This video about the Iraq war says about itself:
No Plan, No Peace – 1:48:47 – 5 Nov. 2007
“Iraq will be better,” declared Tony Blair five days after the fall of Saddam. “Better for the region, better for the world, better, above all, for the Iraqi people.” That contrasts starkly with the several hundred thousand dead and injured Iraqis, four million refugees inside and outside Iraq, 4,141 coalition soldiers who have died and the cost to the UK of well in excess of £5bn. Yet it’s now clear that Mr Blair knew before the invasion that America’s planning for post-war recovery was woefully inadequate – and so was Britain’s.
From British daily The Morning Star:
The left-wing rogues’ gallery
Tuesday 04 August 2009
Neil Clark
It’s a sad truth that some of the biggest enemies of progressive socialist causes have not been those on the right but those who claim to be on the left.
All over the world, some of the most reactionary anti-working-class policies have been carried out by governments which go under a “socialist” or “social democratic” label.
In eastern Europe for instance, nominally leftist governments have presided over mass privatisation and cutbacks in health and welfare provision since the fall of communism 20 years ago.
And in Britain, new Labour has sided with global capital against the interests of ordinary working people as well as supporting illegal imperialist wars of aggression in the Balkans and the Middle East.
New Labour claims to be a left-of-centre party but, as Labour veteran Tony Benn recently stated, in fact it is to the right of the positions taken by old-style “one-nation” Tory figures such as Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan.
They accepted the progressive mixed economy/welfare state consensus of the post-war period and did not believe that market forces should be allowed to rule every aspect of our lives.
So here is a “rogues gallery” of 10 political figures who, while campaigning under a left or progressive banner ended up siding with capitalism and betraying the very people – and the causes – their parties were supposed to represent.
At the 1995 Labour Party conference, the new Labour leader promised a “publicly accountable, publicly owned railway” if his party returned to power.
It was the first of many promises he was to break.
In fact, Blair extended the Tory policy of privatisation into new areas such as air traffic control. An enthusiastic globalist, Blair showed where his loyalties were when he told the bankers of Goldman Sachs that he supported British companies “letting some jobs migrate” to India and China.
In foreign policy, Blair ditched Labour’s traditional scepticism of foreign adventures and respect for the United Nations and enthusiastically supported illegal attacks on Iraq and socialist Yugoslavia.
The man who in his maiden speech in Parliament declared that he was a socialist because “socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral,” currently earns around £2 million a year from US bank JP Morgan Chase and receives up to $250,000 (£147,600) for a 45-minute speech on the US lecture circuit.
A former Hungarian Communist youth leader, Gyurcsany made his fortune from privatisation deals in the early 1990s.
On becoming “socialist” prime minister in 2004, he presided over a large-scale privatisation programme and cutbacks in Hungary’s health and welfare programmes which led to a sharp rise in poverty.
In 2006 he provoked riots when a tape in which he admitted lying “morning, noon and night” to the electorate was leaked to the media.
But while he is [a] hate figure for most Hungarians, others hold a more positive view. “Gyurcsany is our kind of socialist,” was the verdict of a US junk bond trader.
The first ever Labour prime minister sided with the bankers in the economic crisis of 1931, betraying his party and Britain’s working class by forming a Tory-dominated “national government” which introduced swingeing cuts in unemployment pay and the pay of public-sector employees. Macdonald’s treachery led to riots in Glasgow and Manchester.
Lange’s New Zealand Labour government of the 1980s was a forerunner of Britain’s new Labour.
Lange’s finance minister Roger Douglas carried out a programme of privatisation and deregulation which was lauded by free-market economists and big business but alienated the party’s traditional supporters and led to a sharp rise in unemployment and inequality.
A former leader of an underground Maoist grouping, the leader of Portugal’s Social Democratic Party and prime minister from 2002-4, Barroso hosted the infamous meeting at which he, George Bush, Blair and Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar made the final plans for the illegal invasion of Iraq.
In office, Barroso pursued neoliberal policies, which he has continued as head of the European Commission.
The former Communist minister morphed into a hawkish pro-NATO Polish president, supporting the US-led bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the invasion of Iraq four years later. A strong globalist, he is a board member of the Atlantic Council of the United States.
In 1994, after four years of economic hardship, the Hungarian Socialist Party won a convincing election victory on a programme of retaining the best features of the popular “goulash communist” system of the Janos Kadar years.
Western elites were horrified, but when faced with the choice of defending the interests of ordinary Hungarians who had voted for him or siding with the international money men, Horn chose the latter.
He sacked genuinely socialist ministers and appointed wealthy banker Lajos Bokros to introduce a swingeing programme of cuts in public spending and welfare provision.
The “Iron Chancellor” in Ramsay Macdonald’s 1929 Labour government, Snowden blocked plans for a socialist reflation of the economy and joined Macdonald in defecting to a Tory-dominated national government formed in August 1931.
In the election campaign later that year he turned on his former comrades, calling Labour’s pro-working-class policies “Bolshevism run mad.”
He ended up as “the first viscount Snowden” – not bad for a weaver’s son from West Yorkshire.
Austrian Socialist Party politician who, under the pretext of “modernisation” moved his party away from the unequivocally socialist positions it took under the leadership of the popular Bruno Kreisky to adopt a more pro-capitalist stance.
During his period as Austrian chancellor from 1997-2000, Klima privatised publicly owned assets and cut back on welfare provision. His policies undoubtedly aided the rise of far-right politicians such as the late Jorgen Haider.
Leader of the Serbian Socialist Party who last year took his party into a coalition with the Democratic Party of Serbia, whose former leader Zoran Djindic had been responsible for founder of the Serbian Socialist Party Slobodan Milosevic being kidnapped and sent to The Hague.
Dacic’s decision to enter a neoliberal, pro-privatisation coalition with his party’s most bitter enemies was condemned by the party’s traditional supporters who saw it as a betrayal of everything it had claimed to stand for.
Neil Clark is co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership campaign
On December 16 of last year, Egor Gaidar died of a heart attack at his dacha outside of Moscow at the age of 53. He was a leading figure in the implementation of market “reform” in Russia, which had a disastrous impact on the country and resulted in an immense growth in social inequality: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
1
25 Years of Solidarity –
From Workers Revolution to Capitalism
Przemyslaw Wielgosz
Editor in chief of the Polish edition Le Monde diplomatique.
The circumstances and events surrounding the official commemoration celebrations
of the Solidarity uprising 25 years ago speak for themselves. The drama and farce of
the situation facing Poland today are reflected within them; a grotesque irony in
which the ruling elites have appointed themselves as the successors of the August
revolt of 1980.
The Establishment’s propaganda campaign endeavours to associate the Solidarity
uprising with the anti-communist motifs of the teachings of Pope John Paul II, with
the West’s victory in the Cold War, and even with Wiktor Juszczenkos pseudorevolution
in Ukraine. A measure of the scale of manipulation effected through this
occasion can be seen in the pronounced oversight committed by the officials of the
Institute of National Memory (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej – IPN). The IPN added a
disk with the contents of all the issues and supplements of the ‘Solidarity Weekly’
from 1981to the special anniversary bulletin. Only the supplement to issue 29
containing the Solidarity program agreed at the first Congress of Delegates was
omitted. This was the most important document of the Union!
The attitude of the Gdansk ship yard workers provides a good insight into the
character of the trials and conflicts experienced by workers 25 years ago this August,
leading to a great victory for Polish workers. The privatisation and parcelling off of
entire industries into hundreds of companies has already led to the dismissal of
thousands of shipyard workers. Today a board listing workers demands hangs from
the gate of the shipyard, just as it did 25 years ago. This protest however, did not have
support of Solidarity’s National leadership.
When on August 26th officials and opposition leaders of the past, led by Lech Walesa,
arrived in Gdansk to listen to Jean Michel Jarre in Concert, trade unionists from the
neighbouring shipyards demonstrated against the anti-worker policies of the past and
present Polish governments. Significantly, a sizable portion of Solidarity’s former
leaders organised an alternative commemoration of the 25-year anniversary.
Andrzej Gwiazda, Anna Walentynowicz and other leaders of the 1980 uprising spoke
out in 1989 and continue to speak of the betrayal and anti-worker plots lead by
security service agents which they say turned Solidarity into a locomotive for
capitalism. Their slogan is a bitter adaptation of the official commemoration logo. To
the statement ‘It Began in Gdansk’ the heroes of the first Solidarity added ‘And
Ended in Magdalen’ (a reference to the town near Warsaw where the governing elite
and opposition sealed the restoration of capitalism in Poland). Karol Modzelewski,
co-author with Jacek Kuron of the famous ‘Open Letter to the Party’ (1965) is also
critical of the official commemoration, but from a completely different perspective.
Modzelewski spent eight and half years of his life in Communist regime jails. Last
month Lech Walesa announced at the commemoration seminar packed with former
opposition leaders, that he had known as far back as 1980 that ‘We will have to build
capitalism’ Modzelewski retorted ‘He alone must have been thinking about
2
capitalism. I certainly wasn’t. I wouldn’t have spent a week nor a month, let alone 8.5
years in jail for capitalism!’
25-years after the coastal strikes, Poland is everything except the successor of workers
protests. The ultraliberal policies implemented by all the democratic governments
post 1989 have lead to thousand-fold rises in Poles living below the ‘social minimum’
(defined as a living standard of £130 (192,4 EUR) per person and £297 (440,4 EUR)
for a three person family per month) affecting 15% of the population in 1989 to 47%
in 1996, and 59% in 2003. Today unemployment stands at 18% (in 2007 14 %).
Almost 4 million people in a country totalling 38 million live below the ‘minimum of
existence’. On the other hand, the richest 5% of the population consumes over 50% of
society’s general consumption. In the international political arena, Poland is regarded
as an uncritical advocate of the imperialistic aspirations of the USA in Iraq, and as
Washington’s Trojan horse in the EU.
How did a workers revolt give way to Poland participating in the international-law
breaking invasion of Iraq? How did it happen, that a country which one had workers
self-government is ruled today by Prime Minister Marek Belka, who in his stint as
director of economic reconstruction in Iraq with the Coalition Provisional Authority
violated both The Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions? How did it come to
this? That a powerful and democratic movement of self-determination bore poisoned
fruit in the form of an alienated political stage where it is becoming harder and harder
to distinguish the Left from the Right; a depoliticised population lending its’ ears all
too often to Politicians promising iron fisted solutions to clean up a variety of
‘enemies’ – communists, swindlers, criminals, homosexuals and more.
The answers to these questions hold the key to understanding the predicament of
Polish society circa 2005, and in particular, the conditions and perspectives of the
Polish left.
However, in order to communicate this answer, we need to demolish a few of the
main myths surrounding Solidarity which are voiced continually not only by Right
wing historians but equally by the mainstream media and heirs of the old regime.
Workers Revolution
In the summer of 1980, a workers revolution began in Poland. Solidarity was an
expression of workers struggle for political and economic emancipation. Despite its’
lack of revolutionary phraseology, symbolism and organisation at the level of
concrete activity, it can be described as a revolutionary process. It had a workeroriented
character not only due to the arithmetical preponderance – i.e. the sheer
numbers – of workers active in the structures of Solidarity, but above all, because of
the content of Solidarity’s political project. Solidarity’s goals were not economic
recoveries or reform which can always be written back into the system, any more than
it was a return to capitalism. Even the question of political freedoms typical of
bourgeois democracy stood in the background.
Despite the strident questioning of the articles in the constitution referring to the
entrenched leadership of the communist party, there was no demand for a multi-party
system. Democracy was comprehended more according to the traditions of the
revolutionary Left such as workers self-management and autonomy and collective
3
social control over central planning. Therefore, Solidarity was not a pro-capitalist
force. It declared itself as behind socialism not only due to the fact that all its’
documents acknowledge the inviolability of the socialisation of the economy and
other socialist accomplishments of the PRL (The Peoples Republic of Poland) but
above all, because it politicised the sphere which the ruling classes in a capitalist
world strive at all cost to de-politicise. Polish workers wanted democratic selfdetermination
in the workplace, precisely the domain where the Bourgeoisie wants to
see the determination of pure economics.
Point six of the famous Gdansk Agreements states that ‘Reform of the domestic
economy should rest upon the principle of greater independence for the enterprises
and a genuine inclusion of workers self-management within their administration’.
Another demand accepted into the program of the Autonomous Republic during the
first Solidarity Congress in August 1981 was that the domestic economy should rely
on the public sector “which is managed by a collective represented by a workers
council, operated by a director, who is appointed by way of competition through the
council and responsible to it in the interests of society and his/her own collective’.
In spite of Solidarity’s national leadership, which aspired to compromise with the
government, Congress delegates decreed that the union ‘in the struggle for workers
self-management and a socialised enterprise will continue to proceed in accordance
with the will of the collectives’. The uncompromising stance of the Congress revealed
in its’ sharpness, the dominant logic of the mass movement from 1980-81. Radical
autonomous activist Zbigniew M. Kowalewski said of those years, ‘In Solidarity, it
was difficult to overcome with the will of the collectives in the large industrial
workplaces. Whoever had that will behind them could boldly count on it and know
that with it they could win, even against Walesa’.
Martial Law and the Return to Capitalism
Martial law or ‘The State of War’ interrupted the carnival that had been evolving
since August 1980.The workers movement became completely pacified or pushed
underground. It was this movement, and not the leadership of Solidarity – which was
being interned in relatively good conditions – which was the real victim in the Martial
Law period. In these new conditions, Solidarity had to lose its’ mass-movement
character. Nevertheless, most of the trade union structures survived in secret, but the
logic of the mass movement which had kept them animated, was shattered.
Opposition leaders and activists became effectively cut off from their social base.
Under these new conditions, their support came not from the factories and industrial
plants, but the church.
In 1984, despite 80% of Polish workers declaring their support for self governance
and autonomous control of their workplaces, this mood was not reflected in the
politics of the opposition. Less than a year later, the Provisional National Commission
along with Zbygniew Bujak and Bogdan Borusewicz carried out a serious internal
attack on Solidarity’s program, introducing to its program a range of pro-capitalist
elements into it.
The evolution of the Right was bolstered by a free-flow of foreign aid and support
from Western regimes, culminating at its highest point with the USA SEED Act
4
(Support for Eastern European Democracy) passed by US Congress in 1989. The Act
saw over $200m injected into the centres of the opposition to promote a neo-liberal
economic agenda in the region. In Poland this capital was used to create a network of
conservative think tanks, the most serious of which is the Polish American Freedom
Foundation (PAFF). These think-tanks became the incubators of the cadre for the new
governing elites.
What is interesting is that these pro-capitalist tendencies in Solidarity appeared within
the communist party around the same time. When Michael Gorbachov’s government
launched Perestroika, the regime in Warsaw began to drift towards the introduction of
market mechanisms. These were openly activated on a mass scale under the
governments of Zbigniew Messner and Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski (last prime minister
of PRL) Technocrats and regional party barons waited impatiently for the green light
to privatise, knowing that this would enable them to claw back the running of
factories themselves.
The Absolute Sorrow of Restoration
If 1980-81 was a revolutionary period in Poland, in 1989 we saw its’ total opposite. In
Poland, the restorative character of the events of 1989 was felt more acutely than in
Berlin or Prague because the changes in the system were not achieved through or
accompanied by any mass social movement. When Prime Minister Tadeusz
Mazowiecki became ill during his inaugural appearance in Parliament, it was an
ironic symbol of the ‘energy’ of the old opposition. The grassroots revolutionary
energies of Solidarity were finally suppressed by the opposition elites, with Lech
Walesa at the helm, one year earlier. 1988 saw the last workers mass mobilisation in
Poland capable of breaking through the universal apathy of 1986-1987. The country
was swept by a wave of combative factory occupations and strikes organised by
young workers. Officially, Solidarity’s leadership was seen to be supporting the
strikes, however on the ground, it was struggling to extinguish the whole movement
because it threatened the mediation role of the church in the ongoing negotiations
with the government.
If 1980 was a year of utopia then 1989 represented the end of all the utopias, illusions
and dreams of the beginnings of the movement. The lack of enthusiasm experienced
by most of the population translated into a rock-bottom turn-out at the first free
elections (62% – 10 out of 27 million eligible voters did not take part). The mass
meetings and demonstrations that had characterised 1980 were absent. The popular
conviction that the future of the country was being decided behind the backs of its
citizens dominated. A fatalistic anticipation of what the future might bring flooded
the factories and industrial plants. The measure discouragement of this was the
widespread belief (held by nearly half of all workers), that they had no influence over
the direction of the changes then being implemented in Poland. Despite the vast
majority of workers having a negative attitude towards privatisation, actual resistance
to it was weak.
Restoration brought with it disintegration in political activities and the privatisation of
aspiration. People who 10 years earlier has believed in social change now just wanted
a career, quick returns, and personal happiness. Political nihilism, summarised in the
slogan ‘Whatever we do, they’ll do what they want anyway’, soon replaced the past
5
faith in democracy and its institutions. Above all, the previous motor of Solidarity –
the working class – found itself on the sidelines, frustrated and deprived of any
political representation. Without any organisation or any left-wing leadership, many
of the movement’s segments began to drift towards Catholic fundamentalism,
twinning a rejection of capitalism with authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and
conspiracy theory-based interpretations of history. The legacy of this drift today are 2
million members of the Radio Maria family – transmitting the fundamentalist
broadcasts of Tadeusz Rydzyk, the swelling ranks of The League of Polish
Families’(Liga Polskich Rodzin – LPR), as well as the anti-Semitic cries within the
crowds of desperate dockers protesting the anniversary of the August strikes.
In the 25-years that have lapsed since the Gdansk strikes of 1980, Polish society has
walked a twisted and intricate path between the trial-run of realising the dreams of
democratic self-determination to a state of political nihilism cohering with an erosion
of the very concept of democracy. In one respect, this path resembles a circle. Just as
a quarter of a century ago, in today’s Poland the only group which takes the promises
of democracy seriously is the group which has the least from it. It’s possible to see
from the successive social protests that it is workers who are stubbornly holding on to
the ideas of a democratic society, as a community which can realise the principles of
social justice as a reality and not just in the form of equality but also in terms of social
control over strategic decision-making in the economic sphere. This position contrasts
vividly with the ideas and agenda of the political class which seems intent on limiting
an already anaemic democracy exemplified by the singular election mandates
launched by the liberal-conservative Citizens Platform party and the introduction of
tuition fees for higher education, to the awarding of lock-out rights for bosses planned
by Belka’s government.
The restoration of capitalism in Poland has created a social wasteland. The current
‘alterglobalisation’ phenomenon is more of a social scene (activist scene). than a
social movement. Workers protests are truly dramatic and often end in riots (last July
saw rioting in the streets of Warsaw during a Miners demonstration), but they lack coordination
and a political tendency. Even when a wave of strikes and protests rises, as
happened in 2002-2003, forcing changes in the budget policies of the ‘leftwing’
government of the SLD (The Democratic Left Alliance), they do not leave behind any
lasting structures or representation.
In Poland today, Solidarity means almost nothing. In the eyes of ordinary citizens it is
seen as compromised, corrupt and treacherous. It has become less and less of a point
of reference for workers struggling to defend their liquidated workplaces. For them,
more important It is the solidarity with a small ‘s’ that means more to them.
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