In Iran the fierceness of capital against the working class has grown tremendously. The acceleration of capitalism’s centralization has imposed record levels of immense employment upon the masses of labour sellers. The high unemployment in the ever-worsening situation of class antagonism forces the workers to accept anything that capitalism imposes on them because they have to sell their labour power to make ends meet. Capitalism and its governments use the unemployed population as a lever for a new slavery method. The rate of exploitation of the labour force in the golden age of capitalist accumulation was around 400-500%, but at our present time this rate of exploitation has reached 1300%. This rate of accumulation of capital openly demonstrates that the cost of billions of workers’ lives burning in the furnaces is all for the profitability of capital – it is sucking the blood of millions of children in workplaces which have no similarity to any regular workplace, that is they are slaving in dungeons where carpets, bricks, shoes, clothing, etcetera are made. Another situation is where womyn work for free in the home and the majority of the working class in Iran, all along side the profits from the surplus value of oil – this has all contributed to an immense surplus value for the bourgeois of Iran beyond our imagination.
In the European Union capitalism also exerts its power to impoverish workers. In Germany, employment agencies prosper well when renting and selling the labour force where some work for almost one Euro per hour or as contract workers without job security. Additionally, there are immense cutbacks to social assistance for the elderly and disabled, the assaults on the basic rights of children, cutbacks on medication and health care and ultimately to the livelihood of people. For example, 5 million people are unemployed and poverty has become normalized. In France, the intense pressure of capitalism’s exploitation has pushed millions of workers into poverty. In Italy, Holland, and in all of Europe capitalism has imposed the same level of poverty and starvation on the working class.
Between last Mayday and this Mayday humankind everywhere and in every moment is suffering the devastation of not being able to enjoy a simple and basic human existence because this is in direct contradiction to the inhumane and backwards capitalist system. As the capitalist system continues its unending wrath, not a moment goes by where it does not directly cause the death of millions of people in various ways: illness, death and starvation due to lack of access to medication and healthcare, clean water; engagement into sex work; child slavery; the butchering of children for their organs; the addiction of millions of people to different kinds of drugs; work-related injuries and deaths; as well as many more deaths related to class differences. Global capitalism in each moment of its reproductive process duplicates all these crimes on a large social scale across the world. An obvious example of deaths by capitalism is the existence of organized violence, that is, war.
The year of 2005 was a year of continuous war against humanity in Iraq, Israel, Sudan, Somalia, and Palestine. There was no day without bloodshed around the world and has become our social norm. The warfare is not just soldiers of the bourgeois killing soldiers of the bourgeois of another state. Children are killing, being killed, mass killings of homes and families with chemicals (such as in Fallujah), and the means of any existence to workers is destroyed as their communities are bathed in blood. Civil wars destroy even the ability to wage-labour and therefore the simple capacity of workers to earn a living to feed and house themselves.
Cheapening labour and even the ongoing existence of free labour of the labour force around the world during this year similar to previous years is planned on a large scale by the different sectors of global capitalism. The giant industrial capitalist corporation transferred their capital to the cheapest existing areas of selling and buying the labour force; China, East Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The little hands of Chinese girls wrap the fishes from the North Sea; the little fingers of children in India, Pakistan, and El Salvador produce expensive shoes like Nike and Adidas; harvesting the cotton that is full of pesticides on the farms by the poor womyn in Pakistan working seven days a week to produce T-shirts for Nike and Adidas in the factories that in fact was the place of death for many of them. The brutal exploitation of the labour force and in many cases free labour of 3 billion workers in China, India, Pakistan and elsewhere was the beginning of the opening a new phase of a deepened assaults and aggression by the expansion of the exploitation of the international working class. This phase illustrates that capitalism has not recognized any border and limitation for its intensive exploitation of the working class. The character of this phase is changing all inhabitants of the globe as sellers of the labour force into the most disenfranchised, the cheapest and lowest wage-slavery. In this phase capitalism instigates a brutal competition among workers in order to get the cheapest labour for more profit. Additionally the cheap labour in some regions transplants the cheap labour by causing a migration of workers. In 2005 the capitalist system has destroyed the achievements’ of the working class by taking advantage of the status of refugees and migrant workers who increasingly find themselves in vulnerable situations without rights as other fellow workers with status. The system benefits by facilitating the bringing of cheap labour from different countries such as Mexico. In Canada there is a program where Mexican workers come to work on the farms for the growing season for cheap labour without the same rights as other workers with a different status. No matter if the cheap labour force is transported to a ‘First World’ state for a temporary period in order to extract as much surplus value as possible by bringing the workers there, such as the example above in Canada; or the jobs, factories, work itself is transported to the ‘Third World’ where wages are lower; the answer is always the same – at the expense of the dignity of human beings, the governments and bourgeoisie extract greater profits.
With this ever-deepening exploitation of humans, workers have less and less to lose by challenging the system. The year of 2005, was therefore also a year that showed the resistance, struggle, and revolt from France to South Korea, from China to Iran and elsewhere against the brutality and attack of capitalism. The worker protests in Germany alongside many strikes in some industrial sectors some of which still continue; the strike and the street battles in France that pushed the government to scrap the proposed youth employment bill; the revolt of youth in the poor neighbourhoods of France; the general strike in more than 80 cities in Italy; the protests by the auto workers in Detroit; the strike of the transportation workers in New York city; the strike by the Vahed Bus workers in Iran or other strikes across Iran; the movements to occupy and control factories in Latin America; as well as other resistance struggles by workers are examples of all the chains of resistance and the struggle of the international working class against the viciousness of the capitalist system.
During this year, unfortunately, the struggles of the working class were carried out in most cases without vision and strangled by union reformism, and left reformism both of which prevent the true anti-capitalist nature of worker struggles to manifest itself. The trade unions as usual were trying to keep the workers loyal to the wage-slavery system. In many cases, unions sacrificed the working class interests for that of the capitalist’s interest. Also 2005 an anti-wage-labour movement was emerging in the class struggle of the proletarian against capitalism around the world. In Iran, this movement, however, was under pressures of a tyrannical regime where arrests, detention, and torture were used; and on the other hand workers were under pressure of the right syndicalism reformists, or the sectarian left with its own resolution for organizing workers – despite all of this the workers could take a few steps forward with their own power. In Argentina, the extensive council movement for controlling factories brought good experiences and achievements for the working class. In America, the rank and file Auto workers in Detroit had combined their struggle against the concessions and pressure of exploitation and the right reformist unions and talked about abolishing wage-labour. In France, the worker masses spread their revolt to the ‘Per-Lashez’ the place of the most heroic struggle the Communards by singing the Partisan song demonstrated their hate towards the capitalist system. In Germany, many workers left their unions in protest towards their union reformist policies before capitalism which was a new departure against capitalism.
On May 1st, 2006 the workers movement is in a crucial moment within its existence and the fate of its class struggle history as it has reached a fork in the road. The workers movement in this existing situation is not able to go ahead without having a clear horizon for their class struggle or without having suitable power balance. The workers around the world have no way but to raise the red flag of anti-capitalism and anti-wage-labour. The international unity of the workers around the world in front of the international unity of capital is the first step to be taken for this historical class struggle. To have free access to health, education, daycare, housing, and the guarantee of having a high level of humanity and life for all people around the world and where government intervention in our freedoms is completely prohibited - these could be the basic demands to initiate an anti-capitalist movement. The unity of workers around the world and our common struggle to impose these demands on the global bourgeois is the real basis of international class unity for abolishing the capitalist system and the establishment of true working class socialism.
Workers around the world unite.
Anti-Wage-Labor Collective Activists
April 23, 2006
