85 years ago today the Germany currency collapsed, 4.2 trillion marks buying just one US dollar. It looks as if we are all, apart from the extremely wealthy who have been protected, and enabled to carry out their piratical activity, by almost thirty years of Thatcherism in its various guises, in for a bumpy ride in the near future and the powers-that-be do not convince me that they know what they are doing. Or rather they do, and I don't like what that is: they're shoring up capitalism at any price [a price payable by the rest of us in immediate job losses--17,000 notched up this week alone--, cuts in public services, eventual tax rises for those who can't afford them while the non-doms continue to escape, and worse], ensuring that bankers can live to draw their disgusting bonuses again. And a 'return to normal' promised as if it was a good thing. What to do? Here's Rudolf Rocker, secretary of the International Workingmen's Association, addressing the CNT congress in Spain in 1931:
'The greatest danger facing the CNT today is the democratic danger. The Republic offers workers the promise of improvements that are impossible to obtain within the capitalist regime. And there is the risk that the masses will accept its promises. But you already know that democracies only sustain the old capitalist apparatus, not destroy it. They only plan to improve capitalism and, when the workers accept their pledges, they are diverted from their real path. Therefore the danger to Spanish anarcho-syndicalists is the likely diversion of workers towards Republican democracy.
Possibilities unsuspected until now are opening up daily before the global proletariat. But we have to work quickly, energetically, and courageously to seize them. The workers have to fight for the realization of their aspirations, which are nothing other than establishing libertarian communism through social revolution.'
My italics, as they say, as I think that is the only answer to the latest of the grotesque crises to spring from the rampant greed-and-envy machine that is globalised capitalism. It'll be a sair fecht here, of course, as we don't have the politicised and educated union numbers that the CNT had back in the day, or has now if it comes to that: anyone who took part in the embarrassment that was this year's May Day march in Edinburgh and who then saw on the internet the
manifestacion put on by the CNT in Madrid would realise what a strong, militant and politically committed turn-out looked like. That's what will be needed, though, to make a real change for the better.
