05) EGYPTIAN SPRING, ENGLISH SUMMER

By Sam Hammond

     In the wake of uprisings and riots this year, from Cairo to London, there has been much talk of alienation.

     Most people think that alienation is the result of neglect. That can indeed be the case, such as an indifferent parent or a negligent friend. But social alienation in its most general sense is a phenomenon with roots in the relations of class and strata within exploiting society.

     A stand‑alone feature of exploiting societies, basic alienation is the separation of the producers from the products of their labour. Slave, serf or worker, only the form changes.

     If this is so, then there must be "alienators" and "alienated", each with a class identity. Social strata can and do form sections of classes, are classless, or can bridge classes with feet planted on either side, in a fluid, shifting, economically propelled movement from acquisition to dispossession.

     The separation of human beings from what they produce requires a complex package of historically developed instruments of economic coercion, fear, imposed ignorance, and a set of laws enforced by the ruling class instrument, the state.

     To maintain this kind of control and alienation in capitalist society, and also to have a domestic market, the exploiting class must pay wages to purchase the labour power of the working class, so it can purchase its means of subsistence back from them. Simply stated, re‑purchasing what you have produced and what has been expropriated from you.

     This very simple and correct analysis is the basis of the finite social relationships and complexities of modern imperialism, and the complex expressions of alienation between classes and strata in society. It is also true that the producers can never buy back all that they produce, so as a market they are too small to sustain their capitalists. Witness the historical appearance of colonialism and imperialism to capture cheap labour and expanded markets.

     Because of the phenomena of relative "overproduction" and "financialization" under advanced imperialism, the alienation of youth is escalating at a completely predictable pace. The irreconcilable contradiction that defines capitalism - the inability of the masses to purchase the goods they produce - has almost destroyed the "real" economy of manufacturing and commodity production.

     Real wealth can only come from a real economy. The transfer of investment in real production to the trading in paper, in interest, in the purchase and sale of debt itself, has brought us to this stage of imperialism, to privation, hunger, disease and war. Hundreds of millions of workers have become surplus, unwanted humanity with no hope, no future and no purchasing power.

     When millions of workers are surplus, the most experienced are maintained as a reserve core, and some youth are recruited for "McJobs" at less than subsistence wages. Even fewer are highly trained and well rewarded technicians. The majority are in the surplus pool. For older workers this is where they have arrived.

     To understand the intensity of the alienation of youth and its "so‑called" anti‑social behaviour, it must be understood that millions of youth do not arrive at unemployment, privation, homelessness and social redundancy; they start there. The hopelessness of being born into a world that has no real place for you does not breed compliance, social responsibility and worship for the laws of the capitalist state. You cannot alienate, subjugate, disenfranchise, disallow and demean people, then expect them to behave like ladies and gentlemen at a bourgeois tea party.

     Millions of youth have been alienated from the means of production itself, from the mainstream of social existence, even from the class that most of their parents belong to. This is not the alienation of parental neglect, but the objective disposal by the ruling classes of surplus labour, the expulsion of our own children from the economic lever, strength and nurturing that working people employ in their mutual struggle to survive.

     This is a dangerous separation, because classless people quickly lose the culture of class consciousness and the pragmatism of class unity and struggle. Add to this strata of classless youth the elements of the ruined petty bourgeois, the victims of cannibalistic monopoly capital who have no cultural loyalty to the workers and no tradition of disciplined struggle. The mix can produce exactly what we are witnessing in England, or the more disciplined struggles of the Chilean students, the Greeks, the Egyptians or the heroic Palestinians.

     It all depends on time, place and the class forces at work: who leads and who follows.

     The hypocrisy of the English Prime Minister, miffed about a shortened holiday, lecturing about social responsibility and the preservation of property, is laughable. Witness the selected flunky of the ruling class, backed by the media lecturing the victims on their social behaviour.

     The British capitalist class and their bankers, like their compatriots everywhere, have plundered the coffers of their own state to the point of bankruptcy. With their imperialist partners (including Canada), they have stolen and privatized the property of the people and killed millions all over the world, in a bloodbath of lies, murder and greed. While overseeing this, they languish in their spas, attend royal shindigs, indulge in orgies of drugs and privilege. From pulpit and platform they scream and shudder in fear of the stirrings of a generation that might not be governable.

     Their answer is to release the paramilitary forces they have been preparing, and the army if necessary, to extend their rule during periods of social awakening. The symbol of their repression, recruited from our ranks, wears helmet, bullet-proof vest, body armour, gun belt, Plexiglas shield and truncheon. The symbol of revolt is the hoodie.

     The state will temporarily prevail in this one‑sided contest, because they are at war with a strata and not a class. But the explosion is inevitable. Even if the activities of the rioters range from craven to heroic, objectively the responsibility lies with the bourgeois state that itself is doomed, unable and unwilling to provide subsistence and dignity to millions of young people.

     It is not acceptable to sit in judgment of those who plunder and burn at home while honouring those who do so as an instrument of imperial policy on a grander scale in the third world. After all, they do not cannibalize like their masters. The spread of their activities from city to city, described as a plague by hired wordsmiths of capital, is really an act of youth solidarity. It is completely logical for the struggle to expand. The capitalists globally are not in a panic yet, but if they had any brains they would be.

     What is needed everywhere is the leadership of the working class to give tactics, strategy and discipline to this struggle. This requires an objective and a program of escalating demands that can be fought for and organized around, eventually making the possibility of a socialist world not utopian but real. To adjust demands to what the capitalists say is available will leave the youth where they are now: surplus humanity. To comply is to be recruited to the parameters of the state and become an accomplice in the control mechanism.

     The corporations can do this with social democrats, but never with communists. The responsibility for this leadership rests historically with the working class and their most organized section, the unions. The responsibility for injecting this consciousness of historical necessity into the class struggle rests with the Communist Parties.