Page Text: France: Hospitals in turmoil
“We’re tired of working in a gallery!”
The various categories (professions) in French hospitals are formally divided by qualification status. Nurses have a higher status and until 1987 a high school diploma / A-levels were a prerequisite for admission to nursing schools. In hospitals, psychiatric wards, and nursing homes, and in the public and private sectors, there are three major groups of workers: [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no. 105 , spring 2020
Bangladesh: Garment workers fight!
You don't need to know much about Bangladesh to understand that the Corona crisis will lead to extreme conditions locally. Millions of people are already suffering from the economic effects of the pandemic. But in this situation strong struggles are developing. [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no. 105 , spring 2020
A preventable massacre
Why did so many people in Italy die during the Corona crisis?
In Italy, the first infection of an Italian citizen was not detected until the 21st of February at the hospital in Codogno - but by the end of the month, the country had become the centre of the global pandemic. By the 7th of March, there were already 5,000 people who had tested positive and 233 dead.
On the 9th of March, pubs, gyms, etc. were closed and shopping in supermarkets was restricted; in addition, the government imposed a curfew ("orange zone") across the whole of Lombardy, five provinces in Piedmont and Emilia, three in Veneto and over part of the Marche - but production continued. [more...]
translated from: wildcat.aktuelles, 24/04/2020
Class struggle in the times of Corona: Mexico
The women's movement was the biggest movement before the Corona lockdowns and shutdowns. On the 8th March 2020, 200,000 people were on the streets in Mexico City. In the ILA 434 (Latin American magazine) Sonja Gerth describes a cross-class demonstration of "well-off women, young school kids, companies…" Obviously femicide is bad for business too!
On the 9th March, on the day of the Women's Strike ('A Day without Us'), schools had to close, even Audi and Volkswagen stood still because the work process would be 'unsafe' without the female workforce.
In 2020 there were innumerable demonstrations, women even attacked the big government building on the main square in Mexico City. [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no. 104 , winter 2019/2020
’20/32’ - Strike wave in Mexico
In early 2019 up to 80,000 factory workers went on strike in northern Mexico. The movement started in Heroica Matamoros, a town bordering Texas with 450,000 inhabitants. After the initial walkouts workers formed action committees to expand the strike to factories in other towns. The old trade unions, loyal to the system, tried to contain the strike movement and were supported by the threats of the company bosses: striking workers were beaten up by cops and union officials and close to 5,000 workers were fired. Despite this, bosses had to give in to the workers’ demands in 89 factories (or ‘Maquiladoras’, as they are often called locally). [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no. 101 , winter 2018
Migration and national social democracy in Britain
In the first part of this article we look at the historical context of the current debate about migration and working class existence. In the second part we write about our experiences in warehouses and factories in west London and with the mainstream trade union wage management. Since 2012 we organise ourselves as the AngryWorkers collective in one of Europe’s biggest logistic and food processing zones. More than 90 per cent of our colleagues are migrant workers. They keep London running, providing food and personal services to the global financial and political centre, while at the same time being used as pawns in the political game. [more...]
translated from: wildcat.aktuelles, 29/09/2017
Many people from abroad have asked us to explain the outcome of the German election 2017. There was an important shift: In previous elections, were always left majorities« (at least if we briefly take the SPD and the Greens to be »left« parties) – this time the majority was clearly on the right. With all the uproar about this fact, perhaps something decisive is overlooked – as Georg Fülberth 1 pointed out (junge Welt, 26.9.2017): »The market fundamentalist AfD – which in 2015 was taken over by [the much more rightwing leadership crew] Gauland, Höcke, Meuthen and Petry – is back, although under another name: FDP. By adding their votes – and those of the likeminded CDU/CSU voters – to those of the AfD, you can see a strengthened potential for economic and social right wing politics.« 2
Something is seething in Germany
The »normalization« continues. For a long time the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany)was an anomaly in Europe: the only parliament without a radical right-wing party. But in the September election the AfD became the third strongest party (12.6 percent), the second strongest in the German East, and the strongest in Saxony (0.1 percent ahead of the CDU/CSU). For the first time since 1961 a nationalist-völkisch 3 party is in the Bundestag – and will get a lot of money from the state: 16 million Euros a year for being in parliament plus a few million Euros for party funding; plus a part of the 450 million Euros that the state provides annually for the party-affiliated foundations in the Bundestag - donations will also rise... In addition there also are well-paid jobs outside of parliament, for example on administrative boards. [more...]
DIESELGATE
Get rid of the working class to save the climate?
News just in: German car industry multinationals maintained secret arrangements for years to keep production costs low and profit high. We are utterly astonished!
The car industry has a long history of forced labour, ecological destruction, armaments production, co-operation with military dictatorships etc. Some of it is criminal even under the German Civil Code. VW do Brasil, for instance, collaborated with the police during the military dictatorship 1964-1985, informing on troublemaking workers. The Wolfsburg headquarters was well aware of those workers' subsequent arrest and torture. Daimler-Benz likewise collaborated with the military dictatorship in Argentina. [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no. 100 , summer 2016
More post-modernism than communism. Comments on »Communisation«
Gilles Dauvé: From Crisis to Communisation
expected in August 2016 | PM Press | approx. 192 Seiten | approx. 16 Euro
Time and time again over the last 20 years we have translated and published articles by Gilles Dauvé; you can find a selection further down. Maybe a discussion about ‘communisation’ and a new examination of those texts will develop in the wake of this book review.
In 2011 Karl Nesic and Gilles Dauvé wrote the text ‘Communisation’ after which they dissolved their joint project, Troploin. The reasons for this can be found in their text, ‘What Next?’ For Nesic, the crucial factor, amongst others, was the impasse within the communisation discussion. Dauvé continued alone and in 2015 republished ‘Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement’ for the third time within a narrow span of 45 years. His new book, ‘From Crisis to Communisation’ is an extended and over-worked reissue of the ‘Communisation’ text. [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no. 100 , summer 2016
Strike in the port of Koper
The Slovenian government is trying to contain increasing state debt – from 22 percent of the GDP in 2008 to 83 percent in 2015 – with privatisations. On the European level the rulers want to deregulate the ports with new law packages (Port Package). This means that the government and the EU attack the relative protected workers in the semi state-owned enterprises – one of these is the port of Koper, which is 67 percent state-owned. Container handling and profit have continuously increased in the last years, new piers were constructed, new cranes were bought, the basin was dredged; new railways and hinterland terminals are being planned. Since 2011 the port is the most important one for Austrian industry, its volume almost doubling from 2006 to 2014. Koper is the biggest port in the North Adriatic Ports Association (NAPA: Koper, Ravenna, Venetia, Triest, Rijeka). Already in 2011 the workers organized a wildcat strike and were able to win improvements (see Wildcat 94). In July 2016 they struck again to prevent the sellout of the port – and they won. [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no. 99 , winter 2016
Migration, refugees and labour
The 'summer of migration' has ended. While numerous initiatives still support the 'new citizens', through organising day-to-day support, festivals, language courses and much more, the political class wants to invert this dynamic: they try to erect new borders, enforce deterioration of social standards and to use the refugees to politically divide the working class – as a catalyst for a very far-reaching social re-formation.
Within the political left, views on this development can be divided roughly into two sorts: some conceptualise the impressive self-organisation of refugees and the tearing down of border fences as 'autonomy of migration'. Others see Merkel's policies from a solely functionalist perspective: migration is beneficial for capital's interest in cheap, qualified and motivated labour power and in additional contribution payers for the pension funds. [more...]
The Deep State: Germany, Immigration, and the National Socialist Underground
Nearly three years ago, in November 2011, news of a double suicide after a failed bank robbery developed into one of the biggest scandals in postwar German history. Even now, it remains unresolved. For thirteen years the two dead men, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, had lived underground, together with a woman, Beate Zschäpe. The three were part of the National-Sozialistischer Untergrund (NSU), a fascist terror organization which is supposed to have murdered nine migrant small entrepreneurs in various German towns and a female police officer, and to have been responsible for three bomb attacks and around fifteen bank hold-ups. Although the NSU did not issue a public declaration, the connection between the nine murders committed between 2000 and 2006 as obvious: the same weapon was used each time, a Ceska gun. [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no. 98, summer 2015
Global Working Class – Uprising or Class Struggle?
The concept of class has become popular again. After the most recent global economic crisis, even bourgeois newspapers started posing the question: “Wasn’t Marx right after all?” For the last two years Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ has been on the bestseller list – a book which describes in a detailed way how historically, the capitalist process of accumulation resulted in a concentration of wealth into the hands of a tiny minority of capital owners. In western democracies too, significant inequalities have led to an increase in fear of social uprisings. This spectre has haunted the world in recent years [more...]
translated from: Wildcat no.96, spring 2014
Profession and Movement
Three years ago a small scandal took place when the Greek group TGTP published in an open letter that the co-founder of Aufheben, John Drury, lead workshops for the police and military and is known as a “provider of ideas” in these circles. These workshops took part within the framework of his academic career researching Crowd Control, mass panics and rescue operations. Together with his closest colleagues Stott and Reicher he has developed the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM). The social psychologist Stott is renowned to be one of the globally leading experts for protests and violent uprisings. ESIM claims that a ‘mob’ acts according to certain patterns: people in a crowd have individual thoughts and emotions, so when the crowd is attacked indifferently by the police, people act in solidarity with each other and resist together. Therefore ESIM advices that the police should proceed in a multi-levelled approach and extract ‘individual perpetrators’ from the crowd. Using such kind of methods, Stott coordinated security preparations for the European football cup in Poland and Ukraine in 2012. (for more details see both open letters by TPTG) [more...]
Wildcat no. 95, Winter 2013/2014
Fascists in Greece: From the streets into parliament and back
Since the end of the military dictatorship the state has used fascist forces against demonstrations and protests. Since the crisis this collaboration has intensified, which resulted in Golden Dawn's ascent from a militant Nazi-squad to a parliamentary force. After the murder of the hip-hop artist and left-wing activist Pavlos Fyssas, the state curbed their influence again. [more...]
Wildcat no. 95, Winter 2013/2014
The strike at Neupack and the question of strike solidarity
The packaging manufacturer Neupack has two plants, one in Hamburg-Stellingen and one in Rotenburg/Wuemme. The company employs 200 people, out of which two thirds work in production, e.g. of yoghurt pots. The strike in 2013 was conducted under the slogan of 'Justice. Against the arbitrary rule at Neupack'. The goal of the works council and the trade union was a company-based collective agreement (Haustarifvertrag). This contract was supposed to guarantee 83 per cent of the wage stipulated in the sector-wide collective agreement * (Flaechentarifvertrag) and fix wage scales, in order to obtain a more transparent wage categorisation of the workers. The strike attracted wide public attention and a degree of external support - also from the radical left - which hasn't been seen in the Hamburg area in a long time. Nevertheless, this did not turn the strike into a 'victory'. [more...]
Wildcat no. 95, Winter 2013/2014
Dead End: About the Coup in Egypt
Go to the Afterword from February 2014
For two years, Tahrir Square was the symbol of a radical departure from social ossification and crisis. The military coup in the summer of 2013 ended this phase. The various illusions and hopes were buried with the hundreds that died. Essential parts of the liberal milieus have accepted state-led massacres and mass arrests in the name of 'defending democracy'. The hope of a state solution to social misery is also lost; the last heirs of Nasserism and trade union movement-hopefuls now sit at the military (side) table. Their vague promises of reform are drowned out by their appeals to peace, order and willingness to work.
In the acute social situation there is currently no room for participation. The movement will have to provide new questions about social revolution and organisation and will have to find new answers. To this end, migrants play an important role. [more...]
Wildcat no. 95, Winter 2013/2014
Automobiles: Struggles and Class Divisions
In the last auto-article we expressed the vague hope that the defensive struggles in Western Europe and the US would come together with the offensive ones in the East (and South). Although actions and strikes in and around car and supplier factories have increased around the globe, they haven’t, up until now, converged. Struggles are happening against the background of a polarisation of car companies into 'winners’ and ‘losers’, as well as internal divisions within companies. Exceptions were strikes that emerged in the South African auto industry and at Dacia in Romania. Fiat workers in Serbia at a new factory in Kragujevac were also able to push through a considerable wage increase very soon after the plant became operational. [more...]
Wildcat no. 94, Spring 2013 – original version
A glimpse of the society that ‘rapes’
The place where the woman and her male friend boarded the bus at around 9 p.m., a busy and crowded area, called Munirka, is (was till now) a site where a case like this was unheard of (unheard of is a case like this occurring in the public sphere of a market area during the busy hours of the city). Though women face lewd comments and men staring at them, these acts fall under the category of ‘normal’, a ‘normal’ understanding says that rapes in working class localities and slums are widespread, but not in a place like Munirka. [more...]
Translation of an article from Wildcat no. 94, Spring 2013
Umschlagspunkte
Thesis on 'new proletariat' and re-concentration
We have witnessed decades of growth in traffic and for at least two decades we have seen that this growth has deteriorated our working conditions - and rendered something like 'working class' more and more invisible. Now we hear of security guards on strike bringing airports to a standstill; in the US, Walmart workers are on strike and dockers are blockading ports on the West-Coast; even the accident of the Costa Concordia in 2012 exposed the 'mass work' in the bellies of the high-class liners - what's going on? A revival of the working class? Struggling proletarians everywhere? A historical turning point? [more...]
Translation of an article from Wildcat no. 94, Spring 2013
Slovenia: The end of transition
Wildcat strikes and protests in the EU-model state
Since the beginning of the global crisis the social situation has gotten worse in Eastern Europe. In many countries people are protesting against austerity and against the elites. The working class is fed up with waiting for a promised paradise brought about by transition, which has served as a continuous reason for constant new waves of pauperisation for the last two decades. Recently the government was overthrown in Bulgaria. In 2011 a paper already asked the question: »Is the Balkans a new Maghreb?« Slovenia with its two million inhabitants seemed to be an exception to angry workers' protests and street action. But now, it too has come to the former EU-model state. Like in Egypt and Tunisia, a wave of workers struggles paved the way for the revolt on the streets. It marks the final failure of »transition«. [more...]
Translation of an article from Wildcat Zirkular no. 24, February 1996
Is Capitalism a Market Society?
It is a common view nowadays that acts of exchange and their logic are at the centre of capitalist society and that many social processes can be explained on the basis of exchange relations. From this viewpoint the current strategies of ‘privatisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’ become more plausible—both for followers and critics of these strategies. This notion has little to do with the reality of global accumulation of capital, but it is socially confirmed in our daily atomisation, which itself is only the flipside of a lack of open struggles and new collective relationships emerging from within them. To the isolated individual, social processes actually appear to be exchange transactions, or more precisely, it rationalises the experience of powerlessness, because the essence of exchange is just the assumption of the independence and autonomy of individualised subjects. By perceiving social relations as acts of exchange—social relations, which are essentially based on organised and institutionalised violence, exploitation and oppression—the idea of ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ of the individual or certain social groups is rescued. For the individual the perception of social relations as being based on exchange is more than mere imagination. It is a very real experience, given that daily reproduction is mediated by markets and acts of exchange. This form of mediation seems to confirm our individual freedom—and in a certain way actually does confirm it (see below: ‘The Political Ambivalence of the Market’). [more...]
advance publication of Wildcat no. 93, Summer 2012
Book review
David Graeber: The First 5,000 Years *
NO INTEREST BUT THE INTEREST OF BREATHING
This book by an anarchist anthropologist was covered excitedly by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and plugged several times by Financial Times US editor (and ex-anthropologist) Gillian Tett, along with more conventional praise in the culture sections of what pass for serious bourgeois newspapers. Why this should be so is a question worth asking, because Graeber conscientiously avoids the usual shortcuts to liberal embrace of leftist polemics: the book is neither a catalogue of underanalysed moral outrages nor a scholarly survey keeping tactful silence on present-day social antagonism. Not only is Graeber's formidable scholarship free of the positivistic manner that cripples peer-reviewed Human Sciences, his writing bristles with hostility to capitalism, or at least to the social order around him as he sees it, which may not be quite the same thing. [more...]
Wildcat 90, Summer 2011, [e_w90_german_model.htm]
The German Model (excerpt from article in Wildcat no.90)
Between the first 'oil crisis' and the second a combination of neo-mercantilism, strong currency and further segmentation of the working class developed in Germany, promoted by chancellor Schmidt's SPD (Social-Democratic) government as 'the German Model'. The Bundesbank reacted to the strong wage increases of the early 1970s with measures intended to slow economic growth. These measures focused one-sidedly on price stability and slowing down internal demand. The trade unions supported this export-oriented policy of increased productivity and 'modest wage rises'. Thus unit labour costs remained stable.
In social terms this 'German Model' worked by giving security to the core workforce while lowering the standards of the rest. From the Kohl government of the 1980s to the Green Party-SPD coalition of the 1990s this tendency became ever more pronounced: legal changes allowed the expansion of temporary work, companies were taxed less heavily, state spending and welfare services were reduced. During the current crisis the Merkel government and employers have driven this policy further. [more...]
Wildcat no.91, Autumn 2011, [e_w91_nardo.html]
Tomato Harvest in Nardo, Apulia – The First Self-Organised Strike of the Day Labourers
Devi Sacchetto, Mimmo Perrotta
When, in the early dawn of the 30th of July 2011, a group of about 40 African migrants refused to continue harvesting tomatoes on the fields of Nardo (Lecce), nobody would have thought that this would be the beginning of the first self-organised strike of migrant day labourers for better working conditions in Italian agriculture. The group of day labourers refused the demand of the 'caporale' 1 to perform an additional task: to separate the green tomatoes from the valuable red gold, for an average wage of 3.50 Euro per container of 300 kg. The caporale, who had hired the workers, hoped that the workers' concern for their income would make them more cautious, if not submissive – given that the economic crisis has also entered the sphere of agriculture. But he was wrong. The day labourers returned to Masseria Boncuri and erected a street blockade together with some friends, totalling around 60 people. For two years the association Finis Terrae and the Active Solidarity Brigades have organised a tent city on this former farm which accommodates the seasonal agricultural labourers. The day labourers initially arrived hereto harvest watermelons, but they were disappointed that due to low market prices the companies refused to harvest the fruit. They hoped that with the onset of the tomato harvest they would find some days of paid work but they did not accept piece-wages that had dropped to below that of the previous year. This is how the strike started, which was to last for about two weeks and in which, at least during the first days, all migrants from Masseria took part, which was around 350 people. A strike, the impact of which, was to be felt several weeks after it had finished. [more...]
Wildcat no. 90, Summer 2011
Who Owns the Land? –
Peasant Struggles in Indonesia
In December 2008 about 500 cops and hired thugs attacked the Suluk Bongkal, a hamlet in the province of Riau, and drove away its inhabitants. Two military helicopters bombed the hamlet with napalm to burn down the 700 huts. Two children were killed, 200 people were arrested, the other people were able to escape. The Sinar Mas Cooperation had ordered this attack.
In Indonesia only a small share of the land has an ownership title attached to it – on the main island Java it is about a third of the total land, on the smaller islands it is even less. There are hundreds, if not thousands of disputes, but not many of them become public.. People get killed (in the first half of 2011 there were at least seven victims) or injured. There are numerous arrests. But all of these struggles remain confined to a local level and there are hardly any direct links between them. [more...]
DETEST AND SURVIVE
Self-deregulation and asset reallocation in the UK, August 2011
Since June 30, when a one-day strike caused mild additional disruption to parts of Britain’s Public-Private administrative mash-up, trade unions have anxiously debated whether to risk another partial shutdown of disciplinary machinery in schools and dole offices. But on Monday August 8 their agonizing was made redundant (so to speak): a notice on the wall of Brixton JobCentrePlus announced that the interrogation rooms were ‘closed due to unforeseen circumstances’ and all benefits would be paid in full.
On Tuesday August 9, hundreds of grinning young professionals (henceforth HNWI: High Net Worthlessness Individuals) appeared on the streets of Clapham Junction with brooms and rubber gloves to photograph themselves mimicking the clean-up of cleaned-out chain stores accomplished earlier that morning by outsourced municipal workers. One HNWI got herself into the national press by wearing a t-shirt bearing the hand-scrawled legend: LOOTERS ARE SCUM. Some of her fellow class clowns differed slightly on terminology, opting instead for the word TERRORISTS.
While anyone who lives in a riot zone and takes class contradictions seriously might hesitate to say what‘s happening, HNWIs of all kinds (thank you, ’user-generated media‘) are shrieking uninhibitedly for class war.