, and all the evils that afflict humanity, instead of being linked to the relationship of buying and selling labour power and the existence of wage slavery, were patched up and fixed to the unfair distribution of wealth between the rich and the poor. The struggle against capitalism gave way to criticism against poverty and deprivation. In short, hundreds of new delusions were added to the long historical chain of delusions imposed on the working class, and all of these were considered badges of honour for opposing capital!!! The Paris Nightstands campaign has not ostensibly heralded these desolations in the style of similar uprisings, but it seems highly unlikely that it will adopt a different approach from them and implement them.
5. The Nightstands, under the guise of opposition to the status quo!! have sufficiently paved the way for the worst and most risky compromises with capital before the workers. The insistent promotion of non-violence among the working masses is a very despicable strategy and strategy that the rabid reaction of the bourgeoisie has historically pursued, especially in recent times, throughout the world. This ugly, reactionary deception of the bourgeoisie has now emerged from the backpack of the All-Night Stand campaign and has spread before the eyes of the workers and passers-by on the streets of Paris, the very spot where the roar of the Communards’ rage once shook the foundation of the bourgeoisie’s existence. Violence is an inevitable part of the class struggle of the working masses, for the very simple reason that capital is mixed with force, violence, war, brutality, and the Holocaust in all its pores and in the very essence of its existence. Economic, political, police, security, military violence, diplomatic, cultural, ideological, intellectual violence, and the distortion of all realities, the violence of separating the worker from his work, the dominance of dead labour over living labour, the deprivation of workers from free human existence, the violence of depriving billions of workers of drinking water, sanitation, food, clothing, and education, the violence of inciting war, unemployment, homelessness, and sleeping boxes, violence is an inseparable form of capital’s existence. Capital, while simultaneously committing all these forms of violence against the working masses, is calling them with the most disgusting and shameless voices to avoid violence!!! To be peaceful, reformist and non-violent!!! That everything can be solved through negotiation!!! That recourse to law is the cure for all ills!!! That all human beings are equal before the law!!! That civil society is the open field for the peaceful resolution of all disputes!!! Capital is humming all this nonsense in the ears of the working masses and at the same time suppressing their every breath of protest with economic, political, police, ideological and hundreds of other types of violence. The capitalist class’s preaching of non-violence is the most hateful and disgusting scenario in history. Capital has started and ended all its regional and global criminal wars against humanity, its entire inhumane campaign of class domination over the working class, with these same sermons. Look at the owls who are playing the vilest barbaric scenarios in the world, from the leaders and managers of the Islamic Republic of Capital Iran!! to the heads of the White House and the Elysee, they issue charters of sanctions against violence every second! It is not at all clear. Who has launched all the devastating wars in the history of capitalism!! The Hajjarians and Rafsanjani’s have reduced several generations of working people to ashes in the flames of their inhuman class violence to establish the regime of filth, blood, and Islamic barbarity of capitalism. While they shoot every opponent of this building of terror and terror with a gun in their hands, they pray for the protection of this building of terror. The criminal and predatory rulers of capital in America, France, England and all over the world do the same thing. When the Standing Nights campaign preaches non-violence, it must be remembered that it repeats the words of the rulers of capital to the ears of the workers. The global labour movement against capital is forced to resort to violence. The bourgeoisie has filled the entire world with arsenals. Capital’s nuclear weapons are enough to destroy the entire world several dozen times. The annual military expenditure of the US government alone is much more than a trillion. The largest items of the government budget are military expenditures. Every year, a very large part of the surplus value resulting from the exploitation of the world working class by the bourgeoisie is allocated to the violent suppression of the struggles of the working masses. To imagine that world capital would not launch the most barbaric wars in response to the slightest anti-capitalist agitation of the workers of this or that part of the world is absurd. It is pure self-deception. In such circumstances and in the face of such a savage octopus, calling on workers to refrain from violence is not an anti-capitalist struggle but rather aiding capital to suppress the workers’ movement as brutally as possible. One point is worth emphasizing. We speak of the inevitability of the proletariat’s violence against capital and for the destruction of capitalism, and we defend it very resolutely. Any kind of violence by some under the name of the working class is not necessarily the anti-capitalist violence of the proletariat against capital. Let’s finish talking, those who introduce the Paris Nights as a new model of the anti-capitalist movement of the working class! With this, they only shout one thing. That they lied to the workers and continue to lie. Ideological avoidance, anti-partyism and their escape from the union, not the Marxist anti-capitalist critique of conscious workers on ideologizing, party-building and unionism, which is an attempt to prevent labour activists from seeking the real way of fighting against capital, by adding another delusion to the existing delusions.
Nasser Paydar
May 2016