International Review 2010s : 140 - 163

Index of International Reviews for the decade 2010

Site structure: 

2010 - 140 to 143

Index of International Reviews published in 2010.

International Review no.140 - 1st quarter 2010

Index of International Review 140.

Copenhagen Summit: Save the planet? No, they can't!

"Copenhagen ends in failure" (Guardian, UK) "Fiasco in Copenhagen", "Grotesque conclusion", "Worse than useless" (Financial Times, UK), "A worthless summit" (The Asian Age, India), "A cold shower", "The worst agreement in history" (Liberation, France)... The international press is nearly unanimous[1] that this supposedly historic summit was a catastrophe. In the end the participatory countries signed an accord in the form of a vague promise for the future, which guaranteed nothing and committed no one: reducing warming to 2°C in 2050. "The failure of Copenhagen is even worse than one could imagine" according to Herton Escobar, the science specialist of the daily O Estado De Sao Paulo (Brazil), "The greatest diplomatic event in history didn't produce the least commitment".[2] All those who had believed in a miracle, the birth of "green capitalism", have seen their illusions melt away like a glacier in the Arctic or Antarctic.

An international summit to calm fears

The Copenhagen summit was preceded by an immense publicity campaign. The media barrage was orchestrated on an international scale. All the television channels, newspapers and magazines made this event an historic moment. There is no shortage of examples.

From the 5th June 2009 the documentary film by Yann Arthus Bertrand, Home, a dramatic and implacable exposition of the scale of the world ecological catastrophe, was shown simultaneously and without charge in 70 countries (on television, internet, and in the cinemas).

Hundreds of intellectuals and ecological associations have issued pompous declarations to "raise consciousness" and "bring popular pressure to bear on the politicians". In France the Nicolas Hulot foundation launched an ultimatum: "The future of the planet and with it, the fate of a billion starving people... is at stake in Copenhagen. Either solidarity or chaos: humanity has the choice". In the United States the same urgent message was delivered: "The nations of the world meet in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December 2009 for a conference on climate that has been called the last chance. It's all or nothing, make or break, literally, sink or swim. In fact it's the most important diplomatic meeting in the history of the world."[3]

The day of the opening of the summit, 56 newspapers in 45 countries took the unprecedented initiative of speaking with a single voice from one and the same editorial: "Unless we unite to act decisively climate change will ravage our planet [...] Climate change [...] will have indelible consequences and our chances of controlling it will be played out in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries meeting in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to quarrel or blame each other [...] Climate change affects the whole world and must be resolved by the whole world."[4]

These declarations are half true. Scientific research shows that the planet is indeed in the process of being ravaged. Global warming is worsening, and with it, desertification, fires, cyclones... Species are disappearing rapidly with pollution and the intensive exploitation of resources. 15 to 37% of biodiversity will be lost from now till 2050. Today one in 4 mammals, one in 8 birds, a third of amphibians and 70% of plants are in danger of extinction.[5] According to the World Humanity Forum climate change will lead to the death of 300,000 people a year (half from malnutrition)! In 2050 there will be "250 million climatic refugees".[6] Well, yes, it is urgent. Humanity is confronted with a vital historic challenge!

Conversely the other half of the message is a great lie designed to delude the world proletariat. It calls for the responsibility of governments and international solidarity faced with climate danger, as if states were able to forget or overcome their national interests to unite and cooperate in the interests of the well being of humanity. This is a lullaby to reassure a working class worried about the ongoing destruction of the planet and the suffering of hundreds of millions of people.[7] The environmental catastrophe clearly shows that only an international solution can work. To prevent workers thinking too much by themselves about a solution, the bourgeoisie wants to pretend that it is capable of putting aside national divisions and, according to the international editorial of 56 newspapers, of "not getting lost in quarrels", "not blaming each other" and understanding that "climate change affects the whole world and must be resolved by the whole world".

The least one can say is that this objective has completely failed. If Copenhagen has shown anything it is that capitalism can only produce hot air.

Moreover there was no illusion to create, nothing good could emerge from this summit. Capitalism has always destroyed the environment. In the 19th century, London was an immense factory spewing smoke and the Thames became a sewer. The only goal of this system is to produce profit and accumulate capital by any means. It hardly matters that in order to do so it must burn forests, pillage the oceans, pollute rivers and unbalance the climate... Capitalism and ecology are mutually antagonistic. All the international meetings, the committees, the summits (like Rio de Janeiro in 1992 or Kyoto in 1997) have always been fig leaves, theatrical ceremonies to make us think that the "great and the good" are concerned with the future of the planet. The Nicolas Hulots, Yann Arthus Bertrands, Bill McKibbens and Al Gores[8] want to make us think that it will be different this time, that faced with the urgency of the situation, the leaders will come to their senses. While all these ideologues wave their arms in the air, these same leaders brandish their eco...nomic weapons! This is the reality: capitalism is divided into nations, competing one against the other, waging an unceasing commercial and if necessary military war.

A single example. The North Pole is disappearing. The scientists see a veritable ecological catastrophe: rise in sea levels, changes in salination and alteration of currents, destabilisation of infrastructures and erosion of coasts following the melting of glaciers, the liberation of CO2 and methane from defrosted soil, degradation of arctic eco-systems.[9] Capitalist states see this as an opportunity to exploit the resources made newly available and open new sea routes free from ice. Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark (via Greenland) are presently waging an implacable diplomatic war, including the use of military intimidation. Thus, last August, "Some 700 members of the Canadian Forces, from the army, navy and air force, participated in the pan-Canadian operation NANOOK 09. The exercise was designed to prove that Canada is capable of asserting its sovereignty in the Arctic, a region contested by the US, Denmark, and above all Russia, whose recent tactics like the sending of planes or submarines has irritated Ottawa". [10] Since 2007 Russia has regularly sent combat aircraft to overfly the Arctic and sometimes Canadian waters as it did during the Cold War.

Capitalism and ecology are indeed always antagonistic!

The bourgeoisie can no longer even save appearances

"The failure of Copenhagen" is thus anything but a surprise. We said in International Review n° 138: "World capitalism is totally incapable of the degree of international co-operation necessary to address the ecological threat. Especially in the period of social decomposition, with the disappearance of economic blocs, and a growing tendency for each nation to play its own card on the international arena, in the competition of each against all, such co-operation is impossible."[11] It is more surprising, by contrast, that all the heads of state didn't even succeed in saving appearances. Usually a final agreement is signed with great ceremony, phoney objectives are proclaimed and everybody is happy. This time, it was officially a "historic failure". The tensions and bartering have emerged from the corridors and taken centre stage. Even the traditional photo of national leaders, arm in arm with smiles of self-congratulation, was not taken. Which says it all!

This failure is so patent, ridiculous and shameful that the bourgeoisie must keep a low profile. The noisy preparations for the Copenhagen Summit have been succeeded by a deafening silence. Thus, just after the international meeting, the media contented themselves with a few discreet lines reporting the failure (while systematically blaming other nations for it) then carefully avoiding this dirty history in the following days.

Why, unusually, did the national leaders not succeed in making it seem a success? In two words: the economic crisis.

Contrary to what has been claimed everywhere recently, the gravity of the present recession is not pushing the heads of state into "the adventure of the green economy". On the contrary the brutality of the crisis stirs up tensions and international competition. The Copenhagen Summit revealed the war that has been unleashed among the great powers. It is no longer the time to appear cooperative and to proclaim accords (even phoney ones). The knives are out. Too bad about the photo!

Since summer 2007 and the fall of the world economy into the most serious recession in the history of capitalism, there is a growing temptation to listen to the sirens of protectionism. There is a growth of every man for himself. Obviously it has always been in capitalism's nature to be divided into nations that devote themselves to implacable economic war. But the 1929 Crash and the crisis of the 30s revealed to the bourgeoisie the danger of a total absence of rules and international coordination for world commerce. In particular, after the Second World War the blocs of east and west organised themselves internally and constructed a minimum framework of economic relations. Extreme protectionism, for example, was everywhere recognised as damaging to world commerce and therefore to every nation. Accords such as Bretton Woods in 1944 and institutions policing the new rules like the International Monetary Fund have lessened the effects of economic slowdown that hit capitalism after 1967.

But the seriousness of the present crisis has weakened all these rules of functioning. The bourgeoisie has certainly tried to react in a unified fashion, organising the G20 in Pittsburgh and London, but the spirit of everyone for themselves has repeatedly reasserted itself. The plans for recovery are less and less coordinated between nation states and so the economic war is becoming more aggressive. The Copenhagen Summit strikingly confirms this tendency.

Contrary to all the lies about a light at the end of the tunnel and recovery of the world economy the recession continues to deepen and even accelerate anew at the end of 2009. "Dubai: the bankruptcy of the Emirate", "Greece is on the edge of bankruptcy"[12] - such news has been like a thunderclap. Each national state senses that its economy is in danger and is conscious that the future will bring an increasingly profound recession. To prevent the capitalist economy from sinking too rapidly into a depression, the bourgeoisie has had no other choice since summer 2007 than to create money on a massive scale in order to pay the public and budgetary deficits. Thus, as a report titled "Worst-case debt scenario" published in November 2009 by the bank Société Générale says: "The worst could be in front of us... state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems. First among them the deficit... High public debt looks entirely unsustainable in the long run. We have almost reached a point of no return for government debt".[13] Global indebtedness is much too high in most of the developed countries in relation to their GDP. In the United States and the European Union public debt in two years time will represent 125% of GDP. In the United Kingdom it will reach 105% and in Japan 270% (according to the report). Société Generale is not the only one to sound the alarm. In March 2009 Credit Suisse drew up a list of the 10 countries most threatened by bankruptcy by comparing deficits with GDP. For the moment this top ten comprises, in order, Iceland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Latvia, Rumania, Great Britain, the United States, Ireland and Hungary.[14] Another proof of the concern is on the financial markets where a new acronym has appeared: the PIGS. "Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain are going to shake the world. After Iceland and Dubai, these four overindebted countries of the euro zone are considered as possible time bombs of the world economy."[15]

In reality, all nation states, faced with their debt mountains must react with new austerity policies. Concretely that means:

develop a very strong fiscal pressure (raising taxes);

diminish expenses still more drastically by suppressing tens or hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs, reducing pensions, unemployment pay, welfare and health costs in a draconian way;

and, evidently, carry out a more and more aggressive commercial policy on the world market.

In short, this disastrous economic situation exacerbates competition. Each country today is disinclined to accept the least concession; it wages a battle royal against other bourgeoisies to survive. It was this tension, this economic war that was played out at Copenhagen.

Ecological quotas are economic weapons

At Copenhagen all the countries came, not to save the planet, but to defend themselves by hook or by crook. Their only goal was to use "ecology" to adopt rules which advantaged them while disadvantaging their rivals.

The United States and China were accused, by the majority of the other countries, of being mainly at fault for the failure. They both refused to fix any figure for the lowering of CO2 emissions, which are the main cause of climate warming. But the two greatest polluters on the planet have the most to lose.[16] "If the objectives of the IPCC[17] are retained [a lowering of CO2 by 40% by 2050] in 2050 every person in the world must emit only 1.7 tonnes of CO2 per year. Now each American produces about 20 tonnes!"[18] As for China its industry is almost entirely derived from coal that "creates 20% of the world emissions of CO2. That is more than all transport combined: cars, lorries, trains, boats and planes."[19] So one can understand why all the other countries tried so hard to "fix objective figures" for the lowering of CO2!

But the United States and China by no means made common cause. The Middle Empire had, on the contrary demanded a lowering by 40% of CO2 emissions by 2050...for the United States and Europe, while claiming that it should naturally be omitted because it was an "emerging country". "Emerging countries, notably India and China, demanded that the rich countries make a strong reduction of greenhouse gases but refused themselves to be subject to objective constraints".[20]

India used almost the same strategy: a lowering for others but not for itself. It justified its policy by the fact that "it sheltered hundreds of millions of poor and so the country could hardly be expected to make major efforts". The "emerging countries" or "developing countries", often presented in the press as the first victims of the Copenhagen fiasco, have not hesitated to use the misery of their populations to defend their bourgeois interests. The Sudanese delegate, who represented Africa, compared the situation to that of the holocaust. "It is a solution founded on the values that sent 6 million people to the gas ovens in Europe."[21] These leaders, who starve their population and who sometimes even massacre them, dare today to invoke their suffering. In Sudan for example, millions of people are being massacred today with weapons; there's no need to wait for the climate to do it in the future.

And Europe, she who plays at being the lady of good virtue, how does she defend "the future of the planet"? Let's take several examples. The French president Nicolas Sarkozy made a thunderous declaration on the last-but-one day of the summit, "If we continue like this, it's failure. [...] all of us, we must make compromises [...] Europe and the rich countries, we must recognise that our responsibility is greater than the others. Our commitment must be stronger. [...] Who will dare to say that Africa and the poorer countries do not need money? [...] Who will dare say that you don't need a body to compare respect for the commitments of each?"[22] Behind these great tirades hides a more sinister reality. The French state and Nicolas Sarkozy were fighting for a lower target for CO2 emissions and, above all, for unlimited nuclear power, that vital resource of the French economy. This energy also carries a heavy weight of menace, like a sword of Damocles hanging over humanity. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station caused between 4,000 and 200,000 deaths according to estimates (depending on whether the victims of cancers caused by radiation are included).  With the economic crisis, in the decades to come, states will less and less have the means to maintain nuclear power stations, and accidents will become more and more probable. And today, nuclear power pollutes massively. The French state wants us to believe that radioactive waste is treated "carefully" at La Hague when in fact to economise it exports a large part of it to Russia: "nearly 13% of the radioactive material produced by our nuclear industry sits somewhere at the end of Siberia. To be exact, in the atomic complex of Tomsk-7, a secret city of 30,000 inhabitants forbidden to journalists. There, each year since the middle of the 1990s, 108 tons of depleted uranium from French nuclear power stations has come, in containers, put aside in a huge parking lot under the open sky."[23] Another example. The countries of Northern Europe have the reputation of being at the leading edge of ecology, real little models. And yet, as far as the struggle against deforestation is concerned... "Sweden, Finland, or Austria did everything to prevent change."[24] The reason? Their energy production is extremely dependent on wood and they are huge exporters of paper. Sweden, Finland and Austria were therefore to be found at Copenhagen on the side of China which, itself, as the world's biggest producer of wooden furniture, did not want to hear any more talk of some limit to deforestation. This is not just a detail: "Deforestation is in effect responsible for a fifth of global emissions of CO2." [25]  and "The destruction of the forests weighs heavily in the climatic balance [...] Around 13 million hectares of forest are cut down every year, the equivalent of the area of England, and it is this massive deforestation which makes Indonesia and Brazil the third and fourth largest emitters of CO2 on the planet."[26] These three European countries, officially living proof that a green capitalist economy is possible (sic!), "saw themselves awarded the prize of Fossil of the Day[27] during the first day of the negotiations for their refusal to accept their responsibility concerning the conversion of forested land."[28]

The country that sums up all the bourgeois cynicism which surrounds "ecology" is Russia. For months, the country of Putin has cried loud and strong that it is favourable to an agreement on targets for CO2 emissions. This position is a little surprising when one knows the state of nature in Russia. Siberia is polluted by radioactivity. Its nuclear weapons (bombs, submarines...) rust in graveyards. Will the Russian state show any remorse? "Russia presents itself as a model nation on the subject of CO2 emissions. But this is nothing but a conjuring trick. Here's why. In November, Dimitri Medvedev [the Russian president] was engaged in reducing Russian emissions by 20% by 2020 (from a base in 1990[29]), more than the European Union. But there was only one constraint since, in reality, Russian emissions had already reduced by... 33% since 1990 because of the collapse of Russian GNP after the fall of the Soviet Union. In effect, Moscow wants the power to emit more CO2 in the years to come in order to not curb its growth (if this returns). The other countries are not going to accept this position easily."[30]

Capitalism will never be "green". Tomorrow, the economic crisis will hit even harder. The fate of the planet will be the last worry of the bourgeoisie. It will look out for only one thing: to support its national economy, while confronting other countries with ever increasing force; in shutting down less profitable factories, even if it means leaving them to rot; lowering production costs; cutting maintenance budgets for factories and power stations (nuclear or coal-fired), which will also mean more pollution and industrial accidents. This is the future capitalism has in store: a profound economic crisis, a polluted and deteriorating infrastructure, and growing suffering for humanity.

It is time to destroy capitalism before it destroys the planet and decimates humanity!

Pawel (6 January 2010)

 

 


 

[1]. Only American and Chinese papers conjured up a "success", a "step forward". We will say why a little later.

[2]. https://www.estadao.com.br/estadaodehoje/20091220/not_imp484972,0.php

[3]. Bill McKibben, American writer and militant in the magazine Mother Jones.

[4]. https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2009/12/07/les-quotidiens-...

[5]. https://www.planetoscope.com/biodiversite

[6]. https://www.futura-sciences.com/fr/news/t/climatologie-1/d/rechauffement...

[7]. This is not to exclude the fact that a great many intellectuals and responsible ecological organisations themselves believe in the history they have invented.  This is very possibly the case.

[8]. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his struggle against global warming with his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth"!

[9]. https://m.futura-sciences.com/2729/show/f9e437f24d9923a2daf961f70ed44366...

[10]. https://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/National/2009/08/19/001-harper-exe...

[11] "The myth of the ‘green economy'".  Third quarter 2009.

[12]. Liberation, 27 November and 9 December 2009. The list has only grown since the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 when Iceland, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Estonia were already dubbed "bankrupt states ".

[13]. Report made public by the British Daily Telegraph, 18 November 2009. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/6599281/Societe-Generale-t...)

[14]. Source: https://weinstein-forcastinvest.net/apres-la-grece-le-top-10-des-faillit...

[15]. Le nouvel Observateur, French magazine, from 3rd to 9th December.

[16]. Hence the cry of victory from the American and Chinese press (highlighted in our introduction), for whom the absence of an agreement is a "step forward".  .

[17]. The group of inter-governmental experts on the evolution of the climate.

[18]. Le nouvel Observateur , 3 to 9 December (special Copenhagen issue).

[19]. Idem.

[20]. https://www.rue89.com/planete89/2009/12/19/les-cinq-raisons-de-lechec-du...

[21]. Les Echos, 19 December 2009.

[22]. Le Monde, 17 December 2009.

[23]. "Nos déchets nucléaires sont cachés en Sibérie", Libération, 12 Octobre 2009.

[24]. Euronews (European television channel), 15 December 2009 (fr.euronews.net/2009/12/15/copenhague-les-emissions-liees-a-la-deforestation-font-debat)

[25]. www.rtl.be/info/monde/international/wwf-l-europe-toujours-faible-dans-la-lutte-contre-la-deforestation-143082.aspx

[26]. La Tribune (French daily), 19 December 2009 (www.latribune.fr/depeches/associated-press/le-projet-anti-deforestation-...).

[27]. This prize is awarded by a group of 500 environmental NGOs and "rewards" individuals or states which, to use a euphemism, "drag their feet" in the struggle against global warming.  During the week of Copenhagen, almost every country earned the right to their Fossil of the Day (www.naturavox.fr/en-savoir/article/fossil-of-the-day-award).

[28]. Le Soir (Belgian daily), 10 December 2009 (blogs.lesoir.be/empreinte-eco/2009/12/10/redd-l%E2%80%99avenir-des-forets-tropicales-se-decide-a-copenhague).

[29]. 1990 is the reference year for greenhouse gas emissions for all countries since the Kyoto Protocol. 

[30]. Le nouvel Observateur from 3rd to 9th December 2009.

General and theoretical questions: 

Recent and ongoing: 

Immigration and the workers’ movement

As the global economic crisis and social decomposition worsen, living conditions throughout the world, particularly in the underdeveloped countries, become increasingly intolerable. The accumulated effects of economic deprivation, natural catastrophes, warfare and ethnic cleansing, famine, and outright barbarism have become stark everyday reality for millions of people, dramatically increasing pressures for mass migration. Millions flee towards the capitalist metropoles, or even other underdeveloped countries that are in slightly better straits, in order to survive and to find more bearable conditions.

The United Nations estimates that there are as many as 200 million immigrants - approximately three percent of the world's population - living outside their home country, double the number in 1980. In the United States, there are 33 million foreign-born residents, approximately 11.7 percent of the population; in Germany 10.1 million, 12.3 percent; in France 6.4 million, 10.7 percent; in the United Kingdom 5.8 million, 9.7 percent; in Spain 4.8 million, 8.5 percent; in Italy 2.5 million, 4.3 percent; in Switzerland 1.7 million, 22.9 percent; and in the Netherlands 1.6 million.[1] Bourgeois government and media sources estimate that there are more than 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, and more than 8 million in the European Union. In this context, immigration has emerged as a hot button political issue throughout the capitalist metropoles and even within the Third World itself, as the anti-immigrant riots in South Africa last year demonstrate. 

While it varies from country to country in its details, the bourgeoisie's attitude towards mass migration generally follows a three-faceted pattern: 1) encouraging immigration for economic and political reasons; 2) simultaneously restricting it and trying to control it, and 3) orchestrating ideological campaigns to stir up racism and xenophobia against immigrants in order to divide the working class against itself.

Encouraging immigration. The ruling class relies upon immigrant workers, legal and illegal, to fill low paid jobs that are not attractive to native workers, to serve as a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers to depress wages for the entire working class and to fill workforce shortages created by aging populations and declining native birth rates. In the US, the ruling class is abundantly aware that entire industries, such as retail, construction, meat and poultry processing, janitorial services, hotels, restaurants, and home health and child care, rely heavily on immigrant labor, both legal and illegal. This is why the demands by the far right for the deportation of 12 million illegal immigrants and the curtailment of legal immigration in no way represents a rational policy alternative for the dominant fraction of the American ruling class, and has been rejected as irrational, impractical, and harmful to the American economy.  

Restricting and controlling. At the same time, the dominant fraction recognizes a need to resolve the status of undocumented immigrants to alleviate a multitude of social, economic and political problems, including the availability and delivery of medical, social, educational and other public services, as well as a variety of legal questions pertaining to the American-born children of immigrants and their property. This was the backdrop to the proposed immigration reform in spring 2007 in the US, which was supported by the Bush administration and the Republican leadership, the Democrats (including the left personified by the late senator Edward Kennedy), and major corporations. Far from being a pro-immigrant law, the legislation called for the militarization and tightening of the border, the legalization of illegal immigrants already in the country, and measures to control and restrict the future flow of immigrants. While it provided a means for illegal immigrants currently in the country to legalize their status, it was in a no way an "amnesty," as it included time delays and huge fines.  

Ideological campaigns. Anti-immigrant propaganda campaigns vary from country to country, but the central message is remarkably similar, targeting primarily "Latinos" in the US and Muslims in Europe, with the allegation that recent immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, are responsible for worsening economic and social conditions faced by the native working class, by taking jobs, depressing wages, overcrowding schools with their children, draining social welfare programs, increasing crime, and just about any other social woe you can think of. This is a classic example of capitalism's strategy of "divide and rule", to divide workers against themselves, to blame each other for their problems, to fight over the crumbs, rather than to understand that it is the capitalist system itself that is responsible for their suffering. This serves to undermine the working class's ability to regain its consciousness of its class identity and unity, which is feared most of all by the bourgeoisie. Most typically the division of labor within the bourgeoisie assigns the rightwing to stir up and exploit anti-immigrant sentiment in all the capitalist metropoles with varying degrees of success, resonating within certain sectors of the proletariat, but nowhere else has it reached the barbaric level exemplified by the xenophobic riots against immigrants in South Africa in May 2008.   

Worsening conditions in the underdeveloped countries in the years ahead, including not only the effects of decomposition and war, but also climate change, will mean that the immigration question is likely to increase in significance in the future. It is crucial that the workers' movement is clear about the meaning of the immigration phenomenon, the strategy of the bourgeoisie with regard to immigration in terms of its policies and its ideological campaigns, and the proletarian perspective on this question. In this article, we will examine the role of population migration in capitalist history, the history of the immigration question within the workers' movement, the immigration policy of the bourgeoisie, and an orientation for revolutionary intervention in regard to immigration.

Immigration and capitalist development

Migration has been a central characteristic of human populations from the very beginnings of human history, driven largely by the need to survive in the face of difficult conditions. For example, anatomically modern humans, homo sapiens, developed  in Africa about 160,000 to 200,000 years ago, and  are believed to have begun a series of migrations out of Africa towards Asia and Europe  150,000 to 50,000 years ago, driven by unstable climatic and environmental conditions linked to various ice ages.   The subsequent property relations of slave society and feudalism tied humans to the land, but even under these modes of production, populations migrated, conquering new areas, overcoming indigenous populations. As with other questions confronting the working class, it useful to analyze the question of immigration in the context of the ascendancy and decadence of capitalism.

 In the ascendant period, capitalism placed tremendous importance on the mobility of the working class as a factor in the development of its mode of production. Under feudalism the toiling population was bound to the land, hardly moving throughout their lives. By expropriating the agricultural producers, capitalism obliged large populations to move from the countryside to the towns, to sell their labor power, providing a much needed pool of labor. As World Revolution n° 300 noted in "The working class is a class of immigrants", "In the early history of capitalism, its period of ‘primitive accumulation', the first wage laborers had their ties with feudal masters severed and ‘great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process' (Marx, Capital Vol.1, Ch. 26)." As Lenin put it, "Capitalism necessarily creates mobility of the population, something not required by previous systems of social economy and impossible under them on anything like a large scale".[2] As ascendancy progressed, mass migration was critically important for the development of capitalism in its period of industrialization. The movement and relocation of masses of workers to where capital needed them was essential. From 1848 to 1914, 50 million people left Europe, the overwhelming majority settling in the United States. Twenty million migrated from Europe to the US between 1900 and 1914 alone. In 1900 the US population was approximately 75 million and in 1914 it was approximately 94 million; which means that in 1914 more than one in five was a recently arrived immigrant - not counting immigrants arriving before 1900. If the children of immigrants who were born in the US are included in the count, then the impact of immigrants on social life is even more significant. During this period the US bourgeoisie essentially followed a policy completely open to immigration (with the exception of restrictions on Asian immigrants). For the immigrant workers who uprooted themselves, the motivation was the opportunity to improve their standard of living, to escape the effects of poverty and famine, oppression, and limited opportunity.

While it pursued a policy of encouraging immigration, the bourgeoisie did not hesitate at the same time to use ideological campaigns of xenophobia and racism as a means to divide the working class against itself. So called "native workers" - some of whom were themselves only second or third generation descendants of immigrants were pitted against newcomers, who were denounced because of their linguistic, cultural, and religious differences. Even between newly arrived immigrant groups ethnic antagonisms were employed as fodder for the "divide and rule" strategy. It is important to remember that the fear and mistrust of outsiders has deep-seated psychological roots in society, and that capitalism has not hesitated to exploit this phenomenon for its own nefarious purposes. The bourgeoisie, especially in the U.S, has used this tactic of "divide and rule" to undermine the historic tendency towards class unity and to better subjugate the proletariat. Engels noted in a letter to Schlüter in 1892 that the American "bourgeoisie knows much better even than the Austrian Government how to play off one nationality against the other: Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish, and each one against the other..."[3] It is a classic ideological weapon of the enemy class.

Whereas immigration in the period of capitalist ascendance was largely fueled by the need to satisfy the labor force requirements of a rapidly expanding, historically progressive mode of production, in decadence, with the slowing down of exponential growth rates, the motivation for immigration came from more negative factors. The pressure to escape persecution, famine and poverty, which motivated millions of workers in the ascendant period to migrate in search of work and an improved standard of living, inevitably increased in the decadent period at a higher level of urgency. The changing characteristics of modern warfare in decadence in particular gave new impetus to mass migration and the flood of refugees. In ascendance wars were limited primarily to the conflict between professional armies on the battlefields. With the onset of decadence the nature of war changed dramatically, involving the mobilization of the entire population and economic apparatus of the national capital. This consequently made terrorization and demoralization of the civilian population a primary tactical objective, and contributed to massive refugee migrations of the 20th and now the 21st centuries. During the current war in Iraq, for example, an estimated two million people have become refugees, seeking safety primarily in Jordan and Syria. Immigrants fleeing the increasingly barbaric conditions in their home countries are further victimized along the way by corrupt police and military, mafias and criminals, who extort them, brutalize them, and rob them in their desperate journey to a hoped-for better life. Many of them die or disappear along the way and some of them fall into the hands of human traffickers. Remarkably the forces of capitalist law and order appear incapable or unwilling to do anything to alleviate these social evils that accompany mass migration in the current period.

In the US, decadence was accompanied by an abrupt change from a wide open immigration policy (except for the long-standing restrictions on Asian immigrants) to highly restrictive governmental immigration policies. With the change in economic period, there was indeed less need for a continuing massive influx of labor. But this was not the only reason to further restrict immigration; racist and "anti-communist" factors were equally present.  The National Origins Act enacted in 1924 limited the number of immigrants from Europe to 150,000 persons per year, and allocated the quota for each country on the basis of the ethnic makeup of the US population in 1890 - before the massive waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe arrived in the US. Targeting of eastern European immigrant workers in this manner was in part attributable to racism against "undesirable" elements like Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, and Jews. During the period of the "Red Hysteria" in the US following the Russian Revolution, working class immigrants from Eastern Europe were regarded as likely to include a disproportionate number of "Bolsheviks" and those from Southern Europe, anarchists. In addition to restricting the flow of immigrants, the 1924 law created for the first time in the US the concept of the non-immigrant foreign worker - who could come to America to work but was barred from staying.

In 1950, the McCarran-Walter Act, heavily influenced by McCarthyism and the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, imposed new limits on immigration under cover of the struggle against Russian imperialism.  In the late 1960's, with the onset of the open crisis of world capitalism, US immigration policy was liberalized, increasing the flow of immigrants into the US, not only from Europe, but Asia and Latin America,  reflecting in part American capitalism's desire to match the European powers' success in tapping their former colonial countries for talented, skilled intellectual workers, such as scientists, medical doctors, nurses and other professions - the so-called "brain drain" from the underdeveloped countries - and to provide low-paid agricultural workers. The unintended consequence of the liberalization measures was a dramatic increase in illegal as well as legal immigration, particularly from Latin America.

In 1986, America's anti-immigrant policy was updated with enactment of the Simpson-Rodino Immigration and Naturalization Control Reform Act, which dealt with the influx of illegal immigrants from Latin America by imposing, for the first time in American history, sanctions (fines and even prison) against employers who knowingly employed undocumented workers. The influx of illegal immigrants had been heightened by the economic collapse of Third World countries during the 1970s, which triggered a wave of impoverished masses fleeing destitution in Mexico, Haiti, and war-ravaged El Salvador. The enormity of this uncontroled upsurge could be seen in the arrests of a record 1.6 million illegal immigrants in 1986 by US immigration police.

On the level of ideological campaigns, the use of the divide and rule strategy in regard to immigration, already utilized as a tactical weapon against the proletariat during the ascendance of capitalism, has been elevated to new heights in the period of capitalist decadence. Immigrants are blamed for flooding the metropoles, for cutting and depressing wages, for being the cause of epidemics of crime and cultural "pollution", overcrowding in schools, overburdening social programs - every imaginable social problem. This tactic has not been limited solely to the US, but has also been used in Britain, France, Germany and throughout Europe, where immigrants from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East are scapegoated for the social ills of crisis-ridden, decomposing capitalism in remarkably similar ideological campaigns, demonstrating in this way that mass immigration is a manifestation of the global economic crisis and worsening social decomposition in less developed countries. All of this is done in order to throw up obstacles to block the development and spread of class consciousness within the working class, to try to hoodwink workers to prevent them from understanding that it is capitalism which creates war, economic crisis, and the full range of social problems characteristic of social decomposition.   

The social impact of worsening decomposition and attendant crises including the growth of the ecological crisis will undoubtedly drive millions of refugees towards the developed countries in the years ahead. While these sudden, massive population shifts are handled differently by the bourgeoisie to routine immigration, they are still dealt with in a manner that reflects the basic inhumanity of capitalist society. Refugees are often herded into refugee camps, segregated from the surrounding society, and only slowly released and integrated, sometimes over many years, treated more as prisoners and undesirables than as fellow members of the human community. Such an attitude stands in stark contrast to the internationalist solidarity that would clearly be the proletarian perspective.

Historical position of the workers' movement on immigration

Confronting the existence of ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences between workers, the workers' movement has historically been guided by the principle that "workers have no country," a principle that has influenced both the internal life of the revolutionary workers' movement and the intervention of that movement in the class struggle.  Any compromise on this principle represents a capitulation to bourgeois ideology.

So for example, in 1847 the German members of the Communist League in exile in London, though primarily concerned with propaganda work amongst German workers, adhered to an internationalist outlook and "maintained close relations with political fugitives from all manner of countries."[4] In Brussels, the League "held an international banquet to demonstrate the fraternal feelings harbored by the workers of each country for the workers of other countries...One hundred and twenty workers attended this banquet including Belgians, Germans, Swiss, Frenchman, Poles, Italians and one Russian."[5]  Twenty years later, the same preoccupation prompted the First International to intervene in strikes with two central aims: to prevent the bourgeoisie from importing foreign strike-breakers and to provide direct support to the strikers, as they did in strikes by sieve-makers, tailors and basket makers in London and bronze workers in Paris.[6]   When the economic crisis of 1866 prompted a wave of strikes throughout Europe, the General Council of the International "supported the strikers with advice and assistance, and it mobilized the international solidarity of the proletariat in their favor. In this way the International deprived the capitalist class of a very effective weapon, and employers were no longer able to check the militancy of their workers by importing cheap foreign labor. Where its influence was felt it sought to convince the workers that their own interests demanded that should support the wage struggles of their foreign comrades."[7] Similarly in 1871 when a movement for a nine hour workday arose in Britain, organized by the Nine Hour League, not the trade unions who remained aloof from the struggle, the First International supported the struggle by sending representatives to Belgium and Denmark "to prevent the agents of the employers recruiting strike-breakers there, a task which they performed with a considerable degree of success."[8]

The most significant exception to this internationalist position occurred in 1870-71 in the US, where the American section of the International opposed the immigration of Chinese workers to the US because they were used by capitalists to depress wages for white workers. A delegate from California complained that "the Chinese have driven out of employment thousands of white men, women, girls and boys." This position reflected a distorted interpretation of Marx's critique of Asiatic despotism as an anachronistic mode of production, whose dominance in Asia had to be overturned in order to integrate the Asian continent into modern productive relations, which would lead to the development of a modern proletariat in Asia. That Chinese laborers weren't yet proletarianized and were therefore susceptible to manipulation and super-exploitation by the bourgeoisie unfortunately became, not an impetus to extend solidarity and an effort to integrate them into the larger American working class, but a rationalization for racial exclusion.

In any case, the struggle for unity of the international working class continued in the Second International. A little over a hundred years ago at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907, an attempt by the opportunists to support the restriction of Chinese and Japanese immigration by bourgeois governments was overwhelmingly defeated. Opposition was so great that the opportunists were actually forced to withdraw the resolution. Instead the Congress adopted an anti-exclusionist position for the workers' movement in all countries. In reporting on this Congress, Lenin wrote, "There was an attempt to defend narrow, craft interests, to ban the immigration of workers from backward countries (coolies-from China, etc.). This is the same spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the ‘civilized' countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are therefore, inclined to forget the need for international solidarity. But no one at the Congress defended this craft and petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness. The resolution fully meets the needs of revolutionary Social Democracy."[9]

In the US, the opportunists attempted at the 1908, 1910 and 1912 Socialist Party congresses to push through resolutions to evade the decision of the Stuttgart Congress and voiced support for the American Federation of Labor's opposition to immigrants. But they were beaten back every time by comrades advocating international solidarity for all workers. One delegate admonished the opportunists that for the working class "there are no foreigners." Others insisted that the workers' movement must not join with capitalists against groups of workers. In a 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League (the predecessor of the left wing of the Socialist Party that went on to found the Communist and Communist Labor parties in the US) Lenin wrote, "In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingo-socialism' we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the S.P. in America who are in favor of restrictions of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907 and against the decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one cannot be internationalist and at the same time in favor of such restrictions."[10]

Historically, immigrants have always played an important role in the workers' movement in the US. The first Marxist revolutionaries came to the US after the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany and later constituted vital links to the European center of the First International. Engels introduced certain problematic conceptions regarding immigrants into the socialist movement in the US which, while accurate in certain aspects, were erroneous in others, some of which ultimately led to a negative impact on the organizational activities of the American revolutionary movement. Engels was concerned about the initial slowness of the working class movement to develop in the US. He understood that certain specificities in the American situation were involved, including the lack of a feudal tradition with a strong class system, and the existence of the frontier which served as a safety valve for the bourgeoisie, allowing discontented workers to escape from a proletarian existence to become a farmer or homesteader in the west. Another was the gulf between native and immigrant workers, in terms of economic opportunities and the inability of radicalized immigrant workers to communicate with native workers. For example, when he criticized the German socialist émigrés in America for not learning English, he wrote that "they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out-and-out Americans. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they the minority, and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all learn English."[11] It was true that there was a tendency for German immigrant revolutionaries to confine themselves to theoretical work in the 1880's and to disdain mass work with native, English-speaking workers, that led to Engels' comments. It was also true that the immigrant-led revolutionary movement did indeed have to open outward to English-speaking American workers, but the emphasis on Americanization of the movement  implicit in these remarks proved to have  disastrous consequences for the workers' movement, as it eventually pushed the most politically and theoretically developed and experienced workers into secondary roles, and put leadership in the hands of poorly formed militants, whose primary qualification was being a native, English-speaker. After the Russian Revolution, this same policy was pursued by the Communist International with even more disastrous consequences for the early Communist Party. Moscow's insistence that native American-born militants be placed in leadership positions catapulted opportunists and careerists like William Z. Foster to leadership positions, cast Eastern European revolutionaries with left communist leanings totally outside the leadership, and accelerated the triumph of Stalinism in the US party.

Similarly, another remark by Engels is also problematic: that the "great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native workers... [The native working class] has developed and has also to a great extent organized itself on trade union lines. But it still takes up an aristocratic attitude and wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the immigrants, of whom only a small section enter the aristocratic trades".[12] Though it accurately described how native and immigrant workers were effectively divided against each other, it implied wrongly that it was the native workers and not the bourgeoisie that were responsible for the gulf between different segments of the working class. Though this comment described the segmentation in the white immigrant working class, the new leftists in the 1960's interpreted it as a basis for the "white skin privilege theory."[13]

In any case, the history of the class struggle in the US itself disproved Engels' view that Americanization of immigrant workers was a precondition for building a strong socialist movement in the US. Class solidarity and unity across ethnic and linguistic roles was a central characteristic of the workers movement at the turn of the 20th century. The socialist parties in the US had a foreign language press that published dozens of daily and weekly newspapers in different languages.  In 1912, the Socialist Party published 5 English and 8 foreign language daily newspapers, 262 English and 36 foreign weekly newspapers, and 10 English and 2 foreign news monthlies in the US, and this does not include the Socialist Labor Party publications. The Socialist Party had 31 foreign language federations within it: Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hispanic, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jewish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Scandinavian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, South Slavic, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Yugoslav. These federations comprised a majority of the organization. The majority of the members of the Communist and Communist Labor Parties founded in 1919 were immigrants. Similarly the growth in Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) membership in the period before World War I came disproportionately from immigrants, and even the western IWW, which had a large "native" membership, had thousands of Slavs, Chicanos, and Scandinavians in their ranks.

The most famous IWW struggle, the Lawrence textile workers' strike of 1912, demonstrated the capacity for solidarity between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Lawrence was a mill town in Massachusetts where workers laboured under deplorable conditions. Half the workers were teenage girls between 14 and 18 years of age. Skilled craft workers tended to be English speaking workers of English, Irish, and German ancestry. The unskilled workers included French-Canadian, Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, Portuguese, Syrian and Polish immigrants. A wage cut imposed at one of the mills prompted a strike by Polish women weavers, which quickly spread to 20,000 workers. A strike committee, organized under the leadership of the IWW, included two representatives from each ethnic group and demanded a 15 percent wage increase and no reprisals for strikers. Strike meetings were translated into twenty-five languages. When the authorities responded with violent repression, the strike committee launched a campaign by sending several hundred children of the striking workers to stay with working class sympathizers in New York City. When a second trainload of 100 children was being sent to worker sympathizers in New Jersey, the authorities attacked the children and their mothers, beating them and arresting them in front of national press coverage, which resulted in a national outpouring of solidarity. A similar tactic, sending the children of striking immigrant silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913 to stay with "strike mothers" in other cities was also used by the IWW and again demonstrated class solidarity across ethnic barriers.

As World War I unfolded, the role of émigrés and immigrants in the leftwing of the socialist movement was particularly important. For example, on 14 January 1917, the day after he arrived in New York, Trotsky participated in a meeting at the Brooklyn home of Ludwig Lore, a German immigrant, to plan a "program of action" for the left forces in the American socialist movement.  Also participating were Bukharin, who was already a US resident working as editor for Novy Mir, organ of the Russian Socialist Federation; several other Russian émigrés; S.J. Rutgers, a Dutch revolutionary who was a collaborator of Pannekoek's, and Sen Katayama, a Japanese émigré. According to eyewitness accounts, the discussion was dominated by the Russians with Bukharin arguing that the left should immediately split from the Socialist Party and Trotsky that the left should remain within the Party for the moment but should advance its critique by publishing an independent bi-monthly organ, which was the position adopted by the meeting. Had he not returned to Russia after the February Revolution, Trotsky would likely have served as leader of the leftwing of the American movement.[14] The co-existence of many languages was not an obstacle to the movement; on the contrary it was a reflection of its strength. At one mass rally in 1917, Trotsky addressed the crowd in Russian and others in German, Finnish, English, Latvian, Yiddish and Lithuanian.[15]

Bourgeois theorisation of anti-immigrant ideology

Bourgeois ideologists insist that today the characteristics of mass migration towards Europe and the US are totally different than in previous periods of history.  Behind this is the idea that today immigrants are weakening, even destroying the societies that receive them, refusing to integrate into their new societies, and rejecting their political institutions and culture. In Europe, Walter Laqueur's The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent makes the case that Muslim immigration is responsible for European decline. The central thesis argued by the bourgeois political scientist Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University in his 2004 book, Who Are We: the Challenges to America's Identity is that Latin American, especially Mexican, immigrants who have arrived in the US in the last three decades are much less likely to speak English than earlier generations of immigrants coming from Europe because they all speak a common language, are concentrated in the same areas in segregated Spanish-speaking enclaves, are less interested in linguistically and culturally assimilating themselves and are encouraged not to learn English by activists who foment identity politics. Huntington further claims that the "bifurcation" of American society along white/black racial lines that has existed for generations is now threatened to be replaced by a cultural bifurcation between Spanish-speaking immigrants and native English speakers that puts American national identity and culture in the balance. 

Both Laqueur and Huntington boast distinguished careers as cold war ideologists for the bourgeoisie. Laqueur is a conservative Jewish scholar, a Holocaust survivor, intensely pro-Israel, anti-Arab, and a consulting scholar with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Cold War "think tank" linked closely to the Pentagon since 1962. Bush's former secretary of defense, Rumsfeld, consulted with the CSIS on a regular basis. Huntington, a political science professor from Harvard, served as an adviser to Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War and in 1968 recommended a policy of heavy bombardment of the Vietnamese countryside to undermine peasants' support for the Viet Cong and drive them into the cities. He later worked with the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s, authoring the Governability of Democracies report in 1976 and served as policy coordinator for the National Security Council in the late 1970's.   In 1993 he wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, which was later expanded in 1996 into a book titled Clash of Civilizations in which he developed the thesis that after the collapse of the USSR, culture not ideology would become the dominant basis for conflicts in the world, and he predicted that an imminent clash of civilisations between Islam and the West would be the central international conflict in the future. Though Huntington's 2004 anti-immigrant tract was widely dismissed by academic scholars specializing in population studies and immigration and assimilation issues, his views got wide play among the media, pundits and policy "experts" in Washington.    

Huntington's protestations that foreign speaking immigrants would refuse to learn English, resist assimilation, and contribute to cultural pollution are standard fare in the annals of US history. In the late 1700s, Benjamin Franklin feared that Pennsylvania would be overwhelmed by the "swarm" of immigrants from Germany. "Why should Pennsylvania," Franklin asked, "founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them?" In 1896, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Francis Walker, an influential economist, warned that American citizenship could be degraded by "the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe."  President Theodore Roosevelt was so vexed by the influx of non-English speaking immigrants that he proposed that "every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country." Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. made similar complaints about the socially, culturally and intellectually "inferior" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. All of these fears and complaints of yesteryear are remarkably similar to Huntington's characterizations of the present situation.

The historic record has never supported these xenophobic fears. While there was always a certain segment of each immigrant group that aggressively sought to learn English, assimilate quickly and achieve economic success, assimilation tended to occur gradually - typically over a period of three generations. Immigrant adults generally retained their native language and cultural traditions in the US. They lived in ethnic neighborhoods, spoke their language in the community, in the shops, in religious settings, etc. They read native language newspapers, periodicals and books. Their children, who immigrated as youngsters or were born in the US, tended to be bilingual. They learned English in school and in the 20th century were surrounded by English in mass culture, but also spoke the native language of their parents in the home, and tended to marry within the national ethnic group. By the third generation, the grandchildren of the original immigrants generally lost the ability to speak the native language and were more likely to be unilingual English speakers. Their cultural assimilation was marked by a growing trend towards inter-marriage outside the original immigrant ethnic group. Despite the large Latino immigration in recent years, the same assimilation trends seem to be continuing intact in the current period in the US, according to recent studies by the Pew Hispanic Center and Princeton University sociologists.[16] 

However, even if the current wave of immigration were in fact qualitatively different from previous ones, would it matter? If workers have no country, why would we be concerned whether assimilation takes place? Engels advocated Americanization in the 1880s not as an end itself, not as some timeless principle of the workers' movement, but as a means to build a mass-based socialist movement. But as we have seen, this notion that such Americanization was a necessary precondition to build working class unity was disproven by the practice of the workers' movement itself in the early 20th century, which unequivocally demonstrated that the workers' movement can embrace the diversity and international character of the proletariat and build a united movement against the ruling class. 

While the 2008 xenophobic riots in South African slums are a warning sign that the bourgeoisie's anti-immigrant ideological campaigns lead ultimately to barbarism in social life, there is considerable evidence that capitalist propaganda severely exaggerates the level of anti-immigrant sentiment in the working class in the metropoles. In the US for example despite the best efforts of bourgeois media and rightwing propaganda to stir up hatred against immigrants around linguistic and cultural issues, the dominant attitude among the general population, including workers, is that immigrants are just workers trying to earn a living to support their families, that they are taking jobs that are too dirty and too low paying for "native" workers, and that it would be foolish to deport them.[17] In the class struggle itself there are increasing signs of solidarity between immigrant and "native" workers that is reminiscent of the internationalist unity at Lawrence in 1912. Examples include various struggles in 2008, such as the massive upheaval in Greece where immigrant workers joined the struggle, or in the Lindsey oil refinery strike in Britain in winter 2009 where immigrants clearly expressed their solidarity, or in the US in the Republic Window and Door factory occupation by Hispanic immigrant workers when "native" workers flocked to the plant bringing food and other supplies to show their support. 

Revolutionary intervention on the immigration question

According to media reports, 80 percent of Britons believe the United Kingdom faces a population crisis caused by immigration; more than 50% fear that British culture is being diluted; 60 percent that Great Britain is more dangerous because of immigration; and 85% want immigration cut or stopped.[18] The fact that there is a certain level of receptivity to the irrational fears of racism and xenophobia propagated by bourgeois ideology among certain elements of the working class does not surprise us since the ideology of the dominant class in class society will exert immense influence on the working class until the development of an openly revolutionary situation. However, whatever the success of the intrusion of bourgeois ideology within the working class, for the revolutionary movement the principle that the world working class is a unity, that workers have no country, is the bedrock of proletarian international solidarity and working class consciousness. Anything that stresses, aggravates, manipulates, or contributes to the "disunity" of the working class is contrary to the internationalist nature of the proletariat as a class and is a manifestation of bourgeois ideology against which revolutionaries fight. Our responsibility is to defend the historic truth that workers have no country.

In any case, as usual the accusations of bourgeois ideology against immigrants are more myth than reality. Immigrants are more likely to be the victims of criminals than to be criminals themselves. In general immigrants are honest, hardworking workers, who labor long, arduous hours to earn money to support themselves and to send home to their families. They are often cheated by unscrupulous employers who pay them less than the minimum wage and refuse to pay them overtime rates, by unscrupulous landlords who charge them exorbitant rents in slum housing, and by all manner of thieves, muggers, and robbers - all of whom count on the immigrants' fear of the authorities to keep them from complaining about their victimization. Statistics show that crime tends to increase among the second and third generations in immigrant families; not because of their immigration status but due to the fact of their continued grinding poverty, discrimination and lack of opportunity as poor people.[19]

It is essential to be clear about the difference that exists today between the position of the Communist Left and that of all those who defend an anti-racist ideology (including those who pretend to be revolutionaries).  Despite the denunciation of the racist character of anti-immigrant ideology, the actions they promote are on the same terrain. Rather than stressing the basic unity of the proletariat they emphasize its division. In an updated version of the old "white skin privilege theory," they blame workers who are suspicious of immigrants, not capitalism for anti-immigrant racism, and they even go on to glorify immigrant workers, as heroes who are purer than native born workers. The "anti-racists" support immigrants versus non-immigrants rather than stress working class unity. The ideology of multiculturalism which they propagate seeks to divert workers away from class consciousness to the terrain of "identity politics" in which ethnic, linguistic, and national "identity" is determinant and not membership of the same class. This poisonous ideology says that Mexican immigrant workers have more in common with the Mexican bourgeois elements than other workers.  Faced with the discontent of immigrant workers against their persecution "anti-racism" ties them to the state. The solution proposed to immigrants' problems invariably stresses the resort to bourgeois legality, whether it is recruiting workers to the capitalist trade unions, or immigration law reform, or enrollment of immigrant workers in electoral politics, or formal recognition of legal "rights."  Everything but the united class struggle of the proletariat.

The Communist Left's denunciation of the xenophobia and racism directed against immigrant workers is sharply distinguished from this anti-racist ideology. Our position is in direct continuity with the position defended by the revolutionary movement from the Communist League and the Communist Manifesto, the First International, the left in the Second International, the IWW, and the early Communist Parties. Our intervention stresses the fundamental unity of the proletariat, exposes the attempt of the bourgeoisie to divide the workers against themselves, opposes bourgeois legalism, identity politics, and inter-classism. For example, the ICC demonstrated this internationalist position in the US when it exposed the capitalist manipulation aimed at the demonstrations of 2006 (in favor of the legalization of immigrants) which were largely composed of Hispanic immigrants. As we wrote in Internationalism n° 139, these demonstrations were "in large measure a bourgeois manipulation," "totally on the terrain of the bourgeoisie, which provoked the demonstrations, manipulated them, controlled them, and openly led them," and were infected with nationalism, "whether it was Latino nationalism which cropped up in the opening moments of the demonstrations, or the sickening rush to affirm Americanism that followed more recently," which was "designed to completely short circuit any possibility for immigrants and American-born workers to recognize their essential unity."

Above all else, we must stand for the defense of the international unity of the working class. As proletarian internationalists we reject as bourgeois ideology such constructs as "cultural pollution," "linguistic pollution," "national identity," "distrust of foreigners," or "defence of the community or neighbourhood." On the contrary, our intervention must defend the historical acquisitions of the working class movement: that workers have no country; that the defense of national culture or language or identity is not a task or concern of the proletariat; that we must reject the efforts of those who try to use these bourgeois conceptions to exacerbate the differences within the working class, to undermine working class unity. Whatever intrusions of alien class ideology may have occurred historically, the red thread running through the entire history of the revolutionary workers movement is internationalist class solidarity and unity. The proletariat comes from many countries and speaks many languages but it is one worldwide class with the historic responsibility to confront the system of capitalist exploitation and oppression. We embrace the linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity of our class as a strength, not a weakness, and stress the unity of the proletariat above all else and international proletarian solidarity in the face of attempts to divide us against ourselves. We must turn the principle that the workers have no country into a living reality that holds within itself the possibility to create a genuine human community in communist society. Anything else constitutes an abandonment of revolutionary principle.

Jerry Grevin, Winter 2009.

 

 

 



[1]. Muenz, Rainer. "Europe: Population and Migration in 2005." Retrieved Sept. 2009 from https://www.migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display.cfm?ID=402

[2]. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia - also quoted in the same World Revolution article.

[3]. Engels to Hermann Schlüter (1892) in Marx and Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971. p. 354.

[4]. Mehring, Franz, Karl Marx, p. 164.

[5]. Ibid. p. 167.

[6]. Stekloff, G.M., History of the First International, England: 1928. Chapter 7.

[7]. Mehring, op cit., p. 419.

[8]. Ibid. p. 486

[9]. Lenin, V.I. "The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart," Proletary n° 17, Oct. 20, 1907 (We leave aside in this text controversies concerning the question of "aristocracy of labour" that Lenin implies.)

[10]. Lenin, V.I., Letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda League, Nov. 9, 1915.

[11]. Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, p. 162-3, 290 (cited in Draper's, Roots of American Communism.)

[12]. Engels, Letter to Schlüter, op cit.

[13]. White skin privilege theory was an ideological concoction of the 1960's new leftists, which claimed that a supposed deal between the ruling class and the white working class granted white workers a higher standard of living at the expense of black workers who were victimized by racism and discrimination.

[14]. Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. Pp. 80-83

[15]. Ibid. p.79.

[16]. See "2003/2004 Pew Hispanic Center/the Kaiser Family Foundation Survey of Latinos: Education" and Rambaut, Reuben G., Massey, Douglas, S. and Bean, Frank. D. "Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California. Population and Development, 32 (3): 47-460. Sept. 2006.

[17] "Problems and Priorities," PollingReport.com, retrieved June 11, 2008.

[18]. Sunday Express. April 6, 2008.

[19]. States News Service, Immigration Fact Check: Responding to Key Myths, June 22, 2007

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Recent and ongoing: 

Science and the Marxist movement: The legacy of Freud

On the occasion of the recent bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth, the ICC published several articles about this great scientist and his theory of the evolution of species.[1] These articles are an aspect of something that has always been present in the workers' movement: an interest in scientific questions, which is expressed at the highest level in the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, marxism. Marxism developed a critique of the idealist and religious views of human society and history which predominated in feudal and capitalist society but which also impregnated the socialist theories which marked the first steps of the workers' movement at the beginning of the 19th century. Against the latter, marxism saw as one of its first priorities the need to base the perspective of the future society, which would deliver humanity from exploitation, oppression and all the scourges which have afflicted it for millennia, not on the realisation of the abstract principles of equality and justice but on a material necessity flowing from the actual evolution of human history, and of nature, which is driven in the last instance by material forces and not by spiritual ones. This is why the workers' movement, beginning with Marx and Engels themselves, always paid particular attention to science.

Science appeared well before the beginning of the workers' movement and the working class itself. We can even say that the latter was only able to develop on a broad scale thanks to the progress of science, which was one of the preconditions for the rise of capitalism, the mode of production based on the exploitation of the proletariat. In this sense, the bourgeoisie is the first class in history which had an ineluctable need for science to ensure its own development and to affirm its own power over society. By appealing to science it was able to break the grip of religion which was the basic ideological instrument for the defence and justification of feudal society. But even more than this, science was the underpinning of the mastery of the technology of production and transport, which was a precondition for the expansion of capitalism. When the latter had reached its high point, bringing into being the force which the Communist Manifesto called its "gravedigger", the modern proletariat, the bourgeoisie turned back towards religion and the mystical visions of society which had the great merit of justifying a social order founded on exploitation and oppression, In doing so, while it continued to promote and finance all the research needed to guarantee its profits, to increase the productivity of labour power and improve the effectiveness of its military forces, it moved away from the scientific approach when it came to understanding how human society works.

It fell to the proletariat, in its struggle against capitalism and for its overthrow, to take up the flame of scientific understanding abandoned by the bourgeoisie. This is what it did in the mid-19th century by opposing the apologetics which had taken the place of the study of the economy, ie the skeleton of society, and putting forward a critical and revolutionary approach to this subject, a necessarily scientific vision, expressed for example in Karl Marx's Capital. This is why the revolutionary organisations of the proletariat have the responsibility of encouraging an interest in scientific knowledge and research, notably in the areas which relate to human society, to the human being and the psyche, domains where the ruling class has an interest in cultivating obscurantism. This does not mean that to be part of a communist organisation it is necessary to have studied science, to be capable of defending Darwin's theory or to resolve second degree equations. The bases for joining our organisation are contained in the platform which every militant has to agree with and has a responsibility to defend. Similarly, on a whole series of questions, for example the analysis we make of this or that aspect of the international situation, the organisation has to have a position which is expressed, generally speaking, in resolutions adopted by our congresses or by plenary meetings of our central organ. In these cases, it is not obligatory for each militant to agree with such statements of position. The simple fact that these resolutions are adopted after discussion and vote means that there can perfectly well be different points of view, which, if they persist and are sufficiently developed, can be expressed publicly in our press, as we can see with the debate on the economic basis of the boom that followed the second world war.

With regard to questions that deal with cultural matters (film criticism, for example) or scientific issues, not only do they not need to have the agreement of every militant (as is the case with the platform) but in general they cannot be seen as representing the position of the organisation, as is the case for resolutions adopted by congresses. Thus, like the articles we published on Darwin, the article that follows, written on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the death of Sigmund Freud, does not express the view of the ICC as such. It should be seen as a contribution to a discussion involving not only militants of the ICC who may or may not agree with its content, but also those outside our organisation. It is part of a rubric of the International Review that the ICC aims to make as lively as possible and which has the aim of giving an account of reflections and discussion touching on cultural and scientific questions. In this sense, it constitutes an appeal for contributions which may express a different point of view from the one expressed in this article.

Freud's legacy

On 23 September 1939, Sigmund Freud died in the Hampstead house that is now the London Freud Museum. A few weeks before the Second World War had broken out. There is a story that the dying Freud, either listening a radio debate or responding to a question from his grandson (versions vary), answered the burning question "Will this be the last war?" with the laconic "At any rate, it will be my last war". 

Freud had been exiled from his home and practice in Vienna soon after Nazi thugs entered his apartment and arrested his daughter Anna Freud, who was released soon afterwards. Freud faced persecution from the Nazi power installed after the "Anschluss" between Germany and Austria not only because he was a Jew, but also because he was the founding figure of psychoanalysis, condemned by the regime as an example of "degenerate Jewish thought": Freud's works, alongside those of Marx, Einstein, Kafka, Thomas Mann and others, had the honour of being among the first to be consigned to the flames in the orgy of book-burning in1933. 

But the Nazis were not alone in their hatred for Freud. Their fair-ground mirror image, the Stalinists, had also decided that Freud's theories needed to be denounced from the pulpits of the state. Just as the triumph of Stalinism had put an end to all experimentation in art, education and other areas of social life, so it resulted in a witch-hunt against the followers of psychoanalysis within the Soviet Union, in particular those who saw Freud's theories as being compatible with marxism. The early Soviet power had taken a very different attitude. Even though the Bolsheviks were by no means monolithic in their approach to this question, a number of leading Bolsheviks, including Lunarcharsky, Bukharin and Trotsky himself, were sympathetic to the aims and methods of psychoanalysis; as a result, the Russian branch of the International Psychoanalytical Association was the first in the world to obtain backing and funding from a state. During this period, one of the main focuses of the branch was the setting up of an "Orphans' School" devoted to bringing up and treating children who had been traumatised by the loss of parents in the civil war. Freud himself took a lively interest in these experiments: he was particularly curious about how the various efforts to bring up children on a communal basis, rather than within the tyrannical confines of the nuclear family, would impact on the Oedipus complex, which he had identified as a central issue in the individual's psychological history. Meanwhile, Bolsheviks like Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Luria, Tatiana Rosenthal and M A Reisner made contributions to psychoanalytical theory and explored its relationship with historical materialism.[2]

All this came to an end as the Stalinist bureaucracy fortified its grip over the state.  Freud's ideas were increasingly denounced as petty bourgeois, decadent and above all idealist, while the more mechanistic approach of Pavlov and his theory of the "conditioned reflex" were favoured as an example of materialist psychology. In the later 20s there was a formidable growth of vicious anti-Freudian texts written by mouthpieces of the regime, a series of "defections" by former supporters of Freud like Aron Zalkind, even hysterical attacks on the "loose morality" crassly associated with Freudian ideas as part of a more general "Thermidor in the Family" (Trotsky's phrase).

Stalinism's final victory over "Freudism" was consecrated at the Congress on Human Behaviour in 1930, particularly in the speech by Zalkind, who poured scorn on the entire Freudian approach and argued that its views on human behaviour were entirely incompatible with the needs of "socialist construction": "How can we use the Freudian conception of man for socialist construction? We need a socially 'open' man who is easily collectivised, and quickly and profoundly transformed in his behaviour - a man capable of being a steady, conscious and independent person, politically and ideologically well-trained..."[3] We know full well what this kind of "transformation" and "training" really meant: breaking the human personality and the resistance of labour in the service of state capital and its remorseless Five Year Plans. In this vision, there was clearly no place for the subtleties and complexities of psychoanalysis, which might be used to show that Stalinist "socialism" had cured none of humanity's ills. And of course, the fact that psychoanalysis had enjoyed a certain measure of support from the now-exiled Trotsky was milked to the maximum in the ideological offensive against Freud's theories.

And in the "democratic" world?

But what of the representatives of capitalism's democratic camp? Didn't Roosevelt's America bring pressure to bear in getting Freud and his immediate family out of Vienna, and didn't Britain provide the eminent Professor Doctor Freud with a comfortable home? Didn't psychoanalysis in the west, and above all in the USA, become a new kind of orthodox psychological church, and certainly a profitable one for many of its practitioners? As it happens, the reaction to Freud's theories among the scientists and intellectuals in the democracies has always been very mixed, with veneration, fascination and respect being liberally mixed with outrage, resistance and scorn. But in the years that followed Freud's death, there have been two major trends in the reception of psychoanalytical theory: on the one hand, a tendency among many of its own spokesmen and practitioners to water down some of its most subversive implications (such as the idea that present-day civilisation is necessarily founded on the repression of humanity's deepest instincts) in favour of a more pragmatic, revisionist approach more likely to find social and political acceptance from that very same civilisation; and, on the other hand, among a number of philosophers, psychologists of rival schools, and more or less commercially successful authors, a growing rejection of the entire corpus of Freudian ideas as subjective, unverifiable, and basically unscientific. The dominant trends in modern psychology (there have been exceptions, such as the ideas of "neuro-psychoanalysis" which have re-examined Freud's model of the psyche in terms of what we now understand about the structure of the brain) have abandoned Freud's journey along the "royal road to the unconscious", his insistence on exploring the meaning of dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue and other insubstantial wraiths, in favour of studying more observable and measurable phenomena: the external, physiological manifestations of mental states, and the concrete forms of behaviour among humans, rats and other animals observed in laboratory conditions. In psychotherapy, the welfare state, keen to reduce the potentially enormous costs incurred in the treatment of growing pandemic of stress, neurosis and plain old insanity engendered by the present social system, favours quick-fix solutions like "Cognitive Behaviour Therapy" over the efforts of psychoanalysis to penetrate to the deep roots of individual neuroses.[4] Above all, and this is especially true in the last couple of decades, we have seen a veritable torrent of books and articles which have tried to cast Freud as a lying charlatan, a fraud who doctored his evidence, a tyrant towards his followers, a hypocrite and (why not?) a pervert. This onslaught has more than a passing resemblance to the anti-Marx campaign launched after the collapse of so-called "Communism" at the end of the 80s, and just as the latter campaign gave rise to its Black Book of Communism, so we have now been treated to a Black Book of Psychoanalysis[5] which devotes no less than 830 pages to its search for dirt on Freud and the psychoanalytical movement.    

Marxism and the unconscious

Hostility to psychoanalysis didn't surprise Freud: in general, it confirmed to him that he was hitting the right target. After all, why would he be popular for pointing out that civilisation (at least as presently constituted) was so antithetical to man's instincts, and for dealing a wounding, further blow to man's "naïve self-love" as he put it?

"But in thus emphasising the unconscious in mental life we have conjured up the most evil spirits of criticism against psychoanalysis, Do not be surprised at this, and do not suppose that the resistance to us rests only on the understandable difficulty of the unconscious or the relative inaccessibility of the experiences which provide evidence of it. Its source, I think, lies deeper. In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man's supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This re-evaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind".[6]

For marxists, however, it should come as no shock to be told that man's conscious life is - or has been hitherto - dominated by unconscious motivations. The marxist concept of ideology (which in its view encompasses all forms of social consciousness prior to the emergence of the class consciousness of the proletariat) is firmly predicated on exactly such a notion.

"Every ideology ... once it has arisen develops in connection with the given concept-material, and develops this material further; otherwise it would cease to be ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws. That the material life-conditions of the persons inside whose heads this thought process goes on in the last resort determine the course of this process remains of necessity unknown to these persons, for otherwise there would be an end to all ideology."[7]

Marxism thus recognises that up till now man's consciousness of his real position in the world has been inhibited or distorted by factors of which he is unaware; that social life as hitherto constituted has created fundamental blockages in man's mental processes. A clear example of this would be the historic inability of the bourgeoisie to envisage a higher form of society than capitalism, since this would imply its own demise. This is what Lukacs called a "class conditioned unconsciousness".[8] And the question can also be approached from the standpoint of Marx's theory of alienation: alienated man is man estranged from his fellow man, from nature, and from himself, whereas communism will overcome this estrangement and man will be fully conscious of himself.

Trotsky defends psychoanalysis

Of all the marxists of the 20th century, it is perhaps Trotsky who has been most committed to opening a dialogue with the theories of Freud, which he had initially encountered during his stay in Vienna in 1908. While still involved in the Soviet state, but increasingly marginalised, Trotsky insisted that Freud's approach to psychology was essentially materialist. He was opposed to any particular school of psychology being adopted as the "official" line of state or party, but called instead for an open and wide-ranging debate. In Culture and Socialism, written in 1925-6, Trotsky weighs up the different approaches of the Pavlovian and Freudian schools and outlines what he thinks should be the party's attitude to these questions:

"Marxist criticism in science must be not only vigilant but also prudent, otherwise it can degenerate into mere sycophancy...Take psychology even. Pavlov's reflexology proceeds entirely along the paths of dialectical materialism. It conclusively breaks down the wall between physiology and psychology. The simplest reflex is physiological, but a system of reflexes gives us ‘consciousness'. The accumulation of physiological quantity gives a new ‘psychological' quality. The method of Pavlov's school is experimental and painstaking. Generalisations are won step by step: from the saliva of dogs to poetry, that is, to the mental mechanics of poetry, not its social content - though the paths that bring us to poetry have as yet not been revealed.

"The school of the Viennese psychoanalyst Freud proceeds in a different way. It assumes in advance that the driving force of the most complex and delicate of psychic processes is a physiological need. In this general sense it is materialistic, if you leave aside the question whether it does not assign too big a place to the sexual factor at the expense of others, for this is already a dispute within the frontiers of materialism. But the psychoanalyst does not approach problems of consciousness experimentally, going from the lowest phenomena to the highest, from the simple reflex to the complex reflex; instead, he attempts to take all these intermediate stages in one jump, from above downwards, from the religious myth, the lyrical poem, or the dream, straight to the physiological basis of the psyche.

"The idealists tell us that the psyche is an independent entity, that the ‘soul' is a bottomless well. Both Pavlov and Freud think that the bottom of the ‘soul' is physiology. But Pavlov, like a diver, descends to the bottom and laboriously investigates the well from there upwards, while Freud stands over the well and with a penetrating gaze tries to pierce its ever-shifting and troubled waters and to make out or guess the shape of the things down below. Pavlov's method is experimental; Freud's is conjecture, sometimes fantastic conjecture. The attempt to declare psychoanalysis ‘incompatible' with Marxism and simply turn one's back on Freudianism is too simple, or, more accurately, too simplistic. But we are in any case not obliged to accept Freudianism. It is a working hypothesis that can produce and undoubtedly does produce deductions and conjectures that proceed along the liens of materialist psychology. The experimental procedure in due course will provide the tests for these conjectures. But we have no grounds and no right to a ban upon the other procedures which, even though it may be less reliable, yet tries to anticipate the conclusions to which the experimental procedure is advancing only very slowly".

In fact, Trotsky very quickly began to question Pavlov's somewhat mechanistic approach, which tends to reduce conscious activity to the famous "conditioned reflex". In a speech given shortly after the publication of the above text, Trotsky wondered whether we could indeed arrive at knowledge of the sources of human poetry by studying the saliva of dogs.[9] And in his subsequent reflections on psychoanalysis contained in these "philosophical notebooks" compiled in exile, his emphasis is much more on the need to understand that recognising the relative autonomy of the psyche, while conflicting with a mechanistic version of materialism, is perfectly compatible with a more dialectical vision of materialism:

"It is well known that there is an entire school of psychiatry (psychoanalysis, Freud) which in practise completely removes itself from physiology, basing itself upon the inner determinism of psychic phenomena, such as they are. Some critics therefore accuse the Freudian school of idealism....But by itself the method of psychoanalysis, taking as its point of departure ‘the autonomy' of psychological phenomena, in no way contradicts materialism. Quite the contrary, it is precisely dialectical materialism that prompts us to the idea that the psyche could not even be formed unless it played an autonomous, that is, within certain limits, an independent role in the life of the individual and the species.

"All the same, we approach here some kind of crucial point, a break in the gradualness, a transition from quantity into quality: the psyche, arising from matter, is ‘freed' from the determinism of matter, can independently - by its own laws - influence matter".[10]

Trotsky is arguing here that there is a real convergence between marxism and psychoanalysis. For both, consciousness, or rather the whole of the psyche, is a material product of the real movement of nature, and not some force squatting outside the world; it is the product of unconscious processes which precede and determine it. But it in turn becomes an active factor that to a certain extent takes on its own dynamic, and which, most importantly, is capable of acting on and transforming the unconscious. This is the only basis for an approach which makes man something more than the creature of objective circumstances, and renders him capable of changing the world around him.

And here we come to what is perhaps the most important conclusion that Trotsky draws from his investigation into Freud's theories. Freud, we recall, had argued that the principal blow that psychoanalysis had dealt to man's "naïve self-love" was its confirmation that the ego is not master of the house, that to a large extent its view of and approach to the world is conditioned by instinctual forces which have been repressed into the unconscious. Freud did, on one or two occasions, allow himself to envisage a society which had overcome the endless struggle against material scarcity and therefore would no longer have to impose this repression on its members.[11] But on the whole, his outlook remained cautiously pessimistic, seeing no social avenue that could lead to such a society. Trotsky, as a revolutionary, was obliged to raise the possibility of a fully conscious humanity that had indeed become master of its own house. Indeed, for Trotsky, the freeing of mankind from the domination of the unconscious becomes the central project of communist society:

"Man at last will begin to harmonise himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo Sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho‑physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the socialist organisation of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub‑soil. Is it not self‑evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction?"[12]

Evidently, Trotsky is looking very far into the communist future in this passage. The priority of mankind in the earlier phases of communism will surely be concerned with those layers of the unconscious where the origins of neurosis and mental suffering can be tracked down, while the goal of achieving control over even more basic physiological processes raises further questions which are beyond the scope of this essay, and which in any case are most likely to be posed in a more advanced level of communist culture.

Communists today may or may not agree with many of Freud's ideas. But we must certainly react with extreme distrust towards the current campaigns against Freud and stand by the open-minded approach which Trotsky advocated. At the very least it must be admitted that as long as we live in world where mankind's "evil passions" can still explode with terrifying force; where sexual relations between human beings, whether brutally held in check by mediaeval ideologies or cheapened and prostituted in the global marketplace, continue to be a source of untold human misery; where for the vast majority of mankind the creative powers of the mind remain largely buried and inaccessible - then the problems posed by Sigmund Freud must not only remain as relevant today as when they were first raised, but their resolution will surely be an irreplaceable element in the construction of a truly human society.

Amos



[1]. See Anton Pannekoek's "Darwinism and Marxism" in International Review n° 137 and no. 138 as well as the articles "Darwin and the workers' movement ", "On the book The Darwin Effect: A materialist conception of the origins of morals and civilisation " and "Social Darwinism, a reactionary ideology of capitalism " on ICC online.

[2]. The following words from Lenin, reported by Clara Zetkin in "Reminiscences of Lenin", 1924, show that the Bolsheviks did not have a unilateral approach towards Freud's theories - even if it seems that Lenin's criticisms were directed more at the defenders of these theories than at the theories themselves :"The situation In Germany itself calls for the greatest unity of all proletarian revolutionary forces, so that they can repel the counter-revolution which is pushing on. But active Communist women are busy discussing sex problems and the forms of marriage ‘past, present and future'. They consider it their most important task to enlighten working women on these questions. It is said that a pamphlet on the sex question written by a Communist authoress from Vienna enjoys the greatest popularity. What rot that booklet is! The workers read what is right in it long ago in Bebel. Only not in the tedious, cut-and-dried form found in the pamphlet but in the form of gripping agitation that strikes out at bourgeois society. The mention of Freud's hypotheses is designed to give the pamphlet a scientific veneer, but it is so much bungling by an amateur. Freud's theory has now become a fad. I mistrust sex theories expounded in articles, treatises, pamphlets, etc. in short, the theories dealt with in that specific literature which sprouts so luxuriantly on the dung heap of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always absorbed in the sex problems, the way an Indian saint is absorbed In the contemplation of his navel.

"It seems to me that this superabundance of sex theories, which for the most part are mere hypotheses, and often quite arbitrary ones, stems from a personal need. It springs from the desire to justify one's own abnormal or excessive sex life before bourgeois morality and to plead for tolerance towards oneself. This veiled respect for bourgeois morality is as repugnant to me as rooting about in all that bears on sex. No matter how rebellious and revolutionary it may be made to appear, it is in the final analysis thoroughly bourgeois. Intellectuals and others like them are particularly keen on this. There is no room for it in the Party, among the class-conscious, fighting proletariat."

[3].  Quoted in Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks, Yale, 1998, p 102.

[4]. We should however point out that we are not concerned in this article to make judgments on the therapeutic effectiveness of Freud's approach. We are hardly qualified to do so, and in any case there is no mechanical link between the practical application of Freudian therapy and the theory of mind that lies behind it - not least because the "cure" for neurosis in a society which constantly engenders it must ultimately lie at the social rather than the individual level. It is the fundamentals of Freud's theory of mind that we are considering here, and it is above all these fundamentals that we see as a real heritage for the workers' movement.

[5]. Le Livre Noir de la Psychoanalyse. The Black Book of Psychoanalysis: To Live, Think and Feel Better Without Freud Catharine Meyer, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jean Cottraux, Didier Pleux & Jacques Van Rillaer (Ed). Paris, France: Les Arènes. 2005.

[6]. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Lecture 18, "Fixation to traumas - the unconscious". 1917.

[7]. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1886.

[8].  History and Class Consciousness.

[9]. See Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935, Writings on Lenin, Dialectics and Evolutionism, translated and introduced by Philip Pomper, New York 1998, p 49.

[10]. Culture and Socialism, p. 106.

[11]. Contrary to the oft-repeated cliché that Freud "reduced everything to sex", he made it clear that "the motive of human society is in the last instance an economic one; since it does not possess enough provisions to keep its members alive unless they work, it must restrict the number of its members and divert their energies from sexual activities to work. It is faced, in short, by the eternal, primeval exigencies of life, which are with us to this day" (Introductory Lectures, Lecture 20, "The sexual life of human beings"). In other words; repression is the product of human social organisations dominated by material scarcity. In another passage, this time from The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud showed an understanding of the class nature of "civilised" society and even permitted himself in passing to envisage a stage beyond it: "If a culture has not gone beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the suppression of another - and this is the case in all present-day cultures - it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share...The hostility of these classes to civilisation is so obvious that it has caused the more latent hostility of the social strata who are better provided for to be overlooked. It goes without saying that a civilisation which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence" (Chapter 2).  Thus the present order not only has "no prospect of a lasting existence", but there could perhaps be a culture that has "gone beyond a point" at which class divisions (and, by implication, the hitherto existing mechanisms of mental repression) might become superfluous.

[12]. Literature and Revolution, 1924.

General and theoretical questions: 

People: 

The Hot Autumn in Italy 1969 (Part 1)

An Episode in the Historic Resurgence of the Class Struggle

What is generally remembered of the "Italian Hot Autumn",[1] which took place 40 years ago, is of a number of struggles that shook Italy from Piedmont to Sicily and which permanently changed the social and political framework of the country. But this was not a specifically Italian occurrence. In Europe in particular but not exclusively, the end of the 1960s saw the development of a series of struggles and of consciousness within the proletariat, that together showed that something had changed: the working class had reappeared on the social scene. It was re-embarking on its historic struggle against the bourgeoisie following the long dark years of counter-revolution, which it had been plunged into by the defeat of the 1920s, the Second World War and the counter-revolutionary activities of Stalinism. The "French May" in 1968,[2] the strikes in Poland in 1970[3] and the struggles in Argentina[4] from 1969 to 1973 constitute, together with the Hot Autumn in Italy, the most important moments in this new dynamic which affected every country in the world because it opened up a new period of social confrontations which, although experiencing high and low points, continues up to the present day.

What led up to the Hot Autumn?

Having learned from the experience of May ‘68, the Italian bourgeoisie was not taken by surprise when the struggles exploded in 1969, as the French bourgeoisie had been the previous year, although this did not mean that it was not at times overtaken by events. These struggles did not come like lightning from a clear blue sky. In fact there were a whole number of factors at the national as well as the international level that came together to create a new atmosphere in the Italian working class and particularly among its young elements.

The climate internationally

Internationally, a significant fringe of young people were sensitised by a number of situations, in particular:

-          The Vietnam war,[5] which came across as a fight between David - Vietnam - and Goliath - the USA. Outraged by the terrible massacres using napalm and other violence inflicted by the American army upon the local population, many went so far as to identify with the Vietcong resistance and to support "poor little Vietnam" against powerful American "imperialism".[6]

-          The epic tale of Che Guevara,[7] with his hero's halo fighting for the liberation of humanity and all the more revered by future generations after he was assassinated by the Bolivian army and CIA special forces in October 1967.

-          The plots of the Palestinian guerrillas,[8] in particular of George Habache's FPLP, which developed within the context of hostile reactions to the outcome of the Six Days War, waged and won in 1967 by Israel against Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

-          An international echo of "Chinese communism", presented as the establishment of real communism in contrast to bureaucratised "Soviet communism". In particular, the "cultural revolution",[9] carried out by Mao Zedong in the period 1966-1969 defined itself as a struggle to return to the orthodox application of "Marxist-Leninist thought".

Some of these aspects are not even remotely linked to the proletarian class struggle to overthrow capitalism. The horrors inflicted upon the Vietnamese population during the war were a consequence of the imperialist antagonisms between the two rival blocs that divided up the world at the time. The resistance on the part of guerrilla movements, whether Palestinian or Guevarist, were no more than an episode in the fight to the death between these two blocs for the domination of other regions of the world. As for "communism" in China, it was as capitalist as that existing in the USSR and the so-called "cultural revolution" was no more than a power struggle between Mao's faction and that of Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi.

Nevertheless, all these incidents bore witness to a profound suffering on the part of humanity which generated in many elements a deep disgust for the violence of war and a feeling of solidarity towards the populations that were its victims. As for Maoism, although it was by no means a solution to the ills of capitalism and was rather a mystification and one more trap on the path of emancipation, it did nevertheless nourish international contestation of the reality of "communism" in Russia.

Within this context, the explosion of student and workers' struggles that was the "French May" had such an international echo that it represented a reference point and an encouragement for the youth and the proletarians of the whole world. In fact May ‘68 was a demonstration that you can not only struggle but you can also win. May '68 itself however, at least as far as the student struggles were concerned, was prepared by other movements, such as those that appeared in Germany with the experience of the Kritische Universität[10] and the formation of the SDS (Socialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), or in Holland with the Provos, or again in the United States with the Black Panther party.  This was a period in which somehow everything that happened in the world had a great echo in all the other countries because of the significant receptivity that existed, especially among the young generation of proletarians and students who were to be the main protagonists of the Hot Autumn. The ambient anxiety and reflection inspired charismatic personalities in the world of show business, such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jimmy Hendrix and others whose songs evoked both the demands of peoples and social strata who were repressed and exploited historically (such as the blacks in America) as well as the atrocities of war (such as Vietnam) and also exalted the desire for emancipation.

Politicisation at the national level

In Italy too, as in France earlier, the weakening of the iron yoke forged by Stalinism during the long years of counter-revolution made possible the development of a political maturation that provided a favourable terrain for the emergence of various minorities which would take up the task of research and clarification. In addition, the arrival of a new generation of workers meant a greater combativity that led to the appearance of new characteristics in the struggle and experience of street confrontation that would leave their mark on the working class.

The experience of the Quaderni Rossi (QR, Red Notebooks)

At the beginning of the 1960s, although still fully in the period of counter-revolution, small groups of elements who were critical of Stalinism tried to the best of their ability to "start from scratch". In fact in this period the PCI (Italian Communist Party), which had gone over to the counter-revolution and been "Stalinised" as had the other CPs in the world, had a large number of rank and file members and sympathisers, partly thanks to the aura inherited from the old revolutionary party founded by Bordiga in 1921. The twenty years of fascism in Italy and the disappearance of the "democratic" parties made it possible for the PCI, more than the other CPs, to escape identification as a real class enemy by the mass of workers. However, as early as the 1950s and even more so in the 1960s, minorities had begun to appear, even within the PCI itself, who were trying to return to real class positions. They returned above all to Marx, whereas Lenin was read less in this period. Rosa Luxemburg was also rediscovered.

One of the experiences that was a reference point in this period was that of the Quaderni Rossi, a group formed within the PCI and around the person of Raniero Panzieri and which in the period of its existence (1961-1966) published only six issues of a review which would certainly have an enormous weight in the history of the theoretical reflection of the left in Italy. We can attribute to this review the origin of "operaismo" (workerism), which we will go into later. The two main groups of Italian workerism, Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua, come out of this matrix. The work of Quaderni Rossi was divided between the re-reading of Capital, the "rediscovery" of Marx's Grundrisse and research into the new composition of the working class. "(...) Quaderni Rossi, the review of Raniero Panzieri, Vittorio Foa, Mario Tronti and Alberto Asor Rosa, between 1961 and 1966 was at the forefront in terms of the intuition that was to be central to the political line of Lotta Continua: the revolution will not come out of ballot boxes or parties (...); it is a matter of freeing the expression of antagonism between the workers and exploitation, an antagonism that should not be channelled towards factory agreements and reforms but should rather be taken out of the hands of the unionists and engineers and axed around the perspective of control of production and a global change in the system".[11]

Panzieri's project was to assemble tendencies and viewpoints that were pretty varied and distant from each other, although the period, which was still strongly marked by the counter-revolution, did not make such an enterprise possible. So "at the beginning of 1962, although the debate had hardly begun in the first issue of the review, the union group withdrew; in July of the same year, following the events of Piazza Statuto, there was the first defection of interventionists (who would produce the paper ‘Gatto selvaggio' (Wildcat)."[12]

In parallel with the QR experience, in the Venice region there was another experience but one that had less political breadth, Progresso Veneto. The man who was to become the unifying element between the two experiences and who became  very famous subsequently  started his political career as a local councillor in the Padua district:   his name was Toni Negri. The Progresso Veneto, which was active between December 1961 and March 1962, was where Venetian workerism began to be forged, with the industrial region of Porto Marghera especially as a reference point. QR and Progresso Veneto worked in symbiosis for a certain period until the Venetian group experienced a split in June 1963 between the workerists and the socialists, who remained more faithful to the party to which they belonged.

But the most important split is the one that took place in 1964 with QR. The original group saw the departure of Mario Tronti, Alberto Asor Rosa, Massimo Cacciari, Rita Di Leo and others to form Classe Operaia (Working Class). Whereas Panzieri remained set on a kind of sociological research with no significant impact on reality, Class Operaia aimed at having a presence and an immediate influence within the working class, judging the time to be ripe for this: "In our eyes their work appears as sophisticated intellectualising in the face of what we consider to be an urgent necessity, that is, to make the unions understand how they should do their job as unionists and make the party understand how to make the revolution".[13]

A party of workerists from Progresso Veneto later joined Classe Operaia, which was led by Mario Tronti. In the beginning at least, Negri, Cacciari and Ferrari Bravo participated. But the new review also had a hard life; the Venetian editorial commission of Classe Operaia began gradually to distance itself from the one in Rome. In fact, whereas the Romans drew closer to their origins in the PCI, the Venetians gave birth to Potere Operaio, which originally came out as a supplement to Classe Operaia in the form of a review-cum-leaflet. Class Operaia began its swan song in 1965 but the last publication came out in March 1967. In the same month Potere Operaia was born as a political paper of the Porto Marghera workers.[14]

Apart from Quaderni Rossi and its various epigones, in Italy there was a rich network of editorial initiatives, which were sometimes born in specific cultural sectors, such as the cinema or literature, and then gradually acquired more political breadth and a certain militant character. Publications such as Giovane Critica, Quaderni Piacentini, Nuovo Impegno, Quindici, Lavoro Politico were also expressions and component parts of the maturation that led to the events of 1968-69.

We can see that there was a long period of political work taking place at the dawn of the Hot Autumn which made possible, at least at the level of the minorities, the development of political thought and the rediscovery, still very partial, of the patrimony of the Marxist classics. But we must still stress the fact that what were to become the most significant workerist formations in the 1970s were deeply rooted in the political culture of the old PCI, and that they developed in a period much earlier than the explosion of struggles in 1969 and of those of the students in 1968. To have the Stalinist party as a point of departure and reference, even if this was in a negative sense in its criticisms, constitutes, as we will see, the gravest limitation upon the experience of the workerist groups and for the movement of the whole period.

The "new" working class

Socially the determining factor in the development of the situation was probably the significant growth of the working class in the years of the economic miracle at the expense of the population in the countryside and in peripheral areas in the south. "To sum up, we find an elite group of professional workers surrounded by a large majority of unqualified workers working with very brief cycles, sometimes only a few seconds long, subjected to rigid control of the time that they put into piece work and with absolutely no perspective of a professional career".[15] This new generation of proletarians from the south did not yet have experience of factory work and had not yet been exposed to its constraints. As they were young and often experiencing their first job, these proletarians had no knowledge of the unions and, in particular, they had not endured the weight of the past decades of defeat, of the war, fascism, repression. They had simply the impetuousness of those who are discovering a new world and want to bend it to their own liking. This "new" working class; young, non-politicised and not unionised, without the weight of history to pull them down, would to a large extent make the history of the Hot Autumn.

The movements of July 1960 and the confrontations in Piazza Statuto in July 1962

The workers' struggles of the Hot Autumn have a significant prelude at the beginning of the 1960s when there were two important episodes of struggle: the street movements in July '60 and the confrontations in Piazza Statuto, Turin in July '62.

Although these two episodes are removed in time from the period 68-69, they contain some important premises. In fact the working class experienced what it means to have the state taking an interest in it.

The movement of July 1960 took off from a  protest against the neo-fascists holding their congress in Genoa, which had unleashed throughout Italy a series of demonstration that were savagely repressed: "At San Fernando in Puglia, the workers were on strike over the workplace agreements, as in the rest of Italy. Armed police attacked them and three workers were seriously injured. In Licata, in the Agrigento region, a general strike took place against working conditions. On the 5th the police charged and opened fire on the demonstration that was led by the DC (Christian Democrat) mayor Castelli, the shop-keeper Vincenzo Napoli, 25 years old, was shot dead. (...) The following day a procession making its way towards the sanctuary of Porta San Paolo - the last bastion in the defence of Rome against the Nazis - was charged and savagely beaten. (...) Another general strike broke out. This produced another furious reaction on the part of the government, which gave orders to shoot on sight: five shot dead and twenty-two wounded in Reggio Emilia on the 7th. (...) The first to fall was Lauro Ferioli, a 22 year old worker. Mario Serri, 40 year old ex- partisan, was next to him and fell a moment later: the killers were two agents positioned among the trees. (...) Later a burst of machine gun fire cut down Emilio Reverberi, 30 years old. Finally, when the furious voice of a police chief was recorded shouting ‘fire into the crowd', it was the turn of Afro Tondelli, 35 years old, to fall. As shown in a photographic document, he was killed in cold blood by a policeman who knelt down to improve his aim..."[16]

As we can see, the forces of order have no regard for the poor, for proletarians who make their demands. Two years later, the same kind of police violence occurred again when there were confrontations in Piazza Statuto in Turin, which broke out on a strictly workers' terrain. The UIL and the SIDA, two unions that had already clearly shown which side they were on, signed separate and hurried factory agreements with the Fiat management that were completely unfavourable to the workers: "6 to 7,000 people, exasperated when they discovered this, met up in the afternoon at Piazza Statuto in front of the UIL offices. For two days the place was to become the theatre for a series of extraordinary confrontations between demonstrators and the police. The former, armed with catapults, sticks and chains, smashed shop fronts and windows, erected rudimentary barricades and repeatedly charged police lines. The latter replied by charging the crowd in jeeps, suffocating the square with tear gas and beating the demonstrators with rifle butts. The confrontations lasted late into the evening on Saturday 7th as well as Monday 9th July 1962. The leaders of the PCI and of the CDIL, Pajetta and Garavini among them, tried in vain to convince the demonstrators to disperse, One thousand demonstrators were arrested and many were informed against. The majority were young workers, mainly from the south."[17]

It is thanks to Dario Lanzardo[18] that we have a clear account of these few days, including official testimonies concerning all the gratuitous violence meted out by the police, not only against the demonstrators but also against anyone who was unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of Piazza Statuto. If we consider all the massacres carried out by the forces of order against demonstrations of workers in struggle from the end of the war up until the Hot Autumn, then we can really see the difference between the black period of counter-revolution - in which the bourgeoisie had its hands completely free to do what it liked against the working class - and the period of resurgence in the struggle when it was preferable to have recourse first to the weapons of ideological mystification and union sabotage. In fact what was to change with the Hot Autumn, understood as a sign of the resurgence of class struggle nationally and internationally, was the balance of forces between the classes both nationally and internationally. This is the key to understanding the new historic phase that opened up at the end of the 1960s and not some so-called democratisation of state institutions. From this point of view, the position adopted by the PCI concerning the confrontations is a perfect illustration of the bourgeois political terrain upon which it had based itself for four decades: "... Unità of 9th July defined the revolt as ‘attempts at provocation on the part of hooligans' and the demonstrators as ‘uncontrolled and exasperated elements', ‘small groups of irresponsible elements', ‘young louts', ‘anarchists, internationalists'."[19]

From the student autumn to the Hot Autumn

To speak of the Hot Autumn is rather restrictive when we are dealing with an historic event which, as we can see, has its roots in a dynamic at a local and international level going  back several years. In addition, the movement did not last just one season, as was the case with the French May, but rather continued at a high level for at least two years, from 1968 to 1969, with repercussions that lasted until the end of 1973.

The proletarian movement during these two years, and even during those that followed, was deeply marked by the outbreak of student struggles, the Italian 68. This is why it is important to go back over each episode in order to follow the impressive development in the maturation of the class struggle as it returned to the historic scene in Italy.

The student 68

Signs of the change in the historic period resounded strongly in the schools and especially in the universities. The economic boom which took place in Italy following the end of the war, as in the rest of the world, had made it possible for workers' families to enjoy a less wretched standard of living and for businesses to count on a massive enlargement of their workforce. The young generation of the less well-to-do strata could now study at university in order to train for employment, gain a broader culture and have some hope of acquiring a more satisfying social position than that of their parents. However, the entrance en masse into university of less privileged strata not only changed the social composition of the student population; it also devalued the image of the graduate. They were no longer educated to fill management posts, as they had been up till then, but rather to be integrated into the organisation of production - industrial or commercial - where individual initiative is more and more limited. This social and cultural framework explains, at least in part, the reasons behind the youth movement in these years: the contesting of dogmatic knowledge retained by a privileged caste of university mandarins using methods from the Middle Ages, of meritocracy, of sectional divisions, of a society seen as ageing and closed in on itself. The student demonstrations had begun as early as February 1967 with the occupation of the Palazzo Campana in Turin, a movement that gradually spread to all the other universities from the Normale in Pisa, the sociology faculty in Trento, to the catholic faculty in Milan and then moving towards the south over several months until the final explosion in 1968. In this period the political groups with a large following that became known in the 1970s had not yet come into being but this is the period which gave birth to the various political cultures that were at the foundations of these groups. The experiences that left the most profound mark on what was to come were certainly those  in Pisa, where there was an important group of elements who already had a publication, Il Potere Operaio (called " Pisan" to distinguish it from the other one of the same name brought out by Classe Operaia). Il Potere Operaio was already a workers' paper in as far as it was published as a factory paper of Olivetti in Ivrea. In fact the Pisa group, in which are to be found the names of the best known leaders during these years, had from the beginning distinguished itself because it talked of the working class and intervention within it. Generally there was a tendency within the student movement of the time to orient itself towards the working class and to make it its main reference point and ideal partner, although this was more or less explicit. Most towns were won over by the student contestation and delegations of students went regularly to the factory gates to hand out leaflets and generally to form an alliance with the world of the working class, which was increasingly felt to be where they belonged. This identification of students as part of the working class was even theorised by some parts of the movement that were more workerist.

The development of workers' struggles

As we have said, 1968 in Italy also marked the beginning of important workers' struggles: "In spring 68 there was a series of struggles in factories throughout Italy, whose aim was wage increases that were the same for everyone and that were to compensate for the 'meagre' agreements of 1966. Among the first factories to mobilise there was Fiat, where the workers carried out the largest conflict for over 14 years, and in Milan strikes broke out in Borletti, Ercole Marelli, Magneti Marelli, Philips, Sit SIEMENS, Innocenti, Autelco, Triplex, Brollo, Raimondi , Mezzera, Rhodex, Siae Microelettronica, Seci, Ferrotubli, Elettrocondutture, Autobianchi, AMF, Fachini, Tagliaferri, Termokimik, Minerva, Amsco and another score of small enterprises, (...) At the beginning the struggle was led by old activists and by the unions outside the factories and so it was led in a fairly authoritarian way. But after a month, young workers made their presence felt, who  'strongly criticised the unionists and the members of the CI[20] for the way they were struggling and on the stages of the struggle', and they qualitatively changed the way of mobilising, introducing tough pickets and internal processions to force white collar workers to strike. On one occasion these workers spontaneously prolonged a strike for several hours and forced the unions to support them. This breeze of youth produced massive participation in the struggle, the number of strike hours multiplied, demonstrations took place on the streets of Sesto San Giovanni, going so far as to bash in the door of the building which housed the management. The strikes continued even though the Assolombarda made it a condition for the opening up of negotiations that they stop: there was total participation on the part of the manual workers and hardly any of the office workers were against".[21]

From then on everything escalated: "The balance sheet of ‘69 at Fiat is a war bulletin: 20 million strike hours, 277,000 vehicles lost, a boom (37%) in sales of foreign cars".[22]

What changed radically with the struggles of the Hot Autumn was the balance of forces within the factory. The worker, who was exploited and humiliated by the speed of production, controls and continual punishments, entered into daily conflict with the boss. The initiatives of the workers were no longer concerned with the number of strike hours but with how to conduct the strikes. There rapidly developed a logic of refusing to work that was equivalent to an attitude of refusing to collaborate with the employers' strategy for the workplace, while remaining firmly anchored to the defence of workers' living conditions. There followed a new way of thinking about how to conduct the strike, which aimed at using minimum effort on the part of the workers to inflict maximum damage on the bosses. This was the wildcat strike in which only a small number of workers struck but the whole cycle of production was dependent on them. By rotating the group who would strike, it was possible to paralyse the factory with the minimum of "cost" to the workers.

Another expression of the changed balance of forces between the working class and the bosses were the processions within the factories. At the beginning these demonstrations took place in the long corridors and passageways of the Fiat premises and those of other important industries and were an expression of protest. They later became a way to convince those who were hesitating, the white collar workers in particular, to join the strike: "The internal processions always began from the coachwork department, often from the varnishing workshop. The news went out that some workshop had gone back to work or else that the strike breakers had been concentrated in office 16, that of the women. So we would go and gather everyone. We trawled them in. Mirafiori is composed of corridors and in such narrow places no-one can escape. Soon it was no longer necessary: as soon as people saw us they slowed down the chain and followed us."[23]

On the question of workers' representation, the period was characterised by the slogan: "we are all delegates", that  is to refuse all union mediation and impose a direct balance of forces upon the bosses by means of the workers' struggle. It is important to return to this slogan which was diffused throughout the struggles and which would impregnate the class struggle for a long time during this period. This is a valuable experience especially given the doubts that proletarian minorities sometimes have today when they want to struggle outside the unions but cannot see how to do so as they are not recognised by the state.

This was not a problem for the workers during the Hot Autumn. When it was necessary, they struggled, went on strike outside of the unions and against their directives but they did not always have an immediate aim. In this phase the workers' struggle was the expression of enormous combativity, of a long repressed will to respond  to the intimidation of the bosses; it did not necessarily need immediate grounds or objectives in order to burst forth; it was its own stimulant; creating a relationship of force, gradually changing the attitude of the working class. The unions had no more than an ephemeral presence in all of this. In fact the unions - and the bourgeoisie generally in this period - were pushed to one side by the strength of the working class struggle. They did the only thing they could do: they tried to keep their heads above water, follow the movement and try not to be too much overtaken by it. On the other hand, such a strong reaction within the class also showed that the unions were not really rooted in the proletariat and so not able to prevent or block the combativity as they can today. This does not mean that there was a deep anti-union consciousness in the working class. In fact the workers acted in spite of the unions, not against them, although there were significant developments at the level of consciousness, as can be seen from the Unitary Rank-and-file Committees (CUB) in the Milan region: "the unions are 'professional negotiators' who, together with the so-called workers' parties, have chosen the path of reform, that is the path of global and definitive agreement with the bosses".[24]

The years 1968-69 were a steam-roller of strikes and demonstrations with moments of acute tension such as the struggles in the Syracuse region, which produced the confrontation in Avola,[25]  or those of Battipaglia which gave rise to violent confrontations.[26] However, the conflicts of Corso Traiano in Turin in July 1969 certainly represent a historic step in this dynamic. On this occasion the movement of the class in Italy made an important step forward: the coming together of the workers' movement with that of the student vanguard. As the students had more time at their disposal and were more mobile, they managed to make an important contribution to the working class in struggle, which in turn became aware of its alienation through the medium of these newly-awakening young people, and showed its willingness to do-away with wage slavery. The link between these two worlds gave a strong impulse to the struggles of 1969, particularly those of Corso Traiano. We are quoting a long extract from a leaflet drafted on 5th July by the Turin workers' assembly, not only because it gives an excellent account of what happened but it also has great political value as a document:

"The events of 3rd July are not an isolated incident or an uncontrolled outbreak of revolt. They came after fifty days of struggle that involved an enormous number of workers, completely blocked the production cycle, represented the highest point in the level of political and organisational autonomy that the workers' struggles have attained up to now by destroying any possibility for the unions to control them.

"Having been thrown out of the workers' struggle, the unions tried to get it to go out of the factories towards the outside and then regain control by calling for a 24 hour general strike to freeze  rents. But once more the initiative of the workers got the upper hand. Symbolic strikes that turn into rest days with one or two processions here and there are only of use to the bureaucrats. In the hands of the workers the general strike becomes an opportunity to unite, to generalise the struggle taking place in the factory. The press refuses to talk about what is happening at Fiat or it lies about it. This is the moment to break this conspiracy of silence, to come out of our isolation, to communicate to everyone the real facts behind the experience of the workers at Mirafiori.

"Hundreds of workers and students decided in an assembly to call for a large demonstration on the day of the strike which was to start off from Mirafiori and proceed to the workers' districts in order to unite the workers of the various factories. (...)

"This was too much for the bosses. Before the procession could even form up, an army of tough guys and police threw themselves without warning into the crowd, coshing, arresting, throwing tear gas canisters (...) After a short while, it was not only the worker and student vanguard who were confronting them but the entire proletarian population of the district. Barricades went up and there were charges in response to those of the police. The battle went on for hours and hours and the police were forced to retreat. (...)

"In this process, the control and mediation of the unions was thrown overboard. Apart from some partial aims, the struggle meant:

-          the rejection of  capitalist organisation of the work,

-          the rejection of the wage being tied to the boss' need to produce,

-          the rejection of exploitation both inside and outside the factory,

"The strikes, the processions, the internal assemblies had blown away the divisions between the workers and matured the autonomous organisation of the class by adopting these aims:

-          always maintain the initiative within the factory against the unions,

-          an increase on the basic wage of 100 lire, the same for all,

-          the second grade for everyone,

-          a real reduction in working hours.

"(...) In fact the struggle of the Fiat workers has re-produced  at a massive level aims that had already been formulated in 1968-69 during the struggles of the largest concentrations of workers in Italy, from Milan to Porto Marghera, from Ivrea to Valdagno. These aims were:

-          a large increase in the basic wage equal for all,

-          the abolition of grades,

-          the drastic and immediate reduction in working hours with no loss of wages,

-          immediate and complete equality between manual and white collar workers."[27]

As we have already said, a whole series of strengths coming out of the Hot Autumn find an echo in this leaflet. First of all, the idea of equality, that wage rises should be the same for everyone, independent of their grade and not subject to the profitability of the work. Secondly, the recuperation  of free time for the workers, in order for them to have a life, to engage in politics, etc. Consequently, the demand for a reduction in working hours and the rejection of piecework.

This same leaflet states that, on the basis of these elements, the Turin workers held an assembly following the confrontations of 3rd July, in which they proposed that all workers in Italy embark upon a new and more radical phase of the class struggle that, on the basis of the aims put forward by the workers themselves, would develop the political unification of all the experiences of autonomous struggle up until then.

With this aim in mind, a national gathering of committees and workers' vanguards was convoked in Turin:

1. To compare and unite the various experiences of struggle on the basis of the significance of the Turin struggle

2. To bring out the aims of the new phase of class confrontation, which should take as a starting point the material conditions of the workers and should encompass all capitalist social organisations.

On 26/27 July at the Turin Palasport there was held a "national gathering of the workers' vanguard". Workers from the whole of Italy gave an account of the strikes and demonstrations, spoke and put forward demands such as the abolition of grades, the reduction of working hours to 40, equal wage increases for everyone in absolute terms (not a percentage) and recognition of parity with white collar workers. "The whole of Italian industry was represented: in order of intervention, after Mirafiore, Marghera petrochemicals, la Dalmine and Il Nuovo Pignone from Massa, Solvay from Rossignano, Muggiano from La Spezia, Piaggio from Pontedera, Italsider from Piombino, Saint Gobain from Pisa, Fatme, Autovox, Sacet and Voxon from Rome, SNAM, Farmitalia, Sit Siemens, Alfa Romeo and Ercole Marelli from Milan, Ducati and Weber from Bologna, Fiat de Marina in Pisa, Montedison from Ferrare, Ignis from Varese, Necchi from Pavia, Sir from Porto Torres, technicians from the RAI in Milan, Galileo Oti from Florence, the unitary rank-and-file committees from Pirelli, the dockyards of La Spezia".[28] This was something never seen before: a national assembly of the workers' vanguard from all over Italy, a moment in which the working class affirmed itself and which can only be experienced when there is a great increase in workers' combativity, as was the case during the Hot Autumn.

In the following months what remains in historic memory as the "Hot Autumn" unfolded along the same lines. The number of episodes of struggle, about which interesting photographic documentation can be found on the site of La Repubblica,[29] followed on one after another at an incredible rate. The following is a list that is by no means exhaustive:

-          2/09: strike of manual and white collar workers at Pirelli for production premiums and union rights. At Fiat, the workers of departments 32 and 33 at Mirafiori go into struggle against union directives over factory discrimination concerning grade changes;

-          4/09: Agnelli the Fiat boss suspends 30,000 workers;

-          5/09: the attempt of the union management to isolate the vanguard workers at Fiat fails, Agnelli is forced to withdraw the suspensions;

-          6/09: more than two million metal workers employed in construction and the chemical industry enter  into struggle for the renewal of the wage contract;

-          11/09: following the breakdown in negotiations over their new contract on 8th September, a million metal workers  go on strike throughout Italy. In Turin, 100,000 blocked Fiat;

-          12/09: national strike of building workers; all building sites in the country are closed. Demonstrations of steel workers in Turin, Milan and Taranto;

-          16-17/09: 48 hour national strike of chemical workers, national strike in the cemeteries and another day of struggle by building workers;

-          22/09: demonstration of 6,000 workers of Alfa Romeo in Milan. A day of struggle of metal workers in Turin, Venice, Modena and Cagliari;

-          23-24/09: another 48 hour general strike by the cemetery workers;

-          25/09: lock-out at Pirelli, indefinite suspension of 12,000 workers. An immediate response from the workers who block all of the group's plants;

-          26/09: demonstration of metal workers in Turin, where a procession of 50,000 starts out from Fiat. General strike in Milan and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of workers who force Pirelli to end the lock-out. Processions of tens of thousands of workers in Florence and Bari;

-          29/09: demonstrations of metal, chemical and building workers in Porto Marghera, Brescia and Genoa;

-          30/09: strike of building workers in Rome, demonstrations of 15,000 metal workers in Livorno;

-          7/10: metal workers' strike in the Milan province, 100,000 workers from nine processions come together in Piazza Duomo;

-          8/10: national general strike of chemical workers. Strike in the Terni region. Demonstrations of metal mechanics in Rome, Sestri, Piombino, Marina di Pisa and L'Aquila;

-          9/10: 60,000 metal workers strike in Genoa. General strike in Friuli Venezia Giulia;

-          10/10: for the first time an assembly is held inside the workshops of Fiat-Mirafiori. Assemblies and processions are also held inside other factories in the group. The police charge the outside of the buildings. Strike at Italsider in Bagnoli against the suspension of 5 workers;

-          16/10: hospital workers, rail workers, postmen, local government workers and day workers enter into struggle for the renewal of their contracts. General strikes take place in the districts of Palermo and Matera;

-          22/10: 40 factories in Milan win the right to hold assemblies;

-          8/11: the building workers contract is signed: it gives a 13% increase on the lowest incomes, the gradual reduction of working hours to 40 and the right to hold assemblies on the building sites;

-          13/11: very tough confrontations between workers and the police in Turin;

-          25/11: general strike in the chemical industry;

-          28/11: in Rome hundreds of thousands of metal workers animate one of the largest and most combative demonstrations that has ever taken place in Italy in order to support their demands;

-          3/12: all-out strike of the Fiat car body workers , demonstration of local government workers;

-          7/12: an agreement is reached on the contract in the chemical industry: it provides wage increases of 19,000 lire per month, a 40 hour week over 5 days and three weeks paid leave;

-          8/12: agreement reached on the contract for the metal industry with state participation: the contract provides an increase of 65 lire per hour, the same for all, legal parity between manual and white collar workers, the right to hold assemblies at the workplace during working hours up to 10 hours per year; and a 40 hour week;

-          10/12: general strike of agricultural workers for the national agreement, hundreds of thousands demonstrate throughout Italy. The beginning of the four day strike of workers in the private oil companies for the renewal of their contract;

-          19/12: national strike of industrial workers in support of the metal workers conflict. Another national strike of agricultural workers;

-          23/12: signing of the agreement for the new metal workers contract : it gives wage increases of 65 lire per hour for the manual workers and 13,500 lire per month for the white collar workers, a wage for the 'thirteenth month', the right to hold assemblies in the factory, the recognition of union representatives from the work-place and the reduction of working hours to 40 per week;

-          24/12: the national agreement for the agricultural workers is signed after four months of struggle, it provides the gradual reduction of working hours to 42 per week and 20 days holiday.[30]

This impressive list of struggles was not solely the result of strong pressure from the workers but also showed the marks of union manoeuvres to disperse the struggles by holding separate actions, made possible because the expiry date varied for different contracts in different sectors and workplaces. In this way the bourgeoisie succeeded in preventing the profound social discontent from exploding into a generalised conflagration.

This enormous development in combativity, accompanied by significant moments of clarification within the working class, also encountered other serious obstacles in the period to come. The Italian bourgeoisie, like that in other countries when confronted with the resurgence in class struggle, did not stand idly by. In addition to frontal attacks by the police, it tried to gradually encircle the movement using other  means. What we will show in the second part of this article is that the capacity of the bourgeoisie to take back control of the situation was based mainly on the weaknesses of a proletarian movement that, in spite of its enormous combativity, had not yet acquired a clear class consciousness and in which even the vanguard did not have the maturity and the clarity necessary to play its role.

Ezechiele (1st November 09)



[1].   From July 1969 and lasting several months.

[2].   See: International Review n° 133 and 134, "May 68 and the Revolutionary Perspective" (parts 1 and 2I), 2008.

[3].   See: "Class Struggle in Eastern Europe (1970-1980)", International Review n° 100.

[4].   From 1973 to 1974, the Cordobazo, the Mendoza strike and the wave of struggles that overwhelmed the country represented the key to the evolution of the social situation at the time. These struggles did not have an insurrectional character but they did signal an awakening of the proletariat in South America. See: "Popular revolt in Argentina; only the self-affirmation of the proletariat on its own terrain can drive back the bourgeoisie." International Review n° 109, 2002.

[5].   See: "Notes on the history of the United States imperialist policy from the Second World War", part 2. International Review n° 114.

[6].   "In this way was born the slogan: ‘the University is our Vietnam'; the Vietnamese guerrillas are fighting against American imperialism, the students make their revolution against power and academic authority". Alessandro Silj, Malpaese, criminalità,corruzione e politica nell'Italia della prima Republica 1943-1994 Donzelli edition, Rome 1994, p.92.

[7].   See "Che Guevara: mythe e réalité (à propos de couriers d'un lecteur)", in Révolution Internationale n° 384; « Quelques commentaries sur une apologie d'Ernesto "Che" Guevara (à propos d'un livre de Besancenot)", in Révolution Internationale n° 388.

[8].   See: "The Jewish/Arab conflict: the position of the Internationalists in the 1930s",  Bilan n° 30 and 31, in International Review n° 110; "Notes on the history of the imperialist conflicts in the Middle East", parts 1,2 and 3,  in International Review n° 115, 117 and 118; "Affrontements Hamas/Fatah; la bourgeoisie palestinienne est aussi sanguinaire que les autres", in Révolution Internationale n° 381.

[9]. See: "Le maoisme: un pur produit de la contre-révolution", in Révolution Internationale n° 371; "China 1928-1949: a link in the chain of imperialist war (I and II), in International Review n° 81 and 84; "Cina: il capitalismo di stato, dalle origini alla Rivoluzione Culturale" (I and II) in Rivoluzione Internazionale n° 5 and 6.

[10].  See: Silvia Castillo, Controcultura e politica nel Sessantotto Italiano.

[11].  Aldo Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione, 1968-1978, Storia critica di LottaContinua. Edited by Sperling and Kupfer, p.13.

[12].  Luca Barbieri, Il caso 7 aprile. Cap III, http.//www.indicius.it/7aprile_02htm

[13].  Interview given by  Rita Di Leo in L'operaismo degli anni sessanta. From ‘Quaderni Rossi' a ‘classe operaia'. Giuseppe Trotta and Fabio Milana. DeriveApprodi edition. https://www.deriveapprodi.org/admi/articoli/allegati/articoli/2.Dossier_...

[14].  See: Luca Barbieri, Il caso 7 aprile. Cap.III, https://www.indicius.it/7aprile_02htm

[15].  Emiliano Mentasti, La guardia rossa raconta. Storia del Comitato operaio della Magneti Marelli, p.25, Colibri Edition.

[16].  Giorgio Frasca Polara, Tambroni e il luglio "caldo" del 60, https://www.libertaegiustizia.it/primopiano/pp_leggi_articolo.php?id=280...

[17]La rivolta operaia di piazza Statuto del 1962. https://lotteoperaie.splinder.com/post/5219182/la+rivolta+operaia+di+pia...

[18].  Dario Lanzardo, La rivolta di piazza Statuto, Torino, Luglio 1962, Feltrinelli.

[19]La rivolta operaia di piazza Statuto del 1962, https://lotteoperaie.splinder.com/post/5219182/la+rivolta+operaia++di+pi...

[20].  CI is an abbreviation for the Internal Commissions, which were officially structures representing the workers when there were conflicts in the workplace. In fact they were an expression of union control over the workers. They were in operation up until the Hot Autumn and were later replaced by the factory councils (CdF).

[21]. Emilio Mentasti, La guardia rossa racconta. Storia del Comitato operaio della Magneti Marelli, p.37, Colibri Edition.

[22]. Aldo Cazzulo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione. 1968-1978. Storia critica di Lotta Continua, pp.75-76, edited by Sperling and Kupfer.

[23]. Ibid, p.60.

[24].  Document of the CUB of Pirelli (Bicocca), "IBM and Sit Siemens", quoted in Alessandro Silj, Mai più senza fucile, Vallecchi, Florence 1977, pp.82-84.

[25]. "The struggle of the agricultural workers in the Syracuse province on 24th November, with the participation of the agricultural workers of Avola, demanded an increase in the daily wage, the elimination of the difference in wages and working hours between the two zones into which the province was divided, the introduction of a law to guarantee that contracts were respected, the setting-up of control commissions with parity of representation, the latter had been obtained in the 1966 struggle but had never worked. (...) The agricultural workers set up roadblocks and were charged by the police. On 2nd December Avola participated en masse in the general strike. During the night the dayworkers set up road blocks on the main road to Noto and the other workers were with them. In the morning the women and children arrived. At about 14.00 hours the Deputy Chief of Police of Syracuse, Samperisi, gave orders for the Celere company, joined by that of Catania, to attack. (...) That day the Celere brigade sounded the charge three times, shooting into the crowd, who thought that they were firing blanks. The agricultural workers tried to find shelter; some threw stones. This war scene lasted about half an hour. In the end, Piscitello, a communist deputy, piled more than two hundred kilos of shells on the tarmac. The outcome was 2 dayworkers dead, Angelo Sigona and Giuseppe Scibilia, and 48 wounded, 5 seriously." (www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip/php?article2259).

[26]. "We went out onto the street with the usual generosity of the young by the side of workers, male and female, who were striking against the closure of the tabacco and sugar industries. The closure of these enterprises, and also those subsidiary to them, meant crisis for the whole town, as for about half the population they were the sole means of income. The general strike was the only alternative and was felt to be such and so the whole town, including us students, participated. Many of us, although not from Battipaglia, felt the need to join in because we understood the importance of these two industries for the town's economy. There was also another reason for the general strike; it was an opportunity to show our solidarity with those from the tabacco factory who had been occupying the premises in Santa Lucia for nearly twelve days. The spectre of crisis hung over the town; it had already been felt with the closure of some canning factories and looked like being very serious for thousands of workers who would inevitably lose their jobs. (...) Very quickly there were moments of tension and, as often happens, these were transformed into real movements. Battipaglia became the stage for violent confrontation, barricades were erected, all road  exits were blocked and the station was occupied. The police charged and what was supposed to be a great day of solidarity with those who were trying to keep their jobs became a popular insurrection. The balance sheet: two dead, hundreds wounded, dozens of vehicles burnt (those of the police and private ones) and incalculable damage. (...) To gain control of a wounded and furious town it took the forces of order about twenty hours". (Eye witness account reported in the blog: massimo.delmese.net/189/9-aprile-1969-9-aprile-2009-a-40-anni-dai-moti-di-battipaglia/).

[27]https://www.nelvento.net/archivio/68/operai/traiano02.htm

[28].  Aldo Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione, 1968-1978. Storia critica di Lotta Continua,  p.67, edited by Sperling and Kupfer.

[29]https://static.repubblica.it/milano/autunno-caldo/

[30]. From the site: https://www.pmli.it/storiaautunnocaldo.htm

Historic events: 

What are workers' councils? (Part 1): Why did workers' councils emerge in 1905?

On March 2nd 1919, at the inaugural session of the First Congress of the Communist International, Lenin argued that the "Soviet system" (that's Russian for workers' councils) having previously been "a Latin phrase" to the great mass of workers, had entered into everyday language in many countries and, above all, was a more common form of struggle for workers; he read out a report in an English bourgeois newspaper that said: "The British government had just met the Birmingham Council of Workers' Deputies and had expressed its readiness to recognise the Councils  as industrial organisations." [1]

Today, 90 years later, comrades from different countries write and ask us: "What are workers' councils?" acknowledging that it is a subject which they know virtually nothing about and of which they would like to know more.

The weight of the most terrible counter-revolution in history, the difficulties which, since 1968, have prevented the politicisation of the struggles of the working class; the falsification, or the total silence that the media and bourgeois culture imposes on the historic experience of the proletariat - all this means that words such as soviet or workers' council which were once so familiar to generations of workers in 1917-23, are now something alien to them or are interpreted in a completely different way from the original meaning. [2]

This article will try and answer four simple questions: What are the workers' councils? Why did they suddenly appear? To what historical needs did they respond? Are they still relevant today? In answering these questions, we will use the historic experience of our class, an experience that comprises the revolutionary combat of 1905 and 1917 as well as the debates and the writings of militant revolutionaries like Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Pannekoek.

The historical conditions that gave rise to the workers' councils

Why did the workers' councils appear in 1905 and not in 1871 at the time of the Paris Commune? [3]

We can only understand the emergence of the workers' councils during the Russian Revolution of 1905 by analysing all the relevant factors: the historic period, the direct experience of proletarian struggle itself, and the intervention of revolutionary organisations.

With regard to the period, capitalism was at the pinnacle of its evolution, but had been showing more and more signs of entering into decline, particularly at the imperialist level. Trotsky, in his works 1905 and Results and Prospects to which we will refer, highlights this: "By drawing all the countries together through its mode of production and commerce, capitalism made the world a single economic and political organisation"; and more specifically, "This gives the current events an immediate international character, and a global perspecive. The political emancipation of Russia under the leadership of the working class will raise the class to hitherto unknown historical heights and will bring about the downfall of capitalism, through which history has realised its goals."[4] The massive movements and general strikes produced by this new period had erupted across the world before 1905: general strikes in Spain in 1902 and in Belgium in 1903 and in Russia itself at various times.

We come to the second factor, the struggle itself. The workers' councils did not emerge out of the blue, like lightning on a clear day. In the preceding years, there had been many strikes in Russia from 1896 onwards: the general strike of textile workers in St. Petersburg in 1896 and 1897; major strikes in 1903 and 1904 that shook the whole of southern Russia, etc. These experiences show tendencies towards spontaneous mobilisation, in which organs of struggle that no longer correspond to the typical union forms of struggle are created, preparing the ground for the struggles of 1905: "... the history of the present period of mass struggles begins with those general strikes in St. Petersburg. They are therefore important for the problem of the mass strike because they already contain, in the germ, all the principle factors of the later mass strikes." [5]

Furthermore, with regard to the third factor, the proletarian parties (the Bolsheviks and other tendencies) had obviously not made any previous propaganda on the theme of the workers' councils since their appearance had taken them by surprise; nor did they set up intermediate structures of organisation in preparation. And yet, their incessant work of political propaganda had greatly contributed to their emergence. This is Rosa Luxemburg's view of the spontaneous movements such as the textile workers' strike in St. Petersburg in 1896 and 1897: "The next occasion of the movement was wholly accidental, even unimportant, its outbreak elementary; but in the success of the movement, it expressed the fruits of the agitation, extending over several years, of the Social Democracy..."[6]

In this regard, it rigorously clarifies the role of revolutionaries: "To fix beforehand the cause and the moment from and in which the mass strikes in Germany will break out is not in the power of Social Democracy, because it is not in its power to bring about historical situations by resolutions at party congresses. But what it can and must do is to make clear the political tendencies, when they once appear, and to formulate them as a resolute and consistent tactics." [7]

This analysis provides an understanding of the nature of the great movement which shook Russia during 1905 and which reached its decisive stage in the last three months of that year, from October to December, during which the development of workers' councils became widespread.

The revolutionary movement of 1905 had its roots in the unforgettable events of "Bloody Sunday", January 22nd 1905.[8]  This movement experienced its first reflux in March 1905 before re-emerging along various paths in May and July.[9]  During this period, however, it took the form of a series of spontaneous explosions with a poor level of organisation. By contrast, from September, the question of the general organisation of the working class had come to the forefront: this was the start of a phase of increasing politicisation of the masses, in which we saw the limits of the struggle for immediate demands but also the exasperation caused both by the brutality of Tsarism and the hesitations of the liberal bourgeoisie.[10]

The debate among the masses

We have seen the historical conditons in which the first Soviets appeared. But what were the determining factors in this? Were they created through the deliberate actions of a bold minority? Or, alternatively, were they the direct product of the objective conditions?

If the revolutionary propaganda carried out over a number of years did, as was said, contribute to the emergence of the Soviets, and if Trotsky played a leading role in the Petersburg Soviet, their appearance was neither the direct result of the agitation or organisational proposals of the marxist parties (divided at this time into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), nor did it result from initiatives of anarchist groups as Voline claimed in his book The Unknown Revolution.[11]  Voline[12] believed the first Soviet appeared in between the middle and the end of February 1905. Without doubting the credibility of his facts, we can say that this meeting - that Voline himself called "private" - would have been a contributory factor in the emergence of the Soviets, but did not constitute their founding act.

It is customary to regard the Soviet of Ivanovo-Vosnesensk as the first or one of the first.[13] In total, 40 to 50 Soviets were identified, together with some soldiers and peasants soviets. Anweiler emphasises their disparate origins: "Some were modelled on older organisations such as strike committees and deputies assemblies; others were formed directly, initiated by Social Democatic party organisations, which then exercised considerable influence in the soviet. Frequently boundaries between a simple strike comitee and a fully developed council of workers deputies were fluid, and only in the main revolutionary centres with considerable concentrations of workers - such as (apart from St Petersburg) Moscow, Odessa, Novorossiysk, and the Donets Basin - were the councils thoroughly organised".[14]

Thus, the paternity of the Soviets can not be attributed to this or that person or minority; they emerged spontaneously from out of nowhere. In essence, they were the collective work of the class: multiple initiatives, discussions, proposals arising from here or there, all woven into the evolution of events, and with the active intervention of the revolutionaries, resulted in the birth of the Soviets. Looking more closely at this process, we can identify two determining factors: the massive scale of debate and the increased radicalisation of struggles.

The noticeable maturation of consciousness within the masses from September 1905 expressed itself in the development of a great appetite for debate. The heated discussions spreading through the factories, universities, neighborhoods, were a "new" phenomenon that increased significantly during the month of September. Trotsky provides some evidence: "... that perfectly free popular gatherings were taking place in the walls of universities, while Trepov's[15] unlimited terror reigned within the streets, was one of the most astonishing political paradoxes of the autumn months of 1905." Increasingly these meetings were attended by workers en masse: "‘The people' filled the corridors, lecture rooms and halls. The workers went directly from the factory to university", says Trotsky, adding the following: "The official telegraph agency, horrified by the audience that gathered in the assembly hall of the Vladimir University, reported that apart from students, the crowd consisted of ‘a multitude of extraneous persons of both sexes, secondary school pupils, adolescents from the town's private schools, workers, and a miscellaneous rabble of people and tramps'"[16].

But it was not at all a "miscellaneous rabble" as the news agency scornfully claimed, but a collective group that discussed and reflected in an orderly and methodical manner, maintaining a strict discipline and a maturity that even the bourgeois newspaper columnist Rouss (Russia) recognised, as Trotsky notes: "Do you know what astonished me most of all at the university meeting? The extraordinary exemplary order. Soon after I had arrived, an interval was announced in the assembly hall and I went for a stroll down the corridor. A univeristy corridor is rather like a street. All the lecture rooms off the corridor were full of people, and independent sectional meetings were taking place inside them. The corridor itself was packed to overflowing: crowds were moving back and forth (...) One might have thought that one was attending a ‘reception', only a rather more serious one than these affairs usually are. And yet this was the people, the real genuine people, with hands coarsened by hard manual work, with that earth-coloured complexion that people get from spending days in unhealthy, airless premises."[17]

We can observe the same discipline in the industrial town of Ivanovo-Vosnesensk, referred to above, from the month of May: "The plenary sessions take place every morning at nine o'clock. When this meeting [of the Soviet] ended, the workers' general assembly began looking at all the issues connected to the strike. There were progress reports on the negotiations with employers and authorities. After the discussion, the Soviet's proposals are submitted to the assembly. Then, the party activists made stirring speeches on the situation facing the working class and the meeting continued until exhaustion set in. At this point, the crowd began to sing revolutionary songs and the assembly was terminated. Every day's the same."[18]

The radicalisation of struggles

A small strike that broke out on September 19th in the Sitin print shop in Moscow would light the fuse to the massive October general strike in which the Soviets became widespread. Solidarity with the Sitin print shop brought more than 50 Moscow print shops out on strike, resulting in a general meeting of printers on September 26th, where the name Soviet or council was adopted. The strike spread to other sectors: bakeries, metallurgical and textiles industries. Agitation won the support of the railway workers on one side, and the printers in St. Petersburg on the other, demonstrating solidarity with their comrades in Moscow.

Another organised front arose unexpectedly: a railway delegates' conference on retirement funds opened in St. Petersburg on September 20th. Departing from its agenda, the conference launched an appeal to all sectors of workers to organise joint meetings and put forward economic and political demands. Encouraged by the telegrams of support from across the country, the conference announced another meeting for October 9th.

Shortly afterwards, on October 3rd, "A meeting of workers' delegates from the printing, engineering, cabinet-making and other trades adopted a decision to  form a general council (Soviet) of all Moscow workers."[19]

The railway strike, which broke out spontaneously on a few lines of the rail network, became a general strike from October 7th. In this context, the meeting called for the 9th was turned into "an extraordinary meeting of the Petersburg delegates' congress of railway personnel [where] slogans of the railway strike were formulated and immediately disseminated by telegraph to all lines. They were the following: eight-hour day, civil liberties, amnesty, Constituent Assembly".[20]

There were very intense debates in the mass meetings at the university on the on-going situation, real-life experiences and the alternatives the future opened up, but in October the situation changed: the debates did not die down, quite the contrary, they matured into an open struggle, which, in turn, began to establish a general organisation, which not only led the struggle but guided and cohered the massive debate. The need to regroup, unite and to unify the various centres of the strikes was raised very clearly by the Moscow workers. The congress of railway workers had been able to provide a program of economic and political demands in relation to the situation and in accord with the real practicalities facing the working class. Debate, unified organisation, a programme of struggle: these were the three pillars on which the soviets were built. So it is clear then that it's the convergence of initiatives and proposals from different sectors of the working class that gave rise to the soviets and absolutely not the "plans" of some minority. The soviets were the concrete expression of what, some 60 years earlier in the Communist Manifesto, looked like a utopian formulation: "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority".

The Soviets, organs of revolutionary struggle

"The first meeting of what was to become the Soviet was held on the evening of the 13th, in the Technological Institute. Not more than thirty or forty delegates attended. It was decided immediately to call upon the proletariat of the capital to proclaim a political general strike and to elect delegates"[21]

This Soviet launched the following appeal, written at this first meeting: "The working class has resorted to the final, powerful weapon of the world workers' movement - the general strike ... Decisive events are going to occur in Russia in the next few days. They will determine the destiny of the working class for many years ahead; we must meet these events with full readiness, united in our common Soviet ... ".[22]

This passage shows the general vision and broad perspective of the body that was newly born from the struggle. It expresses, in a simple way, a vision that is clearly political and in tune with the essential being of the working class, allying itself to the international workers' movement. At the same time, this consciousness is an expression of and an active factor in the extension of the strike to all sectors and to all parts of the country, becoming a general strike effectively from October 12th. The strike paralysed the economy and social life, but the Soviet ensured that it didn't  paralyse the working class struggle itself. As Trotsky shows: "When it needed news bulletins of the revolution, it (the strike) opened a printing works; it used the telegraph to send out strike instructions; it let trains carrying strikers' delegates pass".[23] The strike "was not a merely temporary interruption of work, a passive protest made with folded arms. It defended itself and, in its defence, passed to the offensive. In a number of towns in the south it erected barricades, seized gun shops, armed itself and offered a heroic if not victorious resistance."[24]

The Soviet was the scene of lively debates that had three axes:

  • What relationship to have with the peasants? As indispensible allies, how and under what conditions can they be integrated into the struggle?
  • What is the role of the army? Will the soldiers desert the repressive machinery of the regime?
  • How will they arm themselves in the coming confrontation with the Tsarist state, which is becoming more and more inevitable?

In the conditions of 1905, these questions could be posed, but not answered. The answers would be provided by the Revolution of 1917. That said, the achievements that came about in 1917 could not have been envisaged without the great battles of 1905.

It's commonly thought that questions like those raised above would only concern small coteries of "revolutionary strategists". Despite this, under the Soviets, there was a massive debate around these questions with the participation and contributions of thousands of workers. Those pedants who consider workers incapable of dealing with  such matters would have found evidence of workers speaking without inhibitions, as passionate and committed experts, letting their intuitions, their feelings, and their conscious understanding built up over the years, pour out into the crucible of collective organisation.  Rosa Luxemburg interpreted it this way: "Under the conditions of the mass strike, the honest family man becomes a romantic revolutionary".

If on the 13th, there were barely 40 delegates at the meeting of the Soviet, subsequently the numbers multiplied day after day. The first decision of any factory that called a strike was to elect a delegate who was given a mandate adopted and clarified by the assembly. Some sectors were hesitant: the textile workers of St. Petersburg, unlike their colleagues in Moscow, would not join the struggle until the 16th. On the 15th "The Soviet worked out a complete range of methods, from verbal appeals to forcible cohersion, to involve non-strikers in the strike. But it turned out to be unnecessary to  resort to extreme methods. Where a printed appeal had no effect, it was enough for a crowd of strikers to appear on the scene - sometimes only a few men - and work was immediately interrupted."[25]

Meetings of the Soviet were the antithesis of a bourgeois parliament or a disputation among academic scholars. "There was no trace of magniloquence, that ulcer of representational institutions! The questions under discussion - the spreading of the strike and demands to be addressed to the Duma - were of a purely practical nature and were debated briefly, energetically and in a businesslike manner. One felt that every atom of time was accounted for. The slightest tendency towards rhetoric was firmly checked by the chairman with the stern approval of the entire meeting."[26]

This lively and practical debate, at once profound and concrete, revealed a transformation in the consciousness and the social psychology of the workers and was a powerful factor in developing these. Consciousness is the collective understanding of the social situation and its perspectives, of the real power that comes from mass action, and of the need to set goals, distinguish friends from enemies, and elaborate a vision of the future world. But at the same time social psychology is a factor that is both distinct from but that exists alongside consciousness; a factor that is expressed in the moral and living attitudes of workers, in their contagious solidarity, in their empathy with others, in their open-mindedness and learning and in their selfless devotion to the common cause.

This mental transformation may appear utopian and impossible to those who only see workers through the prism of everyday life where they may appear as atomised robots without the least initiative or collective sentiment, destroyed by the weight of competition and rivalry. It's the experience of massive struggle and the development of the workers' councils that is the engine of such a transformation, as Trotsky says: "Socialism does not aim at creating a socialist psychology as a pre-requisite to socialism but at creating socialist conditions of life as a pre-requisite to socialist psychology."[27]

The general assemblies and the councils elected by them and responsible to them became both the brain and heart of the struggle. The brain, so that thousands of human beings could think aloud and could take decisions after a period of reflection. The heart, so that these beings could stop seeing themselves lost in a sea of strangers, unknown and potentially hostile to each other, and become an active part of a broad community that unites them all and where everyone feels mutual solidarity and support.

By building on these solid foundations, the Soviet established the proletariat as the alternative power to the bourgeois state. It became increasingly recognised as a social force: "As the October strike developed, so the Soviet naturally came more and more to the political forefront. Its importance grew literally from hour to hour. The industrial proletariat was the first to rally around it. The railwaymen's union established close relations with it. The Union of Unions, which joined the strike from October 14, was obliged to place itself under the Soviet's authority almost from the start. Numerous strike committees (...) adapted their actions to the Soviet's decisions."[28]

Many anarchists and councilist writers have made the soviets the standard bearers of a federalist ideology built on local and corporatist autonomy that opposes the supposedly "authoritarian and debilitating" centralism of marxism. A reflection of Trotsky answers these objections: "The role of St. Petersburg in the Russian revolution cannot be compared in any way with that of Paris in the French revolution. The economically primitive nature of France (and, in particular, of the means of communication) on the one hand and administrative centralisation on the other,  allowed the French revolution to be localised - to all intents and purposes - within the walls of Paris. The situation in Russia was entirely different. Capitalist development in Russia had created as many independent centres of revolution as there were centres of major industry - independent, that is, but also intimately linked with one another."[29]

Here we see in practice what proletarian centralisation means. It is the antithesis of the bureaucratic and debilitating centralisation characteristic of the state and of all the exploiting classes throughout history. Proletarian centralisation is not based on the denial of initiative and spontaneity to its various components; instead  it uses all its resources to aid their development. As Trotsky remarks: "The railways and the telegraph decentralised the revolution despite the centralised character of the state; but, at the same time, they brought unity to all its scattered manifestations. If, as the result of all this, we recognise that Petersburg had the leading voice of the revolution, it does not mean that the revolution was concentrated in Nevsky Prospect or outside the Winter Palace, but only that the slogans and fighting methods of struggle of Petersburg found a mighty revolutionary echo in the country as a whole. "[30]

The Soviet was the backbone of this massive centralisation: "...we must recognise the council, or Soviet of workers' deputies as the cornerstone of all the events", Trotsky continues, "Not only because it is the greatest workers' organisation to be seen in Russia until that time. Not only because the St. Petersburg soviet served as a model for Moscow, Odessa and a number of other cities. But, above all, because this purely class-founded, proletarian organisation was the organisation of the revolution as such. The Soviet was the axis of all events, every thred ran towards it, every call to action emanated from it."[31]

The role of the Soviets at the end of movement

In late October 1905, it was clear that the movement was faced with a choice: either to make the insurrection or to be crushed.

The aim of this article is not to analyse the factors that led to the second outcome.[32] The movement did indeed culminate in defeat and the Tsarist regime - once again in control of the situation - unleashed a brutal crackdown. However, the manner in which the proletariat fought a fierce and heroic but fully conscious battle was preparation for the future. The painful defeat in December 1905 prepared the future revolution of 1917.

The Petersburg Soviet had a decisive role in this: it did everything it could to prepare for an inevitable confrontation in the best possible conditions. It formed workers' patrols, initially defensive in nature (against the punitive expeditions of the Black Hundreds organised by the Tsar and composed of the dregs of society), established arms depots and organised and trained militias.

But at the same time, and learning from the workers' uprising of the 19th century,[33] the Petersburg Soviet insisted that the key to the situation was the attitude of the troops, and that is why it concentrated the bulk of its efforts on deciding how to win the soldiers over to its side.

And, in fact, the appeals and leaflets addressed to the army, the invitations to troops to attend meetings of the Soviet were not wasted. They found an echo to some degree in the growing discontent among the sailors who led the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin (immortalised by the famous movie) or in the uprising of the Kronstadt garrison in October.

In November 1905, the Soviet called a massively supported strike where the objectives were directly political: the ending of martial law in Poland and the abolition of the special military Tribunal prosecuting the sailors and soldiers of Kronstadt. This strike was able to pull in sectors of workers who had never struggled before and won enormous sympathy from soldiers. However, the strike also demonstrated the exhaustion of working class forces and a largely passive attitude among the soldiers and peasants, particularly in the provinces, which led to the failure of the strike.

The Soviet took two seemingly paradoxical measures in October and November that were another contribution in preparing for confrontation. As soon as it understood that the strike in October was over, the Soviet proposed to the workers' assemblies that all the workers go back to work at the same time. This was a demonstration of force that showed the determination and the conscious discipline of the workers. The operation was carried out in November before the movement got weaker. It was a way of conserving energy for the general confrontation to come, showing the enemy the strength and steadfast unity of the combattants.

Once the Russian liberal bourgeoisie became aware of the proletarian threat, it closed ranks around the Tsarist regime. This regime now felt itself in a stronger position and began to systematically hunt down the Soviets. The news spread quickly that the workers' movement in the provinces was in retreat. Despite this, the workers in Moscow launched an insurrection that was only crushed after 14 days of fierce fighting.

The crushing of the insurrection in Moscow was the final act of three hundred days of liberty, fraternity, organisation and community, experienced by "ordinary workers" as the liberal intellectuals liked to call them. During the last two months, these "ordinary workers" had built a simple structure, the Soviets, which was able to respond quickly to events, and which, in no time at all, achieved immense power. But with the end of the revolution, they seemed to have disappeared without trace forever . Apart from revolutionary minorities and groups of advanced workers, no one spoke about them anymore. Yet in 1917, they returned onto the social scene with a recognised purpose and with irresistible force. We will see all this in our next article.

C. Mir, 5/11/09

 


[1].  Lenin Selected Works Volume X  p.26 (Lawrence and Wishart).

[2]. The phrase "Soviet system" is now associated with the barbaric regime of state capitalism that existed in the former USSR and "the Soviets" is now synonymous with Russian imperialism during the long period of the Cold War (1945-89).

[3]. Despite the fact that Marx recognised the Commune as the "finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat " and that it was a harbinger of what would later be the Soviets, the Paris Commune is associated more with the organisational forms of radical democracy peculiar to the urban masses during the French Revolution: "The central committee of the National Guard, which headed a system of soldiers councils, took the initiative in proclaiming the Commune. The battalion clubs, as the lowest elements, elected a legion council, each of which sent three representatives to the sixty-member central committee. In addition, provisions were made for a general assembly of delegates from the companies, which was intended to meet once a month" (Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: the Russian Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, Pantheon, 1974, p11-12)

[4]. Trotsky, Results and Prospects, 1906

[5]. Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, The Political Party and the Trade Unions, Chapter 3, "The Development of the Mass Strike Movement in Russia". Merlin Press, p 23.

[6]. Ibid., p 24.

[7]. Ibid, Chapter 7, "The Role of the Mass Strike in the Revolution", p 70.

[8]. We cannot develop here a chronicle of these events. For this, see International Review n° 120,  "100 years ago: The 1905 Revolution in Russia (I)".

[9]. In her book on  The Mass Strike, Rosa Luxemburg describes and analyses the dynamics of  the movement very clearly, its ups and downs, its moments of advance and sudden retreat.

[10]. Russia, with the global capitalist system at the pinnacle if its development and at the beginning of its decline, was trapped in a contradiction between the burden of feudal Tsarism on capitalist development and the dependency of the liberal bourgeoisie on the bureaucratic apparatus, not only for its own development, but also for maintaining  the repressive fortress required to halt the threat of the proletariat. Read Trotsky ‘s book referred to above.

[11]. " Then one evening when, as usual, there were several men with me - and Nossar was one of us [Nossar was the first president of the Petersburg Soviet in October 1905] - the idea arose among us to create a permanent workers' organisation: a sort of committee or rather a council to watch over events, to serve as a link between all the workers, to inform them on the situation and to be able, when appropriate, to rally the revolutionary forces of the working class around it."https://kropot.free.fr/Voline-revinco.I.htm#2.2.

[12]. Voline was an anarchist militant who remained faithful to the proletariat, denouncing the Second World War from an internationalist position.

[13]. It came into being on May 13, 1905 in the industrial city of Ivanovo-Vosnesensk in central Russia. For more details, read the article in International Review n° 122, ‘100 years ago: The 1905 Revolution in Russia (II)'.

[14]. Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets, p47.

[15]. Note: Fyodor Trepov, a soldier by training, was head of the Tsarist police in Warsaw between 1860 and 1861 and between 1863 and 1866. He carried out the same duties in Petersburg in the years 1874-1880. He was known for his brutal methods of repression,  especially the crushing of student rioters at the Technological Institute in January 1874 and the demonstrateurs outside Kazan Cathedral in 1876 (source Wikipedia).

[16]. Trotsky, 1905  "The strike in October, part I", Pelican Books, p100.

[17]. Ibid., p101

[18]. Andres Nin, Los Soviets en Rusia, P. 17, (translated from Spanish by us).

[19]. Trotsky 1905 "The strike of October, part II", p 104.

[20]. Ibid., part III, p106.

[21]. Ibid., "Creation of the Soviet of  Workers Deputies", p 123.

[22]. Ibid., p 123

[23]. Ibid., p 123.

[24]. Ibid., "The strike of October, part VI",  p 112.

[25]. Ibid., "Creation of the Soviet of  Workers' Deputies", p 125.

[26]. Ibid., p 127.

[27]. Trotsky, Results and Prospects, Chap. 7, "The Prerequisites of Socialism".

[28]. Trotsky 1905 "Creation of the Soviet of  Workers Deputies", p 128.

[29]. Ibid., p 121

[30]. Ibid.,. p 121

[31]. Ibid., p 122.

[32]. Look especially at the article in International Review n° 123 , "1905 and the role of the soviets" (part 2).

[33]. Above all, fighting on the barricades, the limits of which Engels was able to understand in his "Introduction" to Marx‘s Class Struggle in France. This "Introduction", written in 1895, became widely known because the criticisms by Engels of the fighting on the barricades was used by the opportunists of the Social Democrats to endorse the rejection of violence in favour of the exclusive use of parliamentary and union procedures.

Deepen: 

History of the workers' movement: 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

International Review no.141 - 2nd quarter 2010

Contents of IR 141

Capitalism’s bankruptcy is more and more obvious - The only future is the class struggle!

Never has the bankruptcy of the capitalist system been more obvious. And never before have such massive attacks on the working class been planned. What developments in the class struggle can we expect?

The crisis is so serious that the bourgeoisie can no longer hide it

The subprime crisis of 2008 led to an open world crisis, resulting in a fall in economic activity without precedent since 1929:

-         within a few months, a whole number of financial institutions fell like dominoes;

-         there was a proliferation of factory closures with hundreds of thousands of workers being laid off worldwide. 

The measures the bourgeoisie has used to prevent the collapse being even deeper and more brutal have been no different from the successive policies applied since the beginning of the 1970s, based on credit. That's the way a new step in world debt has been taken. But today the growth in world debt is such that the present phase in the economic crisis is often called the "debt crisis".

The bourgeoisie has prevented the worst, for the moment. That said, not only has there not been a recovery, but a number of countries present the risk of serious insolvency, with debt above 100% of GDP. Not only Greece but also Portugal, Spain (5th largest economy in the EU), Ireland and Italy. While Britain has not reached this level of debt, it shows signs that specialists regard as very worrying.

Faced with the gravity of the crisis of overproduction, the bourgeoisie has only one resort: the state. But this, in turn, reveals its fragility. The bourgeoisie can only delay their repayment dates while all the economic players have no option but this headlong flight which is becoming more and more difficult and risky: always going further into debt. In this way the historic bases of the crisis tend to become more obvious. The bourgeoisie can no longer camouflage the reality of the crisis, as in the past, making it clearer and clearer that there is no possible solution within its system.

In such a context, the insolvency of a country[1] incapable of paying the interest on its debt from now on can provoke a chain reaction leading to the insolvency of many economic players (banks, enterprises, other countries). Certainly the bourgeoisie still tries to confuse the issue by focusing attention on speculation and speculators. Speculation is real, but it permeates the whole system and not only some "profiteers" or "criminal bosses". Mad finance, meaning unlimited debt and speculation on everything goes with, and is encouraged by, capitalism as a whole, as a means to delay the demands of the recession. This is capitalism's way of life today. The problem also resides in capitalism itself, incapable of surviving without new and ever more massive injections of credit.

What remedies are the bourgeoisie concocting to face the present crisis of debt? The bourgeoisie is in the process of trying to push through a terrible austerity plan in Greece. Another is being prepared in Spain. In France, new attacks on pensions and retirement are being planned.

Can the austerity plans contribute to loosening the grip of the crisis?

Are the austerity plans a way to a new recovery? Will they permit a rise, however small, in the proletarian standard of living that has suffered such hard attacks in the last two years of the crisis?

Certainly not! The world bourgeoisie cannot allow a country like Greece to "run down" (despite all Angela Merkel's thundering), without running the risk of similar consequences for some of its creditors. But the only aid it can give is new credit at "acceptable" rates (however the loans at 6% imposed on Greece by the EU recently are already particularly high). In return guarantees of budgetary rigour have been demanded. The recipient must provide evidence that it will not be a bottomless pit for "international aid". So Greece faces the demand to "reduce its way of life" to slow the growth of its deficit and debt. On condition of harsh attacks on the living conditions of the working class, the world capitalist market will have new confidence in Greece, which will be able to attract foreign loans and investments.

It is no paradox that the confidence accorded to Greece will depend on its capacity to reduce the rate of growth of its debt, and not its ability to stop the growth itself, which would be impossible. This means that for the world's capital markets the solvency of a country hangs by an increase in its debt that is "not too large". In other words, a country that has been declared insolvent because of its debt can become solvent again even if its debt continues to rise. Besides, Greece has every interest in holding out the threat of its "insolvency" to try and lower the interest rates charged by its creditors who, if they are not paid at all, will register a complete loss on their mounting credits and find themselves rapidly "in the red". In today's over-indebted world, solvency is not based on objective reality but on confidence... which is not based on reality.

The capitalists are forced to adhere to this faith; or else they must cease to believe in the durability of their system of exploitation. But if the capitalists have to believe it, this is not the case for the workers! The austerity plans as a whole allow the bourgeoisie to reassure themselves, but do not resolve the contradictions of capitalism at all and cannot even curb the growth of debt.

The austerity plans demand a drastic reduction in the cost of the workforce, which will be applied in all countries since all, to varying degrees, are confronted with enormous problems of debt and deficit. Such a policy, for which there is no real alternative in the framework of capitalism, can prevent a panic, even precipitate a mini-recovery built on sand, but certainly not cure the financial system. Still less can it resolve the contradictions of capitalism which are pushing it ever further into debt on pain of being shaken by more and more brutal depressions. But it must also make the working class accept the austerity plans. For the bourgeoisie these are the highest stakes and it also has its eyes fixed on the proletarian response to these attacks.

In what spirit is the working class approaching this new wave of attacks?

From the beginning of the 2000s the bourgeoisie's calls to "tighten your belts now so that things will be better tomorrow" were no longer succeeding in creating illusions in the working class, even if there were differences between one country and another at this level. The recent aggravation of the crisis has not, up to now, given rise to a broadening of the mobilisations of the working class over the last two or three years. The tendency was even the reverse in 2009. The characteristics of some of the attacks, particularly massive redundancies, have made the working class response to these more difficult because:

-         the bosses and governments have hidden behind the peremptory argument: "It is nothing to do with us if unemployment rises and you are laid off: it's because of the crisis";

-         with the closure of an enterprise or factory, workers lose the strike weapon, which accentuates their feeling of impotence and their disarray.

However, even if these difficulties weigh still more heavily on the working class, the situation is not blocked. This is illustrated by a change in spirit in the working class and expressed by small movements in the class struggle.

Workers' exasperation and anger is fed by a profound indignation in the face of a more and more scandalous and intolerable situation: the very survival of capitalism has, among other things, exposed the reality of two "different worlds" within the same society more plainly than ever. In the first world we find the immense majority of the population who experience all the injustices and poverty and must pay for the second, the world of the ruling class, with an indecent and arrogant display of power and wealth.

More directly linked to the present crisis, the widespread idea that "the banks have left us broke and we can't get out of it" (when we see states themselves close to cessation of payments) is less and less able to mislead and divert the anger against the system. Here we see the limits to the bourgeoisie's speeches which make the banks responsible for the present crisis in order to try and spare its system as a whole. Mud from the "banking scandal" is sticking to the whole of capitalism.

Even if the working class internationally remains stunned and helpless in the face of the avalanche of blows from governments of left and right, it is not resigned to it; it has not failed to react over the last few months. In fact the fundamental characteristics of the majority of workers' mobilisations since 2003 have appeared more explicitly. In particular, workers' solidarity is tending to impose itself anew as a fundamental need of the struggle, after having been denatured and depreciated in the 1990s. At present it is expressed in the form of initiatives which are certainly very minoritarian, but hold promise for the future.

The struggle of the workers of Tekel in Turkey last December and January was a beacon for the class struggle. It united Turkish and Kurdish workers in the same struggle (when a nationalist conflict has divided these populations for years), just as it showed a ferocious will to extend the struggle to other sectors and to oppose union sabotage.

At the very heart of capitalism, while the union framework is more powerful and sophisticated than in the peripheral countries, which allows it to prevent the explosion of massive struggles, we are seeing a renewal of working class combativity. These characteristics were verified in Vigo in Spain in early February. There the unemployed went to employed workers in the naval dockyards and demonstrated together, rallying other workers in order to stop work in the whole naval sector. What was most remarkable in this action was that the initiative was taken by workers laid off from the naval dockyards, having been replaced by immigrant workers "who sleep in the parks and eat just a sandwich a day". Far from eliciting xenophobic reactions from the workers with whom they have been put into competition by the bourgeoisie, these workers expressed their solidarity against the inhuman conditions of exploitation reserved for immigrant workers. These manifestations of workers' solidarity had already also seen in Britain among the construction workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in January and June 2009 as well as in the naval dockyards in Sestao in Spain in April 2009.[2]

In these struggles the working class has, even if still in a limited and embryonic way, shown not only its militancy but also its capacity to counter the ruling class' ideological campaigns to divide it, expressing proletarian solidarity, uniting workers from different corporations, sectors, ethnicities or nationalities in the same struggle. Similarly, the revolt of young proletarians, organised in general assemblies and with the support of the population, in Greece in December 2008, struck terror into the ruling class, fearing the "contagion" of the Greek example for other European countries, especially among the young generation of students. Today it is no accident that the bourgeoisie has again turned its eyes to the proletarian reactions in Greece to the austerity plan imposed by the government and other European Union states. These reactions are a valuable test case for other states threatened by the bankruptcy of their own national economies. Besides, the almost simultaneous announcement of similar plans has also precipitated demonstrations of tens of thousands of proletarians in the streets of Spain and Portugal. So, despite the difficulties that still weigh on the class struggle, a change of spirit is nevertheless at work within the working class. Everywhere in the world workers' exasperation and anger are deepening and generalising.

Reactions to austerity plans and attacks

In Greece...

In Greece on 3rd March the government announced a new austerity plan, the third in three months, including a rise in consumer taxes, a 30% reduction in the 13th month of salary and a 60% reduction in the 14th, premiums affecting civil servants (a fall of between 12% and 30% of their salaries) as well as freezing public sector pensions and private sector pay. But this plan has been very badly received by the population, especially by workers and pensioners.

In November/December 2008 the country was shaken for over a month by a social explosion, mainly led by proletarian youth, following the assassination of a youth by the police. This year the austerity measures announced by the Socialist government are threatening to unleash an explosion not only among students and the unemployed but also among the main battalions of the working class.

A general strike movement on the 24th February 2010 against the austerity plan was widely followed and a demonstration of civil servants mobilised about 40,000. A large number of civil servants and pensioners also demonstrated in the centre of Athens on 3rd March.

The events which followed have shown still more clearly that the proletariat is mobilised: "Just hours after the announcement of the new measures, laid-off workers of Olympic Airways attacked riot police lines guarding the State General Accountancy and have occupied the building, in what they call a open-ended occupation. The action has led to the closing of Athens' main commercial street, Panepistimiou, for long hours."[3]

In the days before the general strike of 11th March a series of strikes and occupations took place: the workers laid off from Olympic Airways occupied the offices of the General State Accountancy, while employees of the electricity company occupied the employment agencies in the name of the "right of the future unemployed, which we are", according to them. The workers at the state publishing company occupied their place of work and refused to print the legal documents for the economic measures, pointing out that until the law is printed it is not valid... Inland revenue officials stopped work for 48 hours; driving school employees in the North of the country struck for 3 days; even the judges and other court officials stopped all activity for 4 hours a day. No rubbish bins were emptied for several days in Athens, Patras and Salonica, the dustmen having blocked the large rubbish dumps in these cities. In the town of Komitini workers at ENKLO textiles held protest marches and strikes: they occupied two banks.

But if wider sections of the working class in Greece have been mobilised than during the struggles in November-December 2008, the bourgeoisie's apparatus to contain those struggles has been better prepared and more effective in order to sabotage the workers' response.

In fact the bourgeoisie has taken centre stage to turn workers' anger and militancy towards political and ideological dead ends. These have emptied out all the potential for proletarian solidarity and for taking control of the struggle that had started to take shape in the struggle of young workers in 2008.

Patriotism and nationalism are widely used to divide the workers and isolate them from their class brothers in other countries: in Greece they used the fact that the German bourgeoisie was refusing to aid the Greek economy, and the PASOK[4] government didn't hesitate to exploit anti-German feelings that persist from the time of the Nazi occupation.

Control by the parties and unions has allowed them to divide workers one from another. So the Olympic Airways employees have not allowed anyone outside the company into the public building they were occupying and the union leaders made them leave it without consulting a mass meeting. When other workers wanted to go to the public Treasury, occupied by workers from the state publishers, they were curtly sent away on the pretext "that they do not belong to the ministry"!

The profound anger of workers in Greece is directed against PASOK and the union leaders who are allied to it. On 5th March the leader of the GSEE, the central private sector union, was abused and hit when he tried to speak in front of the crowd and had to be protected by riot police and hide in the Parliament building, with the crowd hooting ironically that he had found his proper place: in the nest of thieves, assassins and liars.

But the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and its official union, the PAME, pass themselves off as "radical" alternatives to the PASOK while they are conducting a campaign to blame the crisis on the bankers and on "the misdeeds of liberalism".

In November/December 2008 the movement was largely spontaneous and held open assemblies in the occupied schools and universities. The headquarters of the Communist Party (KKE), like the headquarters of the PAME union confederation, were occupied, a sign of the clear distrust of the union and Stalinist apparatus, which had denounced the young demonstrators as lumpenproletarians and spoiled children of the bourgeoisie.

But this time the Greek Communist Party is ostensibly at the head of the most radical strikes, demonstrations and occupations: "On Thursday morning, workers under the Communist Party union umbrella PAME occupied the Ministry of Finance on Syntagma square (...) as well as the county headquarters of the city of Trikala. Later, PAME also occupied 4 TV station in the city in Patras, and the state TV station of Salonica, forcing the news broadcasters to play a DVD against government measures".[5] Many strikes have also been called on the initiative of the Communist Party. On 3rd March it called a "general strike" and a demonstration starting from 4th and from 5th in different cities. PAME has stepped up its spectacular actions, sometimes occupying the Finance ministry, sometimes the locality of the stock exchange.

On 11 March, Greece was 90% paralysed over the whole country for 24 hours by the movement expressing the population's anger following a second call for a general strike in less than a month by the two main unions. More than 3 million people (from a total population of 11 million) took part. The 11 March demonstration in Athens was the largest in 15 years and showed the working class's determination to respond to the capitalist offensive.

...and elsewhere

In all regions in the world, in Algeria, Russia, among immigrant manual workers in the Emirates, super-exploited and deprived of all social protection, among British workers and among students reduced to a precarious existence in the former richest American state, California, the current situation shows an underlying tendency towards the recovery of the class struggle internationally.

The bourgeoisie is confronted with a situation in which, in addition to redundancies from enterprises in difficulties, states must carry out frontal attacks on the working class to make it pay for the debt. The direct responsibility of the state for the attacks in this instance is much more easily identifiable than in the case of redundancies in sectors where the state can present itself as the "protector" of employees, even if not a very effective one. The fact that the state can be clearly seen for what it is, the main defender of the interests of the capitalist class as a whole against the working class as a whole, is a factor which encourages the development of the class struggle, its unity and its politicisation.

In the current situation all the elements for the explosion of massive struggles are developing. But what will set these off is certainly the build up of exasperation, discontent and indignation. The bourgeoisie's application of the different austerity plans in different countries will provide the working class with so many occasions to gain experience of struggle and draw lessons.

Massive struggles, an important step in the development of the class struggle... but not the last

The collapse of Stalinism, and above all the bourgeoisie's ideological exploitation of it, based on the greatest lie of the century which identifies the Stalinist regimes with socialism, has left traces which are still at work in the working class today.

Faced with the bourgeoisie's "evidence" that "communism doesn't work; the proof is that it has been abandoned in favour of capitalism by the populations affected", workers can only turn away from any alternative society to capitalism.

The resulting situation is very different to the end of the 1960s from that point of view. At that time the massive scale of workers' combats, especially the May 1968 strike in France and the Italian "hot autumn" in 1969, showed that the working class could be a significant force in the life of society. The idea that it could one day overturn capitalism did not appear to be an unrealistic dream, as it does today.

The difficulty of embarking on massive struggles shown by the proletariat since the 1990s resulted in a loss of self-confidence, which has not been overcome by the renewal of class struggle since 2003.

Only the development of massive struggles will enable the proletariat to recover confidence in its own strength and put forward its own perspective again. So this is a fundamental step in which revolutionaries must encourage the working class's capacity to understand what is at stake - the historic dimension of its struggles, to recognise its enemies and to take its struggles into its own hands.

However important this future stage in the class struggle, it will not mean an end to the proletariat's hesitations in about setting out on the road to revolution.

Already in 1852 Marx brought out the difficult and tortuous course of proletarian revolution as opposed to bourgeois revolutions which "like those of the 18th century, storm swiftly from success to success".[6]

This difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as revolutionary classes results from the differences between the conditions of the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution.

Taking political power for the capitalist class was the end point of a whole process of economic transformation within feudal society. During this process the old feudal relations of production were progressively supplanted by capitalist relations of production. The bourgeoisie depended on the new economic relations to take political power.

The process of proletarian revolution is completely different. Communist relations of production, which are not market relations, cannot develop within capitalist society. Because it is the exploited class in capitalism, deprived by definition of property in the means of production, the working class does not have and cannot have any economic power in the conquest of political power. It relies on its consciousness and organisation in the struggle. In contrast to the revolutionary bourgeoisie, the first act of communist transformation of social relations must be conscious and deliberate: taking political power at the world level by the proletariat as a whole organised in workers' councils.

The enormity of this task is evidently one to make the working class hesitate, and doubt its own strength. But it is the only road for the survival of humanity: the abolition of capitalism, of exploitation, and the creation of a new society.

FW, March 31st 2010.

 


 

[1]. It is evident that the bankruptcy of a state does not at all have the same characteristics as that of an enterprise: if it becomes incapable of repaying its debts there is no question of a state "shutting up shop", laying off all its civil servants and dissolving its structures (police, army, education or administrative bodies) even if, in some countries (notably in Russia or certain African countries), the state employees can go unpaid for months due to the crisis.

[2]. See the following articles on our website, internationalism.org: on the strikes in Britain "Construction workers at the centre of class struggle"; on "Turkey: Solidarity with Tekel workers' resistance against government and unions!"; on Spain "Vigo: joint struggle of the unemployed and shipyard workers".

[3]. Blog on libcom.org.

[4]. PASOK - Panhellenic Socialist Movement

[5]. From libcom.org: https://libcom.org/article/mass-strikes-greece-response-new-measures

[6]. In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Geographical: 

Recent and ongoing: 

Decadence of capitalism (vi): The theory of capitalist decline and the struggle against revisionism

 

Engels discerns the approach of capitalism's historic crisis

According to a certain school of academic Marxologists, councilists and anarchists, marxist theory entered a period of sterility after Marx's death in 1883.  The social democratic parties and the Second International, in this view, were actually dominated by "Engelsism", an attempt by Marx's second fiddle and his camp-followers to turn Marx's method of investigation into a semi-mechanical system which falsely equates radical social criticism with the approach of the natural sciences. "Engelsism" is also attacked for being a regression to quasi-mystical Hegelian dogmas, particularly in its efforts to elaborate a "dialectics of nature". In this view, what is natural is not social, and what is social is not natural. If the dialectic exists, it can only be applied to the social sphere.

This break in continuity between Marx and Engels - which in its extreme form dismisses almost the whole of the Second International as a vehicle for integrating the proletarian movement into the needs of capital - is frequently used to reject any idea of continuity in the political history of the working class. From Marx, whose work few of our anti-Engelsists repudiate (indeed they frequently become experts on the minutiae of the value/price transformation problem or other partial aspects of Marx's critique of political economy), we are encouraged to leap over Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, and the Second and Third Internationals; and although parts of the communist left may, despite being the scions of this dubious parenthood, be grudgingly acknowledged to have hit upon a few insights, the real continuity of Marx's theory passes from Marx to....the scattering of brilliant individuals who have really understood him in the last few decades - none other, in fact, than the proponents of the "anti-Engelsist" thesis.

We can't respond to this whole ideology here. Like all myths, it is based on a certain element of truth which is then distorted and exaggerated beyond measure. During the period of the Second International, a period when the workers' movement was establishing itself as an organised force within capitalist society, there was a real tendency to schematise marxism and to turn it into a form of determinism, just as there was a real pressure on the workers' movement from the weight of reformist ideas; and even the best marxists, including Engels himself, were not immune from this.[1] But even if Engels did make some important errors during this period, to flatly dismiss Engels' work in the years after Marx's death as a negation and a perversion of Marx's real thought is an absurdity given the extremely close cooperation between the two men from the beginning to the end of their relationship. It was Engels who took on the immense task of editing and publishing Marx's Capital and it is ironic that so many of those who try to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels are perfectly happy to quote the Marx of volumes two and three of Capital, despite the fact that they only appeared in public via the allegedly uncomprehending mind of Engels.

One of the principal exponents of this "anti-Engelsist" line of thought is the Aufheben group in the UK, whose series "Decadence: Theory of decline or the decline of theory"[2] has been taken by some to have driven the last nail into the coffin of the notion of capitalist decadence, given the number of times the series is cited by those who are hostile to this notion. In their view, the decadence of capitalism is essentially an invention of the Second International: "The theory of capitalist decadence first comes to prominence in the Second International. The Erfurt Programme supported by Engels established the theory of the decline and breakdown of capitalism as central to the party's programme."[3] And they cite the following passages: 

"Private property in the means of production has changed... From a motive power of progress it has become a cause of social degradation and bankruptcy. Its downfall is certain. The only question to be answered is: shall the system of private ownership in the means of production be allowed to pull society with itself down into the abyss; or shall society shake off that burden and then, free and strong, resume the path of progress which the evolutionary path prescribes to it? [p. 87] The productive forces that have been generated in capitalist society have become irreconcilable with the very system of property on which it is built. The endeavour to uphold this system of property renders impossible all further social development, condemns society to stagnation and decay. [p. 88] The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalist production. The erection of a new social order for the existing one is no longer something merely desirable; it has become something inevitable. [p. 117] As things stand today capitalist civilisation cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism".

In the summary that begins the next article in the series (Aufheben n° 3), the argument that the concept of decadence was rooted in "Second International Marxism" is even more explicit:

"In Part I we looked at how this idea of the decline or decadence of capitalism has its roots in Second International Marxism and was maintained by the two claimants to the mantle of true continuers of the 'classical Marxist tradition' - Trotskyist Leninism and Left or Council communism".

Although the quotes Aufheben describes as being from the Erfurt Programme appear to come from Kautsky's comments on the programme (The Class Struggle, 1892) rather than the document itself, the preamble to the actual programme certainly contains a reference to the notion of capitalist decline and indeed asserts that this period has already opened up: "The gulf between the propertied and the propertyless is further widened by crises that are grounded in the nature of the capitalist mode of production, crises that are becoming more extensive and more devastating, that elevate this general uncertainty into the normal state of society and furnish proof that the powers of productivity have grown beyond society's control, that the private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their appropriate application and full development".  As a matter of fact, however, despite Aufheben's view that the Erfurt programme is so dependent on the theory of decadence, a cursory reading of the programme gives the impression that there is hardly any connection at all between the overall diagnosis cited above and the demands put forward in the programme, which are all essentially a series of minimum demands to be fought for inside capitalist society; and even Engels' many detailed points of criticism of these demands makes almost no reference to the historical context in which these demands are being raised.[4]  

That said, it is certainly true that in the work of Engels and other marxists in the last part of the 19th century we find increasing references to the notion of capitalism entering upon a crisis of old age, a period of decline.

But while for Aufheben this was a departure from Marx - who, they maintain merely maintained that capitalism was a "transitory" system and did not put forward any idea of an objective process of decline or breakdown as a foundation for the revolutionary struggle against the system - we have tried to show in previous articles in this series that the conception of capitalist decadence (as of the decadence of previous class societies) was entirely in line with Marx's own thinking.

Again, it's certainly the case that Marx's writings on political economy were produced during the period when capitalism was still in its triumphant ascendancy. Its periodic crises were crises of youth which served to impel the imperious march of this dynamic mode of production across the surface of the globe. But Marx had also been able to see these convulsions as harbingers of the system's eventual demise, and had already begun to see signs of capital completing its historic mission by opening up the more remote areas of the planet, while in "old Europe", in the wake of the events of the Paris Commune, he affirmed that the phase of heroic national wars had come to an end. 

Furthermore, during the period after Marx's death, the approaching signs of a crisis of historical proportions, and not just a repetition of the old cyclical crises, were becoming increasingly clear. 

Thus, for example, Engels pondered the significance of the apparent end of the "ten year cycle" of crises and the onset of what he termed a chronic depression affecting the original capitalist nation, Great Britain. And while new powerful capitalist nations were thrusting their way onto the world market, above all Germany and the USA, Engels saw that this would inevitably result in a much more profound crisis of overproduction:

"America will smash up England's industrial monopoly - whatever there is left of it - but America cannot herself succeed to that monopoly. And unless one country has the monopoly of the markets of the world, at least in the decisive branches of trade, the conditions - relatively favourable - which existed here in England from 1848 to 1870 cannot anywhere be reproduced, and even in America the condition of the working class must gradually sink lower and lower. For if there are three countries (say England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the Weltmarkt, there is no chance but chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required".[5] 

Simultaneously, Engels saw capitalism's tendency to engineer its own ruin in the accelerating conquest of the non-capitalist hinterland that surrounded the capitalist metropoles: 

"For it is one of the necessary corollaries of grande industrie that it destroys its own home market by the very process by which it creates it. It creates it by destroying the basis of the domestic industry of the peasantry. But without domestic industry the peasantry cannot live. They are ruined as peasants; their purchasing power is reduced to a minimum; and until they, as proletarians, have settled down into new conditions of existence, they will furnish a very poor market for the newly-arisen factories.

"Capitalist production being a transitory economical phase, is full of internal contradictions which develop and become evident in proportion as it develops. This tendency to destroy its own market at the same time it creates it, is one of them. Another one is the insoluble situation to which it leads, and which is developed sooner in a country without a foreign market, like Russia, than in countries which are more or less capable of competing on the open world market. This situation without an apparent issue finds its issue, for the latter countries, in commercial revulsions, in the forcible opening of new markets. But even then the cul-de-sac stares one in the face. Look at England. The last new market which could bring on a temporary revival of prosperity by its being thrown open to English commerce is China. Therefore English capital insists upon constructing Chinese railways. But Chinese railways mean the destruction of the whole basis of Chinese small agriculture and domestic industry, and as there will not even be the counterpoise of a Chinese grande industrie, hundreds of millions of people will be placed in the impossibility of living. The consequence will be a wholesale emigration such as the world has not yet seen, a flooding of America, Asia and Europe by the hated Chinaman, a competition for work with the American, Australian and European workman on the basis of the Chinese standard of life, the lowest of all--and if the system of production has not been changed in Europe before that time, it will have to be changed then.

"Capitalistic production works its own ruin, and you may be sure it will do so in Russia too...."[6]

The growth of militarism and imperialism, aimed above all at completing the conquest of the non-capitalist areas of the planet, also enabled him to see with remarkable lucidity the danger of these developments rebounding back to the centre of the system - to Europe, threatening to engulf civilisation in barbarism while at the same time accelerating the maturation of the revolution.

"No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt-of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any storm of locusts has ever done. The devastation of the Thirty Years War compressed into three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent: famine, pestilence, general descent into barbarism, both of the armies and the mass of the people; hopeless confusion of our artificial system of trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy, collapse of the old states and their traditional elite wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the pavement and there will be nobody to pick them up; absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class".[7]

As it happens, however, Engels did not see such a war as inevitably bringing forth socialism: he had a well-founded fear that the general exhaustion would affect the proletariat as well and render it incapable of accomplishing its revolution (hence, we could add, a certain attraction for somewhat utopian schemes that might delay or put off the onset of war, such as the replacement of standing armies with a popular militia). However, Engels had grounds to hope that the revolution would break out prior to a pan-European war. A letter to Bebel (24-26 October, 1891) encapsulates this "optimistic" view:

"...According to the reports, you said that I had prophesied the collapse of bourgeois society in 1898. There is a slight error there somewhere. All I said was that we might possibly come to power by 1898. If this does not happen, the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed"

In this passage you have both the illusions of the movement of the time and its underlying theoretical strength. The steady gains of the social democratic party, above all on the electoral front and in Germany, gave rise to exaggerated hopes that there could be a kind of inexorable progress towards the revolution (and even the revolution itself could be seen in semi-parliamentary terms, despite oft-repeated warnings against the parliamentary cretinism that was a central aspect of the rapidly burgeoning ideology of reformism). At the same time, the consequences of the failure of the proletariat to take power are laid out clearly: capitalism surviving for several decades as a "rotten old casing" - although Engels, like most revolutionaries of his day, would probably not have thought that it could survive its crisis of decline for a century or more. But the theoretical underpinning for anticipating such a state of affairs is clearly laid out in this passage.   

Luxemburg leads the battle against revisionism

And yet, precisely because the great imperialist expansion of the last decades of the 19th century made it possible for capitalism to experience dramatic rates of growth, this phase is remembered above all as one of unprecedented prosperity and progress, of steadily improving living standards for the working class, thanks not only to the favourable objective conditions but also to the growing influence of the workers' movement organised in trade unions and social democratic parties. This was especially the case in Germany, and it was here that the workers' movement was faced with a major challenge: the rise of revisionism.

Spearheaded by the writings of Eduard Bernstein at the end of the 1890s, the revisionists argued that social democracy should recognise that the evolution of capitalism had invalidated some fundamental elements in Marx's analysis - above all the prediction of ever-growing crises and consequent impoverishment of the proletariat. Capitalism had shown that by using the mechanism of credit and organising in huge trusts and cartels it could overcome its tendency towards anarchy and crisis and, under the impulsion of a well-organised workers' movement, could make growing concessions to the working class. The "ultimate" goal of revolution enshrined in the programme of the social democratic party had therefore become redundant; and the party should acknowledge itself for what it really was: a "democratic-socialist party of reform", advancing gradually and peacefully towards a transformation of capitalism into socialism.

A number of figures on the left wing of the social democracy responded to these arguments. In Russia Lenin polemicised against the Economists who wanted to reduce the workers' movement to the fight for "bread and butter" issues; in Holland Gorter and Pannekoek led the polemic against the mounting influence of reformism in the trade union and parliamentary arenas. In the USA Louis Boudin wrote an important book, The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (1907), in answer to the revisionist arguments - we shall return to this later on. But it was above all Rosa Luxemburg in Germany who is associated with the struggle against revisionism, at the core of which was the reaffirmation of the marxist notion of the decline and catastrophic collapse of capitalism.

Reading Luxemburg's polemic with Bernstein, Social Reform or Revolution (1900), it is striking how much the arguments that the latter put forward have been repeated over and over again, almost every time that capitalism gave the appearance - however superficial - of overcoming its crises.  

"According to Bernstein, a general decline of capitalism seems to be increasingly improbable because, on the one hand, capitalism shows a greater capacity of adaptation, and, on the other hand, capitalist production becomes more and more varied.

"The capacity of capitalism to adapt itself, says Bernstein, is manifested first in the disappearance of general crises, resulting from the development of the credit system, employers' organisations, wider means of communication and informational services. It shows itself secondly, in the tenacity of the middle classes, which hails from the growing differentiation of the branches of production and the elevation of vast layers of the proletariat to the level of the middle class. It is furthermore proved, argues Bernstein, by the amelioration of the economic and political situation of the proletariat as a result of its trade union activity."[8]

How often have we been told, not only by the official ideologists of the bourgeoisie, but also by those who claim to have a far more radical ideology in their pockets, that crises are a thing of the past because capitalism today is organised on a national or even international scale, because it can have infinite recourse to credit and other financial manipulations; how many times have we been told that the working class has ceased to be a revolutionary force because it is no longer facing the absolute misery described in Engels' book about the conditions of the working class in Manchester in 1844, or because it is becoming more and more indistinguishable from the middle classes? Certainly these were the grand sociological refrains of the 1950s and 60s, given a radical gloss by the likes of Marcuse and Castoridadis; and they were dragged out of the cupboard again in the 1990s after the collapse of the eastern bloc and with the credit-fuelled boom that has only recently been exposed as a hollow sham.

Against these arguments, Luxemburg insisted that far from overcoming crises, the "organisation" of capital through cartels and credit was a response to the contradictions of the system and tended to raise these contradictions to a higher and more devastating level.

Credit was seen by Luxemburg essentially as a means for facilitating the extension of the market while concentrating capital in fewer and fewer hands. At this point in history, this was certainly the case - there was a real possibility for capitalism to expand outwards and credit greatly accelerated this expansion. But at the same time Luxemburg was able to grasp the destructive side of credit as this expansion of the market was also the premise for future conflict with the mass of productive forces set in motion:

"We see that credit, instead of being an instrument for the suppression or the attenuation of crises, is on the contrary a particularly mighty instrument for the formation of crises. It cannot be anything else. Credit eliminates the remaining rigidity of capitalist relationships. It introduces everywhere the greatest elasticity possible. It renders all capitalist forces extensible, relative and mutually sensitive to the highest degree. Doing this, it facilitates and aggravates crises, which are nothing more or less than the periodic collisions of the contradictory forces of capitalist economy."[9]

Credit was not yet what it has largely become today - not so much a means of accelerating the expansion of a real market, but an artificial market in itself, upon which capitalism has become increasingly dependent. But its function as a medicine that aggravates the disease has thereby become even more evident in this epoch, and above all since the outbreak of the so-called "credit crunch" of 2008.

By the same token, the tendency of capitalism and the capitalists to organise themselves on a national and even international scale was seen by Luxemburg not as a solution to the antagonisms of the system but as a potent force for raising them onto a higher and more destructive level:

"capitalist combinations aggravate the contradiction existing between the international character of capitalist world economy and the national character of the State - insofar as they are always accompanied by a general tariff war, which sharpens the differences among the capitalist States. We must add to this the decidedly revolutionary influence exercised by cartels on the concentration of production, technical progress, etc.

"In other words, when evaluated from the angle of their final effect on capitalist economy, cartels and trusts fail as ‘means of adaptation'. They fail to attenuate the contradictions of capitalism. On the contrary, they appear to be an instrument of greater anarchy. They encourage the further development of the internal contradictions of capitalism. They accelerate the coming of a general decline of capitalism".[10]

These predictions - above all as the organisation of capital passed from the stage of cartels to the national "state capitalist trusts" which confronted each other for control of the world market in 1914 - were to be profoundly vindicated by the entire history of the 20th century.

Luxemburg also responded to Bernstein's arguments that the proletariat did not need to make a revolution because it was enjoying growing living standards as a result of its effective organisation in trade unions and through the activities of its representatives in parliament. She warned that trade union activity had inherent limitations, describing it as a "labour of Sisyphus", necessary, but constantly frustrated in its efforts to increase the worker's share in the products of his labour because of the inevitable increase in the rate of exploitation brought about by the development of productivity. Later developments in capitalism would expose even more thoroughly the historical limits of trade unionism, but even while activity in the trade unions (as well as the parallel fields of action in parliament and cooperatives) still retained a validity for the working class, the revisionists were already falsifying reality by arguing that such activities could secure for the working class a constant and indefinite improvement in its living conditions.

And while Bernstein saw a tendency towards the attenuation of class relations through the proliferation of small-scale enterprises and thus the growth of the middle class, Luxemburg affirmed the existence of the tendency that was certainly to become predominant in the century that followed: the evolution of capitalism towards increasingly gigantic forms of concentration and centralisation, both at the level of the "private" enterprise and the state and imperialist alliance.   Others on the revolutionary left, such as Boudin, responded to the claim that the proletariat itself was becoming middle class by arguing that many of the "white collar" and technical strata which were supposedly swallowing up the working class were in reality themselves a product of the process of proletarianisation - again, a tendency that has become increasingly marked in the last few decades. Boudin's words from 1907 thus have a very modern ring to them, as do the specious arguments they are directed against:

"A very great proportion of what is termed new middle class, and appears as such in the income statistics, is really a part of the regular proletariat, and the new middle class, whatever it may be, is a good deal smaller than might be supposed from the tables of incomes. This confusion is due, on the one hand, to the old and firmly-rooted prejudice, according to which Marx is supposed to ascribe value creating properties only to manual labour, and on the other to the severance of the function of superintendence from the possession of property - effected by the corporations as noted before. Owing to these circumstances large sections of the proletariat are counted as belonging to the middle class, that is, the lower strata of the capitalist class. This is the case with almost all those numerous and growing occupations in which the remuneration is termed ‘salary' instead of ‘wages'. All these salaried persons, no matter what their salaries may be, who make up perhaps the bulk, and certainly a great portion, of the ‘new' middle class, are in reality just as much a part of the proletariat as the merest day-labourer."[11]

Heading towards the debacle of bourgeois civilisation

Today's open economic crisis is taking place in a very advanced stage of capitalism's decay. Luxemburg was responding to Bernstein in a period which she characterised, again with remarkable lucidity, as being not yet that of the period of decline, but as one in which the approach of this period was becoming increasingly evident.  This passage occurs in Luxemburg's response to Bernstein's empirical (and empiricist) question: why have we not seen any expressions of the old decennial cycle since the early 1870s? Luxemburg's answer is to insist that this cycle was in fact the product of a youthful phase of capitalism; the world market was at that point in a "transitional period" between its period of maximum growth and the onset of an epoch of decline:

"The world market is still developing. Germany and Austria only entered the phase of actual large industrial production in the 1870s; Russia only in the 1880s; France is still in large part in the stage of smallscale production; the Balkan states, for the most part, have still not stripped themselves of the chains of a natural economy; and only in the 1880s did America, Australia and Africa enter into a large and regular exchange of goods with Europe. Thus, on the one hand, we now have behind us the sudden and large opening up of new areas of the capitalist economy, as occurred periodically until the 1870s; and we have behind us, so to speak, previous youthful crises which followed these periodic developments. On the other hand, we still have not progressed to that degree of development and exhaustion of the world market which would produce the fatal, periodic collision of the forces of production with the limits of the market, which is the actual capitalist crisis of old age. We are in a phase in which the crises are no longer the accompaniment of the growth of capitalism, and not yet that of its decline."[12]

Interestingly, however, in the second edition of the pamphlet, published in 1908, Luxemburg omitted this passage and an ensuing paragraph and mentioned the crisis of 1907-8, centred precisely in the most powerful industrial nations: evidently, for Luxemburg, the "transitional period" was already drawing to a close.

Furthermore, she also hints that the previous expectation of the new period being opened by a "great commercial crisis" might prove to have been mistaken - already in Social Reform or Revolution she points to the growth of militarism, a development that was to preoccupy her more and more. It is surely the possibility that the opening of the new period might be marked by war rather than open economic crisis that lies behind the following observation:

"Socialist theory up to now declared that the point of departure for a transformation to socialism would be a general and catastrophic crisis. We must distinguish in this outlook two things: the fundamental idea and its exterior form.

"The fundamental idea consists of the affirmation that capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible. There were good reasons for conceiving that juncture in the form of a catastrophic general commercial crisis. But that is of secondary importance when the fundamental idea is considered".[13]

But whatever form the dawning of the "crisis of senility" might take, Luxemburg insisted that without this vision of the catastrophic downfall of capitalism, socialism becomes a mere utopia: 

"According to scientific socialism, the historic necessity of the socialist revolution manifests itself above all in the growing anarchy of capitalism, which drives the system into an impasse. But if one admits with Bernstein that capitalist development does not move in the direction of its own ruin, then socialism ceases to be objectively necessary...

"Revisionist theory thus places itself in a dilemma. Either the socialist transformation is, as was admitted up to now, the consequence of the internal contradictions of capitalism, and with the growth of capitalism will develop its inner contradictions, resulting inevitably, at some point, in its collapse, (in that case the ‘means of adaptation' are ineffective and the theory of collapse is correct); or the ‘means of adaptation' will really stop the collapse of the capitalist system and thereby enable capitalism to maintain itself by suppressing its own contradictions. In that case socialism ceases to be an historic necessity. It then becomes anything you want to call it, but it is no longer the result of the material development of society.

"The dilemma leads to another. Either revisionism is correct in its position on the course of capitalist development, and therefore the socialist transformation of society is only a utopia, or socialism is not a utopia, and the theory of ‘means of adaptation' is false. There is the question in a nutshell".[14]

In this passage Luxemburg draws out with stark clarity the intimate relationship between the revisionist outlook and the rejection of Marx's theory of capitalism's decline - and conversely, the necessity for such a theory as the foundation-stone of a coherent conception of revolution. 

In the next article in this series we will look at how Luxemburg and others sought to locate the origins of the approaching crisis in the underlying process of capitalist accumulation.

Gerrard, Winter 2009.

 

 


[1]. See for example the article "1895-1905: parliamentary illusions hide the perspective of revolution" (International Review n°88), the concluding chapter of our book Communism is not a nice idea but a material necessity.

[2]. Aufheben n°s 2 and 3: https://libcom.org/aufheben

[3]. Aufheben n° 2.

[4]. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm

[5]. Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. February 3 1886.

[6]. Letter to Nikolai Danielson, Sept 22 1892.

[7]. 15 December 1887, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol. 26, p451.

[8]. Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, Chapter 1, "The opportunist method".

[9]. Ibid. Chapter 2, "The adaptation of capitalism".

[10].  Ibid.

[11]. The Theoretical System of Karl Marx, 1907, p 207.

[12]. Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, Chapter two.

[13]. Ibid, Chapter 1.

[14]. Ibid.

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ICC internal debate on economics (Part 5): Chronic overproduction - An unavoidable fetter on capitalist accumulation

World debt has reached astronomical proportions, no longer making it possible to go on "re-launching" the economy through a new spiral of debt without threatening the financial credibility of states and the value of their currencies. Faced with this situation, revolutionaries have a responsibility to make an in-depth analysis of the ways in which capitalism has up till now kept its system artificially alive by "cheating" its own laws. This is the only method that can result in a pertinent evaluation of the impasse which the world bourgeoisie now faces.

Studying the period known as the "Thirty Glorious Years", so lauded and so regretted by the bourgeoisie, is no exception to this and revolutionaries obviously need to refute the interpretations offered by the defenders of capitalism, in particular when they want to convince us that capitalism can be reformed.[1] while at the same time engaging in a fraternal confrontation with the different points of view that exist on this subject within the proletarian camp. This is the aim of the debate to which our organisation has opened the columns of the International Review for two years now.[2]

The view developed in our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism, according to which the destruction that took place during the Second World War, by creating a reconstruction market, were the source of the boom of the 1950s and 1960s, has been subjected to a critique in the ICC, particularly from the position of the thesis we defend, referred to as "extra-capitalist markets and debt". As its name indicates, this thesis considers that it was selling to extra-capitalist markets and selling on credit that was the motor for capitalist accumulation during the 1950s and 60s, and not Keynesian measures, as defended in the other thesis, referred to as the Keynesian-Fordist thesis.[3] In International Review n° 138 there was a contribution signed by Salome and Ferdinand, defending the latter point of view and which, by putting forward a number of arguments that have not yet been publicly discussed, has reanimated the debate. While responding to the arguments of these two comrades, this article has the following objectives: to recall the foundations of the thesis of extra-capitalist markets and debt; to present some statistical elements which, in our opinion, illustrate its validity and to examine its implications for the ICC's global framework of analysis of the period of capitalist decadence.[4] 

The main theoretical arguments

The analysis defended in The Decadence of Capitalism sees a certain economic rationality in war (war as having positive economic consequences). In this sense, it is in contradiction with older texts of our organisation which argue that "what characterises all these wars, like the two world wars, is that unlike those of the previous century, at no time have they permitted any progress in the development of the productive forces, having had no other result than massive destructions which have bled dry the countries in which they have taken place (not to mention the horrible massacres they have provoked)".[5]

In our opinion the mistake in our pamphlet is the result of a hasty and erroneous application of the following passage from the Communist Manifesto: "And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones". In fact, these lines do not attribute the destruction of the means of production with the virtue of opening a new solvent market capable of getting the economic machine back in motion. In conformity with all the economic writings of Marx, it's necessary to interpret the effects of the destruction of capital (or rather the devaluing of capital) as helping to disgorge the existing market and counter the tendency towards the falling rate of profit.[6]

The thesis referred to as Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism offers an interpretation of the years of "prosperity" in the 1950s and 1960 different both from the one put forward in The Decadence of Capitalism and the extra-capitalist markets and debt thesis. "The guaranteed growth in profits, state spending and the rise in real wages, were able to guarantee the final demand so vital if capital were to continue its accumulation."[7] Two arguments have been put forward in response to this idea:

Increasing wages above what is necessary for the reproduction of labour power constitutes, from the capitalist point of view, a pure and simple waste of surplus value which can in no way contribute to the process of accumulation. Furthermore, while it's true that increasing workers' consumption (through raising wages) and augmenting state spending create an outlet for a growth in production, the overall consequence of this is a sterilisation of wealth which cannot usefully serve the valorisation of capital.[8]

Among the sales made by capitalism, the part which can be devoted to the accumulation of capital, and which thus participates in its real enrichment, correspond to sales realised through trade with extra-capitalist markets (internal or external). This is effectively the only way of permitting capitalism to avoid finding itself in a situation where "capitalists are exchanging among themselves and consuming their own production", which, as Marx said "does not at all permit the valorisation of capital".[9]

In their article in International Review n° 138, comrades Salome and Ferdinand come back to this subject. Here they make a precision, a perfectly appropriate one in our view, regarding what they see as the framework of this debate: "One might reply that such an increase in the size of the market is not enough to realise the whole of the surplus value necessary for accumulation. This is true in general and in the long term. Those of us who defend the ‘Keynesian-Fordist' thesis do not think that we have discovered a solution to capitalism's inherent contradictions, which could be endlessly repeated".

They then illustrate via a schema (based on those used by Marx in the second volume of Capital to present the problem of enlarged reproduction) how accumulation can continue despite the fact that a part of the surplus value is deliberately returned to the workers in the form of wage increases. From their point of view, the same underlying logic explains why an extra-capitalist market is not indispensible to the development of capitalism: "if the conditions are such as those assumed in the schemas, and if we accept the consequences (conditions and consequences which can be analysed separately), then a government which controls the entire economy can theoretically organise it in such a way that accumulation functions according to the schema"

For the comrades, the balance sheet of this redistribution of surplus value, even if it slows accumulation down, is nevertheless positive, since it makes it possible to enlarge the internal market: "If this profit is high enough, then the capitalists can increase wages without losing all the increase in extracted surplus value...The only ‘damaging' effect of this ‘waste of surplus value' is that the increase in capital's organic composition is less frenetic than it would otherwise have been".

We agree with the observation the comrades make regarding the effects of the "waste of surplus value". But on this subject they also say: "we cannot assert that this ‘waste of surplus value' plays no part in the process of accumulation. On the contrary this distribution of profit obtained through the increase in productivity plays a complete part in accumulation". It is clear, as the comrades themselves recognise, that the waste in question does not participate in the process of accumulation through the injection of capital into the process of production. Indeed it diverts capital which could have been accumulated away from the capitalist goal of accumulation. There is no doubt a momentary usefulness in this for the bourgeoisie, since it allows it to artificially maintain, or even increase, a certain level of economic activity. It thus postpones the problem of the lack of sufficient markets for capitalist production. This is the function of Keynesian measures; but, once again, this does not participate in the process of accumulation. Rather it participates in the process of production in the conditions of the decadence of capitalism, when this system, more and more unable to function "normally", has to multiply unproductive expenses in order to keep economic activity going. This waste is added on to the already enormous amount of waste made up of military spending or the cost of keeping society under control. Motivated by the necessity to create an artificial internal market, it is an expense equally as irrational and unproductive as the last two.

While Keynesian measures did allow for a very important growth in GNP in the main industrial countries during the 50s and 60s, thus giving the illusion of a lasting return to the prosperity of the ascendant phase of capitalism, the wealth really created during this period grew at a rhythm that was necessarily much more modest since a significant part of the growth of GNP was made up of unproductive expenses.[10]

To finish this part, we will examine another implication of the comrades' reasoning, which holds that "at this level there is no necessity for extra-capitalist markets". Contrary to what the comrades announce, we have not found here the least new argument putting into question the necessity for a buyer outside capitalist relations of production. The schema that they put forward of is that of a "government which controls the entire economy (and so) can theoretically organise it" in such a way as to allow the enlargement of production (through the increase in the means of production and of the means of consumption), without having recourse to an external buyer and by paying the workers more than is necessary for the social cost of reproducing their labour power. Very good, but this does not represent enlarged accumulation as capitalism practises it. More precisely, enlarged accumulation could not be practised in this way under capitalism whatever the level of state control over society, and this is true whether or not the workers receive extra wages.

The explanation given by Rosa Luxemburg for why this is impossible, in her description of the infinite merry-go-round implied in the enlarged reproduction schemas (elaborated by Marx in Volume Two of Capital), refers to the concrete conditions of capitalist production. "According to Mark's diagram, Department I has the initiative: the process starts with the production of producer goods. And who requires these additional means of production? The diagram answers that Department II needs them in order to produce means of consumption in increased quantities. Well then, who requires these additional consumer goods? Department I, of course - replies the diagram - because it now employs a greater number of workers. We are plainly running in circles. From the capitalist point of view it is absurd to produce more consumer goods merely in order to maintain more workers, and to, turn out more means of production merely to keep this surplus of workers occupied."[11]

At this stage in our reflection it would be opportune to examine a remark made by the comrades: "If there were no credit, and if it were necessary to realise the whole of each year's production in money form then yes, an outside purchaser would be necessary for capitalist production. But this is not the case".

We agree with the comrades that it is not necessary for an external buyer to intervene in each cycle of production, as long as credit exists. This said, it doesn't eliminate the problem but simply extends it in time, ensuring that it is posed less often but at each step in a more significant way.[12] Once an external buyer is present, for example after 10 cycles of accumulation involving the cooperation of sectors one and two, and he buys the means of production or consumption needed to reimburse the debts contracted during those ten cycle of accumulation, then all goes well for capitalism. But if in the final instance there is no external buyer, the debts accumulated can never be reimbursed, or only at the price of new loans. Debt then swells inevitably and immeasurably until the outbreak of a new crisis which merely has the effect of increasing the spiral of debt. It is exactly this process that we have been seeing with our own eyes, in an increasingly serious manner, since the end of the 1960s.

Redistributing part of the extracted surplus value in the form of wage increases only, in the end, increases the cost of labour power. But this in no way eliminates the problem of the endless merry-go-round pointed out by Rosa Luxemburg. In a world made up only of capitalists and workers, there is no answer to the question which Marx kept posing in Volume Two of Capital "but what is the source of the money needed to pay for the increase both in means of production and means of consumption?" In another passage in The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg takes up this problem and poses it in a very simple way:   "Part of the surplus value is consumed by the capitalist class itself in form of consumer goods, the money exchanged for these being retained in the capitalists' pockets. But who can buy the products incorporating the other, the capitalised part of the surplus value? Partly the capitalists themselves - the diagram answers - who need new means of production for the purpose of expanding production, and partly the new workers who will be needed to work these new means of production. But that implies a previous capitalist incentive to enlarge production; if new workers are set to work with new means of production, there must have been a new demand for the products which are to be turned out... Where does the money for realising the surplus value come from if there is accumulation, i.e. not consumption but capitalisation of part of the surplus value?"[13] In fact, Marx himself provided a response to this question by pointing to "foreign markets".[14]

According to Luxemburg, bringing in a buyer who is outside capitalist relations of production resolves the problem of the possibility of accumulation. This also resolves the other contradiction in Marx's schemas that results from the difference in rhythm in the evolution of the organic composition of capital in the two sections (means of production and means of consumption).[15] In their text the two comrades come back to this contradiction noted by Rosa Luxemburg: "this distribution of profit obtained through the increase in productivity plays a complete part in accumulation. Not only that, it attenuates the problem identified by Luxemburg in Chapter 25 of The Accumulation of Capital, where she insists that with a tendency towards an ever-increasing organic composition of capital, the exchange between the two main sectors of capitalist production (production of the means of production on the one hand, and of the means of consumption on the other) becomes impossible in the long term". In this regard the comrades make the following comment: "Sternberg considers this point of made by Luxemburg is the most important ‘of all those that have been carefully avoided by those who criticise Luxemburg'. (Sternberg, El imperialismo)." Here again we don't share the position of the comrades, nor that of Sternberg, which doesn't really correspond to the way Rosa Luxemburg posed the problem.

For Luxemburg, this "contradiction" is resolved in society by placing "ever increasing portions of the surplus value earmarked for accumulation in Department I rather than in Department II. Both departments being only branches of the same social production - supplementary enterprises, if you like, of the "aggregate capitalist" - such a progressive transfer, for technical reasons, from one department to the other of a part of the accumulated surplus value would be wholly feasible, especially as it corresponds to the actual practice of capital. Yet this assumption is possible only so long as we envisage the surplus value earmarked for capitalisation purely in terms of value."[16] This presupposes the existence of "external buyers" regularly intervening in the successive cycles of accumulation.

In fact, while such a "contradiction" contains the risk of making exchange between the two sectors of production impossible, it is essentially in the abstract world of the schemas of enlarged reproduction, as soon as an "external buyer" is taken out of the equation:

"The adjustments we have tried out on Marx's diagram are merely meant to illustrate that technical progress, as he himself admits, must be accompanied by a relative growth of constant as against variable capital. Hence the necessity for a continuous revision of the ratio in which capitalised surplus value should be allotted to c and v respectively. In Marx's diagram, however, the capitalists are in no position to make these allocations at will, since the material form of their surplus value predetermines the forms of capitalisation. Since, according to Marx's assumption, all expansion of production proceeds exclusively by means of its own, capitalistically produced means of production."[17]

In fact we think that the comrades have never been convinced by Rosa Luxemburg's demonstration of the necessity of an outside buyer to permit capital to accumulate (or, if not, a resort to credit which is however non-reimbursable). On the other hand, we have not identified the way in which the objections they put forward, based on the arguments of Sternberg (who we also have good reasons to think did not really assimilate the essentials of Luxemburg's theory of accumulation[18]) actually put into the question the cardinal positions of this theory.

As we have already underlined in previous contributions, the fact that extra wages given to the workers do not serve to augment either constant capital or variable capital is already enough to conclude that, from the standpoint of capitalist rationality, these expenses are a total waste. From the strictly economic point of view, the same effects would be produced by increasing the personal expenditure of the capitalists. But to arrive at this conclusion it is not necessary to look to Rosa Luxemburg.[19] This said, if we have judged it necessary to reply to the comrades' objections to the theory of accumulation defended by Rosa Luxemburg, it is because we consider that the debate on this question helps to provide us with a more solid basis for understanding not only the phenomenon of the Thirty Glorious Years but also the problem of overproduction, which is hard to deny lies at the heart of the current difficulties of capitalism.

The part played by extra-capitalist markets and debt in accumulation during the 1950s and 60s

Two factors are at the origin of the increase in GNP during this period:

  • an augmentation of society's real wealth through the process of capital accumulation;
  • a whole series of unproductive expenditure, which grew as a consequence of the development of state capitalism and in particular the Keynesian measures that were put in place.

In this section we are interested in the way that accumulation took place. It was the opening of the accelerated exploitation of extra-capitalist markets which was at the origin of the phase of very powerful expansion of capitalism during the second half of the 19th century, a phase brought to a halt by the First World War. The period of capitalist decadence was globally characterised by the relative insufficiency of these markets in relation to the ever-growing need for outlets for commodities. But should we conclude from this that extra-capitalist markets no longer played anything but a marginal role in accumulation in the period of capitalism's life opened by the war of 1914? If that was the case, then these markets could not explain, even partially, the accumulation carried out in the 1950s and 60s. This is the reply given by the comrades in their contribution: "For us, the mystery of the Reconstruction boom cannot be explained by the remaining extra-capitalist markets, since these have been insufficient for the requirements of expanded capital accumulation ever since World War I". For our part, we think on the contrary that these extra-capitalist markets played an important role in accumulation, especially at the beginning of the 1950s, progressively decreasing until the end of the 1960s. The more insufficient they became, the more debt took over the role of external buyer for the capitalists; but obviously this was debt of a "new quality", having no prospect of being reduced. In fact, we have to look back to this period to find the origin of the phenomenon of the explosion of world debt that we are seeing today, even if the value contribution of debt in the 1950s and 1960s, compared to today's debts, is rather derisory.

Extra-capitalist markets

Statistically, it was in 1953 that we saw the high point  in the portion of exports from the developed countries towards the colonial countries, evaluated as a percentage of world exports (see figure 1, where the curve of imports from colonial countries is supposed to be the same as those of exports from developed countries towards the colonial countries.). The rate of 29% attained at that point was thus an indication of the importance of exports towards the extra-capitalist markets in the colonial countries since, in this period, the colonial markets were still to a large extent extra-capitalist. After that, this percentage diminished to around 22% of exports in 1966. In reality, the shrinking of this percentage, relative to GNP and not exports, was much more rapid than this since during this period GNP grew more rapidly than exports.

Figure 1 Imports from colonial markets as a percentage of world imports (tables taken from the BNP Guide Statistique 1972. Source: P Bairoch, op cit, OECD Communiqué, November 1970)

To the exports in the direction of the extra-capitalist markets of the colonies, we should add the sales achieved in capitalist countries like France, Japan, Spain, etc to sectors like agriculture which were as yet only partly integrated into capitalist relations of production. Similarly, in Eastern Europe there was still an extra-capitalist market, since the outcome of the First World War had condemned capitalist expansion in these countries to stagnation.[20]

Thus if we take into account all the sales carried out by regions dominated by capitalist relations of production towards those still producing under pre-capitalist relations, whether these were external or internal markets, we can see that they were able to support an important part of the real growth that took place during the Thirty Glorious Years, at least at the beginning of that period. In the final part of this article we will come back to the appreciation of the level of saturation of markets at the time capitalism entered into its period of decadence, in order to characterise this more precisely.

Debt

Right at the beginning of our internal debate, those who put forward the Keynesian-Fordist thesis opposed our hypothesis that debt played a major role in supporting demand during the 1950s and 60s, arguing that "total debt practically did not increase during the period 1945-1980. It was only in response to the crisis that it exploded. Debt can therefore not explain the vigorous post-war growth" The whole question is to know what lies behind this "practically did not" and whether, despite everything, this was enough to complete the process of accumulation alongside the extra-capitalist markets.

It is quite difficult to find statistical data for the evolution of world debt during the 1950s and 60s for most countries, except for the US.

We do have figures for the evolution of the total debt and of the American GNP, year by year, between 1950 and 1969. Studying this data (figure 2) should enable us to reply to the following question: is it possible that, each year, the growth of debt was sufficient to cope with the part of the augmentation of GNP which did not correspond to sales directed towards extra-capitalist markets? As we have already said, as soon as these markets are no longer available, it's debt that plays the role of buyer outside the capitalist relations of production.[21]

Year

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

GNP

257

285

328

346

365

365

398

419

441

447

484

504

520

560

591

632

685

750

794

866

932

Debt

446

486

519

550

582

606

666

698

728

770

833

874

930

996

1071

1152

1244

1341

1435

1567

1699

%annual Debt/GNP

 

171

158

159

160

166

167

167

165

172

172

174

179

178

181

182

182

179

181

181

182

%over  the period Δ Debt /ΔGNP

185%

Δ annual GNP

 

28

44

17

19

0

33

21

22

6

36

20

16

40

30

42

53

65

44

72

67

Δ annual Debt

 

40

33

31

31

24

60

33

30

41

63

41

56

66

75

81

93

97

94

132

132

(Δ annual Debt- Δ annual GNP)

 

12

-11

14

12

24

27

11

8

35

27

21

40

26

45

39

40

32

50

60

65

                                               

Figure 2 Comparative evolution of US GNP and debt between 1950 and 1960[22] (Source (of GNP and debt): Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/scb/page/6870 https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/scb/page/6870/1615/download/6870.pdf

 

Year

50

55

60

65

70

%annual Debt/GNP

22

39

47

67

75

Figure 3 Evolution of debt in West Germany between 1950 and 1970. Source: Survey of Current Business (07/1975) - Monthly Review (vol 22, no.4, 09/190, p 6)

The increase in the value of debt as a percentage of the increase in the value of GNP is, for the period in question, 18%. In other words, the increase in the value of debt is almost double the increase in GNP over 20 years. In fact, this result shows that the evolution of debt in the USA was such that, overall during this period, it could on its own have ensured the growth in GNP in the US (and even play a part in the growth of other countries) without the need to have recourse to sales on extra-capitalist markets. Furthermore, we can see that each year, with the exception of 1951, the increase in debt is superior to that of GNP (it was only in 1951 that the difference between the increase in debt and the growth in GNP was negative). This means that, for all of these years except one, it is debt which took charge of the augmentation of GNP. This was more than was necessary given the contribution that extra-capitalist markets could still make at the time.

The conclusion from this regarding the US is the following: the theoretical analysis which holds that the resort to credit took over from sales to extra-capitalist markets in order to allow accumulation to take place is not refuted by the real evolution of debt in these countries. And while such a conclusion cannot be automatically generalised to all the industrial countries, the fact that it concerns the world's biggest economic power does confer a certain universality on it, and this is confirmed by the case of West Germany. With regard to the latter, we do dispose of statistics on the evolution of debt in relation to GNP (figure 3) which illustrate the same tendency.

What are the implications for our analysis of decadence?

What was the level of the saturation of markets in 1914?

The First World War broke out in the midst of a phase of prosperity for the world capitalist economy. It was not preceded by any open economic crisis; but still, it was the growing imbalance between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production which lay at the origin of the world conflict and, along with it, the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence, The development of this system had been conditioned by the conquest of extra-capitalist markets, and the end of the colonial and economic conquest of the world by the great capitalist metropolises led the latter into a confrontation over their respective markets.  

Contrary to the interpretation by comrades Salome and Ferdinand, such a situation does not imply that "the extra-capitalist markets ...have since the First World War been insufficient with regard to the necessities of enlarged accumulation reached by capitalism" If that had been the case, the crisis would have manifested itself at a purely economic level before 1914.

It was these characteristics of the period (imperialist rivalries around the remaining non-capitalist territories) which were expressed very precisely in the following passage from Luxemburg: "Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment. Still the largest part of the world in terms of geography...."[23] On several occasions Luxemburg came back to the state of the world during this period: "alongside the old capitalist countries there are still those even in Europe where peasant and artisan production is still strongly predominant, like Russia, the Balkans, Scandinavia and Spain. And finally, there are huge continents besides capitalist Europe and North America, where capitalist production has only scattered roots, and apart from that the people of these continents have all sorts of economic systems, from the primitive communist to the feudal, peasantry and artisan."[24]

In fact, "The world war, while ultimately a product of the system's economic contradictions, had broken out before these contradictions could reach their full import at a 'purely' economic level. The crisis of 1929 was thus the first global economic crisis of the decadent period."[25]

If 1929 was the first significant manifestation, during the period of decadence, of the insufficiency of extra-capitalist markets, does this mean that after that date it was no longer possible for them to play any significant role in capitalist prosperity?

In the ten years that preceded 1929, it had not been possible to "dry up" the vast pre-capitalist zones which existed around the world in 1914: this was a period which was not marked by intensive economic activity on a world scale. Similarly, during the 1930s and a good part of the 1940s, the economy had slowed down. This is why the crisis of 1929, while revealing the limits of the extra-capitalist markets which had been opened up at this point, did not mark the end of any possibility of them playing a role in the accumulation of capital.

The exploitation of a virgin extra-capitalist market, or the better exploitation of an old one, depends to a large extent on factors such as the productivity of labour in the capitalist heartlands, which determines the competitiveness of the commodities they produce, and the means of transport available to capital to ensure the circulation of commodities. These factors constitute the motor of the expansion of capitalism around the world, as was already pointed out in The Communist Manifesto.[26] Furthermore, the process of decolonisation, by relieving trade of the burden of maintaining an apparatus of colonial domination, made certain extra-capitalist markets much more profitable.

The cycle "crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis" is put into question

Some time ago the ICC corrected the false interpretation that the First World War was the consequence of an open economic crisis. As we have seen, the cause and effect relationship between crisis and war has to be considered by seeing the term crisis in broad terms, as a crisis of the relations of production.

As for the sequence "war-reconstruction-new crisis", we have also seen that it was not able to take account of the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s, which cannot be attributed to the post Second World War reconstruction. It's the same regarding the revival that took place after the First World War, when capitalism re-connected with the pre-war dynamic based on the exploitation of extra-capitalist markets, but on a much smaller scale given the effects of the destruction brought about by the war. There is indeed a process of reconstruction after war, but far from facilitating accumulation, it is part of the faux frais needed to get the economy going again.

And since 1967, when capitalism once again entered into a period of economic turbulence, crises have come one after the other and capitalism has ravaged the planet by multiplying imperialist conflicts without at all creating the conditions for a reconstruction that is synonymous with a return to prosperity, even in a limited and momentary sense.

As the ICC has shown, the entry into decadence did not mean the end of accumulation as the continuation of growth between 1914 and today has shown, although overall it has taken place at a rhythm inferior to the most rapid phases of the ascendant period (most of the second half of the19th century until 1914). This continued accumulation was based on the exploitation of extra-capitalist markets until the point where they were exhausted. It was then non-reimbursable debt which took up the baton, while at the same time piling up increasingly insurmountable contradictions.

Thus, and contrary to what's implied by the formula "crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis", the mechanism of destruction/reconstruction was not what enabled the bourgeoisie to prolong capitalism's life, neither after the First World War nor the Second. The main instruments of such an enterprise, Keynesianism and above all debt, while having an immediate effect by postponing the impact of overproduction, are by no means a miraculous answer. The most striking proof of this is the abandonment of Keynesian measures in the 1980s and the present impasse of generalised, bottomless debt. 

Silvio, 1st Quarter, 2010.

 

 


 

[1]. Faced with the crisis, there is no lack of voices on the "left" (and even for a good part of the right these days) calling for a return to Keynesian measures, as can be seen from the following passage taken from a working document by Jacques Gouverneur, a teacher at the Catholic University of Louvin in Belgium. As the reader can see, the solution he puts forward involves making use of increases in productivity to install Keynesian measures and alternative policies...rather like the ones that were advocated by the left of capital in response to the aggravation of the economic situation at the end of the 1960s, with the aim of mystifying the working class about the possibility of reforming the system. "To get out of the crisis and solve the problem of unemployment, should we reduce - or, on the contrary should we increase - wages, social security benefits (unemployment pay, pensions, health benefits, family allowances) public spending (education, culture, public works...)? In other words: should we carry on with restrictive policies inspired by neo-liberalism (as we have done since the beginning of the 1980s) or should we on the contrary advocate a return to the expansive policies, inspired by Keynesianism, and applied during the period of growth between 1945 and 1975? In other words: can enterprises simultaneously increase their profits and their outlets? For this two conditions are necessary. The first resides in a general increase in productivity, in the sense that with the same number of workers (or inhabitants) the economy produces a greater volume of goods and services. To use an image, an increase in productivity over a given period...enlarges the size of the "cake" produced, increases the number of slices to be given out. In a period when productivity increases, the establishment of Keynesian measures is the second condition for enterprises to have at their disposal bigger profits and wider outlets...The perpetuation of neo-liberal policies will multiply social dramas and will lead into a major economic contradiction: it accentuates the divorce between the global growth of profits and the global growth of outlets. But it does favour enterprises and the dominant groups: the latter will continue to exert effective pressure on the public authorities (national or supranational) in order to prolong these pernicious policies. The return to Keynesian policies presupposes a change in the current balance of forces: it will not however be enough to resolve the economic and social problems highlighted by the structural crisis of the capitalist system. The solution to these problems demands alternative policies: an increase in public taxes (essentially on profits) in order to finance socially useful production, reduction of working time in order to develop levels of employment and free time, a sliding composition of wages in order to promote solidarity" https://www.capitalisme-et-crise.info/telechargements/pdf/FR_JG_Quelles_... (our emphasis).

[2]. The presentation of this debate and of the three main positions involved can be found in the article "ICC internal debate: The causes of the post-war economic boom" in IR n° 133; we then published the following articles: "The origins, dynamics, and limits of Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism" in IR n° 135; "The bases of capitalist accumulation" and "War economy and state capitalism" in IR n° 136; "In defence of the "Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism" thesis  (reply to Silvio and Jens)" in IR n° 138.

[3]. "In defence of the "Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism" thesis  (reply to Silvio and Jens)" in IR n° 138.

[4]. If the present contribution doesn't look into Salome and Ferdinand's response to the war economy and state capitalism thesis, this is because we see the discussion raised by the latter as being less of a priority, though still necessary to come back to. This is because this thesis is not first and foremost determined by a particular conception of the process of accumulation but more by the geopolitical conditions in which accumulation takes place.

[5]. "War, militarism and imperialist blocs in the decadence of capitalism", International Review n° 52, cited in the article which opened up this debate in IR n° 133. '

[6]. See  "The decadence of capitalism: the mortal contradictions of bourgeois society" in IR n° 139

[7]. "Origins, dynamic and limits of Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism", IR n° 135

[8]. See "The bases of capitalist accumulation" in IR n° 136

[9]. See the section on the extra-capitalist markets and debt thesis in "The causes of the post-1945 economic boom" in IR n° 133. The references in Marx are from Capital Vol. 3, part III, "The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall", chapter XV, "Exposition of the internal contradictions of the law", 3, "Excess capital and excess population".

[10]. On this point see the section on extra-capitalist markets and debt in the article in IR n° 133.

[11]. The Accumulation of Capital, chapter 7, "Analysis of Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction".

[12]. It is undeniable that credit plays a regulating role and makes it possible to attenuate the need for extra-capitalist markets during each cycle. But it does not at all do away with the basic problem, which can be looked at, as Rosa Luxemburg puts it, through the study of an abstract cycle resulting from the elementary cycles of various capitals: "The characteristic feature of enlarged reproduction of the aggregate social capital - just as in our previous assumption of simple reproduction - is the reproduction of individual capitals, since production as a whole, whether regarded as simple or as enlarged production, can in fact only occur in the form of innumerable independent movements of reproduction performed by private individual capitals" Accumulation of Capital, chapter 6. Similarly, it is obvious that only in certain of these cycles does an external buyer intervene

[13].  These two passages are from chapters 7 and 9.

[14]. This response can be found, among other places, in volume 3 of Capital: "How could there otherwise be a shortage of demand for the very commodities which the mass of the people lack, and how would it be possible for this demand to be sought abroad, in foreign markets, to pay the labourers at home the average amount of necessities of life? This is possible only because in this specific capitalist interrelation the surplus-product assumes a form in which its owner cannot offer it for consumption, unless it first reconverts itself into capital for him. If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities among themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it". (Part III, "The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall", chapter XV, "Exposition of the internal contradictions of the law", 3, "Excess capital and excess population").

[15]. The rising organic composition of capital (i.e. the greater growth of constant capital in relation to variable capital) in the means of production sector is on average faster than in the means of consumption sector, given the technological characteristics of these two sectors.

[16]. Accumulation of Capital, "Contradictions within the diagram of enlarged reproduction".

[17]. Ibid

[18]. Despite the excellent illustrations and interpretations of the development of world capitalism which he produced, drawing from the theory of Rosa Luxemburg, in particular in The Conflict of the Century, we can nevertheless ask whether he really assimilated this theory in depth. Thus, in this same book, Sternberg analyses the crisis of the 1930s as a result of capitalism's inability during this period to synchronise the increase in production with that of consumption: "the attempt to synchronise, on the basis of the capitalist profit economy and without any major external expansion, on the one hand the growth in production and productivity, and on the other hand the increase in consumption, ended in failure. The crisis was the result of this failure" (p 344). This leads us to understand that such synchronisation is possible under capitalism and this is the beginning of an abandonment of the rigour and coherence of Rosa Luxemburg's theory. This is confirmed in Sternberg's study of the post- Second World War period, where he develops the idea that it is possible to transform society through nationalisations and to improve workers' living conditions. The following passage gives us a glimpse of this: "...the integral realisation of the Labour programme of 1945 was a great step towards the complete socialisation of the British economy, making it possible for further steps in the same direction to be taken more easily...During the first years after the war, the Labour government sought to carry out the mandate conferred on it by the people. Keeping strictly to the methods and means of traditional democracy, it brought in radical changes to the capitalist state, society and economy" (chapter headed "The world today", p 629). The aim here is not to make a radical critique of Sternberg's reformism. It is simply a question of showing that his reformist approach necessarily involved a considerable underestimation of the economic contradictions that assail capitalist society, an under-estimation that is hardly compatible with Rosa Luxemburg's theory as developed in The Accumulation of Capital   

[19]. As illustrated in our text "The bases of capitalist accumulation", which is based on the writings of Paul Mattick. For the latter, unlike Rosa Luxemburg, for accumulation to be possible, the intervention of  buyers outside capitalist relations of production is not necessary. 

[20]. The Conflict of the Century, III, "The stagnation of capitalism; the halt in capitalist expansion; the halt in the external expansion of capitalism".

[21]. We should not however forget that the function of debt is not only to create an artificial market.

[22]. % annual Debt/GNP = (Debt/GNP)*100;  % over the period  Δ Debt/ΔGNP = ((Debt in 1969 - Debt in 1949) / (GNP in 1969 - GNP in 1949))*100 ; Δ annual GNP = GNP in (n) - GNP in (n-1) ; Δ annual Debt for the year (n) = Debt for the year n - Debt for the year (n-1) 

[23]. The Accumulation of Capital, "Protective tariffs and accumulation", our emphases.

[24]. The Accumulation of Capital, an Anticritique, our emphases.

[25]. "Resolution on the international situation" 16th ICC Congress, International Review n° 122.

[26]. "The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate" (our emphasis).

Deepen: 

General and theoretical questions: 

The Free Association of German Trade Unions (FVdG) on the road to revolutionary syndicalism

In the first part of this article ,[1] we looked at the controversy within the German trade union movement and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) that led to the creation of the Free Association of German Trade Unions (Freie Vereinigung Deutscher Gewerkschaften, FVDG), the organization that would be the precursor of German revolutionary syndicalism. This survey covered the period from the 1870s to 1903. The FVDG, founded in 1897, explicitly saw itself from then up until 1903, as a combative part of the Social Democratic trade union movement. It had no links with revolutionary syndicalism or anarchism, which were very active in other countries like France or Spain. In a very logical way and at the theoretical level, the FVDG defended the need for workers organised in unions to be involved not only in economic matters but in political ones too.

Owing to dispersion from the time of its birth under the anti-socialist laws and to disputes with the General Trade Unions Confederation, the FVDG was not able to develop sufficient internal agreement to wage a collective struggle. The IWW, an established revolutionary syndicalist organisation in the United States, was far ahead of the FVDG in centralising its activity. The preference for federalist dispersal, even if not theorised in the FVDG, remained a constant weakness of this organisation. Confronted with the appearance of the mass strike, the reluctance to centralise its combat would increasingly hinder the FVDG's political activity.

The discussion around the new forms of struggle that started with the appearance of the workers' mass strikes in the early years of the 20th century proved a big challenge to the FVDG. As a consequence, it began moving towards revolutionary syndicalism. As we will show in this article, this tendency would continue to strengthen up to the outbreak of the First World War.

The mass strike eclipses the old trade union spirit

At the start of the 20th century the growth of the mass strike was seen more and more to be a new form of the class struggle at the international level. With its spontaneous dynamic towards extension, going beyond the professional and trade divisions of the unions and raising political demands, the mass strike was quite different from the practices of the old class struggle unionism of 19th century, completely organised by the trade union apparatus, limited to sectoral and economic demands. The mass strikes, which sprang up across the world, also exhibited a working class vitality that effectively rendered obsolete strikes that were well prepared in advance and completely dependent on the state of the unions' strike funds.

Already in 1891, a strike of 125,000 workers had taken place in Belgium, and then in 1893 another of 250,000 workers. Then in 1896 and 1897 there were general strikes of textile workers in St. Petersburg in Russia. In 1900 it was the turn of miners in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and then, in 1902 and 1903, those in Austria and France. In 1902 there was a new mass strike in Belgium for universal suffrage and in 1903 it was the turn of railway workers in the Netherlands. In September 1904 there was a national strike wave in Italy. In 1903 and 1904 big strikes shook the whole of southern Russia.

At this time, Germany, despite the strengths of its powerful union traditions and its concentrated and organised working class, was not at the epicentre of the new phase of class struggle that was spreading in powerful waves. Nevertheless, the question of the mass strike was passionately debated within the ranks of the working class in Germany. The old notion of the unions "controlling the class struggle" so as not to disturb a sacrosanct "public order", came into direct conflict with the energy and the solidarity of the proletariat in the new mass struggles. As Arnold Roller wrote in 1905 during a struggle of miners in the Ruhr that involved 200,000 workers: "They [the unions] were constrained in having to turn strikes into a kind of peaceful demonstration, with a wait-and-see approach, with the possibility of getting some kind of concessions in recognition of our ‘reasonable behaviour'. The miners in the other coalfields organised in a similar spirit, in Saxony, Bavaria, etc., showing their solidarity in their support of the strike and, paradoxically, in working overtime to produce thousands of tons of extra coal - that would be shipped and used by industry in the service of Capital during the strike [...] While the workers in the Ruhr suffered from hunger, their representatives in Parliament negotiated and got promises legally of some improvements but only after there was a return to work. Of course, the German trade union leadership rejected the idea of putting strong pressure on the bosses by extending the strike across the whole coal industry."[2]

The celebrated "debate on the mass strike" in 1905/06 inside the SPD and the German trade unions was undoubtedly inspired to a large extent by the powerful mass strike of 1905 in Russia which surpassed everything that had gone before it in size and political dynamic.[3]

For the unions, the mass strikes were a direct challenge to their existence and historical function. Did it mean their role of organising the permanent economic defence of the working class was at an end? The mass strike of 1905 in Russia, a direct reaction to the appalling misery for the working class and peasantry caused by the Russo-Japanese war, had shown precisely that political questions like war and, ultimately, revolution, were now central to the workers' struggle. Issues like these went far beyond the limits of traditional union thinking. As Anton Pannekoek very clearly wrote: "Now this is entirely in harmony with the innermost character of trade unionism. Trade unionism is an action of the workers that does not go beyond the limit of capitalism. The aim is not to replace capitalism with another form of production, but to secure good living conditions within capitalism. Its character is not revolutionary, but conservative".[4] 

To blame the leaders of the powerful German unions for a lack of flexibility because they did not sympathise with the political form of struggle of the mass strike doesn't give the full picture. Their defensive attitude vis-à-vis the mass strike was a direct product of their nature and how the union organisations they represented saw their role, which meant they were unable to meet the new demands of the class struggle.

Hence, the political organisations and parties of the working class needed to develop an understanding of the nature of the new form of struggle the workers were engaged in with the mass strike. However, "the overwhelming majority of Social Democratic leaders still mouthed the axiom: the general strike is the general nonsense".[5] Unwilling to accept reality, they believed that the appearance of the mass strike was nothing but a clear and simple expression of the "general strike" that was advocated by the anarchists and the supporters of the former co-founder of Dutch Social Democracy, Domela Nieuwenhuis. A few decades previously, in his text The Bakuninists at work in 1873, Engels had, quite justifiably, called the vision of a general strike prepared behind the scenes with a written plan of insurrection, totally stupid. The old vision of the "general strike" was based on the idea that a simultaneous and general stoppage of work led by unions would weaken the power of the ruling class and bring it down within a few hours. In this sense, the leaders of the SPD and the unions justified their reservations and used Engels' words as an excuse to reject and ignore the opening up of the debate on the mass strikes called for by the Left around Rosa Luxemburg inside the SPD.

However, a closer examination of the false opposition between the "anarchist general strike" and the "day to day work of the unions", shows clearly that the old anarchist dream of a grandiose general economic strike and the conception of the main union federation were not in fact very far apart. In both these conceptions, it was exclusively the numbers involved in the struggle that mattered most and they brushed to one side the need to address the political questions that were now posed, at least potentially, by massive struggles.

Up to this point the FVDG had always supported workers' political activity. Would it be in a position to react to events?

The position of the FVDG on the mass strike

Prompted by the experiences of massive movements in Europe at the end of the 19th and the start of 20th century, in 1904 the FVDG began discussing the mass strike ahead of the Amsterdam Socialist Congress where this question was on the agenda. Within the ranks of the FVDG, where the first attempts at understanding the phenomenon of the mass strike began, the debate came up against a certain conception of union work. In its general view of how union work should be conducted, the FVDG didn't distinguish itself in any way at all from the main Social Democratic unions. However, its weak influence did not put it in a position to control the class struggle, and it was much more open to the question of the mass strike than the large trade unions.

Gustav Kessler, co-founder of the "Localist" current and political authority inside the FVDG, died in June 1904. In the FVDG leadership he had represented the strongest orientation towards Social Democracy. The highly heterogeneous nature of the FVDG, a federated union of tradesmen, had always left it tolerant of minority anarchist tendencies, like that around Andreas Kleinlein Platz. Kessler's death and the election of Fritz Kater to the head of the FVDG executive committee in the summer of 1904 would initiate a period of greater openness vis-à-vis revolutionary syndicalist ideas.

It was above all the French revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT, with its concept of the "general strike", which seemed to be able to find a response in part of the FVDG. Under Kessler's influence, the FVDG had until early 1904 refused to make official propaganda in support of the general strike. Reacting against this, the FVDG then asked itself whether different expressions of the recent mass strike across the world were or were not historical confirmation of the old and theatrical vision of the general strike.

Two documents reveal the FVDG's clearest understanding of the mass strike: the pamphlet published by Raphael Friedeberg in 1904, Parliamentarism and the general strike, and a resolution adopted in August of that year by the FVDG. The viewpoint of Friedeberg (he remained a member of the SPD until 1907) was very influential inside the union and in its subsequent thinking.[6]

Friedberg's pamphlet is devoted primarily to a correct and subtly formulated critique of the destructive and stultifying influence of parliamentarism as it was then practiced by the Social Democratic leadership: "Parliamentary methods, the overvaluation of parliamentarism, are too entrenched in the masses of the German proletariat. They are also too accepting of it, everything, any changes to social relations, has to come from legislation; all that anyone has to do is to place his socialist ballot paper in the box every two years (...) This is a very bad way of educating the proletariat. (...) I am willing to concede that parliamentary democracy has had an historical function to carry out in the historical formation of the proletariat, and it will have again." As can be seen, this rejection of parliamentarism was not a rejection in principle, but was only applicable to the current historical stage in which that form of propaganda had become totally ineffective for the proletariat.

Just as Rosa Luxemburg had done, he emphasised the emancipatory nature of mass strike for the proletariat: "The workers educate themselves through the strike. It gives them moral strength, gives them a sense of solidarity, a way of thinking and a proletarian awareness. The idea of the general strike gives unions a horizon just as broad as that given to it until now by the idea of political power of the movement." He also wrote about the ethical aspect to the struggle of the working class: "If workers want to overthrow the class State, if they want to build a new world order, they must be better than the strata they are fighting against, those they want to remove. This is why they must learn to reject everything that is base and vile in themselves, everything that is unethical. This is why the principle characteristic behind the idea of the general strike, is that of an ethical means of struggle."

What is noticeable about Friedeberg's text is the use of the term "general strike" even when he's talking about the actual political mass strike of the previous year.

Even if the spirit of Friedeberg's pamphlet is one of real indignation against the prevailing conservatism of the main union federation, something he shared with Luxemburg, he came to quite different conclusions:

He clearly rejected the tendency inside the FVDG to confront political questions: "we are not carrying out any political struggle and, therefore, we do not need any form of political struggle. Our struggle is economic and psychological."  This is a clear break with the previous position of the FVDG. By making an equation between "parliamentarianism" and "political struggle" he rejected the political dynamic expressed by the mass strike.

In addition, Friedeberg developed a non-materialist vision (albeit that of a very small minority inside the FVDG) of the class struggle based on a psychological concept and on the strategy of a "rejection of personality"- which he called "historic psyche". We can see here that he agreed specifically with some clearly anarchist ideas according to which it is the spirit of individual rebellion that is the engine of class struggle and not the collective development of class consciousness.

Although Friedeberg correctly poured scorn on the reformist social-democrat idea of the proletariat gradually taking state power, he tended to adopt the same kind of gradualist conception but from a syndicalist perspective: "In these last years alone the unions have increased in size by 21% and membership has risen to over a million. Since these things follow a pattern, we can say that in three or four years we will have two million members, and in ten years between three and four million. And when the idea of the general strike has penetrated the proletariat more deeply (...) it will call on between four and five million workers to stop work and then to eliminate the class State." In fact, the largest ever recruitment of the working class into the unions provided no better conditions for proletarian revolution but, on the contrary, was a barrier to it.

Behind the propaganda about a "pure non-violent means of struggle", Friedeberg also hugely underestimated the ruling class's capacity for unleashing brutal repression in a revolutionary situation: "What the general strike fundamentally represents is a way of struggling ethically. [...] What comes afterwards, when our adversaries are seeking retribution and we are having to defend ourselves legitimately, we cannot here foresee."

Friedeberg saw the mass strike essentially as confirmation of the old anarchist idea of the general strike. His greatest weakness was in not recognising that the mass strikes that were taking place could only be developed through the political activity of the working class. Breaking with the tradition of FVDG, which had hitherto continually warned against a purely economic struggle, he reduced the perspective of the mass strike solely to this aspect. The grass roots membership of the FVDG was not united behind the views of Friedeberg who represented a minority wing moving towards anarchism and leading the FVDG towards revolutionary syndicalism. However Friedeberg's positions were adopted for a short period by the FVDG. Friedeberg himself left the FVDG in 1907 to return to an anarchist community in Ascona.

The FVDG could not understand the mass strike by following the theories of Friedeberg. The revolutionary spirit that was developing, expressed by this new form of working class struggle, posed the question of a fusion of political and economic questions. The question of the general strike, which was once again the FVDG's prime concern, was a step backwards in relation to the mass strike and a retreat from the political questions of the day.

However, despite all the confusions that Friedeberg's writing brought back to the surface, the debate within the FVDG did help to stir up the German workers' movement. He deserves some credit since, well before the brilliant and famous pamphlets on the mass strike of 1905 (like those of Luxemburg and Trotsky) were written, he did raise this question inside the SPD.

It is hardly surprising that the FVDG (which was itself an amalgam of various unions) still continued at that time to see trade unions as revolutionary organs. It would have been a step forward if the FVDG had begun to question its own form of organisation. On the other hand, even Rosa Luxemburg still counted a lot on the unions, which she described in many countries (for example in Russia) as a direct product of the mass strike. It took almost five years before Trotsky's book, 1905, which chronicled the experience of workers' councils as revolutionary organs replacing the unions, was published.[7] What remained a constant in the FVDG, and the organisations that succeeded it, was their blindness vis-à-vis the workers' councils and a deep-seated attachment to the unions as revolutionary organs. This weakness would prove fatal in the revolutionary uprising in Germany after the war.

Secret negotiations opposing the mass strike and the debate in Mannheim in 1906

Inside the SPD, a fight broke out over the question of whether the mass strike should be discussed at the Party Congress in 1906. The Party leadership tried feverishly to rule out discussing the most important manifestation of class struggle claiming there was little interest in the topic. The SPD Congress in Jena in 1905 only took a position on its form in a resolution declaring that the mass strike was "a measure worth promoting in the future". It reduced the mass strike to only being an ultimate means of defence against a possible withdrawal of the right to vote. The majority of the SPD leadership characterised the lessons drawn from the mass strike in Russia by Rosa Luxemburg as "revolutionary romanticism" and declared that they had no possible application in Germany.

It is not surprising that shortly after the Jena Congress in February 1906, the SPD leadership and the central committee of the major unions agreed in secret negotiations to work together to prevent mass strikes. The arrangement was nonetheless uncovered. In its newspaper Die Einigkeit (Unity) the FVDG published sections of the minutes of the meeting that had fallen into its hands. Among other things, they read: "The central committee of the Party has no intention of spreading the political general strike, but will try, as far as possible, to prevent it". Its publication produced, "the indignation of villains caught red-handed" inside the SPD leadership and meant that they had to put the debate on the mass strike back on the agenda of the Party Congress on 22nd and 23rd September 1906, whether they liked it or not.

Bebel's first words in his inaugural speech to the Congress in Mannheim reflected the cowardice and ignorance of the party leadership, who felt highly inconvenienced by having to confront a question they had in fact hoped to avoid: "When we left the Jena Congress last year, nobody foresaw that we would have to discuss the mass strike again this year. (...) Because of the gross indiscretion of Die Einigkeit in Berlin, we are now facing a big discussion."[8] To overcome the embarrassment of the secret talks, brought into the open by Die Einigkeit, Bebel simply resorted to mocking the FVDG and Friedeberg's contribution: "No-one can understand how it is possible for the unions organised locally to achieve anything in the context of these developments and with the power of the employer class vis-à-vis the working class. In any case, the party leadership and the great majority of the party believe that local unions are totally powerless in carrying out their duties for the working class".[9] Who, eight years later, faced with the vote for war credits, was "Totally powerless to assume its duties for the working class"? Precisely the leadership of the same SPD! The FVDG, by contrast, faced with the question of war in 1914, was able to take a proletarian position.

During the very poor debate on the mass strike that took place at the Congress, instead of any political arguments, recriminations and bureaucratic justifications were served up, to explain why Party members should stick to the resolution on the mass strike made the previous year at the Jena Congress, or the one at the trade unions' Congress in May 1906, which clearly rejected the mass strike. The discussion revolved around the proposal of Bebel and Legien to give an ultimatum to Party members organised inside the FVDG that they return to the main union federation, under threat of exclusion from the Party should they refuse.

Rather than dealing with the political lessons of victorious mass strikes, or discussing Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet published in the previous week, the debate was reduced to a deplorable quarrel over legal niceties!

While the invited delegate of the FVDG, the Berlin editor of Die Einigkeit, was ridiculed, Rosa Luxemburg strongly objected to plans drawn up to sideline the key debate on the mass strike with formal and purely disciplinary measures: "Furthermore, I think it's irresponsible the way the Party wields a big stick against a group of determined trade unionists, and that we have to endorse the quarrel and discord within the party. There are still undoubtedly a great number of good comrades to be found in the local organisations and it would be irresponsible if, in providing direct help to the unions with this matter, we introduce discord in our own ranks. We respect the opinion that the Localists must not push the dispute in the unions to the level of hindering the union organisation; but in the name of sacrosanct equal rights, we must still at least recognise the same thing with regard the Party. If we directly exclude anarcho-socialists from the Party, as the central committee of the Party proposes, we will be in a very sad state: we will lose our drive and energy since it's a matter of imposing restrictions on the left of our party, while leaving the doors wide open as before on the right.

"Von Elm has told us what Die Einigkeit or a conference of Local organisations would say, as an illustration of what he calls anarchist absurdity: ‘The general strike is the only means of truly revolutionary class struggle'. Of course, this is nonsense and nothing but. However, dear friends, this is no further away from social democratic tactics and principles than the proposals of David showing us that the only means of struggle for social democracy is the legal parliamentary road. We are told that the Localists, the anarcho-socialists, are gradually undermining social democratic principles with their agitation. But when a member of the central committee, like Bringmann, declares himself to be against class struggle in principle as he did at your conference in February, he is also attacking the principles of the grass roots members of social democracy."[10]

As she did at the Hamburg Party Congress in 1900, in the debate on trade unions, Luxemburg opposed the attempts to use the weaknesses of the FVDG as a convenient pretext to suppress key questions. She saw that the greatest danger did not come from a minority union like the FVDG moving towards revolutionary syndicalism, whose militants were often aligned with the left wing inside the SPD, but rather from the centre and the right of the Party.

The FVDG split and the final break with the SPD in 1908

To the leaderships of the reformist SPD and the main union federation, the FVDG in no way represented the same danger as the revolutionary wing of the Social Democracy around Liebknecht and Luxemburg. However, the revolutionary wing could not take too much account of the FVDG simply due to the fact that it constituted a small minority and did not really acknowledge the lessons of mass strikes. The international appearance of powerful revolutionary syndicalist movements from 1905, like the IWW in the United States, did make revolutionary syndicalist tendencies a potential danger to reformism.

The strategy, unveiled in 1906 at the Mannheim Party Congress, to pressurise members of the FVDG to join the main union federation, continued for months. On the one hand, some experienced and militant members of the Local unions were offered paid positions in the bureaucracies of the Social Democratic unions. On the other hand, for the SPD Congress that would be held in 1908 in Nuremberg there appeared another motion on the incompatibility of dual SPD and FVDG affiliation.

But the FVDG would fail above all because of its ambiguities and because of the differences of orientations within its professional associations. At the time when it was important to understand the political mass strike and the emergence of workers' councils, it broke up following an argument over whether to rejoin the main union federation or to move towards revolutionary syndicalism, subordinating political questions to economic ones. At its Extraordinary Congress in January 1908, the FVDG would examine a motion from the stonemasons asking the unions to dissolve the FVDG into the main union federation. Although this motion was rejected, it heralded a split in the FVDG and thus the end of the long history of immense union opposition based on the proletarian tradition of social democracy. More than a third of its members left the FVDG immediately to join the main union federation. The number of members fell from 20,000 to less than 7,000 in 1910.

It was easy therefore for the leadership of social democracy, in September 1908, to endorse the split within the FVDG at the Party Congress with a permanent ban on dual membership of the FVDG and SPD. After this, the remnants of the FVDG no longer posed a serious danger for Legien et al.

In the history of the birth of revolutionary syndicalism in Germany, the year 1908 thus marks the beginning of a new stage, with a change of direction towards revolutionary syndicalism, and this with less than half of the members of the FVDG remaining.

Towards revolutionary syndicalism

Since the FVDG from its birth had appeared as a union opposition movement firmly linked to social democracy, hence to a political organisation of the workers' movement, it was never characterised, before 1908, as revolutionary syndicalist. Indeed, revolutionary syndicalism does not simply mean a wildly enthusiastic commitment exclusively to trade union activities, but also the adoption of a conception that sees the union as the only form of organisation for overthrowing capitalism - a role that, by its nature as an organ of struggle for reforms, it has never been and will never be able to play.

The new programme of 1911, "What do the Localists want? Programme, goals and methods of the FVDG", indicated the direction it was taking and expressed its viewpoint as follows: "The struggle for the emancipation of the workers is mainly an economic struggle that the union, according to its nature as an organisation of producers, must carry out on all fronts. [...] The union (not the political party) is alone in its capacity to expand the economic power of the workers in the right direction..."[11]

In the preceding years, the big mass strikes were evidence of the spontaneous dynamic of the class struggle, and in 1903 the Bolsheviks abandoned the concept of the "mass party", while at the same time clarifying the need for organisations of revolutionary political minorities. However, the new programme of the FVDG, albeit with good will and while fighting against the old "dualism", started from false conclusions: "This is why we reject the harmful dualism (bipartition), as practiced by social democracy and its big trade unions. By this we mean the absurd division of workers' organisations into political and union branches. (...) Because we reject the parliamentary struggle and have replaced it with a direct political struggle through union methods and not for political power, but for social emancipation, any workers' political party, like Social Democracy loses all rationale."[12]

This new program showed itself to be totally blind to the historical emergence and revolutionary character of the workers' councils and took refuge in hopeful theorising of a new type of union as:

  • an alternative to the (de facto) out-dated mass party;
  • an alternative to large bureaucratic unions;
  • an organ of revolution;
  • and finally, an architect of the new society.

What a daunting task!

In the manner characteristic of revolutionary syndicalism, the FVDG defended a clear opposition to the bourgeois state and to the unbridled parliamentarism of the time. It correctly underlined the need for the struggle of the working class against war and militarism.

In the years preceding the First World War, the FVDG did not move closer to anarchism. The theories of Friedeberg having led it away from social democracy towards anarchism in 1904-07, although they were emblematic, did not signify a shift of the whole organisation towards anarchism. Instead, the forces strongly oriented towards revolutionary syndicalism gathered around Fritz Kater also feared the kind of "stewardship" on the part of the anarchists like that exerted by the SPD over the unions. In Die Einigkeit in August 1912, Kater again characterised anarchism as being "just as superfluous as any other political party."[13] It would be wrong to assume that it was the presence of known anarchists within it that led the FVDG to revolutionary syndicalism. Hostility towards political parties, born of the hard controversies within the SPD, was a common feature of all anarchist organisations in the years before the war. It is in no way the influence of the charismatic anarchist Rudolf Rocker in 1919 that introduced the hostility towards political parties within the organisation that succeeded the FVDG, the FAUD. Such a development had already clearly occurred. Rocker theorised the hostility of German revolutionary syndicalism to political parties much more clearly in the 1920s than was the case before the war.

The years before the outbreak of war in 1914 were marked for the FVDG by a withdrawal into itself. The big debates within the parent organisations were at an end. The split with the Confederation of affiliated trade unions had taken place in 1897. The break with the SPD was a good ten years later, in 1908.

Hence a curious situation came about, revealing the recurring paradox that revolutionary syndicalism comes up against: defining itself as a union wishing to have firm roots within the working class at large, the membership of the FVDG did, however, considerably reduce. Among its 7,000 or so members only a fraction were fully active. It was no longer a union! The remains of the FVDG formed propaganda circles for revolutionary syndicalist ideas instead, and had more of the character of a political group. But they didn't want to be a political organisation!

The vestiges of the FVDG remained - and for the working class this is absolutely key - on an internationalist terrain and was opposed, despite all their shortcomings, to the militarism and war of the bourgeoisie. The FVDG and its press were banned in August 1914, immediately after the declaration of war, and many of its still-active members imprisoned.

In a future article, we will examine the role of revolutionary syndicalists in Germany up until 1923, a period covering the First World War, the German revolution and the international revolutionary wave.

Mario, 6/11/2009

 



[1]. "The birth of revolutionary syndicalism in the German workers' movement", International Review n°.137

[2]. Arnold Roller (Siegfried Nacht), Die direkte Aktion, 1912. (our translation). Roller personifies what was until then a very small anarchist wing inside the FVDG.

[3]. See International Review n°s 90, 122, 123, 125 in English, Spanish and French.

[4]. Anton Pannekoek, "Trade Unionism ", International Council Correspondence, n°. 2 - January 1936. Published in English under the pseudonym, John Harper.

[5]. Paul Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg, Her Life and Work, section on "The political mass strike", Monthly Review Press, p128.

[6]. Friedeberg didn't come from anarchism himself but was the local representative of the SPD and a leading member of the Berlin Social Democratic Party.

[7]. Trotsky initially wrote Our Revolution in 1907. Some of the chapters became the basis of his book, 1905, which was written in 1908/1909.

[8]. Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Mannheim, 23. bis 29. September 1906 (Verbal record of the debates at the congress of the Geman Social Democratic Party, Mannheim, 1906), page 227(Our translation).

[9]. Ibid, p.295. (Our translation).

[10]. Ibid, p.315 (Our translation).

[11]. Our translation.

[12]. Our translation.

[13]. See Dirk H. Müller, Gewerkschaftliche Versammlungsdemokratie und Arbeiterdelegierte vor 1918, p.191-198.

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What are workers' councils? (Part 2): The resurgence and crisis of workers’ councils in 1917

The aim of this series is to respond to a question posed by many comrades (readers and sympathisers), above all among the youngest: what are the workers' councils? In the first article of this series ,[1] we saw how they appeared for the first time in history in the heat of the 1905 revolution in Russia and how the defeat of this revolution led to their disappearance. In this second part, we are going to see how they reappeared during the February 1917 revolution and how, under the domination of the old Menshevik and Social Revolutionary (SR) parties who betrayed the working class, they distanced themselves from the will and growing consciousness of the worker masses, becoming, in July 1917, a point of support for the counter-revolution.[2]

Why did the soviets disappear between 1905 and 1917?

Oskar Anweiler, in his work The Soviets,[3] underlined how numerous attempts took place to revive the soviets following the defeat of the revolution in December 1905. A workers' council thus appeared in Spring 1906 in St. Petersburg, which sent delegates to factories in order to push for the renewal of the soviet. A meeting, which regrouped 300 delegates in Summer 1906, came to nothing because of the difficulties in taking up the struggle again. This council wasted away little by little with the weakening of the mobilisation and definitively disappeared in spring 1907. In Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, Poltava, Ekaterinburg, Baku, Batoum, Sostoum and Kronstadt, councils of the unemployed, though more or less ephemeral, also appeared throughout 1906.

 Some soviets also appeared sporadically in 1906-07 in some industrial towns of the Urals. It was however in Moscow that the most serious attempt to set up a soviet took place. A strike broke out in July and quickly spread to numerous workers' concentrations. It rapidly mandated some 150 delegates who aimed to meet up, form an Executive Committee and launch appeals for the extension of struggles and the formation of soviets. Conditions however were not those of 1905 and the government, aware of the faint echo aroused by the mobilisation in Moscow, unleashed a violent repression which put an end to the strike and to any new soviet.

The soviets disappeared from the social scene until 1917. This disappearance surprises many comrades who ask how is it possible that the same workers who had participated with so much enthusiasm in the soviets of 1905 could have forgotten them? How do you understand why the "council" form, which had demonstrated its efficacy and its strength in 1905, disappeared as if by magic for just over a decade?

In order to answer this question, one cannot start off from the point of view of bourgeois democracy, a view that considers society as a sum of "free and sovereign" individuals, as "free" to set up councils as to participate in elections. If that were the case, how do you understand that millions of citizens who "had decided" to set up soviets in 1905 then "chose" to neglect this form of organisation for long years?

Such a point of view can't understand that that the working class is not a sum of "free and self-determined" individuals, but a class which can only express itself, act and organise when it affirms itself through its collective action in the struggle. This struggle is not the result of "individual decisions" but rather the dynamic product of a whole series of objective factors (the degradation of the conditions of existence and the general evolution of society), and of subjective factors (indignation, concern about the future, the experience of the struggle and the development of class consciousness animated by the intervention of revolutionaries). The action and organisation of the working class is a social, collective and historic process, which reveals an evolution in the balance of forces between the classes.

Further, this dynamic of class struggle must in its turn be put in the historic context that permits the birth of the soviets. During the historic period of capitalism's ascendency - and particularly during its "golden age" of 1873-1914 - the proletariat had been able to constitute great permanent mass organisations (particularly the trade unions) whose existence was one of the first conditions for undertaking successful struggles. In the historic period which opened at the beginning of the 20th century, that of the decadence of capitalism marked by the First World War, the general organisation of the working class was constructed in and through the struggle, disappearing with it if the latter was unable to go to the end, that's to say up to a revolutionary combat to destroy the bourgeois state.

In such conditions, the acquisitions of the struggles could no longer be reckoned in the manner of an accountant, as a sum of staggered gains consolidated year on year, nor by mass permanent organisation. These acquisitions were concretised by "abstract" gains (the evolution of consciousness, enrichment of the historic programme due to lessons from the struggle, perspectives for the future...) won in great moments of agitation which then disappear from the immediate understanding of the larger masses and retreat to the small world of minorities, thus giving the illusion of never having existed.

February 1917: the heat of the struggle gives rise to the soviets

Between 1905 and 1917, the soviets were thus reduced to no more than an "idea" orienting the reflection and also the political struggle of a handful of militants. The pragmatic method which only accords importance to what one can see and touch doesn't allow for the idea that the soviets contained an immense material power. In 1917, Trotsky wrote: "Without doubt the revolution's next new assault will bring in its wake everywhere the establishment of workers councils."[4] The great actors of the February revolution were effectively the soviets.

The revolutionary minorities, and more particularly the Bolsheviks after 1905, defended and propagated the idea of setting up soviets in order to push the struggle forward. These minorities kept alive the flame of the workers' councils in the collective memory of the working class. It was for this reason, with strikes breaking out in February, which rapidly took on great breadth, that there were numerous initiatives and appeals for the constitution of soviets. Anweiler underlines that "the idea took hold of re-establishing the soviet, both in the striking factories and among the revolutionary intelligentsia.  Eye-witnesses report that as early as February 24 spokesmen were elected in some factories to a projected soviet."[5] In other words, the idea of soviets, which for a long time had remained confined to some minorities, was largely taken in charge by the masses in struggle.

Secondly, the Bolshevik Party contributed significantly to the rise of the soviets. And it did so not by basing itself on a prior organisational schema of imposing a chain of intermediary organisations which would lead to the formation of soviets, but through a quite different contribution, as we will see, related to a hard political combat.

During the winter of 1915, when strikes began to break out above all in Petersburg, the liberal bourgeoisie contrived a plan to dragoon the workers into war production, proposing that in the factories a Workers' Group was elected within the committees of the war industry. The Mensheviks stood for this and, having obtained a large majority, tried to use the Workers' Group to put forward demands. They were proposing in fact, in the image of the unions in other European countries, to use a "workers' organisation" to sell the war effort.

The Bolsheviks opposed this proposal in October 1915 through the words of Lenin: "We oppose participation in war-industries commissions which further the imperialist, reactionary war"[6]. The Bolsheviks called for the election of strike committees and the Petersburg Party Committee proposed that "Representatives of factories and workshops, elected by proportional representation in all cities, should form an all-Russian soviet of workers' deputies".[7]

At first, the Mensheviks, with their electoral policy in favour of Workers' Groups, controlled the situation with an iron grip. The strikes of winter 1915 and the more numerous strikes of the second half of 1916 remained under the control of the Menshevik Workers' Groups but despite that, here and there, strike committees appeared. It was only in February that the seeds began to germinate.

The first attempt to set up a soviet took place during an improvised meeting held at the Tauride Palace on February 27. Those that participated were not representative; there were some elements of the Menshevik Party and the Workers' Group with some Bolshevik representatives and other independent elements. From this arose a very significant debate which put on the table two totally opposed options; the Mensheviks maintained that the meeting had to call itself the Provisional Soviet Committee; the Bolshevik Shliapnikov "opposed [this], arguing that this couldn't be done in the absence of representatives elected by the workers. He asked for their urgent convocation and the assembly agreed with him. It was decided to end the session and to launch summons to the main workers' concentrations and to the insurgent regiments."[8]

The proposal had dramatic effects. On the night of the 27th it began to spread to the workers' districts, the factories and the barracks. Workers and soldiers closely followed the development of events. The following day, numerous assemblies took place in the factories and barracks and, one after the other, they took the same decision; to set up a soviet and elect a delegate. In the afternoon the Tauride Palace was full from top to bottom with workers' and soldiers delegates. Sukhanov, in his Memoires,[9] describes the meeting that went on to make the historic decision to constitute the soviet: "when the session opened there were perhaps 250 deputies, but new groups endlessly entered the room."[10] He recalled how, when voting for the agenda, the session was interrupted by soldier's delegates who wanted to relay messages from the assemblies of their respective regiments. And one of them made the following summary: "The officers have disappeared. We no longer want to serve against the people, we are associating ourselves with our brother workers, all of us united to defend the cause of the people. We will give our lives for this cause. Our general assembly asked us to salute you". Sukhanov adds: "And with a voice full of emotion, in the middle of thunderous applause, the delegate added: Long Live the Revolution!"[11] The meeting, constantly interrupted by the arrival of new delegates who wanted to transmit the position of those that they represented, progressively confronted different questions: the formation of militias in the factories, protection against looting and the actions of Tsarist forces. One delegate proposed the creation of a "literary commission" to draw up an appeal addressed to the whole country, which was unanimously approved.[12] The arrival of a delegate from the Semionovski regiment - famous for its allegiance to the Tsar and its repressive role in 1905 - led to a new interruption. The delegate proclaimed: "Comrades and brothers, I bring to you salutations from all the men of the Semionovski regiment. Up to the last man, we have decided to join the people". This provoked "a current of enthusiasm which ran throughout the assembly" (Sukhanov). The assembly organised a "general staff of the insurrection" occupying all the strategic points of Petersburg.

The assembly of the soviet didn't take place in a void. The masses were mobilised. Sukhanov underlines the atmosphere  which surrounded the session: "The crowd was very compact; tens of thousands of men came there to salute the revolution. The rooms of the Palace could no longer contain so many men and, in front of the doors, the cordons of the Military Commission arrived in order to contain a more and more numerous crowd".[13]

March 1917: a gigantic network of soviets spreads throughout Russia

In 24 hours, the soviet was master of the situation. The triumph of the Petersburg insurrection provoked the extension of the revolution throughout the country: "The local workers and soldiers soviets throughout Russia were the backbone of the revolution."[14] How could such a gigantic extension happen that, in so little time, spread throughout the whole of the Russian territory? There were differences between the formation of the soviets in 1905 and in 1917. In 1905, the strikes broke out in January and successive waves of strikes unfolded without any massive organisation bar a few exceptions. The soviets were really constituted in October. In 1917 on the contrary, it was at the beginning of the struggle that the soviets were set up. The appeals of the Petersburg Soviet of February 28 fell on fertile soil. The impressive speed with which this soviet was set up was, by itself, indicative of the will to bring it into being that animated large layers of workers and soldiers.

Assemblies were held daily and didn't limit themselves to electing delegates to the soviet. It often happened that they were accompanied by a general assembly. Also and at the same time, workers' district soviets were set up. The soviet itself made such an appeal and, the same day, the workers of the combative Vyborg district, a proletarian area on the outskirts of Petersburg, took the lead in constituting a District Soviet and launched a very combative call for such soviets to be formed throughout the country. Workers in many other popular quarters followed their example in the ensuing days.

And in the same way factory assemblies constituted factory councils. The latter, although born out of the need for immediate demands and the organisation of work, didn't limit themselves to these aspects and became more and more politicised. Anweiler recognised that "In time the Petrograd factory committees achieved a solid organization that to some extent competed with the soviet of workers deputies. They united into borough councils and elected representatives to a central council, headed by an executive committee ... Because the committees represented the worker right at his place of work, their revolutionary role grew proportionately as the soviet consolidated into a permanent institution and lost touch with the masses."[15]

Thus, the formation of the soviets spread like wildfire. In Moscow "elections were held in the factories, and the soviet met for its first session, at which a three-man Executive Committee was elected. On the following day the workers soviet received its final form; ratios for representatives were set, deputies to the Petrograd soviet were elected, and formation of a new Provisional Government was approved." [16] "The revolution's triumphal march through Russia, leading in only a few days to collapse of the czarist government and its administrative machinery, was accompanied by a wave of revolutionary organisation among all levels of society, most strongly expressed in formation of soviets in al cities of the nation, from Finland to the pacific".[17]

Even if the soviets were concerned with local affairs, their main preoccupation was with general problems: the world war, economic chaos, the extension of the revolution to other countries, and they took measures to concretise these preoccupations. We should underline that the efforts to centralise the soviets came from "below" and not above. As we saw above, the Moscow Soviet decided to send delegates to Petersburg, considering it quite natural as it was the centre of the whole movement. Anweiler emphasises that "Workers and soldiers councils in other cities sent delegates to Petrograd or maintained permanent observers."[18] From mid-March, initiatives began to appear for a regional congress of soviets. In Moscow a conference of this nature took place on the 25th to the 27th with the participation of 70 workers' councils and 38 soldiers' councils. In the Donetz basin, there was a conference with the same characteristics which brought together 48 soviets. All these efforts culminated in the holding of a First All Russian Congress of Soviets which took place on the 29th March to the 3rd of April and regrouped delegates of 480 soviets.

The "organisational virus" spread to soldiers who, sick of war, deserted the battlefields, mutinied, expelled their officers and decided to return home. Contrary to 1905, where they practically never existed, soldiers' councils multiplied and proliferated in the regiments, armouries, naval bases and arsenals... The army was made up of a conglomeration of social classes, essentially peasants, the workers being a minority. Despite this heterogeneity, the majority of the soviets united around the proletariat. As the bourgeois historian and economist Tugan Baranovski noted: "it is not the army that has unleashed the insurrection, it's the workers. It wasn't the generals, but soldiers who went to the Duma of the Empire.[19] And the soldiers supported the workers, not at all to docilely comply with the injunctions of their officers, but... because they felt related by blood to the workers as a class of toilers like themselves."[20]

Soviet organisation progressively won ground, broadening out from May 1917 when the formation of peasant councils began to move these masses, for centuries used to being treated like beasts of burden. This was also a fundamental difference with 1905, where there were relatively few, mostly totally disorganised, uprisings. That all of Russia was covered by a gigantic network of councils is a historic fact of enormous significance. As Trotsky noted, "in all preceding revolutions, the workers, artisans and a certain number of students, fought on the barricades; some soldiers played their part; then, the well-to-do bourgeoisie, who had prudently observed events on the barricades through their windows, recovered power"[21], but this didn't happen this time. The masses stopped fighting "for the others" and fought for themselves through the councils. They applied themselves to all the business of economic, political, social and cultural life.

The worker masses were mobilised. The expression of this mobilisation was the soviets and, around them, a great network of soviet-type organisations (district councils, factory councils), a network that fed on itself and, in its turn, impulsed an impressive number of assemblies, meetings, debates and cultural activities that multiplied... Workers, soldiers, women and youth took up a feverish activity. They lived in a sort of permanent assembly. Work stopped to attend the factory assembly, the town or district soviet, gatherings, meetings and demonstrations. It's significant that after the strike of February, there were practically no strikes except at particular moments and in one-off or local situations. Contrary to a limited vision of the struggle, restricted to that of the strike, the absence of the latter did not mean a demobilisation. The workers were in permanent struggle, but the class struggle, as Engels said, constitutes a unity formed by the economic, political and ideological struggle. And the worker masses were involved in simultaneously taking on these three dimensions of their combat. With massive actions, demonstrations, gatherings, debates, the circulation of books and papers... the worker masses of Russia had taken their own destiny in hand and found in themselves inexhaustible reserves of thought, initiative, and research, all being addressed tirelessly in collective forums.

April 1917: the combat for "all power to the soviets"

"The Soviet took possession of all the post offices and telegraphs, the radio, all the stations, printers, so that without its authorisation it was impossible to send a telegram, leave Petersburg or publish a manifesto" were the words in his Memoires of a Cadet Party deputy.[22] However, as Trotsky noted, a terrible paradox existed since February: the power of the soviets had been entrusted by the majority (Menshevik and Social Revolutionary) to the bourgeoisie, practically obliging it to create the provisional government,[23] presided over by a Tsarist prince and made up of rich industrialists, cadets, and, to top it all, the "socialist" Kerensky.[24] The provisional government, hiding behind the soviets, pursued its policy of war and showed little concern for finding any solution to the serious problems that the workers and peasants were posing. This led the soviets to become ineffective and to disappear, as one can surmise from these declarations of leading Social Revolutionaries: "From their beginning the soviets did not...want to replace an all-Russian constituent assembly... On the contrary, leading the country toward a constituent assembly was their primary purpose... The soviets represent neither a state power paralleling the constituent assembly, nor one aligned with the Provisional Government. They are advisers to the people in the struggle for their interests...and they know that they represent only part of the country and are trusted only by the masses for whom they fight.  Therefore the soviets have always refused to pre-empt power and form a government."[25]

At the beginning of March, a sector of the working class was however becoming conscious of the fact that the soviets were tending to act as a screen for, and an instrument of, the policies of the bourgeoisie. There were also very animated debates in some soviets, factory and district committees on the "question of power". The Bolshevik minority were then lagging behind, its Central Committee[26] having just adopted a resolution of support critical of the provisional government, despite strong opposition from different sections of the party.[27]

The debate redoubled in intensity in March. "The Vyborg Committee called a meeting of thousands of workers and soldiers who, almost unanimously, adopted a resolution on the necessity for the Soviet to take power (...) The Vyborg resolution, by virtue of its success, was printed and displayed through posters. But the Petrograd Committee formally prohibited this resolution..."[28]

The arrival of Lenin in April radically transformed the situation. Lenin, who had followed with concern, since his exile in Switzerland, the little information on the shameful attitude of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, was reaching the same conclusions as the Vyborg Committee. In his April Theses he expressed it clearly: "The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution, which - owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie - to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants."[29] Many writers do not see in this decisive intervention of Lenin an expression of the role of the avant-garde of the revolutionary party and its most remarkable militants but, on the contrary, consider it an act of political opportunism. According to them, Lenin grasped the opportunity to use the soviets as a platform for conquering "absolute power", shedding his "strict Jacobin" clothes in order to put on those of an anarchist partisan of the "direct power of the masses". In fact, an old party member let fly that: "For many years, the place of Bakunin in the Russian revolution has been unoccupied; now it's taken by Lenin."[30] This legend is completely false. The confidence that Lenin had in the soviets in fact went very far back, to the lessons he drew from the 1905 revolution. In a draft resolution he proposed to the 4th Party Congress in 1906, he said that: "insofar as the soviets represent cells of revolutionary power, their strength and significance depend entirely on the vigour and success of the insurrection", and he added that "Such institutions are inevitably doomed to failure if they do not base themselves on the revolutionary army and overthrow the government powers (that is, transform them into a provisional revolutionary government."[31] In 1915, he returned to the same idea: "Soviets of workers deputies and similar institutions may be considered instruments of the insurrection and of revolutionary power. These institutions can be of definite usefulness only in spreading the political mass strike and an insurrection, depending on the degree of preparation, development, and progress."[32]

June - July 1917: the crisis of the soviets

Lenin was conscious however that the battle had only just begun: "It is only in fighting against this unconscious trust of the masses (a struggle which can only and must be made with the ideological arms of friendly persuasion, by referring to living experience) that we will really be able to rid ourselves of the present outbursts of revolutionary phrases, and really impulse the consciousness of the proletariat as well as that of the masses' local initiative, audacity and resolution."[33]

This would be bitterly verified at the time of the First Congress of All-Russian Soviets. Convoked in order to unify and centralise the network of different types of soviets spread out over the territory, its resolutions not only went against the revolution but led towards the destruction of the soviets. In June and July, a serious political problem appeared: the crisis of the soviets and their estrangement from the masses.

The general situation was marked by total disorder: a rise in unemployment, paralysis of transport, crop failures in the countryside and general rationing. Desertions multiplied in the army along with attempts to fraternise with the enemy on the front. The imperialist camp of the Entente (France, Britain and latterly the United States) pressurised the Provisional Government to launch a general offensive against the German front. The Menshevik and SR delegates, happy to oblige, adopted a resolution at the Congress of Soviets supporting the military offensive, whereas an important minority, regrouping not just the Bolsheviks, was against. To crown it all, the Congress rejected a proposal to limit the working day to 8 hours and had no interest in the agrarian problem. From the voice of the masses, it became the spokesman for what they hated above all, the continuation of imperialist war.

The circulation of Congress resolutions - and, in particular those supporting the military offensive - provoked a profound disappointment in the masses. They saw that their organisation was slipping between their fingers and they began to react. The district soviets of Petersburg, the soviet of the neighbouring town of Kronstadt and various factory councils and committees of several regiments proposed a great demonstration for June 10 whose objective would be to bring pressure on the Congress so that it changed its policy and oriented itself towards the taking of power, expelling the capitalist ministers.

The response of the Congress was to temporarily forbid the demonstrations under the pretext of the "danger of a monarchist plot". Delegates of the Congress were mobilised to move around the factories and regiments in order to "convince" the workers and soldiers. The evidence of a Menshevik delegate is eloquent: "Throughout the night, the majority of the Congress, more than five hundred of its members, stayed awake and went to factories, workshops and the Petrograd barracks, urging men not to go on the demonstration. In a good number of workshops and factories, and also in some parts of the garrison, the Congress had no authority... The Congress delegates were very often welcomed in a strongly unfriendly manner, sometimes with hostility and were frequently, angrily, shown the door".[34]

The leadership of the bourgeoisie had understood the need to save its main card - the confiscation of the soviets - to use against the first serious attempt of the masses to recuperate them. This it did, with its congenital Machiavellism, by utilising the Bolsheviks as a test of strength, launching a furious campaign against them. At the Congress of Cossacks which took place at the same time as the Congress of Soviets, Miliukov proclaimed that "the Bolsheviks were the worst enemies of the Russian revolution... It is time to finish with these gentlemen."[35] The Cossack congress decided "to support the threatened soviets. We Cossacks will never quarrel with the soviets."[36] As Trotsky underlined, "against the Bolsheviks, the reactionaries were even ready to march with the soviet in order to put it down much more quietly afterwards."[37] The Menshevik Liber clearly showed the objective in declaring to the Congress of Soviets: "If you want for yourselves the masses that are turning towards the Bolsheviks, break with Bolshevism."

The violent bourgeois counter-offensive against the masses was made in a situation where, on the whole, they were still politically weak. The Bolsheviks understood this and proposed the cancellation of the June 10 demonstration, which was only reluctantly accepted by some regiments and the most combative factories.

When this news reached the Congress of Soviets, a delegate proposed that a "really soviet" demonstration be convoked for the 18th of June. Miliukov analysed this initiative thus: "Following some speeches with a liberal tone at the Congress of Soviets, having succeed in preventing the armed demonstration on June 10...the socialist ministers felt that they went too far in their rapprochement with us, that the ground shifted under their feet. Alarmed, they abruptly turned towards the Bolsheviks". Trotsky rightly corrected this: "Understand that it's not a question of a turn towards the Bolsheviks, but of something quite different, an attempt to turn towards the masses, against the Bolsheviks."[38]

This was a bitter setback for the bourgeois-dominated Congress of Soviets. Workers and soldiers participated massively in the June 18 demonstration, brandishing banners calling for "all power to the soviets", the dismissal of the capitalist ministers, the end of the war, appeals for international solidarity. The demonstrations took up the orientations of the Bolsheviks and demanded the opposite of what the Congress asked for.

The situation got worse. Pressed by its allies in the Entente, the Russian bourgeoisie was in an impasse. The famous military offensive turned out to be a fiasco, the workers and soldiers wanted a radical change of the policy of the soviets. But the situation wasn't so clear in the provinces and the countryside where, despite a certain radicalisation, the great majority remained faithful to the SRs and to the Provisional Government.

The moment was approaching for the bourgeoisie to try to lay an ambush for the masses in Petersburg by provoking a premature confrontation which would allow it to deliver a sudden blow to the avant-garde of the movement and thus open the door to the counter-revolution.

The forces of the bourgeoisie reorganised. "Officers' soviets" were set up whose task was to organise elite forces in order to militarily wipe out the revolution. Encouraged by the western democracies, the Tsarist black gangs raised their heads. According to the words of Lenin, the old Duma functioned as a counter-revolutionary office without the social-democratic traitor leaders posing the least obstacle to it.

A series of subtle provocations were programmed in order to drive the workers of Petersburg into the trap of a premature insurrection. First of all the Cadet Party withdrew its ministers from the Provisional Government so that the latter was only composed of "socialists". This was a sort of invitation to the workers to demand the immediate taking of power and launch themselves into insurrection. The Entente then gave a real ultimatum to the Provisional Government: choose between the soviets or a constitutional government. Finally, the most violent provocation was the threat to remove the most combative regiments from the capital and send them to the front.

Important numbers of workers and soldiers in Petersburg took the bait. From numerous district, factory and regimental soviets, an armed demonstration was called for July 4. Its slogan was that the soviets take power. This initiative showed that the workers had understood that there was no outcome other than revolution. But, at the same time, they were demanding that power was assumed by the soviets as they were then constituted, that is to say with the majority in the hands of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries whose concern was to subordinate the soviets to the bourgeoisie. The subsequently celebrated scene, where a worker addressed a Menshevik soviet member, "why don't you take power once and for all?" is significant of the persisting illusions within the working class. This was like inviting the wolf into the sheep-pen! The Bolsheviks warned against the trap that was being laid. They did not do so with complacency, from high on a pedestal, telling the masses on which points they were mistaken. They put themselves at the head of the demonstration, shoulder to shoulder with the workers and soldiers in order to contribute all their forces so that the response was massive but didn't slide towards  a decisive confrontation whose defeat was written in advance.[39] The demonstration ended in good order and did not launch a revolutionary assault. A massacre was avoided, which was a victory for the masses for the future. But the bourgeoisie couldn't retreat; it had to continue its offensive. The Provisional Government entirely made up of "worker" ministers then unleashed a brutal repression aimed particularly against the Bolsheviks. The party was declared illegal, numerous militants were imprisoned, its entire press was forbidden and Lenin had to go into clandestinity.

Through a difficult but heroic effort, the Bolshevik Party contributed decisively to avoiding the masses' defeat, dispersion and rout that was threatened by their disorganisation. The Petersburg Soviet, by contrast, supporting the elected Executive Committee at the recent Congress of Soviets, reached the depths of ignominy by endorsing the unleashing of a brutal repression and reaction.

How was the bourgeoisie able to derail the soviets?

The organisation of the masses in workers' councils from February 1917 created the opportunity to develop their strength, organisation and consciousness for the final assault against the power of the bourgeoisie. The period which followed, the so-called period of dual power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, constituted a critical stage for the two antagonistic classes, which could lead, for one or the other, to a political and military victory over the enemy class.

Throughout this period, the level of consciousness in the masses, which was still weak relative to the need for proletarian revolution, constituted a breach that the bourgeoisie had to try to fill in order to abort the emerging revolutionary process. For this it used a weapon as dangerous as it was pernicious, the sabotage from within exercised by bourgeois forces behind a "radical" " workers'" mask. This Trojan Horse of the counter-revolution was at this time in Russia constituted by the Menshevik and SR "socialist" parties.

At the beginning, many workers entertained illusions in the Provisional Government and saw it as a product of the soviets, whereas in reality it was their worst enemy. As for the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, they enjoyed a certain trust among the great mass of workers who they had  deceived with their radical speeches, their revolutionary phraseology, which allowed them to politically dominate the great majority of the soviets. It was from this position of strength that that they strove to empty these organs of their revolutionary content in order to place them at the service of the bourgeoisie. If they failed in this attempt it was because the permanently mobilised masses, through their own experience, led them with the support of the Bolshevik Party, to unmask the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, to the point that the latter were led to assume the orientation of the Provisional Government on such fundamental questions as war and the conditions of life.

In the next article, we will see how, from the end of August 1917, the soviets were able to regenerate themselves and really become launch-pads for taking power, culminating in the victory of the October revolution.

C.Mir, March 8 2010

 


[1]. Cf. International Review n°. 140.

[2]. We now have lots of material and much more detail on how the Russian revolution developed, and also on the decisive role played by the Bolshevik Party. In particular, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed, our pamphlets on the Russian revolution as well as numerous articles in our International Review, cf. n°s. 71, 72, 89 to 91.

[3]. Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, Pantheon, 1974. Very anti-Bolshevik, the author could nevertheless narrate the facts faithfully, and with impartiality recognize the contribution of the Bolsheviks, which contrasts with sectarian and dogmatic judgments delivered from time to time.

[4]. Quoted by Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.90.

[5]. Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.104.

[6]. Ibid., p.99.

[7]. Ibid., p.100.

[8]. Gérard Walter, Overview of the Russian revolution.

[9]. Published in seven volumes in 1922, they give the perspective of an independent socialist, a collaborator of Gorki and Martov's Menshevik internationalists. Even though he disagreed with the Bolsheviks, he supported the October revolution. This and the following quotes are extracted and translated from a summary of his Memoires, published in Spanish.

[10]. According to Anweiler, there were around 1,000 delegates at the end of the session and up to 3,000 by the next one.

[11]. Sukhanov, Op. Cit., p.54.

[12]. This commission proposed the permanent edition of a soviet paper: Izvestia (The News), which appeared regularly from then on.

[13]. Sukhanov, Op. Cit., p.56

[14]. Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.116.

[15]. Ibid., pp.125-6.

[16]. Ibid., pp.113-4.

[17]. Ibid., p.113. This quote differs slightly from that in the French version of this article.

[18]. Ibid., p.122.

[19]. Chamber of Deputies.

[20]. Quoted by Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. Constitutional Democratic Party (KD) of the big bourgeoisie, hastily formed in 1905. Its leader was Miliukov, eminence grise of the Russian bourgeoisie at that time.

[23]. Trotsky tells how the bourgeoisie was paralysed and how the Menshevik chiefs used their influence in the soviets to reserve for themselves unconditional power, of which Miliukov "made no bones about showing his satisfaction and agreeable surprise" (Memoires of Sukhanov, a Menshevik very close to events within the provisional government).

[24]. This lawyer, very popular in workers' circles before the revolution, ended up being appointed head of the provisional government and then led various attempts to finish off the workers. His intentions are revealed in the memoires of the British ambassador at the time: "Kerensky urged me to have patience, assuring me that the soviets would end up dying a natural death. They would soon give up their functions to the democratic organs of autonomous administration."

[25]. Cited by Anweiler Op. Cit., p.142..

[26]. Composed of Stalin, Kamenev and Molotov. Lenin was in exile in Switzerland and had no practical means of  contacting the party.

[27]. During the Petrograd Party Committee meeting on March 5th, the draft resolution presented by Shliapnikov was rejected. It said: "The task now is development of a provisional revolutionary government through federation of local soviets. For conquest of the central power it is essential...to secure  the power of the workers and soldiers deputies" (Cited by Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.147).

[28]. Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[29]. We can't discuss here  the content of these Theses,  extremely interesting though they are. Cf. International Review n°. 89, "The April Theses: Signpost to the Proletarian Revolution".

[30].  Cited by Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[31].  Cited by Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.82.

[32].  Ibid., p.85.

[33].  Lenin, Selected Works. 

[34].  Cited by Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[35]. That the head of the bourgeoisie in Russia could talk in the name of the revolution reveals all the cynicism typical of this class!

[36]. These regiments were characterised by their obedience to the Tsar and to established order. They were the last to go over to the revolution.

[37].  Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[38]. All the quotes are extracts from Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[39],  See our article on "The July days and the indispensable role of the party", International Review n°. 90. We refer our readers to this article for a more detailed analysis of this event.

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International Review no.142 - 3rd Quarter 2010

Capitalism has reached a dead-end; neither austerity packages nor recovery plans can change anything

"The G20 in search of a new way of governing the world". This was the ambitious title given to an article in Le Monde (26 June 2010) on the latest summit of the world's "great". An ambition in keeping with the catastrophic state of the planet!

An improvement in the situation is no doubt the subject of ardent hopes. But over the past two years, attacks on workers' living standards have been speeding up all over the world. Despite all the announcements about an economic recovery, the world economy is stagnating and its future looks increasingly sombre. In the face of all this, a meeting of the leaders in charge of running this world economy, the people who hold the fate of the planet's inhabitants in their hands, was obliged to discuss ways of making things better.

The meeting of the G8 which preceded this G20 had to agree on the policies to follow to take the world economy out of the crisis: carrying on with recovery plans as the US recommends and is doing, or imposing austerity plans to deal with the threat of bankruptcy looming over a growing number of states, as the most important countries of the European Union recommend and are doing. The G20 had to look at taxing the banks in order to build up a fund for resolving financial crises - the crisis of 2007 has not been resolved even if its most devastating effects have for the moment been held in check; at the same time, it had to agree on ways of regulating the financial system in order to avoid the most destabilising forms of speculation and to guide the financial resources liberated as a result towards developing production. What came out of this summit? Nothing. The mountain didn't even give rise to a mole hill. No decision was taken about any of the problems; as we will see in more detail later on, the participants could do no more than register their complete disagreement: "On the subjects which made up the bulk of this G20, the participants at the summit judged that the most urgent thing was to wait. The divergences were too great and so was the lack of preparation".[1] President Sarkozy of France did his best to play down this demonstration of powerlessness by the world bourgeoisie, commenting that "you can't take historic decisions at every summit"!

The previous G20s had promised to introduce reforms based on the lessons of the "subprime" affair and the financial crisis that followed. This time, there weren't even any promises. Why did the grand managers of world capitalism prove so incapable of taking the least decision? The root of the problem is that there is no solution to the crisis of capitalism other than the overthrow of this historically senile mode of production. There is also another, more circumstantial explanation: since the heads of state are aware that the world economy is sinking into a very deep hole, they are wise enough to avoid having to repeat the famous phrase of the former president of the Ivory Coast, F Houphouët Boigny: "We were at the edge of a precipice but we have taken a big step forward".[2] This time round, no one would be laughing.

The end of recovery plans and the return of the depression

The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 brought with it a fall in production in the major countries of the world (with a slow-down for China and India). To try to deal with this situation, the bourgeoisie in most countries was obliged to bring in recovery plans, the ones in China and the USA being by far the most significant. While these plans did permit a partial revival of global economic activity and a certain degree of stabilisation in the developed countries, their effects on demand, production and trade are now wearing off.

Despite all the propaganda about the so-called recovery, the bourgeoisie is now forced to admit that this is not how things have turned out. In the USA, growth was expected to reach 3.5% in 2010 but has been revised downwards to 2.7%; unemployment figures have grown week by week and the American economy has started destroying jobs;[3] in general, a number of indicators created to measure economic activity in the US show that growth is tending to weaken. In the euro zone, growth was a mere 0.1% in the first quarter of 2010 and the European Central Bank predicts that the total for the year will be no more than 1%. Bad news keeps on coming: growth in manufacturing is less and less strong and unemployment is again on the rise, with the exception of Germany. It is predicted that the GNP of Spain will continue to diminish in 2010 (-0.3%). It is significant that, both in the USA and Europe, investments keep falling, which means that enterprises are not envisaging any real growth in production.

Above all, Asia, the region of the world that was supposed to become the new centre of gravity of the world economy, is now seeing its activity slowing down. In China, the Conference Board index, which was predicted to rise by 1.7% in April, only went up by 0.3%; this figure is corroborated by all of those which have been published recently. While the monthly figures published about a given country are not necessarily indicative of a general tendency, the fact that, in the major countries of the region, economic activity has taken the same turn at the same moment does signify something serious; thus, the index of economic activity in India shows a slow-down and, in Japan, the figures for industrial production and household consumption for the month of May are falling.

Finally, confirming this trend, which gives the lie to all the media fanfares about the recovery, the "Baltic Dry Index", which measures the evolution of world trade, is also heading downwards.

The bankruptcy of states

While the evolution of different forms of economic activity testifies to a descent into depression, entire nation states are experiencing growing difficulty in repaying their debts. This can't fail to recall the sub-prime crisis which saw numerous American households unable to pay back the loans granted to them. A few months ago, it was the turn of the Greek state to be in the hot seat, and it was widely suspected that the state of its finances was much worse than had initially been announced. At the same time, the solvency of several other European states (gracefully given the acronym of PIIGS), Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain as well as Greece, was called into question by the debt-rating agencies. No doubt speculation on these economies worsened their difficulties, and the role played by these agencies (which were created by the big banks) is far from clear. It remains the case that what is basically at issue in the crisis of confidence affecting these countries is the scale of their budget deficits, which have reached levels unequalled since the Second World War, and of their public debt. The recovery plans put in place by the different states have made little impact on the situation. In fact they have led to a fall in the currency reserves of the different public treasuries, and consequently to increasing difficulties for the states concerned in repaying the interest on the loans extended to them. Now, the payment of the interest on their debts is the minimum condition for the great world banking organisms to continue loaning to them. But the PIIGS are not the only ones to see a very strong increase in their public deficits and thus in public debt. The debt-rating agencies have expressly insisted that Britain reduce its debt and warned that it will have to join the ranks of the PIIGS if it doesn't make a major effort to reduce its public deficit. We should add for good measure that Japan (which, in the 1990s was predicted to supplant the USA as the world's leading economy) has reached a public debt that corresponds to twice its GNP.[4] This list, which could easily be lengthened, leads us to the conclusion that the tendency of states to default on sovereign debt is a global one, because all states are being hit by the aggravation of the debt crisis since 2007, and all of them have suffered imbalances comparable to those of Greece and Portugal.

But it's not just states whose financial situation is nearing insolvency. The banking system is also in an increasingly grave situation, for the following reasons:

  • all the specialists know and are saying that the banks have not been purified of the "toxic" products which resulted in the bankruptcy of numerous financial institutions at the end of 2008;
  • the banks, faced with these difficulties, have still not stopped speculating on the world's financial markets by buying some very risky products. On the contrary, they have carried on playing the same game to try to make up for the massive losses they have incurred;
  • the aggravation of the crisis since the end of 2007 has forced a number of companies to go bust, so that many households, hit by unemployment, can no longer, in contrast to previous years, repay the various loans they were given.

An illustration of this situation was provided recently, on 22 May, when a savings company in Spain called Caja Sur was placed under state control. But this event was just the tip of the iceberg as regards the difficulties facing banks in the last few months. Other banks in Europe have been downgraded by the debt-rating agencies (Caja Madrid in Spain, BNP in France); but above all, the European Central Bank has informed the financial world that the European banks will have to depreciate their shares by 195 billion euros in the next two years, and that their need for capital up until 2012 has risen to 800 billion euros. On another level, a recent event has been a striking verification of the present fragility of the banking system: the German company Siemens has decided to create its own bank, an institution which will be in its service and in the service of its clients. The reason for this is simple: having already lost the mere bagatelle of 140 billion euros at the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the company is afraid of a repeat phenomenon with the liquidities it has passed through the tills of the "classical" banks. And we have also learned that Siemens has not invented anything new here, since the Veolia company, which is allied with British American Tobacco and other less important enterprises, did the same thing in January 2010.[5] It's clear that, if companies whose solidity is not in question for the time being are no longer putting their funds in the vaults of the big banks, the situation of the latter is not going to get any better!

But what is particularly important to underline is that problems connected to the insolvency of states and banks can only pile up more and more: this is already the case, but it's going to increase considerably in the weeks and months ahead. It's now clear that if a state goes bust and is not rescued by other states, as has been the case with Greece, this will result in the collapse of the banks which have given it massive loans. The credit doled out by German and French banks to the states belonging to the PIIGS group amounts to something like 1000 billion euros, so it is evident that if these countries default on their repayments this will have incalculable consequences on France and Germany, and thus for the world economy.

Today, it's Spain that is in the eye of the world financial storm. The European Central Bank has announced that Spanish banks that are not creditworthy enough to borrow on the money markets will be refinanced to the tune of 85.6 billion euros, just for the month of May. Moreover it is being said in the stock markets that the Spanish state has got to come up with a considerable sum by the end of July or the beginning of August.[6] Such sums have thus got to be found pretty soon and it's because the situation is so dramatic that the director of the IMF, D Strauss-Kahn, and the joint Secretary of State for the Treasury, C Collins, have both been to Madrid. A plan for salvaging Spain's sovereign debt, involving between 200 and 250 billion euros, is under review.

If there is such a strong focus on Spain at the moment, it's because the problems posed by the financial situation there could have very serious consequences:

  • if Spain is not propped up and it goes bust, this would lead to a general discrediting of the euro and a loss of confidence in all payments in this currency; in other words, the euro zone as a whole will be in trouble;
  • France and Germany, i.e. the strongest economies in the euro zone, would be unable to take up the slack if Spain defaults, and this would result in the destabilisation of their finances and, in the end, of their whole economy (see the analysis developed by the economist P Artus in Le Monde, 16 April 2010).

This means that any aid to the Spanish state to help it avoiding a default on its payments could only be the fruit of an agreement by all the western countries, and the price for this would be to make their own financial situation even more fragile than it is already. And given that, as we have seen, the majority of states are in a situation close to that of Spain, they would also have to come up with policies aimed at preventing them from becoming incapable of repaying a cascading sovereign debt. 

From all this it follows that capitalism no longer has the means to reverse the aggravation of the crisis that we have seen since 2007.

States differ on what policy to adopt

"Rigour or recovery: the persistent disagreement of the G8 leaders" was a headline in Le Monde's 27-28 June edition. Despite the diplomatic language used, it emerged clearly that the disagreement between the different countries was very deep. Rigour was called for by Britain and Germany, with the euro zone in its wake; recovery was wanted by the USA and to a lesser extent by China. What are the reasons behind this disagreement?

Recognising the grave implications for Europe and the world of the bankruptcy of the Greek state, the EU and the IMF finally organised the salvage of Greece's sovereign debt, despite the disagreements between the states taking part in the salvage operation. But this event resulted in a major hardening of attitudes among the countries of the euro zone:

  • first, all finally agreed on the necessity to take steps to shore up states in dire need, since any defaulting on payments would shake the whole European financial system, risking its complete collapse. This is why a 750 billion support fund was set up, two thirds of it supplied by the countries of the euro zone and one third by the IMF, which has the job of making sure that states in default of payments are able to meet their obligations. Similarly, given the situation of the banks in the euro zone, the European Central Bank agreed to take on the more or less dubious debts owed by the banks. This is what we have just seen with the Spanish banks.
  • Secondly, to reduce the risk of defaulting on payments, the states decided to sanitise their own public finances and their own banking systems. To do this they launched austerity plans which mean bringing down working class living standards to a degree comparable to what happened in the 1930s. The number of attacks is so great that just enumerating them would be beyond the scope of this article. Let's just take some significant examples. In Spain, civil servants' wages were cut by 5% and 13,000 jobs were eliminated. In Germany, 14,000 public sector jobs will be cut between now and 2014, and payments to the long term unemployed will be reduced. In all countries public spending will be decreased.

The logic claimed for these measures is this: while we must save the financial system through support to banks in difficulty and states that risk defaulting on their payments, it is necessary to make public finances more healthy in order to be able to borrow again later on and thus launch a new phase of growth. In fact, behind the declared objective, there is first of all the determination of the German bourgeoisie to preserve its economic interests; for this national capital, which has staked so much on being able to sell its commodities - especially its machine-tools and its chemical products - to the rest of the world, it is out of the question to bear the costs of a recovery or of helping other ailing European states by raising its own production costs. This would mean its commodities becoming less competitive. And since this is the only country capable of supporting other European countries, it is imposing a policy of austerity on all of them, even if that doesn't correspond to their interests.

The fact that Britain, which does not suffer from the constraints of the euro zone, is bringing in the same policy, is a significant expression of the depth of the crisis. For the UK, it's not time to boost a recovery since its budget deficit for 2010 has reached 11.5% of GNP. The risk of defaulting on sovereign debt is too great - it would result in the collapse of sterling. We should also note that Japan - given the size of its public debt - has adopted the same austerity policy. More and more countries are thinking that their deficits and public debt have become too dangerous, that defaulting on payment of sovereign debt would mean a considerable weakening of the national capital. They are thus opting for an austerity policy that can only lead to deflation.[7]

Now it's this deflationary dynamic which is so much feared by the US. They are accusing the Europeans of getting themselves into a "Hoover episode" (after the US President during the first part of the Depression in the 30s), which amounts to accusing the European states of pulling the world into a depression and a deflation as in 1929-32. According to the Americans, even if it is legitimate to want to reduce public deficits, this should be done later, when the "recovery" is really underway. By defending this position, the US is standing up for its own interests, since, as the holder of the world's reserve currency, creating extra currency to feed the recovery only costs them the price of the printing. However, this doesn't mean that they don't have a real fear of seeing the world economy lurching into a deflationary course. 

In the end, whatever options are taken up, the policy changes carried out recently as well as the fears expressed by the various factions of the world bourgeoisie reveal the disarray in their ranks: there are no longer any good solutions! 

What perspectives?

The effects of the recovery plans are over and a new plunge into depression is underway. This will mean that companies will have growing difficulties in making adequate profits and many of them will go under. The austerity packages which a large number of countries are putting in place can only accelerate the fall into depression and will engender a process of deflation, some signs of which are already appearing.

There can be no doubt that the hope that austerity policies will restore health to public finances and pave the way for future borrowing is a pure illusion. According to the IMF's calculations, the consequences of Greece's austerity plan will be a loss of 8% of its GNP. A fall in Spain's GNP is already predicted. Furthermore, austerity plans will lead to a fall in fiscal returns and this will serve to further widen the very deficits that the austerity plans are supposed to reduce! We can expect a fall in production in most countries of the world, and of world trade, by the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, with all the consequences this will have for the development of poverty and the degradation of working class living standards.

It's not impossible that, given the danger that austerity policies will only speed up the depression, a change of policy will come about after a few months, and the position advocated by the USA will be adopted. The last six months have shown us how incapable the bourgeoisie is of seeing beyond the very short term, since it has so little margin for manoeuvre: only one year ago everyone was in favour of recovery plans! If a new policy of revival is adopted, it will mean resorting to the printing press in a big way (some say that the US is already getting ready to do this). But then we will see a general fall in the value of currencies, i.e. an explosion of inflation, and that will also mean new and dramatic attacks on workers' living standards.

Vitaz 3.7.10

 

[1]Le Monde, 29 June 2010.

[2]. www.dicocitations.com/citations/citation-7496.php

[3]. After 5 consecutive months in which jobs were being created, 125,000 on were destroyed in June, which is more than the analysts feared. See the article "Après cinq mois de créations d'emplois, les États-Unis se remettent à en détruire" (www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2010/07/03/apres-cinq-mois-de-creations-...)

[4]. Among other things, the fact that Japan currently holds the second largest currency reserves in the world allows it to be marked  less severely by the debt-rating agencies than many countries who are actually less deeply in debt

[5]www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2010/06/29/siemens-cree-sa-banque-afin-de-s-affranchir-des-etablissements-traditionnels_1380459_3234.html

[6]. We are talking about 280 billion euros. Of course, because of their origin (the stock markets) such figures are disputable and have obviously been denied by the authorities, since in such circumstances, silence would be taken as a confirmation and could lead to all kinds of panic.

[7]. This means a long term fall in prices, brought about in this case by a lack of demand, itself the consequence of austerity programmes. 

What are workers' councils? (Part 3): The revolution of 1917 (July to October)

In the series "What are workers' councils?" we want to answer the question by analysing the historical experience of the proletariat. It isn't a case of putting the soviets forward as a perfect model for others to copy; we want to understand both their mistakes as well as their achievements, so that current and future generations will be armed with this knowledge.

In the first article we saw how they emerged in the revolution of 1905 in Russia.[1] In the second we saw how they were the centrepiece of the revolution of February 1917 and how they entered a deep crisis in June-July 1917 until being taken hostage by the bourgeois counter-revolution.[2]

In this third article we will see how they were recaptured by the mass of workers and soldiers who would then seize power in October 1917.

After the defeat of July, the bourgeoisie is intent on destroying the soviets

The process of evolution, both in nature and in human society, is never linear. Its course is full of contradictions, convulsions, dramatic setbacks, retreats and advances. This analysis can readily be applied to the struggle of the proletariat, a class that by definition is excluded from the ownership of the means of production and has no economic power. Its struggle is one of convulsions and contradictions, with retreats, with what seem like permanent acquisitions appearing to be lost, with long periods of apathy and despondency.

Following the February Revolution, the workers and soldiers seemed to skip from one victory to another. Bolshevism became more influential; the masses - especially in the region around Petrograd - were moving in the direction of revolution. It was like a fruit ripening.

However, in July there were moments of crisis and hesitancy that are typical of the proletarian struggle. "A direct defeat was experienced by the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, who in their urge forward had come up against the confusedness and contradictions of their own aims, on the one hand, and, on the other, the backwardness of the provinces and the front."[3]

The bourgeoisie seized the opportunity to launch a furious offensive: the Bolsheviks were vilified as German agents[4] and arrested en masse; paramilitary gangs were organised who attacked them in the street, imposed boycotts of their meetings, wrecked their premises and print shops. The fearsome Tsarist Black Hundreds, the monarchist circles, the government bodies regained the upper hand. The bourgeoisie - with the backing of British and French diplomats - was aiming to destroy the soviets and to impose a ferocious dictatorship.[5]

The revolution that began in February reached a point where the spectre of defeat became ever more likely: "Many thought that the revolution in general had exhausted itself. The February Revolution had indeed exhausted itself to the bottom. This inner crisis in the mass consciousness, combining with the slanders and measures of repression, caused confusion and retreat - in some cases panic. The enemy grew bolder. In the masses themselves all the backward and dubious elements rose to the surface, those impatient of disturbances and deprivations."[6]

The Bolsheviks inspire the response of the masses

However, at this difficult time, the Bolsheviks proved to be an essential bastion of the proletarian forces. Pursued, slandered, shaken by violent debates in their own ranks and the resignation of many militants, they did not weaken or fall into disarray. They concentrated their efforts on drawing the lessons of the defeat and in particular the key lesson: how had the soviets been taken hostage by the bourgeoisie and their existence threatened?

From February to July there was a situation of dual power: The soviets were on the one side and on the other was the power of the bourgeois state, which had not been destroyed and still had enough in reserve to make a full recovery. The events of July had destroyed the impossible equilibrium that existed between soviets and state power:

"The General Staff and the military leaders, with the deliberate or semi-deliberate assistance of Kerensky, whom even the most prominent Socialist-Revolutionaries now call a Cavaignac,[7] have seized actual state power and have proceeded to shoot down revolutionary units at the front, disarm the revolutionary troops and workers in Petrograd and Moscow, suppress unrest in Nizhni-Novgorod, arrest Bolsheviks and ban their papers, not only without trial, but even without a government order. [...] The true meaning of the policy of military dictatorship, which now reigns supreme and is supported by the Cadets and monarchists, is preparations for disbanding the Soviets."[8]

Lenin also showed how the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries "have completely betrayed the cause of the revolution by putting it in the hands of the counter-revolutionaries and by turning themselves, their parties and the Soviets into mere fig-leaves of the counter-revolution."[9]

Under such conditions, "All hopes for a peaceful development of the Russian revolution have vanished for good. This is the objective situation: either complete victory for the military dictatorship, or victory for the workers' armed uprising [...] The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!' was a slogan for peaceful development of the revolution which was possible in April, May, June, and up to July 5."[10]

In his book The Soviets, Anweiler[11] uses this analysis to try to show that "This was the first barely veiled proclamation that the Bolsheviks aimed to win sole power. Lenin aimed to take power for his party with or against the soviets. [...] Plainly to him the soviets were only pawns and had no intrinsic value as a superior democratic form of government."[12]

Here is the now famous and often repeated charge that Lenin "used the soviets tactically to achieve absolute power". However, an analysis of the article that Lenin wrote at a later date demonstrates that his concerns were radically different from those attributed to him by Anweiler: he was trying to find a way to get the soviets out of the crisis they were in, to pull them back from the false path that was leading to their disappearance.

In the article On slogans, Lenin was unequivocal: "After the experience of July 1917, it is the revolutionary proletariat that must independently take over state power. Without that the victory of the revolution is impossible. [...] Soviets may appear in this new revolution, and indeed are bound to, but not the present Soviets, not organs collaborating with the bourgeoisie, but organs of revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. It is true that even then we shall be in favour of building the whole state on the model of the Soviets. It is not a question of Soviets in general, but of combating the present counter-revolution and the treachery of the present Soviets."[13] He specifically asserts: "A new cycle is beginning, one that involves not the old classes, not the old parties, not the old Soviets, but classes, parties and Soviets rejuvenated in the fire of struggle, tempered, schooled and refashioned by the process of the struggle."[14]

The writings of Lenin contributed to a stormy debate in the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, which crystallised during the Sixth Party Congress. It was held from July 26th to August 3rd in the strictest secrecy and in the absence of Lenin and Trotsky, who were being pursued by police. In the Congress three positions were put forward: the first, reflecting the disorientation of the defeat in July and the drift of the soviets, openly proposed "abandoning them" (Stalin, Molotov, Sokolnikov); the second vehemently supported sticking with the old position of "All power to the soviets"; the third advocated entrusting the "grass roots" organisations (factory councils, local soviets, district soviets) with responsibility for reconstituting the collective power of workers.

In mid-July, the masses are beginning to recover

It was the last that proved to be the correct position. From mid-July the "grass roots" soviet organisations had begun a fight for the renewal of the soviets.

In the second article of this series we saw how the masses were organised around the soviets in a huge network of soviet organisations of all sorts, that expressed their unity and strength.[15] The apex of the soviet system - the soviets in the towns - did not preside over an ocean of passivity of the masses; just the opposite, there was an intense collective life embodied in thousands of assemblies, factory councils, district soviets, inter-district assemblies, conferences, formal and informal meetings... In his Memoires, Sukhanov[16] gives us an idea of the atmosphere that prevailed at the Conference of the Petrograd Factory Councils: "On May 30th in the White Hall, a conference of workshop and factory committees from the capital and surrounding areas was convened. The conference had been prepared from the ‘grass roots'; its planning had been conceived in the factories without the involvement of any government bodies concerned with labour issues, or even the soviets. [...] The conference was truly representative: the workers came from their workbenches, and they participated actively in its work in large numbers. For two days, this workers' parliament discussed the economic crisis and the breakdown inside the country."[17]

Even in the worst moments following the July Days, the masses were able to maintain these organisations, which were less affected by the crisis than "the big soviet organs": the Petrograd Soviet, the Congress of Soviets and its executive committee, the CEC (Central Executive Committee).

Two concomitant reasons explain this difference. First, the "grass roots" soviet organisations were directly convened under pressure from the masses who, realising the problems and the hazards, called for an assembly and saw it convened within the space of a few hours. The situation of the soviet organs "at the top level" was very different: "However as the Soviet worked more efficiently, it lost proportionately its direct contact with the masses. The plenary sessions, almost daily during the early weeks, were less frequent and only sparsely attended by the deputies. The Soviet Executive became increasingly independent, even though it remained subject to certain controls of the deputies, who had the right to discharge it."[18]

Secondly, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were concentrated in the bureaucratic nucleus of the large soviet organs. Sukhanov described the atmosphere of intrigue and manipulation that emanated from the Petrograd Soviet: "The Presidium of the Soviet, which was originally an organ to manage internal procedure, tended to substitute itself for the Executive Committee in its functioning. In addition, it strengthened itself through a permanent and somewhat occult organisation that got the name ‘the Star Chamber'. It included members of the Presidium and a sort of clique made up from the devoted friends of Cheidze and Tsereteli. The latter, with the shame and the disgrace that went with it, was one of those accused of being dictatorial inside the Soviet."[19]

By contrast, the Bolsheviks conducted an active and daily intervention inside the soviets at the grass roots level. Their presence was very dynamic, they were often the first to propose meetings and debates and the adoption of resolutions that would give expression to the will and the advancement of the masses.

On July 15th, a demonstration of workers from the large factories in Petrograd massed in front of the building housing the soviet to denounce the slander against the Bolsheviks and to demand the release of prisoners. On July 20th, the assembly at the arms factory in Sestroretsk demanded the payment of wages that had been withheld owing to workers' involvement in the July Days; they devoted the money they recovered to funding the anti-war press. Trotsky recounts how, on July 24th, "...a meeting of the workers of 27 plants in the Peterhoff District passed soon after that a resolution of protest against the irresponsible government and its counter-revolutionary policy."[20]

Trotsky also noted that on July 21st delegations of soldiers from the front arrived in Petrograd. They were tired of all the hardship they were suffering and the repression the officers inflicted on the most visible individuals. They spoke about it to the Executive Committee of the soviet, which didn't consider it of any significance. Then several militant Bolsheviks suggested contacting the factories and the soldiers' and sailors' regiments. The reception there was completely different: they were received like brothers, listened to, fed and housed.

"At a conference that nobody summoned from above, which grew up spontaneously from below, representatives were present from 29 regiments at the front, from 90 Petrograd factories, from the Kronstadt sailors and from the surrounding garrisons. At the focus of the conference stood the trench delegates - among them a number of young officers. The Petrograd workers listened to the men from the front eagerly, trying not to let fall a word of their own. The latter told how the offensive and its consequences had devoured the revolution. Those grey soldiers - not in any sense agitators - painted in unstudied words the workaday life of the front. The details were disturbing - they demonstrated so nakedly how everything was crawling back to the old, hateful, pre-revolutionary regime", says Trotsky, and he adds the following: "Although Socialist-Revolutionaries obviously predominated among the men from the front, a drastic Bolshevik resolution was passed almost unanimously: only three men abstained from the voting. That resolution will not remain a dead letter. The dispersing delegates will tell the truth about how the Compromise leaders repulsed them and the workers received them."[21]

The Kronstadt Soviet - one of the vanguard posts of the revolution - also got to hear: "On 20th July a meeting in Yakorny Square demanded the transfer of power to the soviets, the sending of the Cossacks to the front with the gendarmes and police, the abolition of the death penalty, the admission of the Kronstadt delegates to Tsarskoe Selo to make sure that Nicholas II was adequately guarded, the disbandment of the ‘Battalions of Death', the confiscation of the bourgeois newspapers, etc."[22] In Moscow, the factory councils had agreed to hold joint meetings with the regimental committees, and in late July a conference of factory councils to which soldiers' representatives were invited adopted a resolution denouncing the government and demanding "new soviets to replace the government." In the elections on August 1st, six of the ten district councils in Moscow had a Bolshevik majority.

Faced with the price increases agreed by the Government and plant closures organised by the bosses, strikes and mass protests began to grow. Sectors of the working class hitherto considered to be "backward" (paper, leather, rubber, and janitors, etc.) also took part.

Sukhanov reported a significant development in the Workers' Section of the Petrograd Soviet: "When the Workers' Section of the Soviet created a Presidium, which it did not have before, the Presidium was found to be made up of Bolsheviks."[23]

In August a National Conference was held in Moscow whose objective was denounced by Sukhanov, as: "suppressing ‘all democratic' opinion to benefit ‘nation-wide' opinion, thus freeing the government of ‘the whole country' from the control of all kinds of organisations, of workers, peasants, Zimmerwaldians, half-Germans, half-Jews and other groups of hoodlums."[24]

Workers recognised the danger and many assemblies voted motions calling for a general strike. The Moscow Soviet rejected them by 364 votes to 304 but the district soviets protested against this decision: "The factories immediately demanded new elections to the Moscow Soviet, which was not only lagging behind the masses, but coming into sharp conflict with them. In the Zamoskvoretsky (Moscow suburb south of the Moskva) district soviet, which met jointly with the factory committees, a demand for the recall of those deputies who had ‘gone against the will of the working class' received 175 votes with 4 against and 19 abstaining!"[25] More than 400,000 workers went on strike, which spread to other towns like Kiev, Kostrava and Tsatarin.

The mobilisation and self-organisation of the masses foils the Kornilov coup

These are only a few significant facts, the tip of the iceberg of a vast process that showed a turning point in the attitudes that predominated from February to June - more passive, still suffering many illusions, and with the protests more restricted in workplaces, districts or towns:

  • numerous unitary assemblies of workers and soldiers were opened up to peasant delegates. The conference of factory and district soviets and factory districts invited soldiers' and sailors' delegates to work with them;
  • there was growing confidence in the Bolsheviks: after being slandered in July, the indignation at the persecution they suffered fuelled increasing recognition of the validity of their analyses and their slogans;
  • the multiplication of demands could only be met by the renewal the soviets and by taking power.

 

The bourgeoisie saw that the gains it had made in July were at risk of going up in smoke. The failure of the National Conference in Moscow was a big setback. English and French Embassies pushed for "decisive" action. This was the context of the "plan" for a military coup by General Kornilov.[26] Sukhanov emphasised that "Miliukov Rodzianko and Kornilov themselves had conceived it! Dumbfounded, these valiant heroes of the revolution had begun urgently to prepare, in secret, their plan of action. To allay suspicion, they stirred up public opinion against what the Bolsheviks might do next."[27]

 

We cannot analyse here all the details of the operation.[28] The important thing is that the massive mobilisation of workers and soldiers managed to stop the military machine in its tracks. And what is remarkable is that this response was made by developing an organisational effort that would provide the final impetus for the renewal of the Soviets and their march towards the seizure of power.

On the night of August 27th, the Petrograd Soviet proposed the formation of a Military Revolutionary Committee to organise the defence of the capital. The Bolshevik minority accepted the proposal but added that such a body "must be supported by the mass of workers and soldiers."[29] At the next session the Bolsheviks made a new proposal, accepted reluctantly by the Menshevik majority for, "the sharing of weapons in the factories and working-class neighbourhoods".[30] When announced, there was a quick response: "In the districts, according to the workers' press, there immediately appeared ‘whole queues of people eager to join the ranks of the Red Guard'. Drilling began in marksmanship and the handling of weapons. Experienced soldiers were brought in as teachers. By the 29th, Guards had been formed in almost all districts. The Red Guard announced its readiness to put in the field a force of 40,000 rifles. [...] The giant Putilov factory became the centre of resistance in the Peterhoff district. Here fighting companies were hastily formed. The work of the factory continued night and day; there was a sorting out of new cannon for the formation of proletarian artillery divisions."[31]

In Petrograd, "... the district soviets were drawing more closely together and passing resolutions: to declare the inter-district conferences continuous; to place their representatives in the staff organised by the Executive Committee; to form a workers' militia; to establish control of the district soviets over the government commissars; to organise flying brigades for the detention of counter-revolutionary agitators."[32] These measures "meant an appropriation not only of very considerable government functions, but also of the functions of the Petrograd Soviet. [...] The entrance of the Petrograd districts into the arena of the struggle instantly changed both its scope and its direction. Again the inexhaustible vitality of the soviet form of organisation was revealed. Although paralysed above by the leadership of the Compromisers, the soviets were reborn again from below at the critical moment under pressure from the masses."[33]

This generalisation of the self-organisation of the masses spread across the country. Trotsky cites the case of Helsingfors where "a general congress of all the soviet organisations which sent its commissars to the offices of the governor general, the commandant, the Intelligence service, and other important institutions. Thenceforth, no order was valid without its signature. The telegraphs and telephones were taken under control",[34] and something happened that was very significant: "On the second day, a rank-and-file Cossack appeared before the Committee with the announcement that the whole regiment is against Kornilov. Cossack representatives were for the first time introduced into the Soviet."[35]

September 1917: the total renewal of the soviets

The suppression of the Kornilov coup provided a dramatic reversal of the balance of power between the classes: the Provisional Government of Kerensky was implicated in the whole thing. The masses took sole control over these events, by strengthening and revitalising their collective organs. Their response to Kornilov was "the start of a radical transformation of the whole situation, a revenge for the July Days. The Soviet was reborn!"[36]

The newspaper of the Cadet Party,[37] Retch, was not mistaken when it stated: "The streets are already swarming with armed workers who terrorise peaceable inhabitants. In the soviets, the Bolsheviks firmly demanded their imprisoned comrades be set free. Everyone was convinced that once the action of General Kornilov was over, the Bolsheviks, opposed by the majority in the Soviet, would use all their energy to force it to adopt at least a part of their programme." Retch was however mistaken about one thing: it was not the Bolsheviks who forced the soviet to follow their programme; it was the masses who forced the soviets to adopt the Bolshevik programme.

The workers had gained enormous confidence in themselves and they wanted to apply this to the complete renewal of the soviets. Town after town, soviet after soviet, in a dizzying process, the old social traitors' majorities were overthrown and new soviets with majorities for Bolsheviks and other revolutionary groups (Left Social Revolutionaries, Menshevik internationalists, anarchists) emerged after discussions and massive voting.

Sukhanov describes the state of mind of the workers and soldiers: "Driven on by class instinct and, to some extent, class consciousness; with the theoretical input provided by the Bolsheviks, tired of war and the toll of suffering; disappointed by the sterility of the revolution that had given them nothing as yet; angry with the bosses and the government who were themselves still living in comfort; wishing to exercise the power that was theirs at last, they were eager to go into battle."[38]

The episodes in this re-conquest and renewal of the soviets are legion. "On the night of September 1st, while still under the presidency of Cheidze, the Soviet voted for a government of workers and peasants. The rank-and-file members of the compromisist factions almost solidly supported the resolution of the Bolsheviks. The rival proposal of Tsereteli got only 15 votes. The compromisist presidium could not believe their eyes. The Right demanded a roll call and this dragged on until three o'clock in the morning. To avoid openly voting against their parties, many of the delegates went home. But even so, and despite all the methods of pressure, the resolution of the Bolsheviks received in the final vote 279 votes against 115. It was a fact of great importance. It was the beginning of the end. The presidium, stunned, said they would resign."[39]

On September 2nd, a conference of all the soviets in Finland adopted a resolution for power to be assumed by the soviets, by 700 votes for, 13 against, with 36 abstentions. The Regional Conference of Soviets in Siberia approved a similar resolution. The Moscow Soviet did the same on September 5th during a dramatic meeting in which it approved a motion of distrust in the Provisional Government and the Executive Committee. "On the 8th, the Bolshevik resolution was adopted in the Kiev soviet of workers' deputies by a majority of 130 votes to 66 - although there were only 95 deputies in the official Bolshevik faction."[40] For the first time, the Soviet of peasants' representatives from the Petrograd region elected a Bolshevik as its delegate.

The culminating point of this process was the historic session of the Petrograd Soviet, on September 9th. Preparations were made through countless meetings in factories, neighbourhoods and in the regiments. Around 1,000 delegates attended a meeting where the Bureau had proposed to cancel the vote of August 31st. The new vote gave a result that signified the definitive rejection of the social traitors' policy: 519 votes against cancellation and for the soviets taking power; 414 votes for the presidium and 67 abstentions.

One might think, from a superficial standpoint, that the renewal of the soviets was merely a change of majority, passing from the social- traitors to the Bolsheviks.

It is certain - and we'll deal with it at greater length in the next article in this series - that the working class and therefore its parties too, were still burdened by a vision strongly influenced by parliamentarism in which the class chooses "representatives to act in its name", but it is important to understand that this was not the basis for the renewal of the soviets.

1) The renewal was built on the vast network of meetings of grass roots soviets (factory and district councils, committees from the regiments, joint meetings). After the Kornilov coup, the occurrence of these meetings multiplied dramatically. Each soviet session adopted a unified and clear position derived from an infinite number of preliminary meetings.

2) This self-organisation of the masses was consciously and actively driven by the renewal by the soviets. While previous soviets were autonomous and called only a few massive gatherings, the new soviets called for open meetings on a daily basis. While the former soviets feared and even disapproved of the assemblies in the factories and neighbourhoods, the new ones continually summoned them. The soviet called for meetings "of the grass roots" around each significant or substantial debate so it could adopt a position. The fourth coalition Provisional Government (on September 25th) met a reaction: "Close upon the resolution of the St. Petersburg Soviet refusing to support the new coalition, a wave of meetings swept through the two capitals and the province. Hundreds of thousands of workers and soldiers, protesting against the formation of the new bourgeois government, pledged to carry out a determined struggle against it and demanded power to the Soviets."[41]

3) The proliferation of regional congresses of soviets - which spread like wildfire across all Russian territories from mid-September - was spectacular. "During these weeks the numerous regional soviet congresses meeting reflected the mood of the masses. The Moscow regional congress held in early October demonstrated a typically rapid Bolshevisation and polarisation. At the beginning of the deliberations the Social Revolutionaries offered a resolution opposing the transfer of power to the soviets, which carried 159 votes against 132. But in another vote, three days later, the Bolshevik fraction won 116 votes with 97 opposed. [...] At many later soviet congresses Bolshevik resolutions were also passed, all calling for the assumption of power by the all-Russian Soviet Congress and for removal of the Provisional Government. In Ekaterinburg, 120 delegates from 56 Ural soviets met on October 13th; 86 of them were Bolsheviks. [...] In Saratov, the Volga regional congress rejected a Menshevik-Social Revolutionary resolution and adopted a Bolshevik one..."[42]

But it is important to clarify two issues that are fundamental for us.

The first is the fact that the Bolsheviks' resolutions winning a majority meant much more than a simple delegation voting for a party. The Bolshevik Party was the only party clearly in favour not only of the seizure of power but of putting forward a concrete way of doing it: an insurrection with a comprehensive plan which would overthrow the Provisional Government and dismantle the power of the state. While the social-traitor parties announced their intention to force the soviets to commit hara-kiri, while other revolutionary parties made unrealistic or vague proposals, only the Bolsheviks were convinced that "...the Soviet of Workers; and Soldiers' Deputies is a reality only as an organ of insurrection, as an organ of revolutionary power. Apart from this, the Soviets are a meaningless plaything that can only produce apathy, indifference and disillusion among the masses, who are legitimately disgusted at the endless repetition of resolutions and protests."[43]

It was therefore natural that the masses of workers put their trust in the Bolsheviks not by giving them a blank cheque, but by seeing them as an instrument of their own struggle that was approaching its high point: the insurrection and taking power. "The camp of the bourgeoisie now had reason to be alarmed. The crisis was clear to everyone. The movement of the masses was visibly overflowing; the excitement in the working class neighbourhoods of St. Petersburg was evident. We only listened to the Bolsheviks. At the famous Modern Amphitheatre, where Trotsky, Volodarsky and Lunacharsky came to speak, we saw endless queues and crowds that the huge building was unable to hold. The agitators encouraged the move from rhetoric to action and promised power to the Soviet in the immediate future." This was how Sukhanov, despite being an opponent of the Bolsheviks, described the atmosphere that prevailed in mid-October. [44]

Secondly, the accumulated evidence of September and October pointed to a significant change in the mentality of the masses. As we saw in the previous article in this series, the slogan "All power to the soviets" raised tentatively in March, defended forcefully by Lenin in April, proclaimed massively in demonstrations in June and July, had until then been more an aspiration than a consciously adopted programme of action.

One reason for the failure of the movement in July was that the majority was demanding that the soviets "force" the Provisional Government to appoint some "socialist ministers".

This division between Soviet and Government showed a clear misunderstanding of the work of the proletarian revolution, which is certainly not "to choose its own government" and so preserve the structure of the old state, but to destroy the state apparatus and assume power directly. Although, as we will see in the next article, the multitude of new problems and confusions would affect the consciousness of the masses, they were beginning to see the slogan "All power to the soviets" in more concrete and accurate terms.

Trotsky shows how, having lost control of the Petrograd Soviet, the social traitors used every means at their disposal, concentrating on their last bastion, the CEC: "The Executive Committee had in good season taken away from the Petrograd Soviet the two newspapers established by it, all the administrative offices, all funds and all technical equipment, including the typewriters and inkwells. The innumerable automobiles that had been at the disposal of the Soviet since February, had every last one of them been transferred into the keeping of the compromisist Olympus. The new leaders had nothing - no treasury, no newspapers, no secretarial apparatus, no means of transport, no pen or pencil. Nothing but bare walls and the burning confidence of the workers and soldiers. That, however, proved sufficient."[45]

The Military Revolutionary Committee, soviet organ of the insurrection

In early October, a flood of resolutions from soviets throughout the country called for the Congress of Soviets, continually postponed by the social-traitors, to be held so that practical measures could begin for the seizure of power.

This orientation was a response both to the situation in Russia and to the international situation. In Russia, the peasant revolts were spreading into almost all regions and there were widespread seizures of the land; soldiers were deserting their barracks and returning to their villages, exhibiting growing fatigue faced with an inextricable war; workers in the factories were having to deal with production being sabotaged by some bosses and managers; the whole of society was threatened with famine due to the total breakdown of supplies and the increasing cost of living. On the international frontline, desertions, insubordination and fraternisation between soldiers of both sides multiplied; a wave of strikes swept across Germany, a general strike broke out in August 1917 in Spain. The Russian proletariat had to seize power, not only to respond to the intractable problems facing the country but, more importantly, to open a breach through which the world revolution could develop against the terrible suffering caused by three years of war.

Against the revolutionary upsurge of the masses, the bourgeoisie used its own weapons. In September, it attempted to hold a democratic conference which failed once again, like that in Moscow. For their part, the social-traitors did everything possible to delay the Congress of Soviets, with the goal of keeping the soviets throughout the country dispersed and disorganised and thus preventing their unification for the purpose of seizing power.

But the most formidable weapon, and one still taking shape, was the attempt to sabotage the defence of Petrograd so that the German Army could crush the most advanced bastion of the revolution. Kornilov, the "patriot", had already tried out this coup in August when he abandoned revolutionary Riga[46] to German troops who "restored order" in a bloodbath. The bourgeoisie that makes national defence its credo, using it as a poison against the proletariat, does not hesitate to ally itself with its fiercest imperialist rivals when it sees its power threatened by the class enemy.

This issue, the defence of Petrograd, led the discussions in the Soviet to the formation of a Military-Revolutionary Committee, composed of elected delegates from the Petrograd Soviet, from the soldiers' section of this Soviet, from the Soviet delegates from the Baltic Fleet, from the Red Guard, from the Regional Committee of Soviets in Finland, from the Conference of the factory councils, from the railway union and from the military organisation of the Bolshevik Party. A young and combative member of the Left Social Revolutionaries, Lazimir, was appointed head of this committee. The objectives of the committee were both to defend Petrograd and to prepare the armed uprising, two objectives which "heretofore mutually exclusive, were now in fact growing into one. Having seized the power, the Soviet would be compelled to undertake the military defence of Petrograd." [47]

The next day a Standing Conference of the whole garrison of Petrograd and the region was summoned. With these two organs, the proletariat was equipping itself with the means for the insurrection, the essential and indispensable means for the seizure of power.

In a previous article in the International Review, we demonstrated how - contrary to the fairy tales woven by the bourgeoisie that present October as a "Bolshevik coup d'etat" - the insurrection was the work of the soviets and more specifically the Petrograd Soviet.[48] The organs that had meticulously prepared, step by step, the military defeat of the Provisional Government, the last bastion of the bourgeois state, were the Military-Revolutionary Committee and the Standing Conference of the garrisons. The MRC forced the Army headquarters to submit for approval any order and any decision, no matter how trivial, thus completely paralysing it. On October 22nd during a dramatic meeting, the last recalcitrant regiment -that of the Peter and Paul - agreed to submit to the MRC. On October 23rd, on a momentous day, thousands of assemblies of workers and soldiers were involved in the final seizure of power. The checkmate executed by the insurrection of October 25th, which occupied the headquarters and the seat of the Provisional Government, confronted the last battalions that were faithful to it, arrested ministers and generals, occupied the centres of communication and thereby laid the conditions so that the next day the Congress of Soviets of all the Russias took power.[49]

In the next article in this series, we see the enormous problems that the soviets had to face after taking power.

C. Mir 6-6-10

 


[1]. International Review n° 140.

[2]. International Review n° 141.

[3]. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, volume 2, chapter 11 "The Masses Under Attack, p. 756 (Pluto Press).

[4]. See the very detailed refutation of this thesis in Trotsky op. cit., volume 2, chapter 4, "The Month of the Great Slander".

[5]. General Knox, head of the English military mission, said: "'I'm not interested in the Kerensky government, it is too weak. What is wanted is a strong dictatorship. What is wanted is the Cossacks. This people need the whip! A dictatorship - that is just what it needs.'  So said the representative of the government of the oldest democracy", quoted in Trotsky, op. cit., volume 2, chapter 9, "The Kornilov Insurrection", p.724.

[6]. Trotsky, op. cit., volume 2 , chapter 11, "The Masses Under Attack", p.764.

[7]. Cavaignac: French general (1802-1857), executioner of the insurrection of Parisian workers in 1848.

[8]. Lenin, The political situation (Four theses), 23 (10) July 1917.

[9]. Ibid.

[10]. Ibid.

[11]. See references in the previous article in this series.

[12]. The Soviets, The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1917; Chapter 4, "Bolshevism and the Councils of 1917", p. 170 (Pantheon Books, 1974).

[13]. Lenin, On slogans, Mid- July 1917.

[14]. Ibid.

[15]. See the previous article in this series in the section headed "March 1917: a gigantic network of soviets spreads throughout Russia", International Review n° 141.

[16]. Sukhanov, a Menshevik Internationalist, split from the left wing of Menshevism where Martov was a militant. He published his Memoires in 7 volumes. An abridged version was published in French as The Russian Revolution (Editions Stock, 1965). All quotations below are our translations from this French edition.

[17]. Sukhanov, op. cit., "Triumph of the reaction; Around the coalition", p.210.

[18]. Anweiler, op. cit. Chapter 3, "The Soviets and the Russian Revolution of 1917", p.108.

[19]. Sukhanov, op. cit. "The Triumph of the reaction; In the depths".

[20]. Trotsky, op. cit., volume 2, chapter 11, "The Masses Under Attack", p.767.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. Ibid.

[23]. Sukhanov, op. cit.  "Counter-revolution and disintegration of democracy; after July: the second and third coalitions".

[24]. Sukhanov, op. cit. "The Shame of Moscow".

[25]. Trotsky, op. cit., volume 2, chapter 6, "Kerensky and Kornilov", p.658.

[26]. Kornilov: fairly incompetent general who distinguished himself by his constant defeats at the front, was then praised by bourgeois parties and considered a "patriotic hero" after the July Days.

[27]. Sukhanov, op. cit. "The bourgeoisie unified in action".

[28]. See Trotsky, op. cit., volume 2, chapter 5, "The Counter-Revolution Lifts its head"; chapter 6, "Kerensky and Kornilov"; chapter 8, "Kerensky's Plot" and chapter 9, "Kornilov's Insurrection".

[29]. Sukhanov, op. cit., "The bourgeoisie unified in action".

[30]. Ibid.

[31]. Trotsky, op. cit., volume 2, chapter 10, "The Bourgeoisie Measures Strength with the Democracy", p.735.

[32]. Ibid, p.734.

[33]. Ibid, our emphasis.

[34]. Ibid, p.737.

[35]. Ibid.

[36] Sukhanov, op. cit., "The bourgeoisie unified in action".

[37]. Cadet Party: Constitutional Democratic Party, the main bourgeois party of the time.

[38]. Sukhanov, op. cit., "The Disintegration of Democracy after the Kornilov Uprising".

[39]. Trotsky, op. cit., volume 2, chapter 12, "The Rising Tide", p.803.

[40]. Ibid.

[41]. Sukhanov, op. cit., "The Artillery Preparation".

[42]. Anweiler, op. cit., chapter 4, "Bolshevism and the Councils, 1917," p.182. In the appendices there is a list of the many regional conferences that virtually covered the whole empire, and through their votes decided on the seizure of power.

[43]. Lenin, Theses for the report to the conference of 8th October on the organisation of Petersburg. "On the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets'", October 8th, 1917.

[44]. Sukhanov, op. cit., "The Artillery Preparation".

[45]. Trotsky, op. cit., volume 2, chapter 12, "The Rising Tide, p.807.

[46]. Capital of Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire.

[47]. Trotsky, op. cit., volume 3, "The Military-Revolutionary Committee", p.945.

[48]. See our article "The Russian Revolution, part 2, The Soviets take power " in International Review n°72.

[49]. In our article "October 1917, A Victory of the Working Masses " (International Review n°. 91), we develop a detailed analysis on how the insurrection of the proletariat had nothing to do with a revolt or a conspiracy, what rules it followed, and the indispensable role played in it by the party of the proletariat.

Historic events: 

Deepen: 

History of the workers' movement: 

Decadence of capitalism (vii): Rosa Luxemburg and the limits to capitalist expansion

 

As we saw in the last article in this series, the central target of the revisionist attack on the revolutionary core of marxism was the latter's theory of the inevitable decline of capitalism, resulting from the irresolvable contradictions built into its relations of production. Eduard Bernstein's brand of revisionism, which Rosa Luxemburg refuted so lucidly in Social Reform or Revolution, was to a large extent based on a series of empirical observations derived from the unprecedented period of expansion and prosperity the most powerful capitalist nations lived through in the last decades of the 19th century. There was little pretence of founding the critique of Marx's "catastrophic" view on any profound theoretical investigation of Marx's economic theories. In many ways Bernstein's arguments were similar to those favoured by many bourgeois experts during the phase of economic boom that followed the Second World War, and even during the even more precarious "growth" in the first years of the 21st century: capitalism is delivering the goods, ergo it will always be able to deliver the goods.

Other economists, however, not yet completely divorced from the workers' movement, sought to base their reformist strategies on a "marxist" approach. One such case was the Russian Tugan Baronowski, who in 1901 published a book entitled Studies in the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England. Following the work of Struve and Bulgakov a few years before, Tugan Baranowski's study was part of the "legalist Marxist" response to the Russian populists, who tried to argue that capitalism would face insuperable difficulties in establishing itself in Russia; one of these was the problem of finding sufficient markets for its production. Like Bulgakov, Tugan tried to take Marx's schemes for expanded reproduction in Volume 2 of Capital as proof that there was no fundamental problem of realisation of surplus value in the capitalist system, that it was possible for it to accumulate indefinitely in a harmonious manner as a "closed system". As Rosa Luxemburg summed it up:

"There can be no doubt that the ‘legalist' Russian Marxists achieved a victory over their opponents, the ‘populists', but that victory was rather too thorough. In the heat of battle, all three - Struve, Bulgakov and Tugan Baranovski - overstated their case. The question was whether capitalism in general, and Russian capitalism in particular, is capable of development; these Marxists, however, proved this capacity to the extent of even offering theoretical proof that capitalism can go on forever."[1]

Tugan's thesis brought a swift response from those who still adhered to the marxist theory of crisis, in particular the spokesman of "marxist orthodoxy", Karl Kautsky, who insisted in particular that because neither capitalists nor workers could consume the whole of the surplus value produced by the system, it was constantly driven to conquer new markets outside itself: 

"Although capitalists increase their wealth and the number of exploited workers grows, they cannot themselves form a sufficient market for capitalist-produced commodities, as accumulation of capital and productivity grow even faster. They must find a market in those strata and nations which are still non-capitalist. They find this market, and expand it, but still not fast enough, since this additional market hardly has the flexibility and ability to expand the capitalist process of production. Once capitalist production has developed large-scale industry, as was already the case in England in the nineteenth century, it has the possibility of expanding by such leaps and bounds that it soon overtakes any expansion of the market. Thus, any prosperity which results from a substantial expansion in the market is doomed from the beginning to a short life, and will necessarily end in a crisis.

This, in short, is the theory of crises which, as far as we can see, is generally accepted by ‘orthodox' Marxists and which was set up by Marx".[2]

At more or less the same time, a member of the left wing of the American Socialist Party, Louis Boudin, weighed into the debate with a similar, though actually more developed analysis, in The Theoretical System of Karl Marx.[3]

Whereas Kautsky, as Luxemburg pointed out in The Accumulation of Capital, an Anticritique (1915), had posed the problem of the crisis in terms of "underconsumption" and in the somewhat imprecise framework of the relative speeds of accumulation and expansion of the market,[4] Boudin situated it more exactly in the unique character of the capitalist mode of production and the contradictions which led to the phenomenon of overproduction:

"Under the old slave and feudal systems there never was such a problem as overproduction, for the reason that production being for home consumption the only question that ever presented itself was: how much of the product produced shall be given to the slave or serf and how much of it should go to the slave-holder or feudal baron. When, however, the respective shares of the two classes were determined upon, each proceeded to consume its share without encountering any further trouble. In other words, the question always was, how the products should be divided, and there never was any question of overproduction, for the reason that the product was not to be sold in the market but was to be consumed by the persons immediately concerned in its production, either as master or slave....Not so, however, with our modern capitalistic industry. It is true that all of the product with the exception of that portion which goes to the workingman goes, now as before, to the master, now the capitalist. This, however, does not settle the matter finally, the reason is that the capitalist does not produce for himself but for the market. He does not want the things that the workingman produced, but he wants to sell them, and unless he is able to sell them, they are absolutely of no value to him. Saleable goods in the hands of the capitalist are his fortune, his capital, but when these goods become unsalable they are worthless, and his whole fortune contained in the stores of goods which he keeps melts away the moment the goods cease to be marketable.

"Who then, will buy the goods from our capitalists who introduced new machinery into their production, thereby largely increasing their output? Of course, there are other capitalists who may want these things, but when the production of society as whole is considered, what is the capitalist class going to do with the increased output which cannot be taken up by the working man? The capitalists themselves cannot use them, either by each keeping his own manufacture or by buying them from each other. And for a very simple reason, the capitalist class cannot itself use all the surplus products which its workingmen produce and which they take to themselves as their profits of production. This is already excluded by the very premise of capitalistic production on a large scale, and the accumulation of capital. Capitalistic production on a large scale implies the existence of large amounts of crystallised labour in the shape of great railroads, steamships, factories, machinery and other such manufactured products which have not been consumed by the capitalists, to whom they have fallen as their share or profit in the production of former years. As was already stated before, all the great fortunes of our modern capitalist kings, princes, barons, and other dignitaries of industry, titled or untitled, consist of tools and machinery in one form or another, that is to say, in an unconsumeable form. It is that share of the capitalist profits which the capitalists have ‘saved' and therefore left unconsumed. If the capitalists would consume all their profits there would be no capitalists in the modern sense of the word, there would be no accumulation of capital. In order that capital should accumulate the capitalist must not, under any circumstances, consume all his profits. The capitalist who does, ceases to be a capitalist and succumbs in the competition with is fellow capitalists. In other words, modern capitalism presupposes the saving habit of capitalists, that is to say, that part of profits of the individual capitalists must not be consumed but saved in order to increase the already existing capital... He cannot, therefore, consume all of his share in the manufactured product, It is evident, therefore, that neither the workingman nor the capitalist can consume of the whole of the increased product of manufacture? Who, then, will buy it up?"[5] 

Boudin then attempts to answer how capitalism deals with this problem, in a passage which Luxemburg quotes at length in a footnote to The Accumulation of Capital and which she presents as a "brilliant review" of Tugan's book:[6]

"With a single exception to be considered below, the existence of surplus product in capitalist countries does not put a spoke in the wheel of production, not because production will be distributed more efficiently among the various spheres, or because the manufacture of machinery will replace that of cotton goods. The reason is rather that, capitalist development having begun sooner in some countries than in others, and because even to-day there are still some countries that have no developed capitalism, the capitalist countries in truth have at their disposal an outside market in which they can get rid of their products which they cannot consume themselves, no matter whether these are cotton or iron goods. We would by no means deny that it is significant if iron goods replace cotton goods as the main products of the principal capitalist countries. On the contrary, this change is of paramount importance, but its implications are rather different from those ascribed to it by Tugan Baranovski. It indicates the beginning of the end of capitalism. So long as the capitalist countries exported commodities for the purpose of consumption, there was still a hope for capitalism in these countries, and the question did not arise how much and how long the non-capitalist outside world would be able to absorb capitalist commodities. The growing share of machinery at the cost of consumer goods in what is exported from the main capitalist countries shows that areas which were formerly free of capitalism, and therefore served as a dumping-ground for its surplus products, are now drawn into the whirlpool of capitalism. It shows that, since they are developing a capitalism of their own, they can by themselves produce the consumer goods they need. At present they still require machinery produced by capitalist methods since they are only in the initial stages of capitalist development. But all too soon they will need them no longer. Just as they now make their own cotton and other consumer goods they will in future produce their own iron ware. Then they will not only cease to absorb the surplus produce of the essentially capitalist countries, but they will themselves produce surplus products which they can place only with difficulty."[7]

Boudin thus goes further than Kautsky in insisting that the approaching completion of capitalism's conquest of the globe also signifies the "beginning of the end of capitalism".

Luxemburg examines the accumulation problem

At the same time as these responses were being written, Luxemburg was teaching at the party school in Berlin. In outlining the historical evolution of capitalism as a world system, she was led to return in greater depth to the writings of Marx, both because of her integrity as a teacher and a militant (she had a horror of simply churning out received wisdom in new packages and considered the task of every marxist was to develop and enrich marxist theory) and because of the increasingly urgent need to understand the perspectives facing world capitalism. In re-examining Marx, she would have found much to support her view that the problem of overproduction in relation to the market was a key to understanding the transient nature of the capitalist mode of production (see "The mortal contradictions of bourgeois society" in IR n° 139). Nevertheless, it seemed to her that Marx's schemes of expanded reproduction in Volume Two, however much they were intended by Marx to operate as a purely abstract, theoretical model for approaching the problem, implied that capitalism, which for the sake of argument Marx reduced to a society composed entirely of capitalists and workers, could accumulate in an essentially harmonious way as a closed system, disposing entirely of the surplus value it produced through the mutual interaction of the two main branches of production (the producer goods and consumer goods sectors). To her this seemed to be in contradiction with other passages in Marx (for example in Volume Three) which insist on the necessity for a constant expansion of the market and which at the same time posit an inherent limit to this expansion. If capitalism could operate as a self-regulating system, there may be temporary imbalances between the branches of production but there would be no inexorable tendency to produce an indigestible mass of commodities, no irresolvable crisis of overproduction; if simply the capitalist drive to accumulate in itself generated the constantly expanding demand needed to realise the whole of the surplus value, then how could marxists argue against the revisionists that capitalism was indeed fated to enter a phase of catastrophic crisis that would provide the objective foundations of the socialist revolution?

Luxemburg's answer was that it was necessary to move away from abstract schemes and situate capitalism's ascent in its real historical context. The whole history of capitalist accumulation could only be grasped as a constant process of inter-action with the non-capitalist economies that surrounded it. The most primitive communities which lived by hunting and gathering and had not yet generated a marketable social surplus were useless to capitalism and had to be swept aside through policies of direct destruction and genocide (even the human resources in these communities tended to be unsuitable for slave labour). But the economies which had developed a marketable surplus and in particular where commodity production was already internally developed (such as the great civilisations of India and China) provided not only raw materials but enormous markets for the production of the capitalist metropolises, enabling capitalism in the heartlands to overcome its periodic glut of commodities (this process is eloquently described in the Communist Manifesto). But as the Manifesto also insisted, even when the established capitalist powers tried to restrict the capitalist development of their colonies, these regions of the world inevitably became part of the bourgeois world, ruining pre-capitalist economies and converting them to the delights of wage labour - and thus displacing the problem of the additional demand required for accumulation onto another level. Thus, as Marx himself had put it, the more capitalism tended to become a universal system, the more it was fated to break down: "The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension."[8]

This approach enabled Luxemburg to understand the problem of imperialism. Capital had only begun to deal with the question of imperialism and its economic foundations, which in the period the book was written had not yet become such a central focus of concern for marxists. Now they were confronted with imperialism as a drive not only towards the conquest of the non-capitalist world, but also towards sharpening inter-imperialist rivalries between the major capitalist nations for the domination of the world market. Was imperialism an option, a convenience for world capital, as many of its liberal and reformist critics contended, or was it an inherent necessity of capitalist accumulation at a certain stage of its maturity? Here again the implications were far-reaching, since if imperialism was no more than an optional extra for capital, then it might be feasible to argue in favour of more reasonable and pacific policies. Luxemburg however concluded that imperialism was a necessity for capital - a means of prolonging its reign, which was equally pulling it inexorably towards its ruin.

"Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment. Still the largest part of the world in terms of geography, this remaining field for the expansion of capital is yet insignificant as against the high level of development already attained by the productive forces of capital; witness the immense masses of capital accumulated in the old countries which seek an outlet for their surplus product and strive to capitalise their surplus value, and the rapid change-over to capitalism of the pre-capitalist civilisations. On the international stage, then, capital must take appropriate measures. With the high development of the capitalist countries and their increasingly severe competition in acquiring non-capitalist areas, imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts among the competing capitalist countries. But the more violently, ruthlessly and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of non-capitalist civilisations, the more rapidly it cuts the very ground from under the feet of capitalist accumulation. Though imperialism is the historical method for prolonging the career of capitalism, it is also a sure means of bringing it to a swift conclusion. This is not to say that capitalist development must be actually driven to this extreme: the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe."

The essential conclusion of The Accumulation of Capital was, therefore, that capitalism was entering a "period of catastrophe". It is important to note that she did not, as has often been falsely claimed, consider that capitalism was about to come to dead halt. She makes it quite clear that the non-capitalist milieu remains "the largest part of the world in terms of geography" and that non-capitalist economies still existed not only in the colonies but also in large parts of Europe itself.[9] Certainly the scale of these economic zones in value terms was diminishing relative to the growing capacity of capital to generate new value. But the world was still a long way off from becoming a system of pure capitalism as envisioned in Marx's schemas of reproduction:

"Marx's model of accumulation - when properly understood - is precisely in its insolubility the exact prognosis of the economically unavoidable downfall of capitalism as a result of the imperialist process of expansion whose specific task it is to realize Marx's assumption: the general and undivided rule of capital. Can this ever really happen? That is, of course, theoretical fiction, precisely because capital accumulation is not just an economic but also a political process."[10]

For Luxemburg, a world of just capitalists and workers was a theoretical fiction, but the more this point was reached, the more difficult and disastrous the process of accumulation would become, unleashing calamities that were not "merely" economic, but also military and political. The world war, which broke out not long after Accumulation was published, was a stunning confirmation of this prognosis. For Luxemburg, there is no purely economic collapse of capitalism, and still less an automatic, guaranteed link between capitalist breakdown and socialist revolution. What she announced in her theoretical work was precisely what was to be confirmed by the catastrophic history of the ensuing century: the growing manifestation of capitalism's decline as a mode of production, posing humanity with the alternative between socialism and barbarism, and calling on the working class specifically to develop the organisation and consciousness needed for the overthrow of the system and its replacement by a higher social order. 

A storm of criticism

Luxemburg considered that her thesis was not particularly controversial, precisely because she had based it firmly on the writings of Marx and subsequent followers of his method. And yet it was greeted with a huge storm of criticism - not only from revisionists and reformists, but also from revolutionaries like Pannekoek and Lenin, who in this debate found himself on the same side not only as the legal Marxists in Russia but also the Austro-marxists who were part of the semi-reformist camp within social democracy.

"I have read Rosa's new book Die Akkumulation  des Kapital. She has got into a shocking muddle. She has distorted Marx. I am very glad that Pannekoek and Eckstein and O. Bauer have all with one accord condemned her, and said against her what I said in 1899 against the Narodniks".[11]

The consensus was that Luxemburg had simply misread Marx and invented a problem where none existed: the schemas of expanded reproduction show that capitalism can indeed accumulate without any inherent limit in a world consisting purely of workers and capitalists. Marx's sums add up after all, so it must be true. Bauer was a little more nuanced: he did recognise that accumulation could only proceed if it was fuelled by a growing effective demand, but he came up with a simple answer: the population grows and therefore there are more workers, and therefore an expanding demand, a solution which takes the problem back to point zero because these new workers can still only consume the variable capital transferred to them from the capitalists. The essential view - maintained by nearly all of Luxemburg's critics to this day - is that the reproduction schemes do indeed show that there is no insoluble problem of realisation for capitalism.

Luxemburg was well aware that arguments put forward by Kautsky (or Boudin, although he was obviously a much less known figure in the movement) in defence of essentially the same thesis had not provoked such outrage:

"So far one thing is certain: in 1902, when attacking Tugan-Baranovsky, Kautsky refuted the same assertions which the ‘experts' use to oppose my Accumulation, and the ‘experts' attack as a horrible deviation from the true faith the same assertions, only this time dealing with the problem of accumulation in an exact manner, which Kautsky used in opposition to the revisionist Tugan-Baranovsky as the theory of crises ‘generally accepted' by orthodox Marxists."[12]

Why this outrage? It is easy to understand coming from the reformists and revisionists, because they are concerned above all to reject any possibility of a breakdown of the capitalist system. From the revolutionaries it is harder to grasp. We can certainly point to the fact - and this is very significant as regards the hysterical response - that Kautsky did not seek to relate his argument to the schema of reproduction[13] and thus did not appear as a "critic" of Marx. Perhaps this conservative spirit lies at the heart of many of Luxemburg's critics: a view that Capital is a kind of bible that supplies all the answers to our understanding of the rise and fall of the capitalist mode of production - a closed system in fact! Luxemburg, by contrast, argued forcefully that marxists had to recognise Capital for what it was - a work of genius, but still an unfinished work, particularly in its second and third volumes; and one which in any case could not have encompassed all subsequent developments in the evolution of the capitalist system.  

However, amidst all the scandalised responses, there was at least one very clear defence of Luxemburg's theory written during that period of war and revolutionary upheaval: "The marxism of Rosa Luxemburg" by the Hungarian George Lukacs, who at that point was a representative of the left wing of the communist movement.

Lukacs' essay, published in the collection History and Class Consciousness (1922) begins by outlining the principal methodological consideration in the debate about Luxemburg's theory. He argues that what fundamentally distinguishes the proletarian from the bourgeois world-outlook is that while the bourgeoisie is condemned by its social position to regard society from the point of view of an atomised, competing unit, the proletariat alone can develop a vision of reality as a totality:

"It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science. The capitalist separation of the producer from the total process of production, the division of the process of labour into parts at the cost of the individual humanity of the worker, the atomisation of society into individuals who simply go on producing without rhyme or reason, must all have a profound influence on the thought, the science and the philosophy of capitalism. Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science".

He then goes on to show that their lack of such a proletarian method prevented Luxemburg's critics from grasping the problem she had posed in The Accumulation of Capital:

"The debate as conducted by Bauer, Eckstein and Co. did not turn on the truth or falsity of the solution Rosa Luxemburg proposed to the problem of the accumulation of capital. On the contrary, discussion centred on whether there was a real problem at all and in the event its existence was denied flatly and with the utmost vehemence. Seen from the standpoint of vulgar economics this is quite understandable, and even inevitable. For if it is treated as an isolated problem in economics and from the point of view of the individual capitalist it is easy to argue that no real problem exists.

"Logically enough the critics who dismissed the whole problem also ignored the decisive chapter of her book (‘The historical determinants of Accumulation'). This can be seen from the way they formulated their key question. The question they posed was this: Marx's formulae were arrived at on the basis of a hypothetical society (posited for reasons of method) which consisted only of capitalists and workers. Were these formulae correct? How were they to be interpreted? The critics completely overlooked the fact that Marx posited this society for the sake of argument, i.e. to see the problem more clearly, before pressing forward to the larger question of the place of this problem within society as a whole. They overlooked the fact that Marx himself took this step with reference to so-called primitive accumulation, in Volume I of Capital. Consciously or unconsciously they suppressed the fact that on this issue Capital is an incomplete fragment which stops short at the point where this problem should be opened up. In this sense what Rosa Luxemburg has done is precisely to take up the thread where Marx left off and to solve the problem in his spirit.

"By ignoring these factors the opportunists acted quite consistently. The problem is indeed superfluous from the standpoint of the individual capitalist and vulgar economics. As far as the former is concerned, economic reality has the appearance of a world governed by the eternal laws of nature, laws to which he has to adjust his activities. For him the production of surplus value very often (though not always, it is true) takes the form of an exchange with other individual capitalists. And the whole problem of accumulation resolves itself into a question of the manifold permutations of the formulae M-C-M and C-M-C in the course of production and circulation, etc. It thus becomes an isolated question for the vulgar economists, a question unconnected with the ultimate fate of capitalism as a whole. The solution to the problem is officially guaranteed by the Marxist ‘formulae' which are correct in themselves and need only to be ‘brought up to date' - a task performed e.g. by Otto Bauer. However, we must insist that economic reality can never be understood solely on the basis of these formulae because they are based on an abstraction (viz. the working hypothesis that society consists only of capitalists and workers). Hence they can serve only for clarification and as a springboard for an assault on the real problem. Bauer and his confreres misunderstood this just as surely as the disciples of Ricardo misunderstood the problematics of Marx in their day".

A passage in the Grundrisse, which Lukacs would not yet have had access to, confirms this approach: the idea that the working class is a sufficient market for the capitalists is an illusion typical of the limited vision of the bourgeoisie:

"The relation of one capitalist to the workers of another capitalist is none of our concern here. It only shows every capitalist's illusion, but alters nothing in the relation of capital in general to labour. Every capitalist knows this about his worker, that he does not relate to him as producer to consumer, and he therefore wishes to restrict his consumption, i.e. his ability to exchange, his wage, as much as possible. Of course he would like the workers of other capitalists to be the greatest consumers possible of his own commodity. But the relation of every capitalist to his own workers is the relation as such of capital and labour, the essential relation. But this is just how the illusion arises - true for the individual capitalist as distinct from all the others - that apart from his workers the whole remaining working class confronts him as consumer and participant in exchange, as money spender, and not as worker. It is forgotten that, as Malthus says, ‘the very existence of a profit upon any commodity pre-supposes a demand exterior to that of the labourer who has produced it', and hence the demand of the labourer himself can never be an adequate demand. Since one production sets the other into motion and hence creates consumers for itself in the alien capital's workers, it seems to each individual capital that the demand of the working class posited by production itself is an ‘adequate demand'. On one side, this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs."[14]

In questioning the letter of Marx, Luxemburg more than any other had been faithful to his spirit; but there are many more words by Marx which could be cited to support the central importance of the problem she posed.

In the next articles in this series, we will look at how the revolutionary movement tried to understand the process of capitalism's decline as it unfolded in front of their eyes in the tumultuous decades between 1914 and 1945.

Gerrard

 


[1]. The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter 24.

[2]. Neue Zeit, 1902, n°.5 (31), p.140.

[3]. First published in book form by Charles Kerr (Chicago) in 1915, this study was based on a series of articles in the International Socialist Review between May 1905 and October 1906.

[4]. "Let us forget that Kautsky calls this theory by the dubious name of an explanation of crises caused ‘by under-consumption'. Marx ridicules this in the second volume of Capital (p.414).Let us forget that Kautsky sees only the problem of crises, without noticing that capitalist production poses a problem apart from ups and downs in the state of business. Finally, let us forget that Kautsky's explanation - that the consumption of capitalists and workers does not grow ‘fast enough' for accumulation, which therefore needs an ‘additional market' - is rather vague and makes no attempt to understand the problem of accumulation in its exact terms". (Anticritique, chapter 2) Interesting that so many of Luxemburg's critics - not least the "marxist" ones - accuse her of being an underconsumptionist when she so explicitly rejects this idea! It is of course perfectly true that Marx argued on several occasions that the "the last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses" (Capital, vol. III, chap XXX, p 484), but Marx is careful to explain that he is not referring to "the absolute consuming power", but to "the consuming power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduces the consumption of the great mass of the population to a variable minimum within more or less narrow limits. The consuming power is furthermore restricted by the tendency to accumulate, the greed for an expansion of capital and a production of surplus-value on an enlarged scale" (ibid, chap XV, p 244). In other words: crises are not the result of society's reluctance to consume as much as is physically possible, nor - more to the point, given the numerous mystifications about this, especially those emanating from the left wing of capital - are they caused by wages being "too low". If this were the case, then crises would be eliminated simply by raising wages, and this is precisely what Marx ridicules in Capital Volume II. The problem rather lies in the existence of the "antagonistic relations of distribution", that is, in the wage labour relationship itself, which must always give rise to a "surplus" value above what the capitalist pays to his workers.

[5]. Boudin, p 167-9.

[6]. Accumulation, chapter 23, footnote. Luxemburg's main criticism of Boudin was his apparently prescient idea that arms expenditure was a form of waste or "reckless expenditure", which seemed to go against her notion of "militarism as a province of accumulation" elaborated in the chapter with the same name in The Accumulation of Capital. But militarism could only be a province of accumulation in an epoch in which there was a real possibility that war - colonial conquests to be exact - could open up substantive new markets for capitalist expansion. With the shrinking of such outlets, militarism does indeed become a pure waste for global capitalism: even if the war economy appears to provide a "solution" to the crisis of overproduction by getting the economic machine in motion (most evidently in Hitler's Germany and during the Second World War for example).  In reality it expresses an immense destruction of value.

[7]. Quoted here directly from the English translation of The Accumulation, chapter 23, whose reference to Boudin is Die Neue Zeit, vol. xxv, part 1, "Mathematische Formeln gegen Karl Marx", p.604. A slightly different rendition of this passage in Boudin appears on p243-4 of the book.

[8]. Grundrisse, Notebook IV, "Circulation Process of Capital", p 410 in the Penguin and Marxist.org version.

[9]. "In reality, there are in all capitalist countries, even in those with the most developed large-scale industry, numerous artisan and peasant enterprises which are engaged in simple commodity production. In reality, alongside the old capitalist countries there are still those even in Europe where peasant and artisan production is still strongly predominant, like Russia, the Balkans, Scandinavia and Spain. And finally, there are huge continents besides capitalist Europe and North America, where capitalist production has only scattered roots, and apart from that the people of these continents have all sorts of economic systems, from the primitive Communist to the feudal, peasantry and artisan" (Anticritique, chapter 1). See the article "Overproduction, an unavoidable fetter on capitalist accumulation" for a contribution to understanding the role played by extra-capitalist markets during the period of capitalist decadence (ICC online)

[10]. Anticritique, chapter 6.

[11]. In The Making of Marx's Capital (Pluto Press, 1977) Roman Rosdolsky makes an excellent critique of Lenin's error in siding with Russian legalists and Austro-reformists against Luxemburg (see p. 472f). Although he also has his criticisms of Luxemburg, he recognises the profound value of her work and insists that marxism is of necessity a "break down" theory, pointing in particular to the tendency towards overproduction, as identified by Marx, as a key to understanding this. In fact, some of his criticisms of Luxemburg are actually quite hard to decipher. He insists that her main error was in not understanding that the reproduction schema were merely a "heuristic device", and yet Luxemburg's entire argument against her critics is that the schema can only be taken as a heuristic device and not as a real picture of the historical evolution of capital, not as a mathematical proof of the possibility of unlimited accumulation. (see p. 490 of Rosdolsky's book).

[12]. Anticritique, chapter 2.

[13]. In fact later on Kautsky himself lined up with the Austro-marxists: "In his magnum opus he strongly criticises Rosa Luxemburg's ‘hypothesis' that capitalism must break down for economic reasons; he asserts that Luxemburg ‘finds herself in opposition to Marx, who proved the opposite in the second volume of Capital, i.e. in the schemes of reproduction'" (Rosdolsky, op cit, p 451, citing Kautsky, Die Materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, vol. II, pp 546-47).

[14]. Grundrisse, the Chapter on Capital, Notebook 4. Marx also explains elsewhere that the idea that the capitalists themselves can constitute the market for expanded reproduction is based on a failure to understand the nature of capitalism:  "Since the aim of capital is not to minister to certain wants, but to produce profit, and since it accomplishes this purpose by methods which adapt the mass of production to the scale of production, not vice versa, a rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption under capitalism and a production which forever tends to exceed this immanent barrier. Furthermore, capital consists of commodities, and therefore over-production of capital implies over-production of commodities. Hence the peculiar phenomenon of economists who deny over-production of commodities, admitting over-production of capital. To say that there is no general over-production, but rather a disproportion within the various branches of production, is no more than to say that under capitalist production the proportionality of the individual branches of production springs as a continual process from disproportionality, because the cohesion of the aggregate production imposes itself as a blind law upon the agents of production, and not as a law which, being understood and hence controlled by their common mind, brings the productive process under their joint control. It amounts furthermore to demanding that countries in which capitalist production is not developed, should consume and produce at a rate which suits the countries with capitalist production. If it is said that over-production is only relative, this is quite correct; but the entire capitalist mode of production is only a relative one, whose barriers are not absolute. They are absolute only for this mode, i.e., on its basis. How could there otherwise be a shortage of demand for the very commodities which the mass of the people lack, and how would it be possible for this demand to be sought abroad, in foreign markets, to pay the labourers at home the average amount of necessities of life? This is possible only because in this specific capitalist interrelation the surplus-product assumes a form in which its owner cannot offer it for consumption, unless it first reconverts itself into capital for him. If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities among themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it. In short, all these objections to the obvious phenomena of over-production (phenomena which pay no heed to these objections) amount to the contention that the barriers of capitalist production are not barriers of production generally, and therefore not barriers of this specific, capitalist mode of production. The contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, however, lies precisely in its tendency towards an absolute development of the productive forces, which continually come into conflict with the specific conditions of production in which capital moves, and alone can move" Capital, Vol. 3, chapter 15, part III, our emphasis.

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The Communist Left in Russia: Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Part 1)

The Communist Left in Russia The Manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party

We are publishing below the Manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), often called, from the name of one of its most visible leaders, the "Miasnikov Group" (see note 1 at end of article). This group formed part of what is called the Communist Left,[1] on the same basis as other groups in Russia itself and in other parts of the world, particularly in Europe. The different expressions of this current found their origin in the reaction to the opportunist degeneration of the parties of the Third International and of soviet power in Russia. They represented a proletarian response in the form of left currents, like those that had existed previously faced with the development of opportunism in the Second International.

Our introduction

In Russia itself, from 1918, left fractions appeared within the Bolshevik Party,[2] expressions of different disagreements with its politics.[3] This is in itself proof of the proletarian character of Bolshevism. Because it was a living expression of the working class, the only class that can make a radical and continuous critique of its own practice, the Bolshevik Party perpetually generated revolutionary fractions out of its own body. At every step in its degeneration voices were raised inside the party in protest, groupings were formed inside the party, or split from it, to denounce the betrayals of Bolshevism's original programme. Only when the party had been buried by its Stalinist gravediggers did these fractions no longer spring from it. The Russian left communists were all Bolsheviks; it was they who defended a continuity with the Bolshevism of the heroic years of the revolution, while those who slandered, persecuted and exterminated them, no matter how exalted their names, were the ones who were breaking with the essence of Bolshevism.

Lenin's withdrawal from political life was one of the factors which precipitated an open crisis in the Bolshevik Party. On the one hand, the bureaucratic faction consolidated its grip on the party, initially in the form of the "triumvirate" formed by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, an unstable bloc whose main cement was the will to isolate Trotsky. The latter, meanwhile, although with considerable hesitation, was compelled to move towards an overtly oppositional stance within the party.

At the same time, the Bolshevik regime was faced with new difficulties on the economic and social front. In the summer of 1923, the first clear crisis of the "market economy" installed by the NEP menaced the equilibrium of the whole economy. Just as the NEP had been introduced to counter the excessive state centralisation of war communism, which had resulted in the crisis of 1921, so now it became evident that the liberalisation of the economy had exposed Russia to some of the more classic difficulties of capitalist production. These economic difficulties, and above all the government's response to them - a policy of wage and job-cuts, like in any "normal" capitalist state - in turn aggravated the condition of the working class, which was already at the limits of impoverishment. By August-September 1923 a rash of spontaneous strikes had begun to spread through the main industrial centres.

The triumvirate, which was above all interested in preserving the status quo, had begun to see the NEP as the royal road to socialism in Russia; this view was theorised especially by Bukharin, who had moved from the extreme left to the right wing of the party, and who preceded Stalin in working out a theory of socialism in one country, albeit "at a snail's pace" thanks to the development of a "socialist" market economy. Trotsky on the other hand had already begun to call for more state centralisation and planning in response to the country's economic difficulties. But the first definite statement of opposition from within the leading circles of the party was the Platform of the 46, submitted to the Politburo in October 1923. The 46 was made up both of those who were close to Trotsky, such as Piatakov and Preobrazhinsky, and elements of the Democratic Centralism group like Sapranov, V Smirnov and Ossinski. It is not insignificant that Trotsky's signature was not on the document: the fear of being considered part of a faction (factions having been banned in 1921) certainly played a part in this. Nevertheless, his open letter to the Central Committee, published in Pravda in December 1923, and his pamphlet The New Course, expressed very similar concerns, and definitively placed him in the opposition's ranks.

The Platform of the 46 was initially a response to the economic problems facing the regime. It took up the cudgels for greater state planning against the pragmatism of the dominant apparatus and its tendency to elevate the NEP into an immutable principle. This was to be a constant theme of the left opposition around Trotsky - and as we shall see, not one of its strengths. More important was the urgent warning it issued about the stifling of the party's internal life.[4]

At the same time, the Platform distanced itself from what it referred to as "morbid" opposition groups, even if it saw the latter as expressions of the crisis within the party. This was undoubtedly a reference to currents like the Workers' Group around Miasnikov and Bogdanov's Workers' Truth which had emerged around the same time. Shortly afterwards, Trotsky took a similar view:  a rejection of their analyses as too extreme, while at the same time seeing them as manifestations of the unhealthy state of the party. Trotsky was also unwilling to collaborate in the methods of repression aimed at eliminating these groups.

In fact, these groups can by no means be dismissed as "morbid" phenomena. It is true that the Workers' Truth group expressed a certain trend towards defeatism and even Menshevism: as with most of the currents within the German and Dutch left, its insights into the rise of state capitalism in Russia were weakened by a tendency to put into question the October revolution itself, seeing it as a more or less progressive bourgeois revolution.[5]

This is not the case at all with the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), led by long-standing worker-Bolsheviks like Miasnikov, Kuznetsov and Moiseev. The group first came to prominence by distributing its Manifesto in April-May 1923, just after to the 13th Congress of the Bolshevik party.  An examination of this text confirms the seriousness of the group, its political depth and perceptiveness.

The text is not devoid of weaknesses. In particular, it is drawn towards the "theory of the offensive", which failed to see the retreat in the international revolution and the consequent necessity for a defensive struggle by the working class; this was the reverse of the coin to the analysis of the Communist International, which saw the retreat in 1921 but which drew largely opportunist conclusions from it. By the same token, the Manifesto adopts the erroneous view that in the epoch of the proletarian revolution, struggles for higher wages no longer have any positive role.

Despite this, the strengths of the document far outweigh its weaknesses:

  • its resolute internationalism. In contrast to Kollontai's Workers' Opposition group, there is not a trace of Russian localism in its analysis. The whole introductory part of the Manifesto deals with the international situation, clearly locating the difficulties of the Russian revolution in the delay of the world revolution, and insisting that the only salvation for the former lies in the revival of the latter:  "The Russian worker has learned to see himself as a soldier in the world army of the international proletariat and to see his class organisations as the regiments of this army. Every time the disquieting question of the destiny of the October revolution is raised, he turns his gaze beyond the frontiers of Russia, to where the conditions for revolution are ripe, but where the revolution does not come";
  • its searing critique of the opportunist policy of the United Front and the slogan of the Workers' Government; the priority accorded to this question is a further confirmation of the group's internationalism, since this was above all a critique of the politics of the Communist International. Nor was the group's position tainted with sectarianism:  it affirmed the need for revolutionary unity between the different communist organisations (such as the KPD and the KAPD in Germany), but completely rejected the CI's call for a bloc with the social democratic traitors, its spurious new argument that the Russian revolution had succeeded precisely though the Bolsheviks' clever use of the United Front tactic:  "...the tactic that will lead the insurgent proletariat to victory is not that of the United Front, but the bloody, uncompromising fight against these bourgeois fractions with their confused socialist terminology. Only this combat can lead to victory:  the Russian proletariat won not by allying with the Socialist Revolutionaries, the populists and the Mensheviks, but by struggling against them. It is necessary to abandon the tactic of the United Front and warn the proletariat that these bourgeois fractions - in today's period, the parties of the Second International - will at the decisive moment take up arms for the defence of the capitalist system";
  • its interpretation of the dangers facing the Soviet state - the threat of "the replacement of the proletarian dictatorship by a capitalist oligarchy". The Manifesto charts the rise of a bureaucratic elite and the political disenfranchisement of the working class, and demands the restoration of the factory committees and above all of the soviets to take over the direction of the economy and the state.[6] For the Workers' Group, the revival of workers' democracy was the only means to counter the rise of the bureaucracy, and it explicitly rejected Lenin's idea that the way forward lay through a shake out of the Workers' Inspection, since this was merely an attempt to control the bureaucracy through bureaucratic means;
  • its profound sense of responsibility. In contrast to the critical notes appended by the KAPD when it published the Manifesto in Germany (Berlin 1924), and which expressed the German left's premature pronunciation of the death of the Russian revolution and the Communist International, the Workers' Group is very cautious about proclaiming the definite triumph of the counter-revolution in Russia or the final death of the International. During the "Curzon crisis" of 1923, when it seemed that Britain might declare war on Russia, the members of the Workers' Group committed themselves to defending the Soviet republic in event of war; and above all, there is not the least hint of any repudiation of the October revolution and of the Bolshevik experience.  In fact, the group's stated attitude to its own role corresponds very closely to the notion of the left fraction as later elaborated by the Italian left in exile. It recognised the necessity to organise itself independently and even clandestinely, but both the group's title (Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party - Bolshevik), and the content of its Manifesto, demonstrate that it saw itself being in full continuity with the programme and statutes of the Bolshevik Party. It therefore appealed to all healthy elements within the party, both in the leadership and in the different opposition groupings like the Workers' Truth, the Workers' Opposition, and the Democratic Centralists, to regroup and wage a determined struggle for the regeneration of the party and the revolution. And in many ways this was a far more realistic policy than the hope of the "46" that the factional regime in the party would be abolished "in the first instance" by the dominant faction itself. 

In sum, there was nothing morbid in the project of the Workers' Group, and neither was this a mere sect with no influence in the class. Estimates put its membership in Moscow at 200 or so, and it was thoroughly consistent in its advocacy of taking the side of the proletariat in its struggle against the bureaucracy. It thus sought to make an active political intervention in the wildcat strikes of summer-autumn 1923. Indeed it was for this very reason, coupled with the growing political influence of the group within the ranks of the party, that the apparatus unleashed the full force of repression against it. As he had predicted, there was even an attempt to shoot Miasnikov "while trying to escape". Miasnikov survived and though imprisoned and then forced into exile, continued his revolutionary activity abroad for two decades. The group in Russia was more or less crippled by mass arrests, although it is clear from The Russian Enigma, Ante Ciliga's precious account of the opposition groups in prison in the late 20s, that it by no means disappeared completely and continued to influence the "extreme left" of the opposition movement. Nonetheless, this initial repression was a truly ominous moment: it was the first time that an avowedly communist group had suffered direct state violence under the Bolshevik regime.


 

Manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party

By way of a preface

Every conscious worker, who cannot remain indifferent to the suffering and torment of his class nor to the titanic struggle that it is undertaking, has certainly reflected more than once on the destiny of our revolution at all stages of its development. Each one understands that his fate is very closely linked to that of the movement of the world proletariat.

We still read in the old Social-Democratic programme that "the development of commerce created a close link between the countries of the civilised world" and that "the movement of the proletariat must become international, and that it has already become such".

The Russian worker has learned to see himself as a soldier in the world army of the international proletariat and to see his class organisations as the regiments of this army. Every time the disquieting question of the destiny of the October revolution is raised, he turns his gaze beyond the frontiers of Russia, to where the conditions for revolution are ripe, but where the revolution does not come.

But the proletarian must not complain, nor lower his head because the revolution doesn't present itself at a given moment. On the contrary, he must pose the question: what is it necessary to do in order for the revolution to happen?

When the Russian worker looks at his own country, he sees a working class which has accomplished the socialist revolution, taken on the hardest trials of the NEP (New Economic Policy), while in front of him stand the increasingly well fed heroes of the NEP.  Comparing their situation to his, he asks himself with disquiet: where are we going exactly?

Then come the bitterest thoughts. The worker has shouldered the entire weight of imperialist and civil war; he is feted in the Russian newspapers as a hero who has spilt his blood in this struggle. But he leads a miserable bread and water existence. On the other hand, those who eat their fill on the torment and misery of others, of those workers who have laid down their arms, live in luxury and magnificence. Where are we going then, and what will come of it? Is it really possible that the "New Economic Policy" is being transformed into the New Exploitation of the Proletariat? What is to be done to avoid this danger?

When these questions are posed on the spot to the worker, he automatically looks backward so as to establish a link between past and present, to understand how we have arrived at such a situation. However bitter and instructive these experiences, the worker finds his bearings in the inextricable network of historic events which have unfolded in front of his eyes.

We want to help him, as far as our forces permit, to understand the facts and if possible show him the road to victory. We don't pretend to be magicians or prophets whose words are sacred or infallible; on the contrary we want all we say submitted to the sharpest criticisms and necessary corrections.

To the communist comrades of every country!

The present state of the productive forces in the advanced countries and particularly in those where capitalism is highly developed gives the proletarian movement of these countries the character of a struggle for the communist revolution, for power to be held by calloused hands, for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Either humanity will be involved in unceasing bourgeois and national wars, engulfed in barbarism and drowning in its own blood; or the proletariat will accomplish its historic mission: to conquer power and to put an end once and for all to the exploitation of man by man, to war between classes, peoples, nations; to plant the flag of peace, of labour and of fraternity.

The armaments race, the precipitous reinforcement of the aerial fleets of Britain, France, America, Japan, etc., threaten us with war of a severity unknown up to now and in which millions of men will perish; the wealth of the towns, factories, enterprises, all that the workers have created through exhausting work, will be destroyed.

It is the task of the proletariat to overthrow its own bourgeoisie. The more quickly that it does so in each country, the more quickly the world proletariat will realise its historic mission.

In order to finish with exploitation, oppression and wars, the proletariat must not struggle for an increase in wages or a reduction in its hours of work. This was necessary in the past, but today it must struggle for power.

The bourgeoisie and oppressors of all types and hues are very satisfied with the Socialists of all countries, precisely because they divert the proletariat away from its essential task which is the struggle against the bourgeoisie and against its regime of exploitation: they continually propose petty demands without showing the least resistance to subjection and violence. In this way, they become, at a certain moment, the sole saviours of the bourgeoisie faced with the proletarian revolution. The great mass of workers gives a distrustful reception to what its oppressors directly propose to it; but if the same thing is presented to it as conforming to their interests and clothed in socialist phrases, then the working class, confused by this language, is confident in the traitors and wastes its force in a useless combat. The bourgeoisie thus hasn't, and never will have, better advocates than the Socialists.

The communist avant-garde must before everything expel from the heads of its class comrades all crass bourgeois ideology and conquer the consciousness of the proletariat in order to lead it to a victorious struggle. But to burn off all this bourgeois debris, it must be with them, the proletarians, sharing all their troubles and labour. When these proletarians, who until now have followed the accomplices of the bourgeoisie, begin to struggle, to go on strike, it should not stand outside blaming them scornfully - it must, on the contrary, stay with them in their struggle, explaining relentlessly that this struggle only serves the bourgeoisie. Similarly, to say a word of truth, one is sometimes forced to stand on a pile of shit (to stand for elections) even when it means soiling honest revolutionary shoes.

Certainly, everything depends on the balance of forces in each country. And in some situations it may not be necessary to stand for elections, or to participate in strikes, but to go into battle directly. One cannot put all countries in the same bag. One must naturally look at all ways to conquer the sympathy of the proletariat; but not at the price of concessions, forgetfulness or renouncing fundamental solutions. All this must be rejected because a mere concern for immediate success leads us to abandon the real solutions, prevents us from guiding the masses, so that instead of trying to lead them, we end up copying them; not winning them over, but being towed by them.

One must never wait for others, remain immobile, because the revolution will not break out simultaneously in every country. One must not excuse one's own indecision by invoking the immaturity of the proletarian movement and still less adopt the following language:  "We are ready for the revolution and even quite strong; but the others are not ready yet; and if we overthrow our own bourgeoisie without the others doing the same, what will happen then?"

Let's suppose that the German proletariat chases out the bourgeoisie and all those who serve it. What will happen? The bourgeoisie and the social traitors will flee far from proletarian anger, turn towards France and Belgium and will entreat Poincaré and co. to settle accounts with the German proletariat. They will go as far as promising France to respect the Treaty of Versailles, perhaps offering them the Rhineland and the Ruhr to boot. That's to say that they will act as the Russian bourgeoisie and its Social Democratic allies did and will do again. Naturally Poincaré will rejoice in such good business:  saving Germany from its proletariat and saving, at the same time, Soviet Russia for the thieves of the entire world. Unfortunately for Poincaré and co., as soon as the workers and peasants who compose the army understand that it is a question of helping the German bourgeoisie and its allies against the German proletariat, then they will turn their arms against their own masters, against Poincaré himself. The latter, in order to save his own skin and that of the French bourgeoisie, will recall his troops, abandon the poor German bourgeoisie with its Socialist allies to their fate, and do so even if the German proletariat tear up the Treaty of Versailles. Poincaré, chased from the Rhine and the Ruhr, will proclaim a peace without annexation or indemnity on the principle of self-determination of the peoples. It will not be difficult for Poincaré to come to an understanding with Cuno and the fascists; but a Germany run by workers' councils will break their backs.  When you have force at your disposal, you have to use it and not go round in circles.

Another danger threatens the German revolution; it is the dispersal of its forces. In the interests of the proletarian world revolution, the whole revolutionary proletariat must unite its efforts. If the victory of the proletariat is unthinkable without a decisive rupture and merciless combat against the enemies of the working class, the social traitors of the Second International who militarily repress the proletarian revolutionary movement in their - so-called free - country, this same victory is unthinkable without the joining of all the forces which have the aim of the communist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is why we, the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) whom we count, organisationally and ideologically, among the parties adhering to the 3rd International, look towards honest revolutionary communist proletarians by appealing to them to unite their forces for the last and decisive battle. We address ourselves to all the parties of the 3rd International as to those of the 4th Communist Workers' International,[7] as well as particular organisations which do not belong to any of these Internationals but who pursue our common aim in order to appeal to them to constitute a united front for the combat and victory.

The initial phase has drawn to a close. The Russian proletariat, by basing itself on the rules of the communist and proletarian revolutionary art, has brought down the bourgeoisie and its lackeys of every type and nuance (socialist-revolutionaries, Mensheviks, etc.) who defended it with so much zeal. And, although much weaker than the German proletariat, it has, as we see, repelled all the attacks that the world bourgeoisie led against it, attacks incited by the bourgeoisie, landlords and Socialists of Russia.

It is now incumbent on the proletariat of the West to act, to bring together its own forces and begin the struggle for power. It would evidently be dangerous to close one's eyes to the dangers from within which threaten Soviet Russia, the October revolution and the world revolution. At this time the Soviet Union is going through its most difficult moments: it faces so many deficiencies, and of such a gravity, that they could become fatal for the Russian proletariat and the entire world proletariat. These deficiencies derive from the weaknesses of the Russian working class and those of the world workers' movement. The Russian proletariat is not yet up to opposing the tendencies which, on one side lead to the bureaucratic degeneration of the NEP and, on the other, put in great danger, as much from the inside as from the outside, the conquests of the Russian proletarian revolution.

The proletariat of the entire world is directly and immediately interested in the conquests of the October revolution being defended against all threats. The existence of a country like Russia as the base of the world communist revolution already signifies a guarantee of victory, and as a consequence the avant-garde of the international proletarian army - the communists of every country - must firmly express the still largely mute opinion of the proletariat on the deficiencies and the harm suffered by Soviet Russia and its army of communist proletarians, the RCP (Bolshevik).

The Workers' Group of the RCP (B), which is the best informed of the Russian situation, means to start this work.

We are not of the opinion that we, communist proletarians, cannot talk about our faults because there are in the world social traitors and scoundrels who, as we've seen, could use what we say against Soviet Russia and communism. All these fears are without foundation. Whether our enemies are open or hidden doesn't matter at all:  they remain artisans of calamity who cannot live without being harmful to us, the proletarians and communists who want to liberate ourselves from the capitalist yoke. What will follow from this? Must we because of that keep our troubles and faults quiet, not discuss them nor take measures to eradicate them? What will occur if we let ourselves be terrorised by the social traitors and if we keep quiet? In this case things could go so far that there would no longer be the conquests of the October revolution as we remember it. This would be of great use to the social traitors and a mortal blow for the international proletarian communist movement. It is precisely in the interest of the world proletarian revolution and of the working class that we, the Workers' Group of the RCP (Bolshevik), are beginning, without trembling in front of the opinion of the social traitors, to pose the decisive question for the international and proletarian movement in its totality. We have already observed that its faults can be explained by the weaknesses of the international and Russian movement. The best help that the proletariat of other countries can give to the Russian proletariat is a revolution in their own country, or at least in one or two of the advanced countries. Even if at the present time forces are not sufficient to realise such an aim, they would, in any case, be up to helping the Russian working class to conserve the positions conquered by the October revolution, up to the point when the proletariat of other countries rise up and vanquish the enemy.

The Russian working class, weakened by the imperialist world war, the civil war and the famine, is not powerful. But, in front of the dangers which threaten it at present, it can prepare to struggle precisely because it has already gone through these dangers. It will make every effort possible to surmount them and it will succeed thanks to the help of the proletariat of other countries.

The Workers' Group of the RCP (Bolshevik) has sounded the alarm and its appeal finds a great echo in all of Soviet Russia. All those in the RCP who think along proletarian and honest lines are coming together and beginning to struggle. We will certainly succeed in awakening in the heads of all the conscious proletarians a preoccupation about the fate which awaits the conquests of the October revolution. The struggle is difficult; we are constrained to a clandestine activity:  we are operating in illegality. Our Manifesto cannot be published in Russia:  we have copied and distributed it illegally. The comrades who are suspected of belonging to our group are excluded from the party and the unions and are arrested, deported, liquidated.

At the Twelfth Conference of the RCP (Bolshevik), comrade Zinoviev announced, with the approval of the party and the Soviet bureaucrats, a new formula for stifling any criticism from the working class by saying:  "all criticism against the leadership of the RCP whether from the right or the left, is Menshevism" (Cf. his speech at the Twelfth Conference). That means that if the fundamental lines of the leadership do not appear correct to whatever communist worker and, in his proletarian simplicity, he begins to criticise them, he will be excluded from the party and the unions and handed over to the GPU (Cheka). The centre of the RCP doesn't want any criticism because it considers itself as infallible as the Roman Pope. Our concerns, the concerns of Russian workers about the destiny of the conquests of the October revolution - all that is declared counter-revolutionary. We, the Workers' Group of the RCP (Bolshevik), declare, in front of the entire world proletariat, that the Soviet Union is one of the greatest conquests of the international proletarian movement. It is precisely because of that that we raise the alarm, because the power of the soviets, the power of the proletariat, the victory of October of the Russian working class, is threatened with being transformed into a capitalist oligarchy. We declare that we will prevent with all our might the attempt to overturn the power of the soviets. We will do so even if, in the name of the power of the soviets, they arrest us and send us to prison. If the leading group of the RCP declares that our concerns about the October revolution are illegal and counter-revolutionary, you can, revolutionary proletarians of every country, and above all those of you who adhere to the 3rd International, express your decisive opinion on the basis of your knowledge of our Manifesto. Comrades, all the proletarians of Russia who are worried about these dangers which threaten the great October revolution look to you. At your meetings we want you to discuss our Manifesto and insist that your delegates to the 5th Congress of the 3rd International raise the question of fractions inside the parties and of the policy of the RCP towards the soviets. Comrades, discuss our Manifesto and make resolutions. Understand, comrades, that in this way you will help the exhausted and martyred working class of Russia to save the conquests of the October revolution.  Our October revolution is a part of the world revolution.

To work comrades!

Long live the conquests of the October revolution of the Russian proletariat!

Long live the world revolution!

* * *

Editor's note: The first two parts of the Manifesto are entitled "The character of the proletariat's class struggle" and "Dialectic of the class struggle"We have decided not to publish these here (although they are of course included in our book) insofar as they recall the vision of history and the role of the class struggle as set out by Marx, notably in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. It seems to us preferable to go directly to the part of the document which sets out the analysis elaborated by the Workers' Group of the historic period confronted by the world proletariat at that moment.

* * *

Sauls and Pauls in the Russian revolution

Any conscious worker who has learned the lessons of the revolution, saw for himself how different classes are "miraculously" transformed from Saul into Paul, from propagandists of peace into propagandists of civil war and vice versa. If one remembers the events of the last 15-20 years, they quite clearly show these transformations.

Look at the bourgeoisie, the landowners, the priests, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. Who among the priests and landowners advocated civil war before 1917? None of them. Even better, all those who advocated universal peace and the state of grace, they threw people in jail, had them shot and hanged for daring to make such propaganda. And after October? Who championed and advocated civil war with such passion? These same faithful children of Christianity:  priests, landowners, and officers.

And was the bourgeoisie, represented by the Constitutional Democrats, not formerly the partisan of the civil war against the autocracy? Remember the revolt at Vyborg. Didn't Miluikov, from the high tribune of the Provisional Government, say:  "We take up the red flag in our hands, and it will only be taken away from us when it is prised from our corpses"? True, he also pronounced very different words before the State Duma:  "This red rag that hurts all our eyes". But we can say with certainty that prior to 1905, the bourgeoisie was favourable to the civil war. And in 1917, under the Provisional Government which proclaimed with so much virulence "peace, peace, union between all the classes of society: this is the salvation of the nation!"? It was they, the bourgeoisie, the Cadets. But after October? Who continues today to scream like a fanatic:  "down with the soviets, down with Bolsheviks, war, civil war: this is the salvation of the nation!"? It is these same good masters and "revolutionary" snivellers, who now have the air of tigers.

And the Socialist-Revolutionaries? Did they not in their time assassinate Plehve, the Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, Bogdanovich and other pillars of the old regime? And did these violent revolutionaries not call for unity and civil peace in 1917, under the same Provisional Government? Yes, they called for it, and how! And after October? Did they remain lovers of peace? No!  They turned once again into men of violence...but r-r-reactionaries this time, and fired on Lenin. They advocate civil war.

And the Mensheviks? They were supporters of armed insurrection before 1908, of an 8 hour working day, of the requisition of landed properties, of a democratic republic and, from 1908 to 1917, joined in a sort of "class collaboration" for the freedom to organise and for legal forms of struggle against the autocracy. They were not opposed to the overthrow of the latter, but certainly not during the war, because they are patriots, even "internationalists"; before October 1917, they advocated civil peace and after October, civil war, just like the monarchists, the Cadets and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Is this phenomenon limited to us, the Russians? No. Before the overthrow of feudalism, the English, French, German bourgeoisies, etc, advocated and led civil war. After feudalism fell into dust and the bourgeoisie had seized power, it became the advocate for civil peace, especially with the emergence of a new contender for power, the working class, which fought it tooth and nail.

Look now where the bourgeoisie is favourable to civil war. Nowhere! Everywhere, except in Soviet Russia, it promotes peace and love. And what will its attitude be when the proletariat has taken power? Will it remain the advocate of civil peace? Will it call for unity and peace? No, it will turn into a violent propagandist for civil war and will wage this war to the limit, to the end.

And we Russian proletarians, are we an exception to this rule?

Not at all.

If you take the same year 1917, did our councils of workers' deputies become organs of civil war? Yes. Moreover, they took power. Did they want the bourgeoisie, the landowners, priests and other persons hostile to the councils to revolt against them? No. Did they want the bourgeoisie and all its big and small allies to submit without resistance? Yes, they wanted that. The proletariat was therefore for civil war before taking power, and against after its victory, for civil peace.

It's true that in all these transformations, there is plenty of historic inertia. Even in the epoch where everyone (from monarchists to Mensheviks, including the Socialist-Revolutionaries) was leading the civil war against Soviet power, this was under the slogan of "civil peace". In reality the proletariat wanted peace, but had to call again for war. Even in 1921, or in one of the circulars of the Central Committee of the RCP, one can glimpse this incomprehension of the situation:  the slogan of civil war was considered even in 1921 as an indicator of a strong revolutionary spirit. But one can see this only as an historic case which does not shake at all our point of view.

If currently in Russia, in consolidating proletarian power conquered by the revolution of October, we advocate civil peace, all honest proletarian elements must however have to unite firmly under the slogan of civil war, bloody and violent, against the world bourgeoisie.

The working class actually sees with what hysteria the exploiting layers of the population in the bourgeois countries calls for civil and universal peace, a state of grace.

We must therefore understand now that if, tomorrow, the proletariat of these bourgeois countries takes power, all today's pacifists, from the landowners to the II and II½ Internationals, will lead the civil war against the proletariat.

With all the force and energy we are capable of, we must call the proletariat of all nations to civil war, bloody and ruthless; we will sow the wind, because we want the storm. But with even more force we will make propaganda for civil and universal peace, for a state of grace, everywhere where the proletariat has triumphed and taken power.

As for the landowners, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries of all countries, they will advocate civil peace in every country where capitalist oppression reigns, and even more cruel and bloody civil war everywhere that the proletariat has taken power.

The principal tasks for today

The development of the productive forces in all countries has reached a phase in which capitalism is itself a factor of destruction of these same forces. World War and the events that ensued, the peace of Versailles, the question of reparations, Genoa, the Hague, Lausanne, Paris and finally the occupation of the Ruhr by France, in addition to massive unemployment and the never ending wave of strikes, explicitly show that the last hour of capitalist exploitation has already arrived and the expropriators must themselves be expropriated.

The historical mission of the proletariat is to save humanity from the barbarism it has been plunged into by capitalism. And it is impossible to accomplish this by struggling for pennies, for the 8-hour working day, for the partial concessions that capitalism can grant. No, the proletariat must organise itself firmly with the aim of a decisive struggle for power.

In such a time, all propaganda in favour of strikes to improve the material conditions of the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries is a malicious propaganda that keeps the proletariat in illusions, in the hope of a real improvement in its standard of living in capitalist society.

Advanced workers must take part in strikes and, if circumstances permit, direct them. They must propose practical demands where the proletarian mass still hopes to be able to improve its conditions by following this path; such an attitude will increase their influence within the proletariat. But they should state firmly that this is not a path to salvation, to improving conditions of life of the working class. If it is possible to organise the proletariat with a view to the decisive struggle by supporting all its conflicts with capital, this should not be rejected. It is better to get to the head of this movement and propose demands that are bold and categorical, practical and understandable to the proletariat, while explaining to it that if it does not take power, it will not be able to change its conditions of existence. Thus, for the proletariat, each strike, each conflict will be a lesson that will prove the necessity for the conquest of political power and the expropriation of the expropriators

Here the communists from all countries must adopt the same attitude as towards parliaments - they do not go there to make a positive work for legislation, but with a view to make propaganda, to work towards the destruction of these parliaments by the organised proletariat

Similarly, where there is the need to strike for a penny, for an hour, we must participate, but not to maintain hope of a real improvement in the workers' economic conditions. Instead, we must dispel these illusions, use each conflict to organise the forces of the proletariat while preparing its consciousness for the final struggle. Once, the demand for an 8 hour working day was revolutionary, now it has ceased to be in all countries where the social revolution is on the agenda.

We now turn to the issue of the united front.

* * *

The rest of the Manifesto, which will be published in future issues of the International Review, comprises the following chapter headings:

  • the socialist united front;
  • the question of the united front in countries where the proletariat is in power (workers' democracy);
  • the national question;
  • the New Economic Policy (NEP);
  • the NEP and the countryside;
  • the NEP and politics;
  • the NEP and the management of industry.

Note at the end of the document

1. Gabriel Miasnikov, a worker from the Urals, had leapt to prominence in the Bolshevik Party in 1921 when, immediately after the crucial Tenth Congress, he had called for "freedom of the press from monarchists to anarchists inclusive" (quoted in Carr, The Interregnum). Despite Lenin's attempts to dissuade him from this agitation, he refused to climb down and was expelled from the party in early 1922.  In March 1923 he joined with other militants to found the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), and they published their Manifesto, which was distributed at the Twelfth Congress of the RCP. The group began to do illegal work amongst party and non-party workers, and seems to have had an important presence in the strike wave of summer 1923, calling for mass demonstrations and trying to politicize an essentially defensive class movement. Their activities in these strikes were enough to convince the GPU that they were a real threat; a wave of arrests of their leading militants dealt a severe blow to the group.  Nevertheless they carried on their underground work, if on a reduced scale, until the beginning of the 1930. Miasnikov's subsequent history is as follows: from 1923 to 1927 he spent most of his time in prison or exile for underground activities. Escaping from Russia in 1927 he fled to Persia and Turkey (where he was also imprisoned), eventually settling in France in 1930. During this period he was still trying to organize his group in Russia.  At the end of the war, he petitioned Stalin to permit him to return to the USSR.  From the day when he returned to his country, there was no further news of him. And with reason! After a secret judgement by a military tribunal, he was shot in a Moscow prison on 16 November 1945.

 


[1]. Read our article "The Communist Left and the continuity of marxism" https://en.internationalism.org/the-communist-left.

[2]. The ICC has already published in English and in Russian a pamphlet, The Russian Communist Left, dedicated to the study of the different expressions of the communist left in Russia. A version is also under preparation in French. The English version included the Manifesto of the Workers' Group but, since its publication, a new more complete version of this Manifesto has been unearthed in Russia. It is this latest version (originally in French) that we publish today and which will be incorporated into the future French edition.

[3]. Read our article "The Communist Left in Russia" in the International Review n°s. 8 and 9, also included in the book on the Russian left.

[4]. "Members of the party who are dissatisfied with this or that decision of the central committee, who have this or that doubt on their minds, who privately note this or that error, irregularity or disorder, are afraid to speak about it at party meetings, and are even afraid to talk about it in conversation...Nowadays it is not the party, not its broad masses, who promote and choose members of the provincial committees and of the central committee of the RCP.  On the contrary the secretarial hierarchy of the party to an ever greater extent recruits the membership of conferences and congresses which are becoming to an ever greater extent the executive assemblies of this hierarchy...The position which has been created is explained by the fact that the regime is the dictatorship of a faction inside the party...The factional regime must be abolished, and this must be done in the first instance by those who have created it; it must be replaced by a regime of comradely unity and internal party democracy."

[5]. Read the article "The Communist Left in Russia" in the International Review n°s. 8 and 9, already cited.

[6]. However, the Manifesto seems also to defend the position that the unions must become the organs of the centralisation of economic direction - the old position of the Workers' Opposition that Miasnikov had criticised in 1921.

[7]. This is the KAI (Communist Workers' International, 1921-22), founded on the initiative of the KAPD, not to be confused with the Trotskyist IVth International.

Deepen: 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

People: 

Introduction to the 2nd English edition of the “Left Wing of the Communist Party of Turkey”

The purpose of this article is to introduce the new English edition of our pamphlet on the Left Wing of the Turkish Communist Party (Türkiye Komünist Partisi, TKP), which will be serialised in the following issues of the Review. The first edition of the pamphlet was published in 2008 by the Turkish group Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol (Internationalist Communist Left, EKS), which had already at the time adopted the ICC's basic positions as a statement of principle, and had begun to discuss the ICC's Platform. In 2009, EKS joined the ICC to form our organisation's section in Turkey, publishing Dünya Devrimi ("World Revolution").

This new edition of the English translation follows the publication of a new Turkish edition, which clarified some aspects of the original pamphlet with further references to original Turkish material. It also added as an appendix (for the first time in both modern Turkish and English), the 1920 founding declaration of the TKP in Ankara.

The body of the pamphlet still presents a certain difficulty for the non-Turkish reader, in that it refers to historical events which are common knowledge for any Turkish schoolchild, but are little known or not at all outside Turkey. Rather than weigh down the body of the text with explanations which would be unnecessary for the Turkish reader, we have chosen to add some explanatory notes in the English version, and to give, in this article, a general overview of the historical context which, we hope, will make it easier to for the reader to find his way through a complex period.[1]

Our historical overview will itself be divided into two parts: in the first, we will concentrate on the actual events leading up to the creation of the Turkish state, and the formation of the TKP; in the second, we will examine the debates surrounding the theoretical basis of the Comintern's policy towards national movements in the East, in particular as these are expressed in the adoption of the "Theses on the National Question" at the Comintern's Second Congress.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire

The Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the years following World War I was born out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.[2] The Empire (also known as the Sublime Porte) was not a national state, but the result of a series of dynastic conquests, which - at its greatest extent in the early 17th century - spread along the North African coast as far as Algiers, across present-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon, and much of coastal Saudi Arabia, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; on the European continent, the Ottomans conquered Greece, the Balkans and much of Hungary. Ever since the reign of Selim the Excellent in the early 16th century, the Sultan had also assumed the title of Caliph, that is to say the leader of the whole Ummah, or community of Islam. Insofar as one can make an analogy with European history, the Ottoman Sultans thus combined the spiritual and temporal attributes of the Roman Emperor and the Pope.

By the 19th century however, the Ottoman Empire was coming under growing pressure from the expansionism of modern European capitalist states, leading to its gradual disintegration. Egypt broke away de facto after Napoleon invaded in 1798 and was driven out by an alliance of British and local troops; it became a British protectorate in 1882. French troops conquered Algeria in a series of bloody conflicts between 1830 and 1872, while Tunisia was made a French protectorate in 1881. Greece won its independence in 1830, after a war fought with the help of the British, French, and Russians.

This process of disintegration continued into the early 20th century. In 1908 Bulgaria declared its independence and Austria-Hungary formalised its annexation of Bosnia; in 1911 Italy invaded Libya, while in 1912 the Ottoman army was badly mauled during the First Balkan War by the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks. Indeed the Sublime Porte's survival was due in part to the rivalries of the European powers, none of which could allow its rivals to profit from the Empire's collapse at their own expense. Thus France and Britain - perfectly capable, as we have seen, of despoiling the Empire for their own profit - united to protect the Ottomans against Russian advances during the Crimean War of 1853-56.

Internally, the Ottoman Empire was a hodgepodge of ethnic units whose only cohesion derived from the Sultanate and the Ottoman state itself. The Caliphate was of limited application, since the Empire included large Jewish and Christian populations, not to mention a variety of Muslim sects. Even in Anatolia - the geographical area which roughly corresponds to modern Turkey - national or ethnic unity was lacking. The majority Turkish population, largely made up of peasants farming in extremely backward conditions, lived side by side with Armenians, Kurds, Azeris, Greeks and Jews. Moreover, while some Turkish capital did exist, the great majority of the rising industrial/commercial bourgeoisie was not Turkish but Armenian, Jewish and Greek while other major economic actors were owned by French or German capital. The situation in Turkey is thus comparable to that in Tsarist Russia, where an outdated despotic state structure overlaid a civil society which, for all its backward aspects, was nonetheless integrated into world capitalism as a whole. Unlike Russia, however, the Ottoman state structure was not based on the economically dominant national bourgeoisie.

Although the Sultanate had made some attempts at reform, the experiments with limited parliamentary democracy were short-lived. More concrete results came from collaboration with Germany in the construction of railways linking Anatolia with Baghdad and the Hejaz (Mecca and Medina); these were of particular concern to the British in the years leading up to the war, since they promised to allow both Ottomans and Germans to pose a threat to the Persian oilfields (critical for supplying the British navy) on the one hand, and to Egypt and the Suez Canal (the lifeline to India) on the other. Nor was Britain any more enthusiastic about the Sultan's request for German officers to train the Ottoman army in modern strategy and tactics.

To the rising generation of nationalist revolutionaries who were to form the "Young Turk" movement, it was obvious that the Sultanate was incapable of responding to the pressure imposed by foreign imperialist powers, and building a modern, industrial state. However, the minority status (both national and religious) of the industrial and merchant classes meant that the Young Turk national revolutionary movement which founded the "Committee of Union and Progress" (CUP, in Turkish the İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti) in 1906 was largely made up, not from a rising industrial class, but from frustrated Turkish army officers and state officials; in its early years the CUP also received considerable support from national minorities (including from the Armenian Dashnak Party, and from the population around Salonika in what is now Greece) and, initially at least, from Avraam Benaroya's Workers' Socialist Federation. Although it was inspired by the ideas of the French revolution and the efficiency of German military organisation, it cannot properly be called nationalist since its aim was to transform and strengthen the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. In doing so, it inevitably came into conflict with emerging nationalist movements in the Balkan states, and with Greece in particular.

Support for the CUP grew rapidly in the army, to the point where its members felt able, in 1908, to launch a successful military putsch, forcing Sultan Abdulhamit to call a parliament and accept CUP ministers into his government, which they quickly dominated. The CUP's popular base was so narrow, however, that it was rapidly forced out of power and was only able to re-establish its authority by the military occupation of the capital Istanbul; Sultan Abdulhamit was forced to abdicate and was replaced by his younger brother Mehmet V. In theory at least, the Ottoman Empire had become a constitutional monarchy, which the Young Turks hoped would open the way to the Empire's conversion into a modern capitalist state. However, the fiasco of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) was to demonstrate all too clearly how backward the Ottoman Empire was in comparison to the more modern powers.

The "Young Turk revolution", as it became known, thus set the pattern for the creation of the Turkish Republic and indeed for states that were to emerge later from the collapse of the colonial empires: a capitalist state established by the army, as the only force in society with sufficient cohesion to prevent the country from falling apart.

It is unnecessary to give an account of the Ottoman Empire's misadventures following its entry into World War I on Germany's side;[3] suffice it to say that by 1919 the Empire was defeated and dismembered: its Arabian possessions had been divided between the British and the French, while the capital itself was occupied by Allied troops. The Greek ruling class, which had entered the war on the Allied side, now saw an opportunity to realise their Megali Idea: a "Greater Greece" which would incorporate into the Greek state those parts of Anatolia which had been Greek in the days of Alexander - essentially the Aegean coast including the major port of Izmir and the Black Sea coastal area known as Pontus.[4] Since these areas were also largely occupied by Turks, such a policy could only be carried out by a programme of pogroms and ethnic cleansing. In May 1919, with tacit British support, the Greek army occupied Izmir. The enfeebled Ottoman government, entirely dependent on the unreliable and rapacious goodwill of the victorious British and French, was incapable of resisting. Resistance was to come, not from the discredited Sultanate in Istanbul, but from the central Anatolian plateau. It is here that "Kemalism" entered the historical stage.

Almost simultaneously with the Greek occupation of Izmir, Mustafa Kemal Pasha - better known to history as Kemal Atatürk - left Istanbul for Samsun on the Black Sea coast. As Inspector of the 9th Army, his official duties were to maintain order and to oversee the dismantlement of the Ottoman armies in accordance with the ceasefire agreement with the Allies. His real purpose was to galvanise national resistance to the occupying powers, and in the years to follow Mustafa Kemal was to become the leading figure in Turkey's first truly national movement which led, by 1922, to the abolition of the Sultanate and the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire, the expulsion of Greek armies from Western Anatolia and the creation of today's Turkish Republic.

The year 1920 saw the opening of Turkey's first Grand National Assembly in Ankara. It can also be seen as the moment that events in Russia began once again to play an important role in Turkish history, and vice versa.

The two years following the October Revolution had been desperate ones for the new revolutionary power: the Red Army had had to fight off direct intervention by the capitalist powers, and to wage a bloody civil war against the White armies of Kolchak in Siberia, Denikin on the Don (the north-eastern Black Sea region), and Wrangel in the Crimea. By 1920, the situation was beginning to appear more stable: "Soviet Republics" had been or were about to be created, in Tashkent, Bokhara, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. British troops had been forced to evacuate Baku (the heart of the Caspian Sea oil industry and the region's only real proletarian centre), but remained an ever-present threat in Persia and India. In these circumstances, the national question was of immediate and pressing importance to the Soviet power and to the workers' movement which found its highest political expression in the Communist International (CI): were the national movements a force for reaction or a potential aid to the revolutionary power, as the peasants had been in Russia? How should the workers' movement behave in regions where the workers were still in the minority? What could be expected of nationalist movements like the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, which at least seemed to share a common enemy with the RSFSR[5] in British and French imperialism?

The debate on the national question

In 1920, these questions lay at the heart of the debates both at the CI's 2nd Congress, which adopted "Theses on the National Question", and at the "First Congress of the Peoples of the East", better known as the Baku Congress. These events formed, so to speak, the theoretical context for events in Turkey, and it is to these that we will now turn our attention.

Presenting the "Theses on the National Question" to the CI Congress, Lenin declared that "the most important, the fundamental idea underlying our theses (...) is the distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations [...] In this age of imperialism, it is particularly important for the proletariat and the Communist International to establish the concrete economic facts and to proceed from concrete realities, not from abstract postulates, in all colonial and national problems".[6] Lenin's insistence that the national question could only be understood in the context of the "age of imperialism" (what we would call the epoch of capitalism's decadence) was shared by all the participants in the debates that followed. Many however, did not share Lenin's conclusions and tended to pose the national question in terms similar to those used by Rosa Luxemburg:[7] "In the era of [...] unrestrained imperialism there can be no more national wars. National interests serve only as a means of deceiving, making the working masses serviceable to their mortal enemy, imperialism [...] No suppressed nation can reap freedom and independence from the politics of imperialist states [...] Small nations, whose ruling classes are appendages of their class comrades in the large powers, are merely pawns in the imperialist game of the major powers and are abused as tools during the war, just like the working masses, only to be sacrificed to capitalist interests after the war".[8]

If we look at the debates on the national question in the CI, we can see three different positions emerging.

Lenin's position and the "Theses on the National Question"

Lenin's position is necessarily profoundly influenced by the situation of Soviet Russia on the world arena: "in the current world situation, after the imperialist war, the mutual relations between states, the world system of states, is determined by the struggle of the smaller number of imperialist nations against the Soviet movement and the Soviet powers with Soviet Russia at their head [...] It is only from this standpoint that the political questions of the Communist Parties, not only in the civilised but also in the backward countries, can be posed and answered correctly".[9] At times, this position could come dangerously close to making the proletarian revolution dependent on the national revolution in the East: "The socialist revolution will not be merely, or mainly, the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat of each country against its own bourgeoisie - no, it will be the struggle of all colonies and countries oppressed by imperialism, of all dependent countries, against imperialism".[10]

The danger of this position is precisely that it tends to make the workers' movement in any one country, and the Comintern's attitude to that movement, dependent not on the interests of the international working class and the relations between workers of different countries but on the state interests of Soviet Russia.[11] It leaves unanswered the question of what to do when the two conflict. To take one very concrete example: what should be the attitude of Turkish workers and communists in the war between Mustafa Kemal's nationalist movement and the Greek occupying forces? Should it be the revolutionary defeatism adopted by the left wing in both the Greek and Turkish communist parties, or should it be Soviet Russia's military and diplomatic help to the nascent Turkish state, with a view to defeating Greece on the grounds that the latter is a tool of British imperialism?

Manabendra Nath Roy's position

During the Comintern's 2nd Congress, MN Roy[12] presented his "Supplementary Theses on the national question" which were debated in committee and presented together with Lenin's Theses, for adoption by the Congress. For Roy, capitalism's continued survival depended on "super-profits" from the colonies: "European capitalism draws its strength in the main not so much from the industrial countries of Europe as from its colonial possessions. Its existence depends on the control of extensive colonial markets and a broad field of opportunities for exploitation [...] The super-profits made in the colonies forms one of the main sources of the resources of contemporary capitalism. The European working class will only succeed in overthrowing the capitalist order once this source has finally been stopped up".[13] This pushed Roy towards a view of the world revolution as dependent on the revolution of the working masses of Asia: "The East is awakening: and who knows if the formidable tide, that will sweep away the capitalist structure of Western Europe, may not come from there. This is not idle fancy, nor is it mere sentimental brooding. That the final success of the Social Revolution in Europe will depend greatly, if not entirely, on a simultaneous upheaval of the labouring masses of the Orient, can be proved scientifically".[14] In Roy's view, however, the revolution in Asia depended on the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry. This he saw as being incompatible with support for the democratic nationalist movement: "The struggle to overthrow foreign domination in the colonies does not therefore mean underwriting the national aims of the national bourgeoisie but much rather smoothing the path to liberation for the proletariat of the colonies [...] Two movements can be discerned which are growing further and further apart with every day that passes. One of them is the bourgeois-democratic nationalist movement, which pursues the aim of political liberation with the conservation of the capitalist order; the other is the struggle of the propertyless peasants for their liberation from every kind of exploitation".[15] Roy's objections led to the removal from Lenin's draft theses of the idea of support for "bourgeois-democratic" movements; it was replaced by support for "national-revolutionary" movements. The rub lay, however, in the fact that the distinction between the two remained extremely unclear in practice. What exactly was a "national revolutionary" movement that was not also "bourgeois-democratic"? In what way exactly was it "revolutionary" and how could such a movement's "national" characteristics be reconciled with the demands of an international proletarian revolution? These questions were never clarified by the Comintern and their inherent contradictions remained unresolved.

Sultanzade's position

A third, left, position was perhaps expressed most clearly by Sultanzade,[16] the delegate from the newly-founded Persian CP. Sultanzade rejected both the idea that national revolutions could free themselves from dependence on imperialism, and that the world revolution depended on events in the East: "Does [...] the fate of communism throughout the world depend on the victory of the social revolution in the East, as comrade Roy assures you? Certainly not. Many comrades in Turkestan are caught up in this error [...] Let us assume that the communist revolution has begun in India. Would the workers of that country be able to withstand the attack by the bourgeoisie of the entire world without the help of a big revolutionary movement in England and Europe? Of course not. The suppression of the revolution in China and Persia is clear proof of the fact [...] If one were to try to proceed according to the Theses in countries which already have ten or more years of experience [...] it would mean driving the masses into the arms of counter-revolution. The task is to create and maintain a purely communist movement in opposition to the bourgeois-democratic one. Any other judgment of the facts could lead to regrettable results".[17] That Sultanzade's voice was not an isolated one can be seen from the fact that similar views were being expressed elsewhere. In his report to the Baku Congress, Pavlovitch (who according to some sources[18] worked on the report together with Sultanzade) declares that if "the Irish separatists succeed in their aim and realise their cherished ideal of an independent Irish people. The very next day, independent Ireland would fall under the yoke of American capital or of the French Bourse, and, perhaps, within a year or two Ireland would be fighting against Britain or some other states in alliance with one of the world predators, for markets, for coal-mines, for iron-mines, for bits of territory in Africa, and once again hundreds of thousands of British, Irish, American and other workers would die in this war [...] The example [...] of bourgeois Poland, which is now behaving as a hangman towards the national minorities on its own territory, and serving as the gendarme of international capitalism for struggle against the workers and peasants of Russia; or the example of the Balkan states - Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece - squabbling amongst themselves over the division of the booty and over their desire to annex to their own territory some nation which was only yesterday under the Turkish yoke; and a whole number of other facts of the same sort show that the formation of national states in the East, in which power has passed from the foreign rulers who have been driven out into the hands of the local capitalists and landlords, does not in itself constitute a great step forward in the matter of improving the position of the popular masses.

"Within the framework of the capitalist system, any newly-formed state which does not express the interests of the toiling masses but serves the interests of the bourgeoisie is a new instrument of oppression and coercion, a new factor of war and violence. [...] If the struggle in Persia, India and Turkey were to lead merely to the capitalists and landlords of those countries, with their national parliaments and senates, coming to power, the masses of the people would have gained nothing. Every newly-formed state would be rapidly drawn, by the very course of events and the iron logic of the laws of capitalist economy, into the vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics, and after a few decades we should witness another' world war [...] for the interests of the French, German, British, Indian, Chinese, Persian and Turkish bankers and factory-owners [...] Only the dictatorship of the proletariat and, in general, of the working masses, liberated from foreign oppression and having overthrown capital completely, will provide the backward countries with a guarantee that these countries will not, like the states formed from fragments of the Austro-Hungarian empire and Tsarist Russia Poland, White Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, Armenia - or formed from fragments of Turkey - Venizelist Greece and the rest be new instruments for war, plunder and coercion."[19]

Grigori Safarov (who was to play an important part in the development of the TKP) put the problem more clearly in his Problemy Vostoka: "...it must be emphasized that only the development of proletarian revolution in Europe makes the victory of agrarian-peasant revolution in the East possible [...] The imperialist system of states has no place for peasant republics. Numerically insignificant cadres of local proletarians and semi-proletarian rural and urban elements can carry with them broad peasant masses into the battle against imperialism and feudal elements, but this requires an international revolutionary situation which would enable them to ally themselves with the proletariat of the advanced countries".[20]

To be sure, Pavlovitch's report, which we have cited, is not a model of clarity and contains a number of contradictory ideas. Elsewhere in the report, for example, he refers to "revolutionary Turkey" ("The Greek occupation of Thrace and Adrianople is aimed at isolating revolutionary Turkey and Soviet Russia from the revolutionary Balkans"). He even goes so far as to take up a suggestion from "the Turkish comrades" (presumably the group around Mustafa Suphi) "that the question of the Dardanelles should be decided by the states bordering on the Black Sea, excluding participation by Wrangel[21] and the Entente", and continues that "We warmly welcome this idea, the realisation of which would be a first and decisive step towards a federation of all the peoples and countries whose territories adjoin the Black Sea".[22] This only goes to show that the revolutionaries of the day were confronting, in practice and in conditions of extreme difficulty, new problems which had no easy solutions. In such a situation, a certain degree of confusion was probably inevitable. Let us remark in passing, though, that the "left" positions are being put forward, not by Western intellectuals or armchair revolutionaries, but precisely by those who, on the ground, would have to put the Comintern's policy into practice.

The national question in practice

It should be emphasized that the positions we have outlined here, rather schematically, were not set in stone. The Comintern was confronted with problems and questions that were wholly new: capitalism as a whole was still at the watershed between its period of triumphant ascendancy and the "epoch of wars and revolutions" (to use the CI's expression); the opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat was finding expression in an opposition between the Soviet power and capitalist states; and communists in the East were having to "adapt [themselves] to specific conditions of a sort not met with in European countries".[23]

It has to be said that in confronting these new questions, the Comintern's leaders could sometimes reveal a surprising naivety. Here is Zinoviev, speaking at the Baku Congress: "We can support a democratic policy such as has now taken shape in Turkey and such as will perhaps tomorrow make its appearance in other countries. We support and will support national movements like those in Turkey, Persia, India and China [...] the task of this [current national] movement is to help the East free itself from British imperialism. But we have a task of our own to carry out, no less great - to help the toilers of the East in their struggle against the rich, and here and now to help them build their own Communist organisations, [...] to prepare them for a real labour revolution."[24] Zinoviev was doing no more than echoing Lenin's report on the national question to the Comintern's 2nd Congress: "as communists we will only support the bourgeois freedom movements in the colonial countries if these movements are really revolutionary and if their representatives are not opposed to us training and organising the peasantry in a revolutionary way."[25]

In effect, the policy that Zinoviev is putting forth - and which the Soviet power at first tried to put into effect - assumes that the national movements will accept the Soviet power as an ally, while at the same time allowing the communists a free hand in organising the workers to overthrow them. But nationalist leaders like Mustafa Kemal were not idiots, nor were they blind to their own interests. Kemal - to take the Turkish example - was prepared to let the communists organise only insofar as he needed the support of Soviet Russia against the British and the Greeks. Kemal's determination to keep the popular enthusiasm for communism - which certainly existed and was gaining ground however confusedly - firmly under control, even led to the bizarre creation of an "official" Communist Party whose central committee included the leading generals of the Turkish army! This CP was at least perfectly clear (indeed a good deal clearer than the Comintern) on the radical incompatibility between nationalism and communism, and on the implications of this incompatibility. As the "official" CP's organ Anadoluda Yeni Gün put it: "At the present moment, the program of communist ideas is not only harmful, but even ruinous, for the country. When a soldier realizes that there does not have to be a fatherland, he will not have to go out to defend it; hearing that there does not have to be hatred of nations, he will not go out and fight the Greeks".[26] The Party ideologue Mahmud Esat Bozkurt declared unambiguously that "Communism is not an ideal, but a means for the Turks. The ideal for the Turks is the unity of the Turkish nation".[27]

In short, the Soviet power would be an acceptable ally for the nationalists only insofar as it acted as an expression, not of proletarian internationalist but of Russian national interests.

The consequences of the Comintern's policy towards Turkey were spelled out by Agis Stinas in his Memoirs published in 1976: "The Russian government and the Communist International had characterised the war led by Kemal as a war of national liberation and had ‘in consequence' judged it as progressive, and for that reason supported it politically and diplomatically and sent him advisors, arms and money. If we consider that Kemal was fighting a foreign invasion to liberate the Turkish soil, his struggle had a character of national liberation. But was there anything progressive about it? We believed this and supported it then. But how can we defend the same thesis today? For something to be progressive in our era and to be considered as progressive it must contribute to the raising of the class consciousness of the worker masses, to developing their capacity to struggle for their own emancipation. What has the creation of the modern Turkish state contributed to this? Kemal (...) threw the Turkish Communists into the jails where he hanged them, and then finally turned his back on Russia, establishing cordial relations with the imperialists and giving himself the job of protecting their interests. The correct policy, in line with the interests of the proletarian revolution, would have been to call on the Greek and Turkish soldiers to fraternise, and the popular masses to struggle together, without letting themselves be stopped by national, racial and religious differences, for the republic of workers' and peasants' councils in Asia Minor. Independently of the policy of Russia and the objectives of Kemal, the duty of Greek Communists was definitely one of intransigent struggle against the war."[28]

The importance of the Turkish Left's experience lies not in its theoretical heritage but in the fact that the struggle between nationalism and communism in the East was played out in Turkey to the bitter end, not in debate but on the ground, in the class struggle.[29] The Turkish Left's fight against opportunism within the Party, and against the repression of the Kemalist state, which dipped its hands in workers' blood from its very birth, mercilessly exposed the failings and ambiguities of the Comintern's Theses on the National Question. The struggle of Manatov, Haçioglu and their comrades, belongs to the internationalist heritage of the workers' movement.

Jens, 8-6-10

 


 

[1]. In doing so, we have relied extensively on Andrew Mango's recent biography of Kemal Atatürk, and on EH Carr's history of the Russian Revolution (1950 edition), in particular the chapter in Volume I on "Self-Determination in practice". The French speaking reader can usefully consult the long critical article published in Programme Communiste n°100 (December 2009, https://www.pcint.org/04_PC/100/100_notes-turkish-p-c.htm ), which, despite its inevitable Bordigist blind spots, contains some useful historical material.

[2]. The fact that Turkey as such did not exist for much of the period covered by the pamphlet goes some way to explain why the EKS' original Preface describes Turkey as an "obscure Middle Eastern country"; for the rest, the undoubted ignorance of Turkish affairs by the vast majority of the population in the English speaking world thoroughly justifies the expression. Amusingly, Programme Communiste prefers to attribute it to "the prejudices of a citizen of one of the 'great powers' that dominates the world" on the wholly unfounded assumption that the Preface is written by the ICC. Should we conclude that the PCI's own prejudices leave it unable to imagine that an uncompromisingly internationalist position should be adopted by a member of what they like to call the "olive-skinned peoples"?

[3]. Amid all the crimes perpetrated during World War I, the massacre of the Armenians nonetheless deserves special mention. Out of fear that the Christian Armenian population would collaborate with the Russians, the CUP government and its War Minister Enver Pasha undertook a programme of mass deportations and killings leading to the extermination of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

[4]. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megali_Idea

[5]. Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics.

[6]. The Second Congress of the Communist International, Vol. 1, New Park, p.109. Also to be found on the marxists.org web site.

[7]. In its critique of the EKS pamphlet, Programme Communiste tries to use Lenin against Luxemburg, even going so far as to claim that Luxemburg, under the name of "Junius" "puts forward... a national programme of the defence of the fatherland!" It is true that Luxemburg, like most of her contemporaries including Lenin, was not always free of ambiguities and outmoded references to the national question as it had been treated during the 19th century by Marx and Engels, and by the Social-Democracy more generally. We have already pointed out these ambiguities in International Review n°12 (1978), where we defended Lenin's critique of them in his article on the Junius pamphlet. It is also true that a correct economic analysis does not lead automatically to correct political positions (any more than an inadequate economic analysis invalidates correct positions of political principle). Programme Communiste, however, fails miserably to come up to Lenin's standard when they shamelessly truncate Luxemburg's words in order to avoid putting before their readers what her so-called "national programme" actually consisted of: "Yes, socialists should defend their country in great historical crises, and here lies the great fault of the German social democratic Reichstag group. When it announced on the fourth of August, "in this hour of danger, we will not desert our fatherland," it denied its own words in the same breath. For truly it has deserted its fatherland in its hour of greatest danger. The highest duty of the social democracy toward its fatherland demanded that it expose the real background of this imperialist war, that it rend the net of imperialist and diplomatic lies that covers the eyes of the people. It was their duty to speak loudly and clearly, to proclaim to the people of Germany that in this war victory and defeat would be equally fatal, to oppose the gagging of the fatherland by a state of siege, to demand that the people alone decide on war and peace, to demand a permanent session of parliament for the period of the war, to assume a watchful control over the government by parliament, and over parliament by the people, to demand the immediate removal of all political inequalities, since only a free people can adequately govern its country, and finally, to oppose to the imperialist war, based as it was upon the most reactionary forces in Europe, the program of Marx, of Engels, and Lassalle." (https://marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch07.htm)

[8]. "Either/Or", in Rosa Luxemburg's Selected Political Writings edited by D Howard, p.349. This is not to say that those delegates who echoed some of Luxemburg's positions could be described as "Luxemburgist", especially since there is no clear evidence that Luxemburg's writings were known to them.

[9]. Lenin, in The Second Congress of the Communist International, op. cit.

[10]. Lenin's report to the Second Congress of the Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East, November 1918, cited in Marxism and Asia, Carrère d'Encausse and Schram.

[11]. A striking example of the dominance of Russian state interests can be seen in the Soviet power's attitude to the movement in Guilan (Persia). A study of these events is outside the scope of the present article, but interested readers can find some of the details in Vladimir Genis' study Les Bolcheviks au Guilan, published in Cahiers du Monde russe, July-September 1999.

[12]. Manabendra Nath Roy (1887 - 1954), born Narendra Nath Bhattacharya and popularly known as M. N. Roy, was a Bengali Indian revolutionary, internationally known political theorist and activist. He was a founder of the Communist Parties in India and in Mexico. He began his political activity on the extreme wing of Indian nationalism, but moved towards communist positions during a stay in New York during World War I. He fled to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the British secret service and took part in the formation of the Communist Party there. He was invited to attend the Comintern's 2nd Congress and collaborated with Lenin in formulating the Theses on the National Question. See the Wikipedia entry on Roy at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manabendra_Nath_Roy

[13]. Roy's "Supplementary Theses" in 2nd Congress, op. cit.

[14]. "The awakening of the East", 1920: www.marxists.org/archive/roy/1920/07/15.htm

[15]. "Supplementary Theses".

[16]. Sultanzade was in fact of Armenian origin: his real name was Avetis Mikailian. He was born in 1890 into a poor peasant family in Marageh (North-West Persia). He joined the Bolsheviks in 1912, probably in St Petersburg. He worked for the CI in Baku and Turkestan, and was one of the main organisers of the Persian CP's first congress in Anzali in June 1920. He was present at the 2nd Congress of the Comintern as delegate of the Persian party. He remained on the left of the CI, and opposed to the "nationalist leaders" of the East (such as Kemal); he was also profoundly critical of the Comintern's so-called "experts" on Persia and the East. He died in Stalin's purges some time between 1936 and 1938. See Cosroe Chaqeri's study on Sultanzade in Iranian Studies, spring-summer 1984.

[17]. 2nd Congress, op. cit., pp.135-6.

[18]. See Cosroe Chaqeri, op.cit. In Cahiers du Monde russe, 40/3, July-September 1999, Vladimir Genis mentions a report drawn up jointly by Pavlovitch and Sultanzade, at Lenin's request following the Comintern's 2nd Congress, on "the objectives of the communist party in Persia". The report proposes to undertake massive propaganda "for the complete elimination of private property and for the transfer of land to the peasants, since the landlord class cannot support the revolution either against the Shah, or even against the British". 

[19]. It is significant that he poses things in these terms. See www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/baku/ch05.htm

[20]. Cited in Marxism and Asia, op.cit. Emphasis in the original.

[21]. Wrangel was one of the counter-revolutionary generals whose military campaigns against the revolution were financed by the major powers - in Wrangel's case in particular by the French.

[22]. Op. cit.

[23]. Lenin, speaking to the Congress of Communist Organisations of Peoples of the East. Cited in Marxism and Asia, p168.

[24]. www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/baku/ch01.htm

[25]. Op. cit.

[26]. Cited in George S Harris, The Origins of Communism in Turkey, p.82.

[27]. Ibid.

[28]. Stinas, www.reocities.com/antagonism1/stinas/StChap2.html#_Toc52960176 (our emphasis). For a brief summary of Stinas' memoirs (unfortunately not available in full in English), see our article in International Review n°72 (https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR072_stinas.htm ).

[29]. As the pamphlet puts it, "The left wing of the TKP was a movement shaped around opposition to the national liberation movement for practical reasons because of its terrible consequences for the workers, bringing them only pain and death". Both EKS when the pamphlet was written, and the ICC, were and are well aware that the Turkish Left does not occupy the same place in the theoretical and organisational development of the Communist Left as the Italian Left, for example. This is why the pamphlet is titled "The left wing of the TKP" rather than "The Turkish Communist Left". Apparently this distinction is not clear to Programme Communiste. But then Programme Communiste tends to treat the Communist Left as their personal property, claiming that only the Italian Left "placed itself on the basis of orthodox marxism" ("orthodox marxism" is itself a ludicrous notion which is entirely - dare we say so - unmarxist). Programme Communiste then goes into a long discussion about all the different currents, right and left, in the "young communist movement" and very learnedly informs us that they could be "right" or "left" depending on the changes in political line in the Comintern, citing Zinoviev's characterisation of Bordiga in 1924. But why is no mention made of Lenin's pamphlet written against "Left-Wing Communism", specifically in Italy, Germany, Holland, and Britain? Unlike Programme Communiste, Lenin at least had no difficulty in seeing that there was something in common among the "Left Wing Communists" - even if, of course, we do not agree with his description of Left Communism as a "childhood illness"!

Historic events: 

Deepen: 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

People: 

International Review no.143 - 4th Quarter 2010

This issue begins with Capitalism is a bankrupt system that must be overthrown, which addresses the damage being done at the levels of the economy and the environment, as well as the carnage wreaked by war and the generalised chaos engendered by a system in its death throes. This question is taken up in more historical depth in The age of catastrophes, the eighth part of our series on the decadence of capitalism.

As the deepening of the economic crisis pushes the bourgeoisie to increase its austerity attacks on the working class, and the working class begins to enter the struggle - though with difficulties - it is vital to recall the history of its past struggles. In the second part of the Hot Autumn in Italy, we analyse how the bourgeoisie was able to recuperate the situation in 1968-69, in particular the weaknesses and confusions present within the minorities of the class at the time.

Even further back in the collective memory of the working class stands the shining torch of the Russian Revolution that remains a rich vein of lessons for the working class. The sixth part of the series What are workers' councils? looks back over the period 1917-21 and returns to the perennial question of why the Russian Revolution began to degenerate. The final article in this issue returns to the debates at the Third Congress of the Third international where the Russian left communist Workers' Group published its Manifesto, the second part of which took up the questions of the 'socialist' united front, the Theses of the Executive of the Communist International and the united front in countries where the proletariat has power.

Economic debacle, “natural” catastrophes, imperialist chaos... Capitalism is a bankrupt system that must be overthrown

Since the crisis of the financial system in 2008 it seems nothing can hide the depth of the capitalism’s historic crisis. Attacks on the working class escalate, poverty increases, imperialist tensions sharpen, hundreds of millions are malnourished, natural catastrophes grow more deadly. The bourgeoisie itself cannot deny the scale of the difficulties nor pretend that it can provide a better future. It concedes that the present capitalist crisis is the most serious since the thirties and that we will have to “learn to live with” the evil of worsening poverty. But the bourgeoisie has a strong capacity to adapt: if it has to admit - partly because of the evidence and partly out of political calculation - that things are getting bad and not about to improve, it knows how to present the problems without implicating the capitalist system as a whole. The banks are bankrupt and dragging down the world economy? The traders are to blame! Certain countries are so indebted that they cannot pay? Corrupt governments! War ravages the planet? Lack of political will! Environmental catastrophes and their victims are increasing? Nature's fault! Whatever differences exist in the many analyses of the bourgeoisie, they all have a common thread: they denounce this or that form of governance but not capitalism as a mode of production. In reality all the calamities suffered by the working class are the result of contradictions which are strangling society whatever the mode of government, deregulated or statist, democratic or dictatorial. To better camouflage the bankruptcy of its system the bourgeoisie also pretends that the economy is recovering slightly after the crisis of 2008. In fact this crisis is far from over. It expresses the gravity of the historic crisis of capitalism.

Capitalism sinks into crisis

The bourgeoisie is occasionally happy about the positive perspective announced by economic indicators that are beginning to show a timid growth. But behind this “good news” the reality is very different. In order to avoid the catastrophic scenario of the thirties the bourgeoisie has spent billions in support of the banks and put Keynesian measures in place. These measures consist of lowering the base rates of the central banks which determine the price of credit and the state paying the cost of economic recovery, usually through debt. Such policies are supposed to bring about strong growth. But what is striking today is the extreme weakness of world growth considering the astronomic sums spent and the vigour of inflationary measures. The United States thus finds itself in a situation that the bourgeois economists, lacking the benefit of a Marxist analysis, cannot understand: the American state is in debt by several hundred billion dollars and the base rate of the Federal Reserve is close to zero; but growth was only 1.6% in 2010, less than the 3.7% expected. As the American case illustrates, if the bourgeoisie has momentarily avoided the worst by massive indebtedness, the recovery hasn't happened. Incapable of understanding that the capitalist mode of production is transitory, bourgeois economists don't see the evidence: Keynesianism has proved its historic failure since the 1970s when the contradictions of capitalism proved to be insurmountable even with the trick of debt.

Capitalism has survived with difficulty for some decades because of the prodigious expansion of debt in order to create an artificial market to absorb a part of its chronic overproduction. But capitalist debt is like opium: the more it is used the bigger the dose required. In other words the life belt with which capitalism has kept its head above water finally deflated in 2008.

The sheer size of budget deficits adds to the risk of bankruptcy of numerous countries, in particular Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Spain. All countries are reduced to governing from day to day, changing their economic policies from recovery to austerity in response to events, without being able to offer any lasting improvement. The state, the last resort against the historic crisis of capitalism, is no longer able to hide its impotence.

Everywhere in the world the attacks on the working class are reflected in the growing unemployment rate. The governments, whether of the right or left, are imposing reforms and budgetary cuts on the proletariat with an unprecedented brutality. In Spain, civil service workers have seen their wages cut by 5% this year by the Socialist government of Zapatero, which already promised a freeze in 2011. In Greece, the average retirement age has increased by 14 years while pensions are frozen until 2012. In Ireland, which the bourgeoisie recently vaunted for its dynamism, the official rate of unemployment has risen to 14% while the wages of state employees have been lightened by 5-15% and the dole and family credits reduced.

According to the International Labour Organisation the number of unemployed in the world has gone from 30 million in 2007 to 210 million today.[1] Behind the austerity plans that are hypocritically called reforms, and behind the redundancies and factory closures, entire families slide into poverty. In the United States, nearly 44 million people live below the poverty line according to the report by the Census Bureau, a rise of 6.3 million in two years. This must be added to the three preceding years that showed a sharp increase in poverty. The decade has been marked in the US by a strong reduction in purchasing power.

It is not only in the “rich countries” that the crisis creates poverty. Recently the Food and Agriculture Organisation was proud to observe a decline in 2010 of the number of malnourished particularly in Asia (578 million) and in Africa (239 million) out of a total of 925 million throughout the world. What these statistics don’t reveal immediately is that this figure is larger than that published in 2008 before the effects of speculative inflation in the price of food that provoked a series of riots in numerous countries. The significant decline in agricultural prices has indeed modestly “reduced hunger in the world” but the tendency over several years, independently of the immediate economic conjuncture, is undoubtedly toward an increase. Moreover the heatwaves in Russia, Eastern Europe and recently in Latin America have seriously reduced world harvests which, in the context of price rises, will inevitably lead to greater malnutrition next year. So it is not only at the economic level that capitalist bankruptcy is expressed. Climatic instability and the bourgeoisie’s management of environmental catastrophes are a growing cause of death and destitution.

Capitalism destroys the planet

This summer the world’s population has been subject to violent catastrophes: fires have consumed Russia and Portugal and numerous other countries; devastating floods have drowned Pakistan, India, Nepal and China in mud. In the spring the Gulf of Mexico suffered its worst ever ecological catastrophe after the explosion of an oil platform. The list of catastrophes in 2010 is still longer. Their increase and severity is no accident because capitalism has a very heavy responsibility both for their origins and management.

Recently the rupture of the badly maintained reservoir of an aluminium factory in Hungary caused an industrial and ecological catastrophe: more than a million cubic meters of toxic “red mud” spilled out around the factory causing several deaths and many injuries. Now, to “minimise the impact” of this pollution the bosses either poured millions of tons of red mud into the Danube or into an immense basin, when the technology has existed for a long time to recycle such effluent, in particular the waste from construction or horticulture.

The destruction of the planet by the bourgeoisie is not limited however to the innumerable industrial catastrophes every year. According to scientists global warming plays a major role in the increase of extreme climatic events. “These events will reproduce and intensify in a climate affected by the pollution of greenhouse gases” according to the vice president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. With good reason: from 1997 to 2006, when the temperature of the planet continued to climb, the number of devastating catastrophes grew by 60% in relation to the preceding decade, bringing in their wake more and more victims. From now to 2015 the number of victims of meteorological catastrophes will increase by more than 50%.

While the scientists of oil companies may claim that global warming is not the result of the massive pollution of the atmosphere, the scientific research as a whole shows a clear correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming and the increase of natural catastrophes. However the scientists are mistaken when they claim that a little political will from the governments can change things. Capitalism is incapable of limiting greenhouse gas emissions because it must obey its own laws, those of profit, of cheap production and of competition. The necessary submission to these laws means that the bourgeoisie pollutes with its heavy industry, with the unnecessary transportation of goods for thousands of miles, amongst a host of examples.

The responsibility of capitalism for the scale of these catastrophes is not limited to atmospheric pollution and the unstable climate. The systematic destruction of ecosystems like massive deforestation, storing waste in natural drainage zones, anarchic urbanisation even in dried up riverbeds and in the heart of fire risk areas, have aggravated the intensity of the catastrophes.

The series of fires that hit Russia this summer, in particular a large region around Moscow, is testimony to the bourgeoisie’s inability to master these phenomena. The flames consumed hundreds of thousands of hectares, leaving many victims. For several days thick smoke enveloped the capital, doubling the daily mortality rate. And, for good measure, nuclear and chemical risks threatened those well beyond Russian frontiers because of fires in areas contaminated by the Tchernobyl explosion and the risk to arms depots and chemical products more or less abandoned in the countryside.

An essential element for understanding the role of the bourgeoisie in the scale of the fires is the stupefying neglect of the forests. Russia has extensive and dense forests, requiring particular care for the rapid isolation of outbreaks of fire in order to prevent them spreading and becoming uncontrollable. Now, many of the massive Russian forests do not even have access routes so that fire engines are incapable of extinguishing the heart of most of the fires. Russia only has 22,000 firemen, less than a small country like France, to struggle against the flames. The corrupt regional governors prefer to use their meagre resources for managing the forests for luxury cars as several scandals have revealed.

The same cynicism has been shown toward the peat zones, those areas of decomposing organic material that are particularly flammable. Not only does the Russian bourgeoisie abandon them but it builds houses in areas where extensive fires occurred in 1972. The calculation is simple: property developers can buy these lands at knockdown prices.

In this way capitalism transforms humanly controllable natural phenomena into real catastrophes. And when it comes to horror, the bourgeoisie knows no limits. For several weeks torrential rain caused major flooding in Pakistan with mud slides, thousands of victims, 20 million homeless, and considerable material damage. Famine and the spread of disease, particularly cholera, worsened an already desperate situation. For more than a month, the Pakistani bourgeoisie and its army revealed an incredible incompetence and cynicism, blaming capricious nature. As in Russia, anarchic urbanisation and the impotent emergency services show the laws of capitalism to be the essential factor to understand the scale of the catastrophe.

But a particularly disgusting aspect of this tragedy is the way the imperialist powers tried to profit from the situation, using humanitarian operations as an alibi, to the detriment of the victims. The US supports the controversial government of Youssouf Raza Gilani, in the framework of the war within its Afghanistan neighbour, and very quickly profited from the events to deploy an important quantity of “humanitarian” aid consisting of helicopter carriers, amphibious assault boats, etc. Under the pretext of stopping Al Qaida terrorists from using the situation, the US put a break on the arrival of “international aid” coming from other countries – of course, this “humanitarian aid” also comprised the military, diplomats and unscrupulous investors.

For each sizeable catastrophe every country tries to advance its imperialist interests. Among the means used, the promise of aid has become systematic. All the governments officially announce substantial financial help, which is only really given if it satisfies the ambitions of the donors. For example, to date, only 10% of the international aid promised in January 2010 after the earthquake in Haiti has actually reached the Haitian bourgeoisie. And Pakistan is no exception to the rule: the millions promised will only be given against services rendered.

The bases of capitalism - the search for profit, competition, etc - are thus, at all levels, at the heart of the environmental problem. But the struggles around Pakistan also illustrate the growing imperialist tensions that ravage the planet.

Capitalism sows chaos and war

The election of Barack Obama at the head of the world’s principal imperialist power gave rise to many illusions in the possibility of pacifying international relations. In reality, the new American administration only confirms the imperialist dynamic that opened with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. We predicted that the rigid discipline of the imperialist blocs would follow this collapse, giving place to indiscipline and a rampant chaos, to generalised struggle of each against all and to the uncontrollable proliferation of local military conflicts. Our analysis has been fully confirmed. The period opened by the crisis in 2008 and the worsening of the economic situation have sharpened imperialist antagonisms between nations. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute no less than 1,531 billion dollars have been spent on world military budgets in 2009, an increase of 5.9% compared to 2008 and of 49% compared to 2000. And yet these figures don’t take account of illegal arms trafficking. Even if the bourgeoisie of certain countries is obliged by the crisis to cut down on its military expenses, the growing militarisation of the planet reflects the only future that it promises humanity: the proliferation of imperialist conflicts.

With their 661 billions of military expenditure in 2009 the US benefits from an absolutely incontestable military superiority. However since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc the country is less and less able to mobilise other countries behind it, as the war in Iraq since 2003 shows. Here, despite the pull out announced recently, there are still tens of thousands of American troops. Not only has the US been unable to enrol many powers under its banner, like Russia, France, Germany and China, but others have little by little disengaged from the conflict, in particular Britain and Spain. Above all the American bourgeoisie seems less and less capable of assuring the stability of a conquered country (the Afghan and Iraqi quagmires are symptomatic of this impotence) or a region, as the defiant stance of Iran shows. American imperialism is thus clearly on the decline. Its attempts to restore its leadership through war have only weakened it further. 

Faced with the United States China is trying to realise its imperialist ambitions through military spending (100 billion dollars of military expenses in 2009, with annual double figure percentage increases since the 1990s) and on the ground. In Sudan for example as in many other countries it has implanted itself militarily and economically. The Sudanese regime and its militias, armed by China, continue to massacre the populations accused of supporting the rebels in Darfour, themselves armed by France, through the intermediary of Chad, and the US, the old adversary of France in the region. All these sickening manoeuvres have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and displaced several million others.

The US and China are far from alone in the responsibility for the warlike chaos on the planet. In Africa for example, France, directly or through proxy militias, tries to save what it can from its influence, notably in Chad, in the Ivory Coast, or the Congo. The Palestinian and Israeli cliques, supported by their respective godfathers, continue an interminable war. The Israeli decision not to prolong the moratorium on construction in the occupied territories, while “peace negotiations” organised by the US are continuing, shows the impasse of Obama’s policy which wanted to be more diplomatic than that of Bush. Russia, through the war in Georgia or the occupation of Chechnya, tries to recreate a sphere of influence around itself. The litany of imperialist conflicts is too long to deal with exhaustively. Nevertheless the propagation of conflicts reveals that all the national fractions of the world bourgeoisie, powerful or not, have no other alternative to propose than the spilling of blood in defence of their imperialist interests.

The working class returns to the path of struggle

Faced with the depth of the crisis that capitalism is sinking into, workers’ miltancy is clearly not up to the mark. Past defeats still weigh heavily on the consciousness of our class. But the weapons of revolution are forged in the heart of struggles that the crisis has begun to develop significantly. For several years numerous struggles have broken out, sometimes simultaneously on the international level. Workers’ militancy appears simultaneously in the “rich” countries – in Germany, Spain, United States, Greece, Ireland, France and Japan – and in “poor” countries. The bourgeoisie of the rich countries spreads the dirty lie that the workers of the poor countries are taking the jobs of those in the rich countries. But it takes care to impose a blackout on the struggles of these workers that reveal they are also the victims of the same attacks of capitalism in crisis.

In China, in the country where the share of the wages in GDP has gone from 56% in 1983 to 36% in 2005, the workers of several factories have tried to free themselves from the unions, despite the strong illusions in the possibility of free trade unions. Above all the Chinese workers have co-ordinated their action themselves and spread their struggle beyond the factory. In Panama a strike broke out on the 1st July in the plantations in the province of Bocas de Toro to demand payment of wages and to oppose an anti-strike reform. Despite strong repression by the police and multiple forms of union sabotage, the workers immediately looked, successfully, to spread their movement. The same solidarity and will to fight collectively has animated a wildcat strike movement in Bangladesh, violently repressed by the forces of order.

In the central countries, the workers’ reaction in Greece has been relayed internationally in numerous struggles, in particular in Spain where the strikes have proliferated against draconian measures of austerity. The strike organised by the metro workers in Madrid is testimony to the will of the workers to extend their struggle and to organise themselves collectively through general assemblies. That’s why it has been the target of a campaign of denigration orchestrated by the Socialist government of Zapatero and its media mouthpieces. In France, if the unions are able to contain the strikes and demonstrations the reform to extend the retirement age has provoked a wide section of the working class. There have been significant but very minoritarian attempts to organise outside the unions through sovereign general assemblies to extend the struggles.

Obviously the consciousness of the world proletariat is still insufficient and these struggles, while simultaneous, are not immediately about to create the conditions for a common struggle at the international level. Nevertheless the crisis into which capitalism is sinking, the austerity cures and the growing poverty will inevitably multiply the struggles. These will tend to become more massive and as a result class identity, unity and solidarity will develop in small steps. This is the terrain for the conscious politicisation of the workers’ struggle for emancipation. The road to revolution is still long but as Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that will bring about its own demise, it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians”.

V. 08/10/10

 

 


[1]. These statistics show the general increase in the official rate of unemployment that the tricks of the bourgeoisie can no longer hide. However one must be aware that these figures are far from reflecting the scale of the phenomenon since, in all countries, including those where the bourgeoisie must provide some social welfare, after a certain time of fruitless job-seeking one is no longer considered as unemployed.

General and theoretical questions: 

Recent and ongoing: 

Hot Autumn in Italy 1969 (ii) An episode in the historic resurgence of the class struggle

In the previous article we talked about the major struggle undertaken by the working class in Italy at the end of the 60s, which has passed into history under the name of “the Hot Autumn”. As the article says, this name is too narrow to describe a period which involved the workers in Italy from 1968 -1969 at the very least and which left a profound mark on the years that followed. We also showed how this struggle in Italy was just one of the many episodes in the process of an international resurgence of the class struggle, following a long period of counter-revolution that blighted the whole world after the defeat of the revolutionary wave in the 1920s. The conclusion of the first article recalled the fact that this enormous development of militancy, accompanied by important moments of clarification in the working class, nevertheless encountered serious obstacles in the subsequent period. The Italian bourgeoisie, like that of the other countries that had to confront the awakening of the working class, did not remain with its arms folded for long and used both direct police intervention and other methods to get around its difficulties. As we will see in the following article, the ability of the bourgeoisie to recuperate the situation was largely due to the weaknesses of a proletarian movement which, in spite of its enormous militancy, was as yet lacking in clear class consciousness and whose vanguard did not itself have the necessary maturity or clarity to play its role.

The weaknesses of the working class during the Hot Autumn were mainly linked to the profound organic break experienced in the workers' movement after the defeat of the revolutionary wave in the 1920s and to the stifling domination of Stalinism. This had a two-fold negative effect on class consciousness. On the one hand, the class’ political heritage had been wiped out; the communist perspective had been confused with inter-classist programmes for nationalisation and the class struggle itself had been more and more confused with the struggle for the “defence of the fatherland”![1] On the other hand, the apparent continuity running from the revolutionary wave of the 1920s to the period of the most atrocious counter-revolution, with its Stalinist purges and millions of workers massacred in the name of “communism”, impressed upon people the idea that Marxism and Leninism should be rejected, or at least seriously revised. This idea was also reinforced by the false propaganda of the bourgeoisie about communists always being ready to oppress and exercise violence against people. When the working class awoke, in Italy and also internationally, it did not have the backing of any revolutionary organisation with a theoretical basis solid enough to support its return to the struggle. In fact nearly all the new groups that were formed by the momentum of the resurgence of the class struggle at the end of the 1960s, although they did take up the classics, did so with a sort of a priori critique which did not help them find what they needed. Even the formations of the Communist Left that had survived the long years of counter-revolution had not remained politically unscathed. The councilists - the almost obliterated testimony to the heroic experience of the German-Dutch Left in the 1920s - were still terrorised by the destructive role that might be played by a future degenerated party which, like the Stalinist party had done before, would impose its domination over the state and the proletariat. This led them to withdraw more and more into a position as “participants in the struggle” without playing any vanguard role and keeping the heritage of past lessons to themselves. In a way it was the same with the Bordigists and the Italian Left post 1943 (Programma Comunista and Battaglia Comunista) even though they, on the contrary, forcefully defended a role for the party. Paradoxically, because of their inability to understand the period they were living through and because of a sort of party-worship, combined with an underestimation of workers' struggles when waged in the absence of revolutionary organisations, they refused to recognise the Hot Autumn and the struggles at the end of the 1960s as the historic resurgence of the class at an international level. Because of this, their presence at the time was practically zero.[2] This is why the new political groups that were formed during the 1960s, both because of the distrust evoked by a confrontation with former political experiences, and also because of the absence of previously established political reference points, were obliged to reinvent positions and a programme of action. The problem was that their departure point was their experience within the old, decrepit Stalinist party. This is why a large number of militants from this generation positioned themselves in opposition to these parties and to the unions. They burnt their bridges to the left parties, but also in part to the Marxist tradition, they were searching for a revolutionary way that was “new” and which they thought they would come across in the street. This led to a considerable development in spontaneism and voluntarism because what still appeared in official dress was Stalinism in either its old form (USSR, CP) or in its new “Chinese” guise.

The dominant ideology of the Hot Autumn: workerism

It was within this context that workerism, the dominant ideology of the Hot Autumn, developed. The healthy reaction of the workers to take up the class struggle against the bureaucratised and asphyxiating structures of the Italian CP (PCI)[3] and the unions, led them to lose all trust in these structures and to put all their confidence in the working class itself. This was clearly expressed in the intervention of a worker of the Milan Om at the Palasport in Turin on the occasion of a meeting of the newly formed Lotta Continua in January 1970:

Unlike the Communist Party, we aren't led by four members of the bourgeoisie. [...] We aren't like the PCI because workers will be at the head of the organisation”.[4]

The judgement passed on the unions is particularly harsh:

We don't think that the unions can be changed 'from within' or that new ones – more 'red', more 'revolutionary', more 'proletarian', without bureaucrats – should be formed. We think that the unions are a cog in the bosses' system... and that they must therefore be fought against, as must the bosses”.[5]

So in this article we will try to present the main aspects of workerism, in particular the version defended by Tony Negri, who is still one of the best known representatives of this political current. We will try to draw out its strengths and also the reason behind its failure in the end. In order to do so, we will refer to Toni Negri’s Dall'operaio massa all'operaio sociale. Intervista sull'operaismo.[6] We will begin with a definition of workerism:

What we call 'workerism' had its beginnings and took form as an attempt to reply politically to the crisis in the workers' movement in the 50s, a crisis that was largely determined by the historic events in the movement around the 20th Congress”.[7]

We can already see from this quote that, in spite of the profound break with the official left forces, the definition of the latter – and in particular of the PCI - is completely inadequate and is not rooted in a deep theoretical understanding. The starting point is the so-called “crisis in the workers' movement in the 50s” whereas, on the contrary, what is described as a“workers' movement”was, at the time, no more than the international of the Stalinist counter-revolution. This was so because the revolutionary wave had already been defeated in the 1920s and the majority of the workers' political cadres were annihilated because they were dispersed or massacred. This ambiguity towards the PCI was to find expression in a “love-hate” relationship with the party of origin and explains why, in time, so many elements had no problem returning to the cradle.[8]

Workerism was originally based on what was described as the mass worker, that is, the new generation of proletarians, most of whom had come from the south during the period of the expansion and modernisation of industry which took place from the second half of the 1950s to the early 1960s. It was to replace the old image of the professional worker. This new generation was generally obliged to do unqualified and repetitive jobs. The fact that this part of the proletariat, young and with no past history, was much less amenable to the sirens of Stalinism and syndicalism and much more ready to throw itself into the struggle, led the workerists of the period to come up with a sociological analysis stating that the PCI represented the strata of professional workers, a workers' aristocracy.[9] We will consider later where this sort of social purism leads in terms of political choice.

From the partyist conception to the dissolution of the movement

The general context of the 1960s; the enormous strength and duration of the class movement in Italy at the time, the fact that there was no past experience that pre-existing proletarian organisations could have transmitted directly, led this generation of young militants to conclude that a revolutionary situation had arrived[10] and that it was necessary to set up a relationship of permanent conflict with the bourgeoisie, a sort of dual power. It was the lot of the groups who defended this idea (mainly Potere Operaio) to assume a leadership role in the movement's debates (“act as a party”) and to develop continuous and systematic action against the state. This is how Toni Negri expressed it:

The political activity of Potere Operaio will be to systematically gather together the class movement, the various situations, the different sectors of the working class and the proletariat and to lead them towards significant points, towards moments of mass confrontation that are able to damage the state reality as it appears. The exercising of a counter-power, a counter-power that is linked to specific experiences but which aims increasingly to protect itself and act against state power, is also fundamental as a subject for analysis and a function of the organisation.[11]

Unfortunately, in the absence of a critique of Stalinist practice, these groups – workers or otherwise – entrenched themselves behind a logic that remained a Stalinist one. The idea of “exemplary action” that is able to push workers to behave in a given way, weighed particularly heavily:

I didn't hold pacifist positions”, said Negarville, one of the steward leaders who was looking for, and found, confrontations with the police on Corso Traiano (3rd July 1969: 70 policemen wounded, 160 demonstrators arrested). “The idea of exemplary action which provokes police reaction was part of the theory and practice of Lotta Continua from the beginning, street confrontations are like workers' wage struggles, useful at the beginning of the movement”, says Negarville. There is nothing worse than a peaceful demonstration or a good contract. What is important is not to attain an objective, it is rather the struggle in itself, the struggle “is continuous” in fact.[12]

This is the same logic that would later push the various terrorist formations to challenge the state, on the backs of the workers, acting on the belief that the more the attack is brought to the heart of the state, the more the proletariat will be encouraged. Experience shows that, on the contrary, each time terrorist gangs have stolen the initiative from the working class, placing it in a situation of blackmail in fact, the consequence has always been the paralysis of the working class.[13]

However, this search for continual confrontations not only drained the energy of the workerist formations in the long term, it also made it difficult for them to find room for serious political reflection, which is so necessary:

In fact, the organisational life of Potere Operaio was continually interrupted by the need to deal with decisive moments that, more and more often, went beyond the capacity to react on a massive scale. In addition, there was often little implantation within the masses, which made it impossible to confront these moments”.[14]

Moreover the class struggle, which had accelerated considerably with the development of important struggles at the beginning of the 1970s, began to decline. This put an end to the experience of Potere Operaio and the group was dissolved in 1973:

...as soon as we realised that the problem raised was insoluble given the current situation and balance of forces, we dissolved the organisation. If our strength was not enough to resolve the problem at that time, the strength of the mass movement would have to resolve it in one way or another or else put forward a new way to pose the problem.[15]

The basic hypothesis that there was a proletarian attack upon capital that was permanent and growing in a linear way and that therefore the material conditions were ripe for the construction of “a new revolutionary party”, was soon shown to be unfounded and out of tune with the negative reality of the “reflux”.

But instead of accepting this, the workerists gave themselves over bit by bit to subjectivism, believing that they had produced a crisis in the economic system through their struggles and they gradually lost any materialist basis for their analyses, sometimes going so far as to adopt inter-classist positions.

From workerism to workers' autonomy

The political themes characterising workerism are not always the same, and they can be presented with varying degrees of force. Even so, all the positions of Potere Operaio (and of workerism in general) contain this need for direct confrontation with the state, an opposition that must be ostentatious and continuous and is a sign of political action, an expression of vitality. What was to change gradually was the reference to the working class, or rather the image of the worker to whom reference is made. At first it was the mass worker but this was gradually diluted into that of a so-called “social worker” when there were less struggles. This change in the social reference point goes a long way to explaining the whole evolution of workerism, or more precisely, its political involution.

In order to try to explain this evolution in workerism's positions, a certain picture of capital is painted; one in which capital tends to undo workers' militancy – apparently based in the factory – by dispersing the class geographically:

...capitalist restructuring became equivalent to a colossal operation around the composition of the working class, an operation to liquidate the form taken by the working class in the 1970s and which characterised it then. At that time what predominated was the mass worker as a pivotal figure in capitalist production and in the production of social value concentrated in the factory. Because of this internal political rigidity between production and reproduction, capitalist restructuring was forced to play on the isolation of the mass worker in the factory in relation to the process of socialisation of production and to the image of the worker, which became more diffuse socially. On the other hand, in as far as the production process spread socially, the law of value began to operate only in a formal way, that is, it no longer worked on the direct relationship between individual, specific work and the surplus value extracted, but upon social work as a whole.”[16]

So the reference image of the worker became that of an imaginary “social worker”, an image that was so vague, in spite of Negri's precisions,[17] that at the time the movement saw a bit of everything in it.

The transition from the mass worker to the social worker spelt the dissolution of workerism (Potere Operaio) or its degeneration into parliamentarism (Lotta Continua) and a new phenomenon was born; workers' autonomy,[18] which saw itself as a movement in continuity with the experience of workerism.

Workers' Autonomy was formed in 1973 at the Bologna Congress in a period in which a large number of young people identified with the image of the social worker invented by Toni Negri. For this “young proletariat”, the path to liberation was no longer by means of the conquest of power but through the development “of a social atmosphere able to incarnate the utopia of a community which awakens and which is organised outside of the economic model, of work and wages[19] and so by the creation of “communism right away”. Politics became “a luxury”, dictated by and subject to desires and needs. Taking shape around the social centres, where young people from working class districts congregated, this “communism right away” took the form of an increase in direct action, especially “proletarian expropriations”, seen as a “social wage”, “auto-reduction of bills, the occupation of lodgings”both public and private, and a confused experience of self-management and living alternatively. Moreover, the voluntarist attitude, which takes its desires for reality, was strengthened to the point that it envisaged a situation in which the bourgeoisie would be assailed by the social worker:

...the situation in Italy is now characterised by an indomitable, radical counter-power, which no longer has anything to do with the factory worker, with the situation set up by the ‘labour laws’ or with the institutional structures determined by the post-68ers. On the contrary, we are in a situation in which, within the whole process of reproduction - and this must be stressed – workers' self-organisation has been definitively achieved”.[20]

This analysis was not applied to the Italian situation alone but was extended to the international level, especially to those countries in which the economy was most developed, such as the United States and Great Britain. The conviction that the workers' movement held a position of strength, was so firm that it led Toni Negri (and the autonomists of the period) to believe that states had decided to put their hands in their wallets and try to stem the flow of the proletarian offensive by distributing a larger proportion of the revenue:

...these are phenomena with which we are very well acquainted in economies that are more advanced than our own, phenomena that found complete expression during the 60s, in the United States or in Great Britain, where there was a real attempt to block the movement, on the one hand through the destruction of the subjective vanguard of the movement, and on the other – and this is important – through control mechanisms based on the availability of a great sum of cash, on an intensive structuring of the distribution of revenue”.[21]

Therefore, in a situation in which “the whole process of value no longer exists”, the bosses would even be willing to gain nothing if only to “restore the laws of accumulation” and “completely socialise the instruments of control and command”.[22] In other words, they imagined that their struggle had destabilised the state, that they had created a crisis situation within it, but without even realising that, increasingly, on the streets there were only young people who had less and less to do with the world of the factory and of work and who consequently had less and less chance of imposing a favourable balance of forces against the bourgeoisie.

What characterised the period was the concept of “workers' self-realisation” which, over and above aspects linked to material gains, referred to “moments of counter-power”, that is, “political moments of self-determination, of separation of the reality of the class from that which is the global reality of capitalist production”.[23] Within this context, “the proletarian conquest of revenue” would be able to “destroy at times the equation of the law of value”.[24] Here there is a confusion between, on the one hand, the ability of the class to obtain higher wages and so reduce the proportion of surplus value extorted by the capitalists, with, on the other hand, a so-called “destruction” of the law of value. On the contrary, the law of value, as the history of capitalism has shown, has always survived even in those countries of so-called “really existing socialism” (the Eastern countries that in the past were insidiously called communist).

From all of this we can see that the autonomist milieu was full of illusions that the proletariat could create and enjoy within bourgeois society a relatively “stable” position of counter-power, whereas in reality the situation of dual power is a particularly precarious one, typical of revolutionary periods. It must either evolve into a victorious offensive of the proletarian revolution with the development of the exclusive power of the working class and the destruction of bourgeois power; or it must degenerate into a defeat for the class.

It is this serious disconnection from material reality, from the economic base of the struggle, which led to a fantastical and student-like development in the political positions of autonomy.

One of the positions particularly in vogue with the militants of workers' autonomy was the refusal to work, closely linked to the theory of needs. To the correct observation that the tendency must be for the worker not to remain stuck within the logic of the bosses' interests and for him to demand satisfaction for his basic needs, autonomy's theoreticians superimposed a theory that went further by identifying workers' self-valorisation with sabotaging the bosses' machinery, to the point of claiming that such acts of sabotage are a pleasure. This is what emerges from Negri’s satisfied description of the “freedom” exercised by the Alfa Romeo workers when smoking on the production line without worrying about the damage done to production. No doubt it sometimes gives great satisfaction to do something that there is no point in defending, to do something at any rate that the arrogance of force forbids you to do. It is a psychological – even a physical – satisfaction. But what has this got to do with the conclusions drawn by Toni Negri, who sees this act of smoking as “an extremely important thing [...], almost as important theoretically as the discovery that it is the working class that determines the development of capital,” According to Negri, “the dominion of needs” is no longer that of material, objective, natural needs but rather something that is created gradually, “which permeates, and succeeds in dominating, every opportunity provided by the counter-culture”.

In a way, the correct refusal to remain alienated, not only materially but also mentally, at the workplace, which is expressed in disobedience to factory discipline, is presented as “a qualitatively remarkable fact; something that is in direct proportion to the degree to which needs expand. What does it mean to enjoy the refusal to work, what else could it mean if not to build a series of material capacities for enjoyment which are completely alternative to the rhythm, work-family-bar. This is useful for breaking with this stagnant world; alternative, radical possibilities and power are discovered through the experience of revolt”.[25]

In fact, by losing itself in chasing after empty illusions without any perspective, workerism, in its social worker form, degenerated completely. It became dispersed among a number of separate initiatives, each one aiming to satisfy the needs of this or that category, which was a million miles away from the expression of class solidarity expressed during the Hot Autumn and which reappeared later when the working class took the stage once more.

The reaction of the state and the epilogue to the Hot Autumn

As we said at the beginning of this article, the ability of the bourgeoisie to recuperate the situation is largely due to the weaknesses of the proletarian movement that we have described. We must add however that, although the bourgeoisie was initially taken completely by surprise, it was subsequently able to launch an unprecedented attack against the workers’ movement, both in terms of direct repression and in the form of manoeuvres of every kind.

In terms of repression

This is the classic weapon of the bourgeoisie against its class enemy, although it is not the decisive weapon for creating a real balance of forces against the proletariat. Between October 1969 and January 1970, charges were drawn up against more than three thousand workers and students.

Students and workers, more than three thousand between October 1969 and January 1970, were prosecuted. Fascist laws, which punish 'subversive propaganda' and 'the instigation of hatred between the classes' were dug up. Police confiscated the works of Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara”.[26]

In terms of the interplay fascism/anti-fascism

This is the classic weapon used against the student movement, although it is used less in conflicts with the working class. It aims at derailing the movement into sterile street confrontations between rival gangs with reference, perforce, to the “democratic and anti-fascist” members of the bourgeoisie. In short, it is a way of getting the sheep back into the sheep pen.

In terms of the strategy of tension

This was certainly the masterpiece of the Italian bourgeoisie during these years and it succeeded in changing the political climate dramatically. Everyone remembers the massacre at the Banca dell'Agricoltura, Piazza Fontana in Milan on 12th December 1969, which caused 16 deaths and 88 wounded. But not everyone knows, or remembers, that from 25th April 1969, Italy suffered a continuous series of attacks:

On 25th April, two bombs exploded in Milan; one at the central station and the other, which caused around twenty wounded, at the Fiat stand in the trade fair. On 12th May, three explosive devices; two in Rome and one in Turin, failed to explode by pure luck. In July the weekly magazine Panorama repeated rumours of a right-wing coup d'état. Neo-fascist groups called for mobilisation, the PCI placed its sections on a state of alert. On 24th July, an explosive device similar to those found in Rome and Turin was discovered, unexploded, at the law courts in Milan. On 8th and 9th August, eight attacks against the railways caused serious damage and left some wounded. On 4th October in Trieste an explosive left in an elementary school and timed to explode when the children came out of school, failed to go off because of a technical malfunction; a militant of Avantguardia Nazionale[27] was accused. In Pisa on the 27th October, the toll of a day of confrontations between police and demonstrators , who were protesting against a demonstration of Italian and Greek fascists, was one dead and 125 wounded. [...] On 12th December, four explosive devices went off in Rome and Milan. There were no victims from the three in Rome but the one in Milan, in Piazza Fontana opposite the Banca dell'Agricoltura, caused 16 deaths and 88 wounded. A fifth explosive device, also in Milan, was found intact. So there began in Italy what has in deed been called the long night of the Republic”.[28]

In the subsequent period, the rhythm slowed down slightly but it never stopped. From 1969 to 1980 12,690 attacks and other incidents of politically motivated violence were recorded, killing 362 and wounding 4,490. The number of dead and wounded per attack rose to 150 and 551 respectively; with a total of 11 attacks, the first in December 1969 in Piazza Fontana in Milan, the most serious (85 dead and 200 wounded) at Bologna railway station in August 1980.[29]

...the violence of the state was revealed above all expectation: it organised the attacks, held enquiries, arrested innocent people, one of whom – Pinelli – it killed and it did it all moreover with the blessing of certain newspapers and the TV. The 12th December uncovered an unforeseen dimension to the political struggle and even revealed the breadth of the front that we had to fight against [...)]. So, with Piazza Fontana a new enemy was discovered: the state. Beforehand, the adversary was the teacher, the team leader, the boss. The references went across national borders, they were of different regions of the world: Vietnam, the French May, the Black Panthers, China. The uncovering of the terrorist state opened up a new horizon to the struggles: that of plots, of making use of the neo-fascists[30]

The aim of this strategy was obviously to intimidate and disorient the working class as much as possible, to spread fear of the bombs and insecurity, and this was a partial success. It also had another effect that was certainly more harmful; with Piazza Fontana the state was seen, at least by certain minorities, to be the real enemy, this was the entity with which it was necessary to settle the score. This diverted a series of proletarian and student elements towards terrorism as a method of struggle.

Encouraging the terrorist dynamic

Terrorism therefore became the way in which many brave but adventurist comrades destroyed their lives and their political engagement by engaging in a practice that has nothing to do with the class struggle. This practice also led to dire consequences by provoking a reflux in the whole of the working class, which was confronted with the two-fold threat of state repression on the one hand and blackmail from the “brigadist” and terrorist world on the other.

The unions make up ground by means of the Factory Councils

The last element, but certainly not the least important, on which the bourgeoisie depended was the union. As they could no longer rely on repression to keep the proletariat at arms' length, the bosses who, in all the years from the post-war period to the dawning of the Hot Autumn, had been extremely hostile to the unions, suddenly discovered that they were democratic and lovers of good factory relations. The trick obviously is that what you cannot get through bad relations, you try to get through good ones and you do it by trying to set up a dialogue with the unions, seen to be the only possible intermediaries able to control the struggles and the workers' demands. This granting of a wider democratic terrain to the unions led to the setting up and development of the Factory Councils, a form of base unionism in which it was not necessary to be a card-holder in order to participate. This gave the workers the illusion that this much at least they had won and that it was possible to have confidence in these new structures to pursue their struggle. In fact, the workers' struggle, although often very critical in its relations with the unions, has not managed to make an in-depth critique of them, but limits itself to denouncing their inconsistencies.

In conclusion...

In these two articles we have tried to show, on the one hand the strength and potential of the working class and, on the other, how important it is that its action be supported by a clear consciousness of the path it must take. The workers who awoke to the class struggle at the end of the 1960s in Italy and in the whole world, did not have at their disposal the memory of past experience and so they could depend only on the empirical gains that they gradually accumulated. This was the main weakness of the movement.

Today, in the various representations of France 1968 and the Italian Hot Autumn, there are many who sigh with nostalgia when they recall that this period is long gone and that the struggles seem unable to rise up again. We think that the opposite is the case. The Hot Autumn, the French May and all the struggles that shook society internationally at the end of the 60s were only the beginning of the class struggle, whereas the subsequent years saw a development and a maturation of the situation. In particular, today there is a more significant international presence of political, internationalist vanguards (although still very much a minority) which, unlike the sclerotic groups of the past, are able to debate together, to work and intervene together with the common aim of developing the class struggle.[31]

Moreover, today there is more than just a basic militancy in the class that makes it possible for various struggles to hatch out throughout the world,[32] there is also the general feeling that the society in which we live no longer has anything to offer economically and also that can it give no security against environmental disaster or war, etc. This kind of feeling tends to become more wide-spread to the point at which you can sometimes hear people, who have no political experience, talking of the need to make the revolution. At the same time, most of these people think that the revolution is impossible, that the exploited do not have the strength to overturn the capitalist system:

We can summarise this situation in the following way: at the end of the 1960s, the idea that the revolution was possible could be relatively widely accepted, but the idea that it was indispensable was far less easy to understand. Today, on the other hand, the idea that the revolution is necessary can meet with an echo that is not negligible, but the idea that it is possible is far less widespread.

For consciousness of the possibility of the communist revolution to gain a significant echo within the working class, the latter has to gain confidence in its own strength, and this takes place through the development of massive struggles. The huge attacks which it is now facing on an international scale provides the objective basis for such struggles. However, the main form this attack is taking today, that of massive lay-offs, does not initially favour the emergence of such movements; in general, [...] moments of sharply rising unemployment are not the theatre of the most important struggles. Unemployment, massive lay-offs, have a tendency to provoke a temporary feeling of paralysis in the class [...]. This is why, in the coming period, the fact that we do not see a widescale response from the working class to the attacks should not lead us to consider that it has given up the struggle for the defence of its interests. It is in a second period, when it is less vulnerable to the bourgeoisie's blackmail, that workers will tend to turn to the idea that a united and solid struggle can push back the attacks of the ruling class, especially when the latter tries to make the whole working class pay for the huge budget deficits accumulating today with all the plans for saving the banks and stimulating the economy. This is when we are more likely to see the development of broad struggles by the workers.[33]

This feeling of impotence has been, and still is, a weight upon the present generation of proletarians and it serves to explain the hesitations, the lateness, the lack of reaction to the bourgeoisie's attacks. But we must look upon our class with the confidence that comes from the knowledge of its history and its past struggles. We must work to recreate the link between past struggles and those of the present. We must participate in the struggles and inspire courage and confidence in the future, accompany the proletariat and stimulate it to rediscover the consciousness that the future of humanity rests on its shoulders and that it has the capacity to accomplish this immense task.

 

Ezechiele 23/08/10

 

 


[1]. In particular the destructive role played by the “resistance to fascism” which, in the name of a supposed “struggle for freedom”, led proletarians to get themselves massacred on behalf of one fraction of the bourgeoisie or another in the war in Spain (1936-1939) and then in the Second World War.

[2]. “Having formed the party in 1945, while the class was still in the grip of the counter-revolution, and having failed since then to critise this premature formation, these groups (who continued to call themselves 'the party') proved unable to distinguish between the counter-revolution and the end of the counter-revolution. They saw nothing of any importance for the working class either in the France of May 1968 or in the Italian Hot Autumn of 1969, and put these events down to mere student agitation. By contrast, our comrades of Internacionalismo (in particular MC, an old militant of the Fraction and the GCF); conscious of the change in the balance of class forces, understood the necessity of launching a process of discussion and regroupment with those groups that had emerged as a result of the change in the historic course. These comrades repeatedly asked the PCInt to appeal for the opening of discussion between the groups and to call an international conference inasmuch as the size and influence of the PCInt was far greater than that of our little nucleus in Venezuela. Each time, the PCInt rejected our proposal on the basis that nothing new was going on. Finally a first cycle of conferences began in 1973 following an appeal launched by Internationalism, a group in the United States close to the positions of Internacionalismo and of  Révolution Internationale which had been formed in France in 1968. It was largely thanks to these conferences, which allowed a serious decantation to take place among a whole series of groups and elements that had come towards politics after May 1968, that the ICC was formed in January 1975.” See the history of 30 years of the ICC (http//en.internationalism.org/ir/123_30years).

[3]. On the PCI, see the two articles “Breve Storia del PCI ad uso dei proletari che non vogliono credere più a niente ad occhi chiusi” I (1921-1936) and II (1936-1947) (Rivoluzione Internazionale n° 63 and 64). (“Brief History of the PCI for the use of workers who no longer want to believe in anything with their eyes closed”). The novel by Ermanno Rea, Mistero Romano (editorEinaudi) is particularly useful for understanding how heavy were the relationships within the PCI in this period.

[4]. Also Cazzulo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la revoluzione. 1968-1978. Storia critica di Lotta Continua  Sperling and Kupfer, eds, p.8.

[5]. “Tra servi e padroni”, in Lotta Continua, 6th December 1969, also quoted in Aldo Cazzullo's book, ibid p. 89.

[6]. Antonio Negri, From the mass worker to the social worker. An interview on workerism. In Italian, Ombre Corte editions.

[7]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p. 36-37.

[8]. We cannot help being struck by the number of elements in today's world - public figures, politicians, journalists, writers - holding the political positions of the centre left or even of the right, who in the past have passed through groups of the extra-parliamentary left and through workerism in particular. We will mention only a few: Massimo Cacciari, member of parliament for the PD (formerly the Margherita) and twice mayor of Venice; Alberto Asor Rosa, writer and literary critic; Adriano Sofri, moderate journalist for La Repubblica and Il Foglio; Mario Tronti, who returned to the PCI as a member of the central committee and elected senator; Paolo Liguori, journalist with management responsibilities for various television news broadcasts and other editorial undertakings for Berlusconi... There are dozens upon dozens of other names that could be added to the list.

[9]. We do not share Lenin's analysis that there exists a labour aristocracy within the working class. See our article: “Workers' aristocracy. A sociological theory to divide the working class”. (International Review n° 25)

[10]. An idea that was widely held at an international level as well.

[11]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.105.

[12]. Aldo Cazzullo, op.cit., p. XII.

[13]. On this point see: “Terror, terrorism and class violence”, (International Review n° 14); “Sabotage des lignes SNCF: des actes stériles instrumentalisés par la bourgeoisie contre la class ouvrière” (ICC on line, 2008); “Débat sur la violence (II): il est nécessaire de dépasser le faux dilemme: pacifisme social-démocrate ou violence minoritaire” (ICC on line, 2009).

[14]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.105.

[15]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.108.

[16]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.113.

[17]. “When we say 'social worker', what we really mean – and this is extremely precise – is that surplus value is extracted from this subject. When we speak of the 'social worker', we are talking of a subject that is productive and when we say that he is productive, we are saying that he produces surplus value, in the long or short term”. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.18.

[18]. On this question, see our articles: “L'area della Autonomia: la confusione contro la classe operaia” in Rivoluzione Internazionale n°s 8 and 10.

[19]. N. Balestrini, P. Moroni, L'orda d'oro, Milan, SugarCo Editioni, 1988, p.334.

[20]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.138.

[21]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.116-117.

[22]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.118.

[23]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.142.

[24]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.142.

[25]. Antonio Negri, op.cit., p.130-132.

[26]. Alessandro Silj, Malpaese, Criminalità, corruzione e politica nell'Italia della prima Repubblica 1943-1994. editor Donzelle, p.100-101.

[27]. An extreme right wing group.

[28]. Alessandro Silj, op.cit., p. 95-96.

[29]. Alessandro Silj, op.cit., p. 113.

[30]. Statement of Marco Revelli, who was a militant of Lotta Continua at the time. In: Aldo Cazzullo, ibid, p. 91.

[31]. It is not possible to list here all the various articles dealing with this new generation of internationalists, so we invite our readers to see our web site www.internationalism.org, where they can find a great deal of information.

[32]. On the current development of the class struggle, we refer you to our internet site, drawing particular attention to the articles on Vigo (Spain), Greece and Tekel (Turkey).

[33]. “Resolution on the international situation from the 18th congress of the ICC”, 2009, International Review n°138.

 

Historic events: 

People: 

What are workers' councils? (Part 4): The soviets attempt to wield power (1917 - 1921)

In previous articles in this series, we followed the appearance of the workers’ councils (i.e. soviets in Russian) during the revolution of 1905; their disappearance and resurgence during the revolution of 1917, and their crisis and revival in the hands of the workers which led to their seizure of power in October 1917.[1] In this article we will deal with the attempt by the soviets to wield power, a fundamental moment in the history of mankind: “For the first time, not the minority, not the rich alone, not the educated alone, but the real people, the vast majority of working people, are themselves building a new life, are by their own experience, solving the most difficult problems of socialist organisation[2].

October 1917 - April 1918: the rise of the soviets

Driven along by wild enthusiasm, the working masses set about the task of consolidating and continuing what they started before the revolution. The anarchist Paul Avrich described the atmosphere of those early months, by underlining that “the Russian working class enjoyed a degree of freedom and a sense of power unique in its history”.[3]

The mode of functioning the soviet power attempted to adopt was radically different from that of the bourgeois state in which the executive – the government – has virtually absolute power while the legislature – parliament – and the judiciary, which in theory should act as a counterbalance, are in reality very much subordinate to it. In any event, the three powers are completely divorced from the vast majority of the people whose role is limited to routinely placing voting papers in ballot boxes.[4] Soviet power was based on two completely new premises:

  • the active mass participation of the workers;
  • that it’s the mass of workers themselves who discuss, take decisions and implement them.

As Lenin said at the Second Congress of Soviets: “In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, strength is manifested when the masses go blindly to the slaughter. The only government which the bourgeoisie recognise as strong is one which can use all the power of the state machine to put the masses anywhere it pleases. Our conception of strength is different. In our eyes, a government is strong in proportion to the consciousness of the masses. It is strong when the masses know everything, judge everything, accept everything consciously.”[5]

However, once they took power, the soviets ran into an obstacle: the Constituent Assembly, which represented the very negation of all these premises and a return to the past: the allocation of power and its exercise by a bureaucratic caste of politicians.

When confronting Tsarism, the workers’ movement in Russia had demanded a Constituent Assembly as a step towards a bourgeois republic, but the revolution of 1917 had largely gone beyond this old rallying cry. The weight of the past clearly continued to have an influence, even after the proclamation of soviet power, not only on the large masses of workers but also on many Bolshevik Party activists who believed the Constituent Assembly to be compatible with soviet power.

One of the most serious and fateful errors of the bourgeois-socialist coalition government was that time and again mainly legal considerations persuaded it to postpone the election and opening of the national [Constituent] Assembly”.[6] The succession of governments between February and October 1917 postponed it time and again, contradicting what they themselves claimed to be their ultimate goal. The Bolsheviks – not without internal divisions and contradictions themselves – had during this period been its principal supporters, while acknowledging it was inconsistent with the slogan “All power to the soviets!”

Thus dawned a paradox: three weeks after the soviets seized power, they fulfilled their promise by calling elections to the Constituent Assembly. These elections gave the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries a majority (299 seats), with the Bolsheviks a distant second (168), followed by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (39) and other smaller groups.

How is it possible for the election result to hand a victory to the losers of October?

Several factors explain it, but in Russia at this precise time the most obvious was that voting put on an equal footing “citizens” whose conditions are radically opposed: workers, bosses, bureaucrats, farmers, etc., which always favours the exploiting minority and the status quo. More generally, there is another factor that affects the revolutionary class: the vote is an act in which the atomised individual allows himself to be led by multiple considerations, specific influences and interests, based on the illusion of being a hypothetically free “citizen”, and therefore expresses nothing of the active power of a collective mass. The “individual citizen” worker who votes in the polling booth and the worker who participates in an assembly are like two different people.

The Constituent Assembly was moreover completely ineffective. It was discredited. It took some grandiloquent decisions that had no effect and its meetings were limited to a mere succession of boring speeches. The Bolshevik agitation, supported by the anarchists and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, clearly posed the dilemma of Soviets or Assembly and thus contributed to a clarification of consciousness. After multiple metamorphoses, the Constituent Assembly was quietly disbanded in January 1918 by the sailors assigned to stand guard over it.

Exclusive power passed to the soviets through which the mass of workers reasserted their political existence. During the first months of the revolution and at least until the summer of 1918, the permanent self activity of the masses that we had already witnessed in February 1917, not only continued but spread and grew stronger. The workers, the women and the youth all lived within a dynamic of assemblies, factory and neighbourhood councils, local soviets, conferences, meetings, etc. “The first phase of the soviet regime was that of almost unlimited autonomy of its local institutions. Fuelled by an intense life and a more and more numerous one, the grass roots soviets were protective of their authority.[7] The main discussions in the local soviets were about matters affecting the whole of Russia but they also discussed the international situation, particularly revolutionary developments.[8]

The Council of People’s Commissars created by the Second Congress of Soviets was not conceived as a de facto government, that is to say as an independent power monopolising affairs, but rather as the animator and the engine of mass action. Anweiler refers to the campaign of agitation Lenin conducted: “On 18 November, Lenin appealed to the workers to take over all government affairs: The soviets were now all powerful and would decide everything.[9] It was not rhetoric. The Council of People’s Commissars, unlike bourgeois governments, did not comprise a constellation of impressive advisers, career civil servants, bodyguards, collaborators, etc. As Victor Serge recounts,[10] this body had a head of department and two assistants. Its meetings consisted in examining each matter with the delegations of workers, the members of the Executive Committee of Soviets or the Soviets of Petrograd and Moscow. Secret deliberations by the Council of Ministers were abolished.

In 1918, four All-Russia Congresses of Soviets were held: the Third in January, the Fourth in March, the Fifth in July and the Sixth in November. It shows the vitality and global vision that inspired the soviets. These general congresses, which required a tremendous effort of mobilisation – the transport system was paralysed and civil war made the movement of the delegates very complicated – expressed the global unity of the soviets and implemented their decisions.

The congresses were animated by lively debates in which it was not only Bolsheviks who participated but also internationalist Mensheviks, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists, etc. Indeed Bolsheviks expressed their own differences. The atmosphere had a profound critical spirit as Victor Serge observed: “If the revolution is to be well served...it must be constantly on guard against its own abuses, excesses, crimes and reactionary elements. It therefore has a vital need for criticism, opposition and civic courage on the part of those who carry it out.”[11]

In the Third and Fourth Congresses, there was a stormy debate on the signing of a peace treaty with Germany – Brest Litovsk[12] – that focused on two questions: how to retain soviet power while waiting for the world revolution? And what contribution could it actually make? The Fourth Congress was the scene of a bitter confrontation between the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The Sixth Congress focused on the revolution in Germany and adopted measures to support it, including sending trains containing large quantities of wheat; an expression of the tremendous solidarity and commitment of the Russian workers who were then rationed to only 50 grams of bread per day!

The initiatives of the masses affected all aspects of social life. We aren’t able to provide a detailed analysis of this here and we will simply highlight that courts of justice were established in working class neighbourhoods and were seen as genuine assemblies where the causes of crimes were discussed and sentences were passed with the aim of changing the conduct of criminals and not as punishment or revenge. “According to Lenin’s wife, several male as well as female workers took the floor and their interventions were sometimes extremely vociferous. The embarrassed ‘lawyer’ did not stop mopping the perspiration from his brow, after the accused, his face bathed in tears, promised to refrain from beating his son. Actually, it was not so much a court as a public meeting to control the conduct of its citizens. Under our eyes, the proletarian ethic was taking shape.[13]

From April to December 1918: the crisis and decline of soviet power

However, this powerful momentum weakened and the soviets changed, distancing themselves from the majority of the workers. In May 1918, criticisms of soviet policy were already circulating among the working class in Moscow and Petrograd. As in July-September 1917, a series of attempts were made to revive the soviets;[14] in both cities independent conferences were held which, although focussed on economic demands, took up the renewal of the soviets as their main objective. The Mensheviks held the majority there, and this led the Bolsheviks to reject the conferences and to accuse them of being counter-revolutionary. The unions were mobilised to break them up and they quickly disappeared.

This measure contributed in undermining the very basis of the soviets’ existence. In the previous article in this series, we showed that the soviets did not exist in a vacuum but were the figurehead of a great proletarian movement formed by countless soviet organisations, factory committees, neighbourhood councils, conferences and mass assemblies, etc. By mid 1918, these organisations began to decline and gradually disappeared. The factory committees (which we will speak of again) disappeared first, then the neighbourhood soviets in turn entered a death agony that lasted from the summer of 1918 until their total disappearance in late 1919.

The two vital ingredients of the soviets’ existence were the massive network of grass roots soviet organisations and their constant renewal. The disappearance of the first was accompanied by the gradual elimination of the second. The appearance of the soviets didn’t change; they evolved little by little into a rigid bureaucracy.

The Bolshevik Party unwittingly contributed to this process. To combat the counter-revolutionary agitation of the Mensheviks and other parties inside the soviets, they resorted to administrative measures of exclusion, which contributed in creating an overwhelming atmosphere of passivity, a fear of debate, the gradual submission to the diktat of the Party.[15]

This repression was episodic in its early stages but eventually became widespread in the early months of 1919, when the central organs of the Party openly demanded the complete subordination of the soviets to their own local committees and the exclusion of the other parties.

The lack of life and debate, the bureaucratisation, subordination to the Party etc., became more and more oppressive. At the Seventh Congress of the Soviets, Kamenev recognised that “The soviet plenary sessions as political organisations often waste away, the people busy themselves with purely mechanical chores.... General soviet sessions are seldom called, and when the deputies meet, it is only to accept a report, listen to a speech, and the like.[16] This Congress, held in December 1919, had the rebirth of the soviets as its main topic of discussion and there were contributions not only from the Bolsheviks, seen for the last time expressing differences amongst themselves, but also internationalist Mensheviks, their leader Martov taking a very active part.

There was an effort to implement the resolutions of the Congress. In January 1920 elections were held that sought to re-establish the soviets under conditions of total freedom. “Martov acknowledged at the beginning of 1920 that, except in Petrograd, ‘where “Zinovievite” elections were held in the old manner,’ the return to more democratic methods was general, and often worked to the advantage of the candidates of his party.[17]

Many soviets reappeared and the Bolshevik Party tried to correct the errors of bureaucratic concentration that it had itself progressively helped to create. “The Soviet Government announced its intention of giving up some of the prerogatives it had usurped and restoring the rights of the Central Executive Committee [of the soviets, elected by Congress], which under the constitution of 1918 was supposed to supervise the activities of the People’s Commissars.[18]

These hopes were quickly dashed, however. The intensification of the civil war, Wrangel’s offensive and the invasion of Poland, the worsening famine, the catastrophic economic situation, the peasant revolts, cut these intentions off at root, “with…the ruined state of the economy, the demoralisation of the people, the increasing isolation of a devastated country and an exhausted nation, the very basis for a revival of the soviets was no longer present.[19]

The Kronstadt uprising in March 1921, with its demand for completely renewed soviets effectively exercising power, was the final death agony; its suppression by the Bolshevik Party signalled the almost certain death of the soviets as workers’ organs.[20]

The Civil War and the creation of the Red Army

Why was it that in contrast with September 1917 the soviets were now fighting an uphill battle they couldn’t win? Though only the development of world revolution could have provided the oxygen needed for the movement to survive, we will nonetheless examine the other “internal” factors that played a part. In brief, there are to two key, strongly interconnected factors: the civil war and famine on the one hand and the economic chaos on the other.

Let’s begin with the civil war.[21] The war was organised by the major imperialist powers: Britain, France, the United States, Japan, etc., who united their troops into a heterogeneous body of armed forces, “the Whites”, allied with the defeated Russian bourgeoisie. This war devastated the country until 1921 and caused more than 6 million deaths and incalculable destruction. The Whites carried out unprecedented sadistic and cruel reprisals. “the White Terror was partly responsible for this, of course, since victories by the counter-revolutionary forces were usually accompanied not only by the massacring of large numbers of Communists but also by extermination of the most active members of the soviets, and in any case, by suppression of the latter.[22]

Here we see the first reason why the soviets were undermined. The White Army suppressed the soviets and indiscriminately murdered all their members.

But more complex causes were attached to these massacres. In response to the war, the Council of People’s Commissars in April-May 1918 made two important decisions: the formation of the Red Army and the establishment of the Cheka, the organ responsible for rooting out counter-revolutionary conspiracies. It was the first time the Council made a decision without prior discussion with the soviets, or at least with the Executive Committee.

The creation of a Cheka as a policing organ was inevitable after the revolution. Counter-revolutionary plots followed one after the other, as much from the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks and the Cadets as from the monarchist Black Hundreds and Cossacks, encouraged by British and French agents. As soon as the war began the organisation of a Red Army was also imperative.

These two structures – the Cheka and the Red Army – were not simple tools that could be brought out as and when necessary, they were state organs and, as such, from the point of view of the proletariat double-edged swords; the working class would be forced to use them up until its decisive victory worldwide, but their utilisation presented serious dangers because they tended to take on an independent life vis-à-vis proletarian power.

Why then was an army created, when the proletariat had a soviet military organ that had led the insurgency, the Military Revolutionary Committee?[23]

From September 1917 the Russian army openly began to disintegrate. As soon as peace was declared, the soldiers’ councils rapidly demobilised. The only thing that mattered to the majority of soldiers was returning to their villages. Paradoxical as it may seem, the soldiers’ councils – but to a lesser extent the sailors’ too – that were widespread after the seizure of power by the soviets, concentrated on disbanding the army, avoiding the unruly flight of conscripts and reprimanding bands of soldiers who were using their weapons to rob and terrorise the population. In early January 1918 the army no longer existed. Russia was at the mercy of the German army. The peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk did however allow time for the army to be effectively reorganised to defend the revolution.

At its inception, the Red Army was an army of volunteers. Middle class and peasant youth didn’t enrol and the initial core was made up of workers from the factories and the big cities. This led to a real blood-letting in the ranks of the working class, that had to sacrifice its best elements in a bloody and cruel war: “We know that because of the war the best workers were withdrawn in large numbers from the cities, and that therefore at times it becomes difficult in one or another provincial or district capital to form a soviet and make it function.”[24]

Here we see the second reason for the crisis of the soviets: their best elements were absorbed by the Red Army. To get a real idea of this, in April 1918 Petrograd mobilised 25,000 volunteers, the vast majority of them militant workers, and Moscow 15,000, while the whole country had 106,000 volunteers in total.

As to the third cause of this crisis, it was none other than the Red Army itself that regarded the soviets as an obstacle. It tended to avoid their control and asked the central government to prevent them from interfering in its affairs. It also rejected offers of support from the soviets’ own military units (Red Guards, guerrillas). The Council of People’s Commissars conceded all the army’s demands.

Why did a body created to defend the soviets turn against them? The army is a state organ whose existence and functioning necessarily have social consequences, as it imposes a blind discipline, a rigid hierarchy in its general staff, with an officer corps who only recognise the authority of the government. To alleviate this tendency a network of political commissars was established from trusted workers responsible for controlling the officers. Unfortunately the effects of this measure were very limited and even counterproductive, since this network became in turn an additional layer of bureaucracy.

Not only did the Red Army continue to evade control by the soviets, it also imposed its methods of militarisation over society as a whole, restricting even more, if it was possible, the lives of its members. In his book The ABC of Communism, Preobrazhensky even talks of the proletariat’s military dictatorship!

The imperatives of war and the blind submission to the demands of the Red Army led the government to form a Military Revolutionary Committee in the summer of 1918, which had nothing in common with the one that led the October Revolution, as demonstrated by the fact that its first decision was to appoint local revolutionary committees to impose control on the soviets. “A decision by the Council of People’s Commissars forced the soviets to comply unconditionally with the instructions of these committees.[25]

The Red Army, like the Cheka, gradually ceased to serve the cause for which they were conceived, as weapons to defend the power of the soviets, and in establishing their independence and autonomy, finally turned against the soviets. If the Cheka initially reported to the local soviets and attempted to collaborate with them, the expeditious methods for which they were renowned would quickly prevail and impose themselves on soviet society. “On August 28th, 1918, the headquarters of the Cheka actually instructed its local agencies to refuse to submit to any interference by the soviets: on the contrary, it was these local agencies that were to impose their will upon the soviet bodies. They succeeded in doing this in the many areas that were affected by military operations.[26]

The Cheka eroded the power of the soviets so much that in November 1918 a survey revealed that 96 soviets were demanding the dissolution of Cheka sections, 119 asked for them to be subordinated to the legal soviet institutions and only 19 approved of their actions. This survey was completely useless though as the Cheka continued to accumulate new powers. “‘All power to the soviets’ has ceased to be the principle on which the regime is based, declared a member of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs; it has been replaced by a new rule:‘All power to the Cheka’”.[27]

Famine and economic chaos

The World War bequeathed a terrible legacy. The productive apparatus of the majority of European countries was in a feeble state, the distribution network for consumer goods and food was highly dislocated when not completely paralysed. “Food consumption had in general decreased by about thirty or forty percent. The situation for the Allies was better, thanks to American support. The winter of 1917-1918 was still a harsh one with rigorous rationing and a fuel crisis in Britain and France.”[28]

Russia had suffered cruelly from this situation. The October Revolution had not been able to advance, especially as powerful disruptive forces were at work: systematic sabotage extensively carried out not just by business leaders who, rather than provide the proletariat with the tools needed for production, preferred to pursue a scorched earth policy, but also by entire layers of technicians, managers and even highly skilled workers hostile to soviet power. After taking power the soviets were confronted by a massive strike of public servants, telegraph and railway workers, manipulated by the Menshevik-led unions. This strike was fomented and organised through the union apparatus by “a shadow government [which] was functioning, presided over by Mr. Prokopovich, who had officially taken over the succession from Kerensky, who was said to have ‘resigned’. This clandestine Cabinet directed the strike of officials in concert with a strike committee. The large firms of industry, commerce and banking, such as the Rural Bank of Tula, the Moscow Popular Bank and the Bank of the Caucasus, continued to pay their officials who were out on strike. The former All-Russian Soviet Executive (Mensheviks and SR) used its funds, stolen from the working class, for the same purpose.[29]

This sabotage added to the widespread economic chaos made rapidly worse by the civil war. How could the famine ravaging the cities be fought? How could supplies of basic necessities be maintained?

Here we see the disastrous consequences of what happened in 1918: the social coalition that overthrew the bourgeois government in October 1917 disintegrated. Soviet power was a “coalition” of the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets all practically on an equal footing. With few exceptions the soviets had almost disappeared by the end of 1917, leaving soviet power with no army. But what happened to the peasants’ soviets which were key to ensuring regular supplies to the cities?

The decree on land allocation adopted by the Second Congress of Soviets was surrounded by much confusion, and countless abuses were tolerated and, even though many poor farmers did acquire a plot, the big winners were the rich and middle peasants who greatly increased their holdings. This led to their almost total domination of the peasant soviets. Self-interest typified by private ownership was encouraged. “The peasant received in exchange for his corn only paper roubles with which he could buy nothing except an ever more restricted supply of manufactured articles, and these with a great difficulty; and so he resorted to barter: foodstuffs against goods. A whole host of small speculators operated as middlemen between him and the town.”[30] The peasants only sold their produce to speculators who hoarded it, thus exacerbating the shortages and the inflated prices.[31]

In June 1918, a decree of the soviet government created some committees of poor peasants to combat this situation. They would be a means of bringing the peasant soviets closer to the proletariat by organising the class struggle in the countryside, but it was also an attempt to create shock troops who would requisition the cereals and foods needed to alleviate the terrible famine in the cities.

These committees were specifically assigned, “[along with] armed detachments of factory workers to confiscate grain from the wealthier peasants, to requisition livestock and tools, to distribute them among the rural poor and even to redistribute land.”[32] The results of this experience were largely negative. They were neither able to guarantee supplies to the starving cities nor to revive the peasants’ soviets. And the irony is that in 1919 the Bolsheviks changed their policy to try to gain the support of the middle peasants and forcibly disbanded the committees of poor peasants.

Under modern capitalist production the supply of agricultural products is dependent on the existence of an extensive transport system that is highly mechanised and highly reliant on a wide range of basic industries. In this respect, feeding the starving population was hindered by the widespread collapse of the productive industrial apparatus due to the war and exacerbated by economic sabotage and the outbreak of civil war in April 1918.

The factory councils could have had a decisive role. As we saw in the previous article in this series, they played a very important vanguard role for the soviet system. They could have also helped in fighting the sabotage of the capitalists and preventing shortages and paralysis.

Moreover they did try to collaborate in setting up a central organ to control production and to fight against sabotage and paralysis of the transport system: “After the October Revolution the central councils of factory committees from various cities attempted to form their own national organisation to secure actual economic dictatorship”,[33] but Bolshevik policy was opposed to it. It concentrated the management of the enterprises in the hands of a body of officials subordinated to executive power, and for the first time accompanied it with measures to restore piecework, which resulted in a brutal militarisation which reached its highest levels in 1919-20. It also strengthened the unions. This body of officials, fiercely opposed to the factory councils, led an intense campaign that saw factory councils disappear in late 1918. Anweiler says that “The unions prevented the convocation of an all-Russian congress of factory committees and instead absorbed the factory committees at the lowest level.” [34]

Bolshevik policy attempted to fight the tendency of some factory councils, particularly in the provinces, to see themselves as new owners and as independent and autonomous units. This tendency partly arose from “the difficulty establishing regular channels of distribution and exchange, which left many factories and production centres isolated. So factories appeared very like “anarchist communes”, very inward-looking.[35]

The tendency towards decomposition in the Russian working class

Clearly these developments encouraged divisions in the working class. But the course of events could have been fought through debates inside the factory councils themselves where, as we have seen, a global vision was present. Relying on the unions contributed to destroying these organisations that were the cornerstone of proletarian power and broadly favoured the exacerbation of a fundamental political problem in the early years of soviet power, which was obscured by the enthusiasm of those initial months: “the progressive weakening of the Russian working class, a loss of strength and substance that was to end in its almost complete de-classing and, in a certain sense, its temporary disappearance from the scene.[36]

In April 1918, 265 of the 799 main industrial businesses based in Petrograd had disappeared, half of workers in this city had no work; its population in June 1918 was one and a half million, down from two and a half million one year earlier. Moscow lost half a million people in this short period.

The working class was suffering from hunger and the most terrifying diseases. Jacques Sadoul, a Bolshevik sympathiser, described the situation in Moscow in the spring of 1918: “in the districts away from the centre, frightful poverty prevails. There are epidemics of typhus, smallpox, children’s diseases. Babies are dying en-masse. Those one sees are weak, fleshless, pitiful creatures. In the working-class quarters one too often passes poor, pale, thin mothers, sadly bearing in their arms, in a little coffin of silver-painted wood, looking like a cradle, the tiny lifeless body that a small quantity of bread or milk would have kept alive.”[37]

Many workers fled to the countryside to devote themselves to precarious farm work. The terrifying pressure of famine, disease, rationing and queues meant that workers were forced to spend the whole day trying to survive. As a Petrograd worker in April 1918 testified, “Here is another crowd of workers who have been fired. Although we are thousands, we do not hear a word about the policy; nobody talks about revolution, of German imperialism, or any other current issue. For all these men and all these women who can barely stand, all these issues seem terribly remote.[38]

The unfolding crisis of the Russian working class was so alarming that in October 1921 Lenin approved the NEP,[39] saying that “The capitalists will gain from our policy and will create an industrial proletariat, which in our country, owing to the war and to the desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed, i.e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat.”[40]

We have presented a whole range of general conditions which, added to the inevitable errors, weakened the soviets and contributed to their disappearance as workers’ organs. In the next article in this series, we will discuss the political problems that contributed to making the situation worse.

C. Mir 1/9/10.

 

 


[1]. See International Reviews, n°s 140, 141, 142.

[2]. Lenin, Letter to the American workers, 20 August 1918, Lenin, On the United States of America, Progress, 1967, p.345.

[3]. Quoted by Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin (Merlin Press, 1975), p.335.This is an interesting and well-documented work by a non-communist writer. Whenever possible the quotes from this book have been taken from the English translation published by Merlin Press. However, this is a shortened and revised version of the French original and does not contain some of the passages quoted. Where this is the case the translations have been made by the ICC.

[4]. There was a previous phase in the life of capitalism, when it was still a progressive system, when parliament was a place where different fractions of the bourgeoisie unified or fought over the government of society. The proletariat had to participate and try and influence the actions of the bourgeoisie in defence of its own interests and do it despite the dangerous illusions in the system this could entail. However, even at this time, the three powers were still divorced from the vast majority of people.

[5]. Quoted by Victor Serge, militant anarchist convert to Bolshevism, in Year One of the Russian Revolution, p.83, chapter 3, subheading: “The Great Decrees: Peace”, Allan Lane Penguin Press.

[6]. Oskar Anweiler, The soviets: Russian workers, peasants and soldiers councils, 1905-1921, p.208, Chapter 5, “The Constituent Assembly or Soviet Republic”.

[7]. Marcel Liebman, op. cit., French edition, p.31.

[8]. A large number of discussions took place around events in Germany, including news of strikes and mutinies.

[9]. Oskar Anweiler, op. cit., p.219, Chapter 5, part 2 “The Bolshevik Social System” part (a).

[10]. Victor Serge, op. cit., p.95, Chapter 3, subheading: “The initiative of the masses”.

[11]. Marcel Liebman, op. cit., p.270.

[12]. This treaty was signed between the soviet power and the German state in March 1918. By granting major concessions, the soviet power achieved a truce which allowed it to survive and sent a clear signal to the international proletariat of its desire to end the war. See our articles: “October 17: Start of the proletarian revolution”, part 2, International Review n°13, 1978 and “Communism, not a nice idea but a material necessity”, part VIII: “Understanding the defeat of the Russian Revolution”, International Review n° 99, 1999.

[13]. Marcel Liebman, op. cit., French edition, p.176.

[14]. See the series in International Review n°142, “The Revolution of 1917...”, subheading “September 1917, the total renewal of the soviets”.

[15]. We should make clear that these measures were not accompanied by restricting the freedom of the press. In his book cited above, Victor Serge affirms that “The proletarian dictatorship hesitated a long time before suppressing the enemy press. (…) it was only in July 1918 that the last organs of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie were closed down. The legal press of the Mensheviks only disappeared in 1919; the press of the anarchists hostile to the regime, and the Maximalists appeared down to 1921; that of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries later still. (Footnote on p.103, Chapter 3, subheading: “Proletarian realism and 'revolutionary' rhetoric”.

[16]. Oskar Anweiler, op. cit., p.235, Chapter 5, part 2, “The Bolshevik Social System” part (b).

[17]. Marcel Liebman, op. cit., p.231. Zinoviev, a leading Bolshevik, had great qualities and played a large part in the creation of the Communist International. He was however renowned for his craftiness and manoeuvring.

[18]. Ibid, p.230-1

[19]. Ibid p.231.

[20]. We aren't able to give a detailed analysis of the Kronstadt events here, or their meaning and the lessons we draw. See International Review n° 3, 1975, “The lessons of Kronstadt” and International Review n° 104, 2001, “Understanding Kronstadt”.

[21]. See Victor Serge, op. cit., for an account of the civil war in 1918.

[22]. Marcel Liebman, op. cit., p.229.

[23]. See International Review n°142, “The Revolution of 1917 (from July to October), from the revival of the workers' councils to the seizure of power”, subheading “The Military Revolutionary Committee, soviet organ of the insurrection”, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/142/workers-councils-part-3.

[24]. Speech of Kamenev, quoted by Oskar Anweiler, op. cit., p.235.

[25]. Marcel Liebman, op. cit., French edition, p.33.

[26]. Ibid, page 229.

[27]. Ibid, French edition, p.164.

[28]. Victor Serge, op. cit., p.145, Chapter 5, “The Problem in January 1918”.

[29]. Victor Serge, op. cit., p.94, Chapter 3, “Sabotage”.

[30]. Ibid, p.94, Chapter 6, “The Problem”.

[31]. Ibid. Victor Serge underlines that one of the policies of the unions consisted in creating cooperatives which were devoted to speculating on food to the great benefit of their members.

[32]. Oskar Anweiler, op. cit., p.237, “The Bolshevik Social System” part (b).

[33]. Oskar Anweiler, op. cit., p.221, Chapter 5, part 2 “The Bolshevik Social System” part (a).

[34]. Ibid.

[35]. Marcel Liebman, op. cit., French edition, p.189.

[36]. Ibid, p.223.

[37]. Ibid.

[38]. Ibid, French edition, p.23.

[39] NEP, New Economic Policy, introduced in March 1921 after the events around Kronstadt, made large concessions to the peasantry and to national and foreign capital. See International Review n° 101, in the series “Communism is not a just a nice idea”, the article entitled “1922-23, the Communist fractions against the rise of counter-revolution”.

[40]. Lenin, Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol.33, pp.60-79.

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Working class history

The decadence of capitalism (viii): The age of catastrophes

Even though revolutionaries today are far from all sharing the analysis that capitalism entered into its phase of decline with the outbreak of the First World War, this was not the case for those who had to respond to this war and who participated in the revolutionary uprisings that followed. On the contrary, as shown in this article, the majority of marxists shared this point of view. Similarly, for them, understanding the new historic period was indispensable for reinvigorating the communist programme and the tactics that flowed from it.

In the previous article in this series, we saw that Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the fundamental processes underlying imperialist expansion predicted the return of the calamities visited on the pre-capitalist regions of the globe to the very heart of the system, to bourgeois Europe. And as Luxemburg points out in her Junius Pamphlet (original title, “The crisis in German social democracy”), written from prison in 1915, the outbreak of the imperialist world war in 1914 was not only a catastrophe because of the destruction and the misery it rained on the working class in both belligerent camps, but also because it had been made possible by the greatest act of treason in the history of the workers’ movement: the decision of the majority of the social democratic parties, allegedly beacons of internationalism schooled in the marxist world view, to support the war effort of their respective ruling classes, to sanction the mutual massacre of the European proletariat in spite of all the ringing declarations of opposition to war passed at numerous meetings of the Second International and its constituent parties in the years leading up to 1914.

This was the death of the International, which now fragmented into its different national parties, large segments of which, most often the leading bodies, signed up as press-gang officers for their own bourgeoisie: these were known as the “social chauvinists” or “social patriots”, who also led the majority of trade unions in the same direction. In this terrible debacle, another major segment, the “centrists”, wallowed in all kinds of confusion, unable to break decisively with the social patriots, promulgating absurd illusions in the possibility of peace settlements and, as in the case of Kautsky the former “Pope of Marxism”, frequently turning away from the class struggle on the grounds that the International could only be an instrument of peace, not of war. In these traumatic times, only a minority stood firm on the principles which the entire International had adopted on paper on the eve of war – above all, the refusal to suspend the class struggle lest it endanger the war effort of your own bourgeoisie, and, by extension, the will to use the social crisis brought on by war as a means of hastening the downfall of the capitalist system. But faced with the mood of nationalist hysteria in the opening phase of the war, the “pogrom atmosphere” described in Luxemburg’s pamphlet, even the best militants of the revolutionary left also struggled with doubts and difficulties: Lenin, shown the edition of Vorwarts, the SPD newspaper, that announced the party’s vote for war credits in the Reichstag, believed at first that this was a fake cobbled together by the political police. The anti-militarist Liebknecht, in the German parliament, initially voted for war credits out of party discipline, and the following extract from a letter by Rosa Luxemburg shows the degree to which she felt that the left opposition within social democracy had been reduced to a small collection of inchoate individuals: 

I want to undertake the sharpest possible action against the activities of the (Reichstag) delegates. Unfortunately I get little co-operation from my (collection of) incoherent personalities…Karl (Liebknecht) can’t ever be got hold of, since he dashes about like a cloud in the sky; Franz (Mehring) has little sympathy for any but literary campaigns. Clara (Zetkin’s) reaction is hysteria and the blackest despair. But in spite of all this I intend to try to see what can be achieved”.[1]

Among the anarchists, there was also confusion and outright betrayal. The venerable anarchist Kropotkin called for the defence of French civilisation against German militarism. Those that followed his line became known as the anarcho-trenchists, and the lure of patriotism proved particularly strong in the case of the syndicalist CGT in France. But anarchism, precisely because of its heterogeneous character, was not shaken to the roots in the same way as the “marxist party”. Numerous anarchist militants and groups continued to defend the same internationalist positions as they had before.[2]

Imperialism: capitalism in decay

Patently, a work of reorganisation and regroupment faced the groups of the former social democratic left, in order to carry on the basic work of propaganda and agitation in the teeth of nationalist frenzy and state repression. But what was required above all was a theoretical reassessment, a rigorous effort to understand how the war had swept away so many long-held assumptions of the movement. Not least because it was necessary to tear away the “socialist” wrapping in which the traitors disguised their patriotism, using the words of Marx and Engels, carefully selected and above all taken out of their historical context, to justify the position of national defence – above all in Germany, where there had been a long tradition of the marxist current supporting national movements against the reactionary threat posed by Russian Tsarism.

The necessity for a thorough-going theoretical inquiry was symbolised by Lenin quietly spending his time reading Hegel in the Zurich library at the start of the war. In an article recently published in The Commune, Kevin Anderson from the Marxist-Humanist Committee in the US argues that his studies of Hegel led Lenin to conclude that the majority of marxists in the Second International, including his mentor Plekhanov (and by extension himself) had not broken from vulgar materialism, and that their ignorance of Hegel meant that they had little grasp of the real dialectic of history.[3] And of course one of Hegel’s underlying dialectical principles is that what is rational in one epoch becomes irrational in another. Certainly, this is the method Lenin used to answer the social chauvinists – Plekhanov in particular – who tried to justify their support for the war by referring to the writings of Marx and Engels:

The Russian social-chauvinists (headed by Plekhanov), make references to Marx’s tactics in the war of 1870; the German (of the type of Lensch, David and Co.) to Engels’ statement in 1891 that in the event of war against Russia and France combined, it would be the duty of the German Socialists to defend their fatherland…All these references are outrageous distortions of the views of Marx and Engels in the interest of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists…Anyone who today refers to Marx’s attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie and forgets Marx’s statement that ‘the workingmen have no country’, a statement that applies precisely to the period of the reactionary and outmoded bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution, is shamelessly distorting Marx, and is substituting the bourgeois point of view for the socialist.[4]

Here was the key: capitalism had become a reactionary system, as Marx had predicted it would. The war had proved it and this meant a complete reappraisal of all the old tactics of the movement, a clear understanding of the characteristics of capitalism in its crisis of old age, and thus of the new conditions confronting the class struggle. Among the left fractions, this basic analysis of the evolution of capitalism was universal. Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet, on the basis of the profound investigation into the phenomenon of imperialism in the period leading up to the war, took up Engels’ announcement that humanity would be faced by the choice between socialism and barbarism and declared that this was no longer a prospect for the future but an immediate reality: as she put it, “this war is barbarism”. In the same work, Luxemburg argued that in an epoch of unbridled imperialist war, the old strategy of support for certain national movements had lost all progressive content: “In the era of the unleashing of this imperialism, national wars are no longer possible. ‘National interests’ serve only as the pretext for putting the labouring masses of the people under the domination of their mortal class enemy, imperialism.”

Trotsky, writing in Nashe Slovo, was moving in a parallel direction, arguing that the war was a sign that the nation state itself had become a barrier to further human progress:The nation state has outgrown itself – as a framework for the development of the productive forces, as a basis for class struggle, and especially as the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.[5]

In a more famous work, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin, like Luxemburg, recognised that the bloody conflict between the world’s great powers expressed the fact that these powers had now divided up the entire globe between them, and that henceforth the imperialist cake could only be re-divided through the violent settling of scores between imperialist ogres: “the characteristic feature of the period under review is the final partitioning of the globe—final, not in the sense that repartition is impossible; on the contrary, repartitions are possible and inevitable but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completedthe seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only re-division is possible, i.e., territories can only pass from one ‘owner’ to another, instead of passing as ownerless territory to an owner.[6]

In the same work, Lenin characterises the “highest stage” of capitalism as one of “parasitism and decay”, or as “moribund capitalism”. Parasitic, because – particularly in the case of Britain – he saw a tendency for the productive contribution to global wealth by the industrialised nations to be replaced by a growing reliance on finance capital and super-profits sucked out of the colonies (a vision that can certainly be criticised, but did contain an element of intuition, as witness today’s blossoming of financial speculation and the advancing de-industrialisation of some of the most powerful nations). Decay (by which Lenin did not mean an absolute stagnation in growth) because capitalism’s tendency to do away with free competition in favour of monopoly signified the increasing need for bourgeois society to cede its place to a higher mode of production.

Lenin’s Imperialism suffers from a number of weaknesses. Its definition of imperialism is more a description of some its outward manifestations (the “five defining characteristics” so often cited by leftists to prove that such and such a nation or bloc of nations is not imperialist) than an attempt to go to the roots of the phenomenon in the accumulation process as Luxemburg had done. Its vision of an advanced capitalist centre living parasitically off the super-profits from the colonies (and thus bribing a fringe of the working class, the “labour aristocracy”, to support its imperialist projects), left a large gap for the penetration of nationalist ideology in the form of support for the “national liberation” movements in the colonies. Furthermore the monopoly phase (in the sense of giant private combines) had already, above all during the course of the war, ceded to an even “higher” expression of capitalist decay: the enormous growth of state capitalism.

On this last point, the most the important contribution was surely made by Bukharin, who was one of the first to show that in the era of the “imperialist state” the entirety of social, economic and political life was being swallowed up by the state apparatus, above all for the purpose of waging war with rival imperialisms: 

In total contrast to the state in the epoch of industrial capitalism, the imperialist state is characterised by an extraordinary increase in the complexity of its functions and by an impetuous incursion into the economic life of society. It reveals a tendency to take over the whole productive sphere and the whole sphere of commodity circulation. Intermediate types of mixed enterprises will be replaced by pure state regulation, for in this way the centralisation process can advance further. All the members of the ruling classes (or, more accurately, of the ruling class, for finance capitalism gradually eliminates the different subgroups of the ruling classes, uniting them in a single finance-capitalist clique) become shareholders, or partners in a gigantic state-enterprise. From being the preserver and defender of exploitation, the state is transformed into a single, centralised, exploiting organisation that is confronted directly by the proletariat, the object of exploitation. In the same way as market prices are determined by the state, the workers are assigned a ration sufficient for the preservation of labour power. A hierarchically constructed bureaucracy fulfils the organising functions in complete accord with the military authorities, whose significance and power steadily grow. The national economy is absorbed into the state, which is constructed in a military fashion and has at its disposal an enormous, disciplined army and navy. In their struggle the workers must confront all the might of this monstrous apparatus, for their every advance will be aimed directly against the state: the economic and the political struggle cease to be two categories, and the revolt against exploitation will signify a direct revolt against the state organisation of the bourgeoisie.[7]

Totalitarian state capitalism and the war economy were certainly to prove fundamental characteristics of the ensuing century. Given the omnipresence of this capitalist monster, Bukharin rightly concludes that henceforward every significant workers’ struggle has no choice but to confront the state and that the only way forward for the proletariat was to “explode” this entire apparatus – to destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with its own organs of power. This signified the definitive rejection of all presuppositions about peacefully conquering the existing state, which Marx and Engels had not entirely rejected, even after the experience of the Commune, and which had increasingly become the orthodox position of the Second International. Pannekoek had initially take up this position in 1912, and when Bukharin reiterated it, to begin with Lenin angrily accused Bukharin of lapsing into anarchism; but in the very process of elaborating his reply, and driven by the necessity to understand the unfolding revolution in Russia, Lenin was again gripped by the ever-evolving dialectic and came to the conclusion that Pannekoek and Bukharin had been right – a conclusion formulated in The State and Revolution, written on the eve of the October insurrection.

In Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy (1917) there is also an attempt to locate the drive towards imperialist expansion in the economic contradictions identified by Marx, emphasising the pressure exerted by the fall in the rate of profit but also recognising the need for the constant extension of the market. Like Luxemburg and Lenin, Bukharin’s aim is to demonstrate that, precisely because the process of imperialist “globalisation” had created a unified world economy, capitalism had fulfilled its historic mission and could henceforward only go into decline. This was entirely consistent with the perspective outlined by Marx when he wrote that “the proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market.[8]

Thus, against the social chauvinists and the centrists who wanted to go back to the status quo ante bellum, who distorted marxism to justify support for one or other of the belligerent camps, the genuine marxists unanimously affirmed that there was no more progressive capitalism and that therefore its revolutionary overthrow was now on the historical agenda.

The epoch of proletarian revolution

The same fundamental question of the historic period was posed again in Russia in 1917, the culminating point of a mounting international wave of proletarian resistance to the war. As the Russian working class, organised in soviets, increasingly discovered that getting rid of the Tsar had solved none of their fundamental problems, the right wing and centrist fractions of the social democracy campaigned with all their resources against the Bolshevik call for proletarian revolution and for the soviet counter-power to settle scores not just with the old Tsarist elements but also with the entire Russian bourgeoisie, which claimed February as its legitimate revolution. In this they were supported theoretically by the Mensheviks who trotted out Marx’s writings to show that socialism could only be constructed on the basis of a fully developed capitalist system: since Russia was far too backward for that, it obviously could not go beyond the phase of a democratic, bourgeois revolution, and the Bolsheviks were just a band of adventurists seeking to play historical leap-frog. The answer provided by Lenin in the April Theses was once again consistent with his reading of Hegel, who had always stressed the necessity to see the movement of history as a totality; at the same time it reflected his deep commitment to internationalism. It is certainly true, of course, that the conditions for revolution have to mature historically, but the advent of a new historical epoch cannot be judged on the basis of examining this or that country alone. Capitalism, as the theory of imperialism showed, was a global system, and therefore its decline and the necessity for its overthrow also ripened on a global scale: the outbreak of world imperialist war was ample proof of this. There was no Russian revolution in isolation: a proletarian insurrection in Russia could only be the first step towards an international revolution, or as Lenin put it in his bombshell of a speech to the workers and soldiers who had come to greet him at the Finland Station in Petrograd upon his return from exile: “Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers. I am happy to greet in you the victorious Russian revolution, to greet you as the advance guard of the international proletarian army… The hour is not far when, at the summons of our comrade Karl Liebknecht, the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters…The Russian revolution achieved by you has opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution![9]

This understanding that capitalism had, at one and the same moment, fulfilled the necessary historic conditions for the advent of socialism and entered into a historic crisis of senility – since these are only two sides of the same coin – was encapsulated in the well-known phrase from the platform of the Communist International, drawn up at its First Congress in March 1919: “A new epoch is born! The epoch of the break-up of capitalism, of its internal collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”.

When the revolutionary, internationalist left came together at the CI’s First Congress, the revolutionary tumult unleashed by October was at its highpoint. Although the “Spartacist” uprising in Berlin in January had been crushed and Luxemburg and Liebknecht had been cruelly murdered, the Hungarian soviet republic had just been formed; Europe and parts of the US and South America were being gripped by mass strikes. The revolutionary enthusiasm of the hour was expressed in the basic texts adopted by the Congress. In line with Rosa’s speech to the founding congress of the KPD, the dawn of the new epoch meant that the old separation between minimum and maximum programme was no longer valid; consequently, the work of organising inside capitalism through trade union activity and participation in parliament to fight for meaningful reforms had lost its underlying raison d’être. The historic crisis of the world capitalist system, expressed not only by the imperialist war but also by the economic and social chaos left in its wake, meant that the direct struggle for power, organised in soviets, was now realistically and indeed urgently on the agenda; and this programme of action was valid in all countries, including the colonies and semi-colonies. Moreover, the adoption of this new, maximum programme could only come about via a complete break with the organisations which had “represented” the working class during the previous epoch but which had betrayed its interests as soon as the test of history was applied – the test of war and revolution in 1914-17. The social democratic reformists, the trade union bureaucracy, were now defined as servants of capital, not the right wing of the workers’ movement. The debates at the First Congress show that the early International was open to the most daring conclusions drawn from the direct experience of revolutionary combat. Although the experience in Russia had followed a somewhat different path, the Bolsheviks listened seriously to the testimony of delegates from Germany, Switzerland, Finland, the US, UK and elsewhere, arguing that the trade unions were no longer merely useless but had become a direct and counter-revolutionary obstacle – cogs in the state apparatus, and that workers were increasingly organising outside and against them through the council form of organisation in the factories and the streets. And since the class struggle was precisely focused in the workplaces and on the streets, these living centres of class struggle and class consciousness appeared, in the official documents of the CI, starkly contrasted with the empty shell of parliament, an instrument which, again, was not simply irrelevant in the struggle for proletarian revolution but also a direct weapon of the ruling class, used to sabotage the power of the workers’ councils, as had been clearly demonstrated both in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918. Similarly, the Manifesto of the CI came very near to echoing Luxemburg’s view that national struggles had had their day and the newly arising nations had become mere pawns of competing imperialist interests. At this point these “extreme” revolutionary conclusions seemed to the majority to flow logically from the dawning of the new epoch.[10]

The debates at the Third Congress

When history accelerates, as was the case from 1914, a year or two can see the most dramatic changes. By the time the CI came together for its Third Congress in June/July 1921, the hope of an immediate extension to the revolution, so vigorous at the First Congress, had suffered the most severe blows. Russia had been through three years of exhausting civil war, and although the Red forces had defeated the Whites militarily, the political price was deadly: decimation of a large part of the most class conscious workers, increasing bureaucratisation of the “revolutionary” state to the point that the soviets had effectively lost control of it. The rigours of “War Communism” and the destructive excesses of the Red Terror had finally provoked open revolt in the working class: in March massive strikes broke out in Petrograd, followed by the armed uprising of the Kronstadt sailors and workers, who called for the renaissance of the soviets and an end to the militarisation of labour and the repressive actions of the Cheka. But the Bolshevik leadership, incarcerated in the state, could only see this movement as an expression of the White counter-revolution and suppressed it ruthlessly and bloodily. All this was an expression of the growing isolation of the Russian bastion. Defeat had followed defeat: the Hungarian and Bavarian soviet republics, the general strikes in Winnipeg and Seattle, Red Clydeside, the Italian factory occupations, the Ruhr uprising in Germany and many other mass movements. 

Increasingly aware of their isolation, the party clinging to power in Russia, and other Communist parties outside it, began to resort to desperate measures to spread the revolution, such as the Red Army advance into Poland, and the March Action in Germany in March 1921 – both of them failed attempts to force the pace of the revolution without the massive development of class consciousness and organisation needed for a real assumption of working class power. Meanwhile the capitalist system, though bled white by the war and still exhibiting the symptoms of a deep economic crisis, succeeded in stabilising itself economically and socially, partly the result of the new role being played by the USA as the world’s industrial powerhouse and creditor.

Within the Communist International, the Second Congress in 1920 had already reflected the impact of these preceding defeats. This was symbolised by the publication of Lenin’s Left wing communism, an infantile disorder, which was distributed at the Congress.[11] Instead of opening out to the living experience of the world proletariat, the Bolshevik experience – or a particular version of it – was now presented as a universal model. The Bolsheviks had achieved a certain degree of success in the Duma after 1905, hence the tactic of “revolutionary parliamentarism” was valid everywhere; the trade unions in Russia had been recently formed and had not lost all signs of proletarian life…hence communists in all countries were to do whatever was necessary to stay in the reactionary trade unions and fight to conquer them from the corrupt bureaucrats. Along with the codification of these trade union and parliamentary tactics, put forward in firm opposition to the left communist currents who rejected them, came the call to build up the Communist parties as mass parties, largely through incorporating bodies like the USPD in Germany and the Socialist Party in Italy (PSI).

1921 saw a further evidence of a slide towards opportunism, the sacrificing of principles and long-term goals in favour of short-term success and numerical growth. Instead of the clear denunciation of the social democratic parties as agents of the bourgeoisie, we now had the sophism of the “open letter” addressed to these parties, aimed at “forcing the leaders to fight” or, failing that, at exposing them to their working class membership. In short, the adoption of a politics of manoeuvring in which the masses are somehow to be tricked into becoming class conscious. These tactics were shortly to be followed by the proclamation of the “United Front” tactic and the even more unprincipled slogan of the “Workers’ Government”, a kind of parliamentary coalition between the social democrats and the Communists. Behind all this search for influence at any cost lay the need for the “Soviet” state to hold out in a hostile capitalist world, to find a modus vivendi with world capitalism, even if it meant returning to the practice of secret diplomacy so roundly condemned by the Soviet power in 1917 (in 1922, the “Soviet” state signed a secret agreement with Germany, even supplying it with weapons that would be used to shoot down Communist workers a year later). All this indicated an accelerating trajectory away from the struggle for revolution and towards incorporation into the capitalist status quo – not yet definitive, but indicating the path of degeneration that was to culminate in the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution.

This didn’t mean that all clarity and all serious debate about the historical period disappeared. On the contrary, the reaction by the “left wing communists” to this opportunist course was to base their arguments even more solidly on the view that capitalism had entered a new period: the KAPD programme of 1920 thus begins with the proclamation that capitalism was experiencing its historic crisis, confronting the proletariat with the choice between socialism and barbarism;[12] in the same year the Italian left’s arguments against parliamentarism depart from the premise that while campaigning in parliamentary elections had been valid in the previous era, the advent of a revolutionary epoch invalidated the old practice. But even from the “official” voices of the CI there was still a genuine attempt to understand the characteristics and consequences of the new era.

The report and theses on the world situation, delivered by Trotsky at the Third Congress in June/July 1921, offered a very lucid analysis of the mechanisms resorted to by a profoundly ailing capitalism to ensure its survival in the new period – not least, the flight into credit and fictitious capital. Analysing the first signs of a post-war recovery, Trotsky’s “Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International” posed the question as follows:

How explain these facts and the boom itself? In the first place, by economic causes: after the war international connections were resumed, even though in an extremely abridged form, and there was a universal demand for every type of merchandise. Secondly, by political-financial causes: the European governments were in mortal fear of the crisis that had to follow the war and they resorted to any and all measures to sustain during the period of demobilisation the artificial boom created by the war. The governments continued to put in circulation great quantities of paper currency, floated new loans, regulated profits, wages and bread prices, thus subsidising the earnings of demobilised workers by dipping into the basic national funds, and thus creating an artificial economic revival in the country. Thus, throughout this interval, fictitious capital continued to distend, especially in those countries where industry continued to slump.”

Capitalism’s whole life since that time has only confirmed this diagnosis of a system which can only keep itself afloat by violating its own economic laws. These texts also sought to deepen the understanding that, without a proletarian revolution, capitalism would certainly unleash new and even more destructive wars (even if its deduction of an impending clash between the old power of Britain and the rising power of the USA was wide of the mark, though not altogether without foundation). But the most important clarification contained in these and other documents was the conclusion that the advent of the new period did not mean that decline, open economic crisis and revolution were all simultaneous, an ambiguity that could be seen in the original “a new epoch is born” formulation of 1919, which could be interpreted to mean that capitalism had simultaneously entered a “final” economic crisis and an uninterrupted phase of revolutionary conflicts. This advance in understanding is perhaps most clearly expressed in Trotsky’s text “The Main Lesson of the Third Congress”, written in June 1921. It began as follows:

Classes are rooted in production. Classes remain viable so long they can fulfil a necessary role in the process of social organisation of labour. Classes begin losing the ground under their feet when the conditions necessary for their further existence come into contradiction with the growth of productive forces, i.e., with the further development of economy. Such is the situation in which the bourgeoisie finds itself at the present time.

But this does not at all mean that a class, which has lost its living roots and has become parasitic, is by this very reason doomed to instantaneous death. While economy constitutes the foundation of class rule, the respective classes maintain themselves in power by means of the state – political apparatuses and organs, namely: army, police, party, courts, press, etc., etc. With the aid of these organs, which in relation to the economic foundation represent a ‘superstructure’, the ruling class may perpetuate itself in power for years and decades after it has become a direct brake upon the social development. If such a situation endures too long, an outlived ruling class can drag down with it those countries and peoples over whom it rules…

A purely mechanical conception of the proletarian revolution – which proceeds from the fact that capitalist economy continues to decay – has led certain groups of comrades to construe theories which are false to the core: the false theory of an initiating minority which by its heroism shatters ‘the wall of universal passivity’ of the proletariat. The false theory of uninterrupted offensives conducted by the proletarian vanguard, as a ‘new method’ of struggle; the false theory of partial battles which are waged by applying the methods of armed insurrection. And so forth and so on. The clearest exponent of this tendency is the Vienna journal Communism. It is absolutely self-evident that tactical theories of this sort have nothing in common with Marxism.”

Thus the onset of decline did not preclude recoveries at the economic level, or retreats by the proletariat. Of course, no one could see how decisive the defeats of 1919-21 had already been, but there was a burning need to clarify what to do now, faced with an epoch but not an immediate moment of revolution. A separate text, the “Theses on Tactics” adopted by the Congress,quite correctly put forward the need for the communist parties to take part in defensive struggles in order to build up the confidence and self-awareness of the working class; and this, together with the recognition that decline and revolution were by no means synonymous, was a necessary rebuttal of the “theory of the offensive” which had largely justified the semi-putschist approach of the March Action. This theory – that, given the ripeness of the objective conditions, the communist party had to wage a more or less permanent, insurrectionary offensive to push the masses into action – was held mainly by the left inside the German KPD, by Bela Kun and others – and not, as is often wrongly claimed, by the Communist Left properly speaking, even if the KAPD and those around it were not always clear on this point.[13]

In this respect the interventions of the KAPD delegations at the Third Congress are extremely instructive. Belying the label of “sectarian” in the Theses on Tactics, the KAPD’s attitude at the Congress was a model of how a responsible minority should behave in a proletarian organisation. Despite being frustratingly restricted in the times accorded to its interventions, and despite having to put up with interruptions and sarcasms from supporters of the official line, the KAPD saw itself as fully part of the proceedings and its delegates were very willing to recognise points of agreement where they did exist; they were not at all interested in stressing differences for their own sake, which is the essence of the sectarian attitude.[14] For example, in the discussion on the world situation, a number of the KAPD delegates agreed with many points of Trotsky’s analysis, notably the notion that capitalism was now reconstructing economically and regaining control at the social level: thus Seeman stressed the capacity of the international bourgeoisie to temporarily set aside its inter-imperialist rivalries in order to deal with the proletarian danger, especially in Germany.

The implication here – especially given that Trotsky’s report and theses on the world situation were to a large extent framed as a rebuttal to the partisans of the “theory of the offensive” – is that the KAPD was neither arguing that there could be no further stabilisation of capital, nor that the struggle now had to be an offensive one at any moment. And indeed this point of view was expressed in an explicit manner in a number of interventions.

Sachs, in his reply to Trotsky’s presentation on the world economic situation, put it thus: “We certainly saw yesterday in detail how comrade Trotsky – and everyone here will, I think, be in agreement with him – presented the relationship between on the one hand the small crises and short periods of cyclical and momentary revivals, and, on the other hand, the problem of the rise and decline of capitalism seen in great historical periods. We all agree that the large curve which was formerly going upwards is now irresistibly heading downwards, and that within this broad curve, there will still be oscillations within this general descent.[15]

Thus, whatever ambiguities may have existed in the KAPD’s view of the “mortal crisis”, it did not consider that the onset of decadence meant a sudden and definitive collapse of capitalism’s economic life.

By the same token, Hempel’s intervention on the tactics of the International clearly refuted the charge that the “sectarian” KAPD rejected defensive struggles and demanded the offensive at every moment: “We now come to the question of partial actions. We say that we do not reject any partial action. We say: each action, each combat, because that’s what an action is, has to be pushed forward. We cannot say: we reject this combat here or there. The combat is born from the economic needs of the working class; and it has to be pushed forward by all possible means. Precisely in countries like Germany and Britain, all the countries of bourgeois democracy which have been subjected to bourgeois democracy and all its effects for 40 or 50 years, the working class has to become used to struggles. The slogans have to correspond to the partial actions. Let’s take an example: in an enterprise, or different enterprises, a strike breaks out, it is limited to a particular area. The slogan cannot be: struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. That would be absurd. The slogans have to be adapted to the balance of forces, to what can be expected in a given situation”.[16]

But behind many of these interventions was the KAPD’s insistence that the CI was not going deep enough in its understanding that a new period in the life of capitalism and thus in the class struggle had opened up. Sachs, for example, having agreed with Trotsky on the possibility of temporary recoveries, argued that “what was not expressed in these theses.was precisely the fundamentally different character of this epoch of decline compared to the previous epoch of rising capitalism seen as a totality[17]and that this had implications for the way that capitalism would survive henceforth: “Capital is reconstructing its power by destroying the economy[18] a prescient vision of how capitalism would continue as a system in the ensuing century. Hempel, in the discussion on tactics, draws out the implications of the new period with regard to the political positions that communists had to put forward, particularly on the trade union and parliamentary questions on tactics. In contrast to the anarchists, with whom the KAPD has often been assimilated, Hempel insists that the use of parliament and trade unions had been correct in the previous period: “if we recall the tasks of the old workers’ movement, or more precisely, the workers’ movement prior to the epoch of the eruption of the revolution, its task, on the one hand, thanks to the political organisations of the working class, the parties, was to send delegates to parliament and the institutions which the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy had left open to representatives of the working class. This was one of its tasks. This led to advantages at the time and it was correct. For their part the economic organisations of the working class had the task of improving the situation of the proletariat within capitalism, to push for the struggle and to negotiate when the struggle ended…such were the tasks of workers’ organisations before the war. But the revolution arrived, and other tasks came to light. Workers’ organisations could no longer be limited to the struggle for wage increases or pose as their main aim representing the working class in parliament in order to extract improvements there”;[19] and furthermore, “we have constantly had the experience that the all the workers’ organisations which stayed on this path, despite their revolutionary speeches, unmasked themselves in the decisive struggles”,[20] and this is why the working class needed to create new organisations, capable of expressing the necessity for proletarian self-organisation and the direct confrontation with the state and capital; this was true both for small defensive strikes and wider mass struggles. Elsewhere, Bergmann defines unions as part of the state and hence it was illusory to try to conquer them: “we are fundamentally of the opinion that we have to break out of the old unions. Not because we have a thirst for destruction, but because we see that these organisations have really become, in the worst sense of the term, organs of the capitalist state to repress the revolution.[21] In similar vein, Sachs criticised both the regression towards the notion of the mass party and the tactic of the open letter to the social democratic parties – these were regressions either towards outmoded social democratic practices and forms of organisation, or worse still, towards the social democratic parties themselves which had passed to the enemy.

***

History is generally written by the winners, or at least by those who appear to be the winners. In the years that followed the Third Congress, the official Communist Parties remained as large organisations that could command the loyalty of millions of workers; the KAPD soon fragmented into a number of components, few of which maintained the clarity expressed by its representatives in Moscow in 1921. Now genuinely sectarian errors came to the fore, particularly in the hasty decision of the KAPD’s Essen tendency around Gorter to set up a “Fourth International” (the KAI or Communist Workers’ International), when what was needed in a phase of retreat in the revolution was the development of an international fraction to fight against the degeneration of the Third. This premature writing-off of the Communist International was logically accompanied by an about-turn on the proletarian nature of the October revolution, increasingly rejected as bourgeois. Equally sectarian was the view of the Schröder tendency in the KAI that in the epoch of the “death crisis”, wage struggles were opportunist; other currents began to question the very possibility of a proletarian political party, giving birth to what became known as “councilism”. But these manifestations of a more general weakening and fragmentation of the revolutionary avant-garde were products of the mounting defeat and counter-revolution; at the same time, the maintenance, in this period, of the CPs as influential mass organisations was also a product of the bourgeois counter-revolution, but with the terrible peculiarity that these parties had put themselves in its vanguard along with the fascist and democratic butchers. On the other hand, the clearest positions of the KAPD and Italian left, products of the highest moment of the revolution and solidly anchored in the theory of capitalism’s decline, did not disappear, largely thanks to the patient work of small and often painfully isolated groups of revolutionaries; when the mists of the counter-revolution cleared, these positions found new life in the emergence of a new generation of revolutionaries, and they remain as fundamental acquisitions on which the next party of the revolution must be built.

Gerrard

 

 


[1]. Letter to Konstantin Zetkin, end of 1914, cited in Peter Nettle, Rosa Luxemburg, OUP, 1969.

[2]. It would however be of interest to inquire further into possible contemporary attempts, within the anarchist movement, to analyse the historical significance of the war. 

[4]. Lenin, Socialism and War, 1915. Collected Works, Vol. 21.

[5]. Nashe Slovo, 4 February 1916.

[6]. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, VI, “Division of the world among the great powers”. Collected Works, Vol.22.)

[7]. “Toward a theory of the imperialist state”, 1915.

[8]. Marx to Engels, 8 October 1858, Collected Works, Vol. 40, p.347, Lawrence and Wishart.

[9]. Cited in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Volume one, “The Overthrow of Tzarism”, Chapter XV, “The Bolsheviks and Lenin, p. 296. Pathfinder 1980.

[10]. For further elaboration of these discussions at the First Congress see the article in International Review n° 123 “The theory of decadence at the heart of historical materialism, part v” (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/123_decadence).

[11]. We should note that this text did not go without responses or critiques, particularly from Gorter in his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin.

[12] . “The world economic crisis, born from the world war, with its monstrous social and economic effects which produce the thunderstruck impression of a field of ruins of colossal dimensions, can only signify one thing: the Twilight of the Gods of the bourgeois-capitalist world order is nigh. Today, it is not a question of the periodic economic crises which were once a part of the capitalist mode of production; it is the crisis of capitalism itself; we are witnessing convulsive spasms of the whole of the social organism, formidable outbursts of class antagonisms of an unprecedented pitch, general misery for wide layers of populations: all this is a fateful warning to bourgeois society. It appears more and more clearly that the ever-growing antagonism between exploiters and exploited, that the contradiction between capital and labour, the consciousness of which is becoming more widespread even among those previously apathetic layers of the proletariat, cannot be resolved. Capitalism is experiencing its definitive failure, it has plunged itself into the abyss in a war of imperialist robbery; it has created a chaos whose unbearable prolongation places the proletariat in front of the historic alternative: relapse into barbarism or construction of a socialist world.

[13]. For example: the opening paragraph of the KAPD programme, quoted in a previous footnote, could easily be interpreted as describing a final and definitive crisis of capitalism; and with regard to the danger of putschism, some of the KAPD’s activities during the March Action certainly fall into this category, as for example in its uncritical alliance with the VKPD, in the use of its unemployed members to try to literally bludgeon workers to join the general strike, and in its ambiguous relationship to the “independent” armed forces led by Max Hoelz and others. See also Hempel’s intervention at the 3rd Congress (La Gauche Allemande, p.41), which recognises that the March Action could not have overthrown capitalism but also insists that it was necessary to raise the slogan of the overthrow of the government – a position which seems to lack consistency, since for the KAPD there was no question of advocating any kind of hybrid “Workers’ Government” short of the proletarian dictatorship. (Note: An English translation of the KAPD’s interventions at the Congress has been published on www.libcom.org: “Interventions by the KAPD at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International (1921), parts 1-5”).

[14]. Hempel’s attitude towards the anarchists and syndicalists was also devoid of the sectarian spirit, emphasising the need to work with the genuinely revolutionary expressions of this current (see La Gauche Allemande, pp.44-45).

[15]. La Gauche Allemande, Invariance, 1973, p.21.

[16]. La Gauche Allemande, p.40.

[17]. Ibid, p.21

[18]. Ibid, p.22.

[19].  Ibid, p.33.

[20]. Ibid, p.34.

[21]. Ibid, p.56.

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The Communist Left in Russia: Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Part 2)

We published the first part of the Manifesto in the last issue of the International Review. To recall, the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party, which produced this Manifesto, formed part of what is called the communist left, constituted by the left currents that appeared in response to the opportunist degeneration of the parties of the Third International and of soviet power in Russia.

The following two chapters of this document published below form a sharpened critique of the opportunist united front policy and the workers’ government slogan. Placing this critique in its historical context, the Manifesto should be read as an attempt to understand the implications of the change in historical period; the new period had rendered null and void all policies of alliance with fractions of the bourgeoisie since from now on these were all equally reactionary. Similarly, any alliance with organisations like social democracy, which had already proved its treason, could only lead to a weakening of the proletariat. Further, the Manifesto is perfectly clear on the fact that, in the new period, the struggle for reforms is no longer on the agenda. However, the speed with which these considerable historical changes had taken place did not permit even the clearest revolutionaries to gain the perspective necessary to profoundly understand all the precise implications. This was also the case with the Workers’ Group, which did not make a distinction between the struggle for reforms and the defensive economic struggle of the proletariat faced with the permanent encroachments of capital. While not refusing to participate in the latter, out of solidarity, it considered that only the seizure of power was able to liberate the proletariat from its chains, without taking into account the fact that the political and economic struggle form a whole.

Finally, faced with the restrictions on freedom of speech imposed on the proletariat, even after the end of the civil war, the Manifesto responds very firmly and lucidly when addressing itself to the leaders: “How can you solve the great task of the organisation of the social economy without the proletariat?

 


The socialist united front

Before examining the essential content of this question, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the conditions in which the theses of comrade Zinoviev on the united front were debated and accepted in Russia. From the 19th to the 21st of December 1921, the 12th Conference of the RCP (Bolshevik) took place, during which the question of the united front was posed. Up until then nothing on this subject had been written in the press or discussed in the meetings of the party. However, at the conference, comrade Zinoviev unleashed some crude attacks and the conference was so surprised that it immediately gave way and approved the theses with raised hands. We recall these circumstances not to offend anyone but to first of all draw attention to the facts that: 1) the tactic of the united front was discussed in a very hasty fashion, almost “militarily”; 2) in Russia it was carried out in a quite particular fashion.

The RCP (Bolshevik) was the promoter of this tactic within the Comintern (CI).[1] It convinced foreign comrades that we Russian revolutionaries had succeeded precisely thanks to this tactic of the united front and that it had been built up in Russia on the basis of the experience of the whole pre-revolutionary epoch and particularly from the experience of the struggle of the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks.

Comrades coming from different countries simply knew the fact that the Russian proletariat had won, and they wanted to do the same to their bourgeoisies. Now they were persuaded that the Russian proletariat had conquered thanks to the tactic of the united front. They could do no other since they did not know the history of the Russian revolution. Once comrade Lenin had very severely condemned those who trusted in simple words, but he didn’t really want anyone to take him up on these particular words.

What lesson can we thus draw from the experience of the Russian revolution?

In one epoch the Bolsheviks supported a progressive movement against autocracy:

a) social-democrats must support the bourgeoisie in so far as it is revolutionary or even merely oppositional in its struggle against Tsardom;

b) therefore, social-democrats must welcome the awakening of political consciousness in the Russian bourgeoisie; but, on the other hand, they are obliged to unmask before the proletariat the limited and inadequate character of the bourgeois liberation movement, wherever this limitedness and inadequacy shows itself (Resolution of the IInd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ‘Attitude to the liberals’, August 1903).

The resolution of the IIIrd Congress, held in April 1905, reproduced these two points in recommending to comrades:

1) to explain to workers the counter-revolutionary and anti-proletarian nature of the bourgeois democratic current, regardless of its nuances, from the moderate liberals represented by the vast layers of large landowners and manufacturers to the most radical current known as the “Emancipation Union” and the varied groups of the liberal professions;

2) to fight vigorously against any attempt on the part of bourgeois democracy to recuperate the workers’ movement and to speak in the name of the proletariat and its various groups. Since 1898 social democracy had been favourable to a “united front” (as they say now) with the bourgeoisie. But this united front had three phases:

1) in 1901, social democracy supported all “progressive movements” opposed to the existing regime;

2) in 1903, it recognised the need to go beyond the “limits of the movement of the bourgeoisie”;

3) in 1905, in April, it took concrete steps “in strongly advising comrades to denounce the counter-revolutionary and anti-proletarian nature of the bourgeois democratic current, of all shades”, and to energetically combat its influence on the proletariat.

But whatever the forms of support to the bourgeoisie, it is without doubt that during a certain period, before 1905, the Bolsheviks formed a united front with the bourgeoisie.

And what are we to think of a “revolutionary” who, based on the Russian experience, would propose a united front with the bourgeoisie today?

In September 1905, the Conference convoked specially to debate the question of the “Boulyguine Duma” defined the attitude of the latter towards the bourgeoisie in the following way: “By this illusion of a representation of the people, the autocracy aspires to attach a large part of the bourgeoisie that has grown weary of the labour movement and desires order; in assuring its interest and support, the autocracy intends to crush the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and the peasantry.”

The resolution the Bolsheviks proposed to the RSDLP Unification Congress (April 1906) revealed the secret of the Bolsheviks’ change of policy, from its previous support for the bourgeoisie to a struggle against it: “As for the class of large capitalists and landowners, one can see their very swift passage from opposition to an arrangement with the autocracy to together crush the revolution”. As “the main task of the working class at the current time of the democratic revolution is the completion of this revolution”, it should form a “united front” with parties who also want this. For this reason, the Bolsheviks renounced any agreement with the parties to the right of the Cadets and signed pacts with the parties to their left, the Social-Revolutionaries (SRs), Popular Socialists (NS) and the Trudoviks, therefore building “a socialist united front” in the struggle for the consistent advance of the democratic revolution.

Was the Bolsheviks’ tactic right at this time? We do not believe that among active combatants of the October revolution there are people disputing the correctness of this tactic. We therefore see that from 1906 to 1917 inclusive, the Bolsheviks advocated “a socialist united front” in the struggle for the consistent advance of the democratic revolution achieved by the formation of a Provisional Revolutionary Government which convened a Constituent Assembly.

No one ever considered, nor could consider, this revolution as proletarian or socialist; all well understood that it was bourgeois-democratic. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks proposed and themselves followed the tactic of a “socialist united front” by uniting in practice with the SRs, the Mensheviks, the Populists and Trudoviks.

What was the tactic of the Bolsheviks when the question posed was whether we should struggle for the democratic revolution or for the socialist revolution? Did the struggle for the power of the soviets also perhaps demand the “socialist united front”?

Revolutionary marxists still consider the party of the Social-Revolutionaries to be a “bourgeois democratic fraction” with “ambiguous socialist phraseology”; which has been confirmed in large measure by its activity throughout the revolution and up to the present. As a bourgeois democratic fraction, this party cannot take on the practical task of a struggle for the socialist revolution, for socialism; but it tries, using an “ambiguous socialist” terminology, to hold back this struggle at any price. If this is so (and it is so) the tactic which must lead the insurgent proletariat to victory cannot be that of the socialist united front, but that of bloody combat, without circumspection, against the bourgeois fractions and their confusing socialist terminology. Only this combat can bring victory and it must be done in this way. The Russian proletariat has won, not by allying itself with the Social Revolutionaries, with the Populists and the Mensheviks, but by struggling against them. 

It’s true that toward October, the Bolsheviks succeeded in splitting the SRs[2] and the Mensheviks[3] by releasing the worker masses from the captivity of their obfuscating socialist terminology, and were able to take advantage of these splits, but that can hardly be regarded as a united front with bourgeois fractions.

What does the Russian experience teach us?

1) In certain historical moments, a united front with the bourgeoisie should be formed in countries where the country or the situation is more or less similar to that which existed in Russia before 1905.

2) In countries where the situation is somewhat similar to that in Russia between 1906 and 1917, it is necessary to abandon the tactic of a united front with the bourgeoisie and follow the tactic of a “socialist united front”.

In countries where there is a direct struggle for proletarian power, it is necessary to abandon the tactic of the “socialist united front” and warn the proletariat that “the bourgeois fractions with ambiguous socialist phraseology” – at the present time all parties of the Second International – will at the crucial moment march arms in hand for the defence of the capitalist system.

It is necessary, for the unification of all the revolutionary elements which have the aim of overthrowing world capitalist exploitation, that they align with the German Communist Workers’ Party (KAPD), the Dutch Communist Workers’ Party and other parties that adhere to the 4th International.[4] All the authentic proletarian revolutionary elements must detach themselves from the forces that imprison them: the parties of the Second International, the Two-and-a-half International [5] and their “ambiguous socialist phraseology”. The victory of the world revolution is impossible without a principled rupture and a relentless struggle against the bourgeois caricatures of socialism. The opportunists and social-chauvinists, as servants of the bourgeoisie, and consequently direct enemies of the proletarian class, become, more especially today, linked to the capitalists, to the armed oppressors in their own country and abroad (Cf. programme of the RCP Bolshevik). This is the truth about the tactic of the socialist united front which, as backed up by the theses of the Executive of the CI, is supposed to be based on the experience of the Russian revolution, whereas, in reality, it is an opportunist tactic. Such a tactic of collaboration with the declared enemies of the working class who carry out armed oppression against the revolutionary proletariat in their own and other countries is in open contradiction to the experience of the Russian revolution. In order to remain under the banner of the social revolution, we must make a “united front” against the bourgeoisie and its socialist servants.

As above, the tactic of the “socialist united front” retains its revolutionary value in the countries where the proletariat struggles against autocracy, supported by the bourgeoisie and for the bourgeois democratic revolution.

And where the proletariat still fights autocracy which is also opposed by the bourgeoisie, it should follow the “united front” tactic with the bourgeoisie.

When the Comintern requires the communist parties of all countries to follow at all costs the tactic of the socialist united front, it is a dogmatic requirement which interferes with the resolution of practical tasks in accordance with the conditions of each country and undoubtedly harms the whole revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

Regarding the theses of the Executive of the Communist International

The theses, which were published in Pravda, clearly show that the “theoreticians” understood the idea of a “socialist united front” to be an expression of just two words: “united front”. Everyone knows how “popular” in Russia in 1917 were the social traitors of every country and in particular Scheidemann, Noske and co. The Bolsheviks, the rank and file elements of the party who had little experience, shouted at every corner: “You perfidious traitors of the working class, we will hang you from the telegraph poles. You bear the responsibility for the international bloodbath in which you have drowned the workers of every country. You have assassinated Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The streets of Berlin, thanks to your violent action, ran red with the blood of the workers who rose up against exploitation and capitalist oppression. You were the authors of the peace of Versailles, you have inflicted countless wounds on the international proletarian movement because you have betrayed it every time.”

We should also add that it wasn’t decided to propose to the communist workers the “socialist united front”, that's to say a united front with Noske, Scheidemann, Vandervelde, Branting and co. Such a united front must be disguised in one way or another and that is how it went. The theses are not simply entitled “the socialist united front”, but “theses on the united front of the proletariat and on the attitude vis-à-vis the workers belonging to the Second, and the Two-and-a-half Internationals and that of Amsterdam, similarly towards workers adhering to the anarchist and syndicalist organisations”. Why such a mouthful? You see comrade Zinoviev himself, who not long ago was inviting us to collaborate in the burial of the Second International, now invites us to a wedding feast with it. That's the reason for the long title. In reality it talks of agreement not with the workers but with the parties of the Second International and the Two-and-a-half International. Every worker knows, even if he has never been abroad, that the parties are represented by their central committee, on which sit the likes of Vandervelde, Branting, Scheidemann, Noske and co. Thus it is with them that agreement has to be established. Who is going to Berlin for the conference of the three Internationals? To whom has the Communist International given its heartfelt trust? The Wels’s, Vandervelde's, etc...

But have we tried to get an agreement with the KAPD, given that comrade Zinoviev agrees that the most precious proletarian elements are found there? No. And yet the KAPD fights in order to organise the conquest of power by the proletariat. 

It is true that in his theses comrade Zinoviev affirms that the aim wasn’t a fusion of the Communist International with the Second International: towards the latter, he reminds us of the necessity for organisational autonomy: “absolute autonomy and total independence to explain its positions for each communist party which concludes this or that agreement with the parties of the Second International and Two-and-a-half International”. Communists impose self-discipline in action but they must conserve the right and possibility – not only before and after but if necessary also during the action – of pronouncing on the politics of workers’ organisations without exception. In supporting the slogan of “maximum unity of all workers’ organisations in all practical action against the capitalist front, the communists cannot renounce defending their positions” (see the theses of the Comintern CC for the conference of the RCP in 1921).

Prior to 1906, in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, there were two fractions that had as much autonomy as provided for in the theses of the Comintern cited above.

Discipline in negotiations, and autonomy of judgment in the internal life of the party, are formally recognised by the statutes of the RCP (Bolshevik). One must do what the majority has decided and you can only exercise the right of criticism. Do what you are commanded, but if you’re really too outraged and convinced that one is involved in harming the world revolution, you can, before, during and after the action freely express your rage. This is tantamount to renouncing autonomous actions (rather like Vandervelde signing the Treaty of Versailles and compromising himself).

In these same theses, the Executive proposes the slogan of workers’ government which must be substituted for the dictatorship of the proletariat. What exactly is a workers’ government? It is a government made up of a central committee boiled down from the party; the ideal realisation of these theses occurs in Germany where President Ebert is a socialist and where governments are formed with his approval. Even if this formula is not accepted, communists must back with their votes the socialist prime ministers and presidents such as Branting in Sweden and Ebert in Germany.

Here is how we show our critical autonomy: the chairman of the Comintern, comrade Zinoviev, meets up with the CC of the Social Democratic Party and on seeing Ebert, Noske, Scheidemann, he raises his fists, shouting: “Turncoats, traitors of the working class!” They smile kindly and bow down before him. “You've murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the German proletariat, we’ll hang you from the gibbet!” They smile at him even more kindly and bow down even lower.

Comrade Zinoviev offers them the united front and proposes to form a workers’ government with communist participation. Thus he exchanges the gallows for the ministerial armchair. Noske, Ebert, Scheidemann and co. will go to the workers’ assemblies and say that the CI has given them an amnesty and offered them ministerial posts in place of the gibbet. The condition is however, that the communists authorise a minister. [...].[6] They will say to the whole working class that the communists have recognised the possibility of realising socialism only by uniting with them and not against them. And they will add: Take a look at these people! They would have hung and buried us before; now they have come to us. So good, we forgive them because they have of course forgiven us. A mutual amnesty.

The Communist International has given the Second International a proof of its political sincerity and it has received a proof of political poverty. What's the origin of this change in reality? How is it that comrade Zinoviev offers to Ebert, to Scheidemann and to Noske ministerial armchairs instead of the gallows? Not so long ago they sang the funeral oration of the Second International and now they give it the kiss of life. Why does he now sing its praises? Do we really see its resurrection and do we really lay claim to it?

Zinoviev’s theses effectively respond to such a question: “the world economic crisis is becoming sharper, unemployment is growing, capital is going onto the offensive and is manoeuvring adroitly, the condition of the working class is compromised”. Thus a class war is inevitable and from this it flows that the working class is moving more to the left. Reformist illusions are being destroyed. The greater workers’ base is now beginning to appreciate the courage of the communist avant-garde... and from this fact... a united front with Scheidemann must be constituted. Diabolical! The conclusion is not coherent with the premise.

We wouldn't be objective if we didn’t relate some still more fundamental considerations that comrade Zinoviev puts forward in his theses in order to defend the united front. Comrade Zinoviev makes a marvelous discovery: “We know that the working class struggles for unity. And how does it achieve that other than through a united front with Scheidemann?” Every conscious worker who is not foreign to the interests of his class and of the world revolution can ask: does the working class begin to struggle for unity just at the moment when the necessity of the “united front” is affirmed? Whoever has lived among the workers since the class has entered the field of political struggle, knows the doubts which assail every worker: why do the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, the Trudoviks (populists) fight among themselves? All desire the good of the people. So for what motives are they fighting each other? Every worker has doubts, but what conclusion must we draw from it? The working class must organise itself as an independent class and oppose all the others. Our petty-bourgeois prejudices must be overcome! Such was the truth and such it remains today.

In every capitalist country where a situation favourable to the socialist revolution presents itself, we must prepare the working class for the armed struggle against the international Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. In this case, certainly, the experiences of the Russian revolution will have to be taken into consideration. The world working class must get into its head the idea that the socialists of the Second and the Two-and-a-half Internationals are and will be at the forefront of the counter-revolution. The propaganda for the united front with the social traitors of all nuances tends to the belief that they are also definitively fighting the bourgeoisie, for socialism and not the contrary. But only open, courageous propaganda, in favour of the civil war and the conquest of political power by the working class can interest the proletariat in the revolution.

The time when the working class could ameliorate its own material and juridical condition through strikes and parliament is definitively passed. This must be said openly. The struggle for the most immediate objectives is a struggle for power. We must show through our propaganda that, although on numerous occasions we have incited strikes, we haven’t really been able to ameliorate the condition of the workers, but you, workers, you have not yet gone beyond the old reformist illusion and are undertaking a struggle which weakens you. We can of course be in solidarity with you during strikes, but we will always come back to saying that these movements will not liberate you from slavery, from exploitation and the pangs of unabated need. The only way which will lead you to victory is the taking of power by your own calloused hands.

But this isn’t all. Comrade Zinoviev has decided to solidly justify the united front tactic: we were accustomed to understanding the notion of “the era of the social revolution” as being identical with the present moment, which means that the social revolution is on the agenda; but in practice it has been shown that “the era of the social revolution is a revolutionary process in the long term”. Zinoviev advises putting our feet on the ground and attracting the working masses. But we already attracted the masses by uniting ourselves in different ways with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs) from 1903 until 1917 and, as we have seen, we ended up by triumphing; that is why, he argues, to overcome Ebert, Scheidemann and Cie, we must not fight them, but unite with them.

We will not discuss whether the era of the social revolution is a long term process or not, and if it is, how much time it will take, because it would resemble a monks’ dispute on the sex of angels or a discussion aimed at finding out how many hairs you need to lose to be bald. We want to define the concept of “the era of the social revolution”. What is it? It is firstly the state of the material productive forces which begin to be incompatible with the form of property. Are there the necessary material conditions for the social revolution to be inevitable? Yes. Is something missing? Subjective, personal conditions are missing: the working class of the developed capitalist countries must still realise the need for this revolution, not in the distant future, but today, tomorrow. And for this, what must be done by the advanced workers, the avant-garde which has already realised this? Sound the tocsin, call for the battle by propaganda in favour of civil war using all kinds of things, (lockouts, strikes, the imminence of war, the lowering of living standards) and by preparing, by organising the working class for an immediate struggle.

Can one say that the Russian proletariat triumphed because it was united with the Mensheviks and the SRs? This is nonsense. The Russian proletariat defeated the bourgeoisie and landowners through its fierce fight against the Mensheviks and SRs.

In one of his speeches on the need for a united front tactic, comrade Trotsky said that we have triumphed, but must analyse how we are beaten. He argues that we marched in a united front with the Mensheviks and SRs because we ourselves, the Mensheviks and SRs sat in the same councils. If the united front tactic consists of sitting in the same institution, then the head of forced labour and the convicts are also in a united front: both are in prison.

Our communist parties sit in parliaments – does that mean we can say they are in a united front with all the deputies? Comrades Trotsky and Zinoviev should tell the communists of the entire world that the Bolsheviks had reason not to participate in the “pre-parliament” summoned by the Social Revolutionary Kerensky in August 1917, or the Provisional Government led by the socialists (which was a useful lesson), instead of saying rather dubious things about a so-called united front of the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks and the SRs.

We have already mentioned the era where the Bolsheviks had a united front with the bourgeoisie. But when was this? Prior to 1905. Yes, the Bolsheviks advocated the united front with all the socialists – but when? Before 1917. And in 1917, when they were fighting for working class power, the Bolsheviks joined forces with all revolutionary elements, from the left SRs to the anarchists of all varieties, to fight arms in hand the Mensheviks and SRs who, themselves, were in a united front with so-called “democracy”, that is with the bourgeoisie and the landowners. In 1917, the Russian proletariat put itself at the forefront of “the era of the social revolution", in which the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries had already been living. And in which the victorious tactic of the Russian proletariat in 1917 should be used, taking account of the lessons of the ensuing years: fierce resistance on the part of the bourgeoisie, SRs and Mensheviks faced with the Russian working class which had taken power. It will be this tactic which unites the working class of the developed capitalist countries, since this class is in the process of “getting rid of reformist illusions”; it will not be the united front with the Second International and Two-and-a-half International which will bring victory, but the war against them. This is the slogan of the future world social revolution.

The question of the united front in countries where the proletariat has power (workers' democracy)

All the countries where the socialist assault has already taken place, where the proletariat is the ruling class, require a different approach each time. Note that one cannot develop a valid tactic for all stages of the revolutionary process in each different country, nor a policy for all countries at the same stage of the revolutionary process.

If we remember our own history (without going too far back), the history of our struggle, it will be seen that in fighting our enemies, we have used many different processes.

In 1906 and the following years, it was the “three pillars”: the 8-hour working day, land requisition and the democratic republic. These three pillars included freedom of speech and the press, freedom of association, strikes and unions, etc.

In February 1917? “Down with the autocracy, long live the Constituent Assembly!” This was the cry of the Bolsheviks.

However, in April-May, everything moves in another direction: there is freedom of association, of press and speech, but land is not requisitioned, workers are not in power. They then launch the slogan “All power to the soviets!”

At this time, any attempt by the bourgeoisie to shut our mouth was met by fierce resistance: “long live freedom of speech, press, association, strikes, unions, conscience! Seize the land! Workers’ control of production! Peace! Bread! Freedom! Long live the civil war!”

But then October and victory. Power to the working class. The old mechanism of state oppression is completely destroyed, the new mechanism of emancipation is structured in councils of workers’, soldiers’ deputies, etc.

At this time must the proletariat proclaim the slogan of freedom of the press, of speech, of association, of coalition? Could it allow these gentlemen, from monarchists to Mensheviks and SRs, to advocate civil war? More than that, could it, as a ruling class, grant freedom of speech and press to someone in this milieu who would advocate civil war? No and again no!

Any organised propaganda for civil war against the proletarian power would be a counter-revolutionary act in favour of the exploiters, the oppressors. The more “socialist” this propaganda was, the more harm it could have done. And for this reason, it was necessary to proceed with “the most severe, pitiless elimination of these propagandists of the same proletarian family”.

So there is the proletariat, capable of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters, of organising itself as the only power in the country, of building a national authority recognised even by all the capitalist governments. A new task is imposed on it: to organise the country's economy and create as many material goods as possible. And this task is as immense as the conquest of power and the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters. More than that, the conquest of power and suppression of the exploiters are not goals in themselves, but the means to socialism, to greater well-being and freedom than under capitalism, under the domination and oppression of one class by another.

To resolve this problem of the form of organisation and the means of action used to abolish the former oppressors, new approaches are needed.

In view of our scarce resources, in view of the horrible devastation caused by imperialist and civil wars, the task is imposed on us of creating material goods to demonstrate in practice to the working class and allied groups among the population the attractive force of this socialist society created by the proletariat. To show that it is good not only because there are no longer bourgeois, police and other parasites, but also because the proletariat has become master and is free, certain that all value, all goods, each blow of the hammer serves to improve life: the lives of the poor, the oppressed and the humiliated under capitalism. To show that this is not the kingdom of hunger, but one of abundance never seen anywhere else. This is a task that remains to be done by the Russian proletariat, a task that surpasses those preceding.

Yes, it surpasses these because the first two tasks, the conquest of power and the eradication of the resistance of the oppressors (taking into account the intense hatred of the proletariat and the peasantry towards the landowners and bourgeois), are certainly great, but less important than the third goal. And today all workers might ask: why was all this done? Should it do so much? Should it pay with so much blood? Should it undergo suffering without end? What will solve this problem? Who will be the architect of our fortune? What organisation will do it?

There are no supreme saviours,

Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.

Producers, let us save ourselves!

Decree the common salvation!

To resolve this issue, we need an organisation that represents the unified will of the whole proletariat. We need the councils of workers’ deputies as well as industrial organisations in all enterprises taken over from the bourgeoisie (nationalised) which must spread their influence to the immense layers of fellow travellers.

But what at present are our councils? Do they resemble even a tiny bit the councils of workers’ deputies, i.e. “nuclei of state power in the plants and factories”? Do they resemble the councils of the proletariat which express its unified will to conquer? They have been emptied of their meaning, of an industrial base.

The long civil war that mobilised the attention of the proletariat towards the goals of destruction, of resistance to the oppressors, has postponed, erased all the other tasks and – without the proletariat noticing it – changed its organisation, the councils. The councils of workers’ deputies in the factories are dead. Long live the councils of workers’ deputies!

And is it not the same thing with the proletarian democracy in general? Do we need a similar attitude to the freedom of speech and press for the proletariat as at the time of the fierce civil war, of the revolt of the slave drivers? Is the proletariat, which took power, which was able to defend itself against a thousand terrible enemies, not to be allowed to express its thoughts now, on organising itself to overcome immense difficulties in production, on directing this production and the whole country?

The bourgeois are reduced to silence, certainly, but who will dare dispute the right of free speech for a proletarian who has defended his power without sparing his blood?

What is this freedom of speech and press for us, is it a god, a fetish?

We make for ourselves no idol

Neither on the earth, nor in the sky,

And we prostrate ourselves before no one.

For us, there is no real democracy, no absolute freedom as a fetish or idol, and even no real proletarian democracy.

Democracy was not and never will be a fetish for the counter-revolution, the bourgeoisie, the landowners, the priests, the SRs, and the Mensheviks of all countries of the world. For them, it is only a means to achieve their class goals.

Before 1917, freedom of speech and press for all citizens was our programmatic demand. In 1917, we conquered these freedoms and used them for propaganda and the organisation of the proletariat and its fellow travellers, including the intellectuals and the peasants. After organising a force capable of defeating the bourgeoisie, we, the proletarians, went to war and took power. In order to prevent the bourgeoisie from using freedom of speech and press to conduct the civil war against us, we denied freedom of speech and press not only to enemy classes, but also to a part of the proletariat and its fellow travellers – until the moment when the resistance of the bourgeoisie was broken in Russia.

But with the support of the majority of workers, we have ended the resistance of the bourgeoisie; can we now allow ourselves to talk amongst ourselves, the proletarians?

Freedom of speech and press before 1917, is one thing, in 1917 another, in 1918-20 a third and in 1921-22 a fourth type of attitude by our party towards this question is needed.

But can enemies of soviet power use these freedoms to overthrow it?

Perhaps these freedoms would be useful and necessary in Germany, France, England, etc., if these countries were in the same phase of the revolutionary process, because there is a large working class and there is no huge peasantry. But here, this small proletariat which has survived wars and economic disaster is worn, hungry, cold, bled white and exhausted; is it hard to push it over the edge, to the road leading to overthrow the soviet power? In addition to the proletariat, there is also in Russia a large part of the peasantry that is far from opulence, which barely lives. What guarantees are there that freedom of speech will not be used to form a counter-revolutionary force with this peasantry? No, when we have fed the worker a little, given something to the peasant, then we will see it, but now there is no way. This is more or less the reasoning of right-minded communists.

Allow us to pose a question: how can you solve the great task of the organisation of the social economy without the proletariat? Or else do you want to solve it with a proletariat which says yes and amen each time that its Good Shepherds want it to? Do you have any need of it?

“You worker and you peasant, remain calm, don’t protest, don’t reason because we have some brave types, who are also workers and peasants to whom we have confided power and who use it in a way that you wouldn’t credit; do all this and you will suddenly enter the socialist paradise”. To talk in this way signifies faith in individuals, in heroes, not in the class, because this grey mass with its mediocre ideas (at least the leaders think so) is nothing more than a material with which our heroes, the communist functionaries, will construct the communist paradise. We don't believe in heroes and appeal to all proletarians not to do so either. The liberation of the workers will only be the task of the workers themselves.

Yes, we proletarians, we are exhausted, hungry, cold and we are weary. But the problems we have in front of us, no class, no group of people can solve for us. We must do it ourselves. If you can show us that the tasks which await us can be accomplished by an Intelligence, even if it is a communist Intelligence, then we would agree to confide our proletarian destiny to you. But no-one can demonstrate that. For this reason it is not at all correct to maintain that the proletariat is tired and that it has no need of knowing or deciding anything.

If the situation in Russia is different in the years 1918-20, our attitude on this question must also be different.

When you, right minded communist comrades, you want to smash the face of the bourgeoisie, that’s fine, but the problem, is that you raise your hand to the bourgeoisie and it is us, the proletarians, who have broken ribs and a mouth full of blood.

In Russia, the communist working class does not exist. There simply exists a working class in which we can find Bolsheviks, anarchists, Social Revolutionaries and others (who don’t belong to these parties but draw from their orientations). How should one relate to it? With the bourgeois “Cadets” (constitutional democrats), professors, lawyers, doctors, no negotiation; for them one remedy: the stick. But it's quite another thing with the working class. We must not intimidate it, but influence it and guide it intellectually. For that no violence, but the clarification of our line of march, of our law.

Yes, the law is the law, but not for everyone. At the last party conference, in the discussion on the struggle against bourgeois ideology, it appeared that in Moscow and Petrograd there were 180 bourgeois publishing houses and it was intended, according to the declarations of Zinoviev, that we would combat this not with repressive measures but 90% through our openly ideological influence. But how do they want to “influence” us? Zinoviev knows how he is trying to influence some of us. If only we had less than a tenth of the freedom enjoyed by the bourgeoisie!

What do you think, comrade workers? It is not bad at all, is it not? Therefore, from 1906 to 1917 was one tactic, in 1917 before October another, from October 1917 until late 1920 a third and, since the beginning of 1921 a fourth. […]

 

(To be continued)

 

Part 1

Part 3

 


[1]. Editor’s note: Comintern, Russian name of the Third or Communist International.

[2]. Editor’s note: the Left Social Revolutionaries (“Left SRs”), favourable to the soviets, separated themselves from the Social Revolutionary Party in September 1917.

[3]. At the Congress of the Soviets on 25th October 1917, 110 Menshevik delegates, a minority (out of 673), left the room at the moment of the ratification of the October revolution, denouncing it as a “Bolshevik coup d’etat.

[4]. Editor’s note: that is, the KAI (Communist Workers’ International), 1922-24, founded on the initiative of the KAPD, and not to be confused with the Trotskyist Fourth International.

[5]. Editor’s note: the International Union of Socialist parties was nicknamed the Two-and-a-half International, “because it situated itself between the Second and the Third”. See the critique made of this regroupment in Alfred Rosmer’s Lenin’s Moscow (Pluto Press, 1971), in the chapter ‘The delegates of the Third International in Berlin’.

 

[6]. Editors’ note: Here as elsewhere in the text the symbols […] indicate that a short passage that we have not been able to translate has been deleted.

 

 

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Working class history

2011 - 144 to 147

Index of International Reviews Published in 2011

International Review no.144 - 1st Quarter 2011

France, Britain, Tunisia: The future lies in the international development of the class struggle

The strikes and demonstrations of September, October and November in France, which took place following the reform of pensions, demonstrated a real fighting spirit in the ranks of the proletariat, even if they didn’t succeed in pushing back the attacks of the bourgeoisie.

This movement is taking place in the context of a renewed dynamic of our class as it gradually returns to the path of struggle internationally, following a course marked in 2009 and 2010 by the revolt of new generations of proletarians fighting poverty in Greece and by the determination of the Tekel workers in Turkey to extend their struggle against the sabotage of the unions.

Thus, students have mobilised in large numbers against the unemployment and job insecurity that capitalism has in store for them, as in Great Britain, Italy or the Netherlands. In the United States, despite being confined by the union straitjacket, several major strikes have broken out in various parts of the country since Spring 2010 in opposition to attacks: education workers in California, nurses in Philadelphia and Minneapolis-St-Louis, construction workers in Chicago, workers in the food industry in New York State, teachers in Illinois, workers at Boeing and in a Coca-Cola plant in Bellevue (Washington state), and dockers in New Jersey and Philadelphia.

At the time of going to press, in the Maghreb, and particularly in Tunisia, workers’ anger that has built up over decades spread like wildfire after 17th December when a young unemployed graduate set himself on fire in public after the fruit and vegetable stall that was his livelihood, was confiscated by the municipal police of Sidi Bouzid in the centre of Tunisia. Spontaneous demonstrations of solidarity spread throughout the country, where the population faces high unemployment and sharp increases in prices of basic foodstuffs. A fierce and brutal repression of this social movement led to dozens being killed, with police firing live ammunition at unarmed demonstrators. This only strengthened the outrage and resolve of the proletariat, firstly to demand work, bread and a little dignity and then the departure of President Ben Ali. “We are no longer afraid”, chanted the demonstrators in Tunisia. The children of proletarians took the lead and used the Internet or their mobile phones not only as weapons to broadcast and denounce the repression and to exchange information between themselves, but also to communicate with their family or friends outside the country, particularly in Europe, thus partially breaking the conspiracy of silence of all the bourgeoisies and their media. Everywhere our exploiters have tried to hide the class nature of this social movement, seeking to distort it by sometimes showing it to be like the riots that occurred in France in 2005 or as the work of vandals and looters, or sometimes presenting it as a “heroic and patriotic struggle of the Tunisian people” for “democracy” led by educated graduates and the “middle classes”.

The economic crisis and the bourgeoisie are striking blows all over the world. In Algeria, Jordan and China, similar social movements faced with sinking into poverty have been brutally repressed. This situation should push the more experienced proletarians of the central countries into seeing the impasse and bankruptcy into which the capitalist system is leading the whole of humanity, and into extending solidarity to their class brothers by developing their own struggles. And workers are indeed beginning to react gradually and are refusing to accept austerity, impoverishment and the “sacrifices” being imposed.

At present, this response clearly falls below the level of the attacks we are all being subjected to. That is undeniable. But there is a momentum under way and workers’ reflections and militancy will continue to grow. As proof we are again seeing minorities seeking to organise themselves, to actively contribute to the development of large-scale struggles and to escape the grip of the unions.

The mobilisation against pension reform in France

The social movement in France last autumn provides clear confirmation of the same dynamic as the previous movement that developed against the CPE.[1]

Millions of workers and employees from every sector routinely took to the streets of France. Alongside this, strikes broke out in various places from the beginning of September, some more radical than others, expressing a deep and growing discontent. This mobilisation is the first large-scale struggle in France since the crisis that shook the world financial system in 2007-2008. It is not only a response to pension reform itself but, in its scale and profundity, it is clearly a response to the violent attacks suffered in recent years. Behind this reform and other simultaneous or planned attacks, there is the growing refusal of all proletarians and other layers of the population to accept greater poverty, insecurity and destitution. And with the inexorable deepening of the economic crisis, these attacks are not about to stop. It is clear that this struggle foreshadows others to come, just as it follows closely on those that developed in Greece and Spain against drastic austerity measures there.

However, despite the massive response in France, the government did not give way. Instead, it was uncompromising, repeatedly affirming despite relentless pressure from the streets its firm intention to carry out this attack on pensions, quite cynically repeating the claim that this measure was “necessary” in the name of “solidarity” between the generations.

Why was this measure, which strikes at the heart of all our living and working conditions, passed at all? The whole population fully and strongly expressed its indignation and opposition to it. Why did this massive mobilisation fail to get the government to back down? It’s because the government was assured of the control of the situation by the unions, who have always accepted, along with the left parties, the principle of the “necessary reform” of pensions! We can compare this with the movement in 2006 against the CPE. This movement, which the media initially treated with the utmost contempt as a short-lived “student revolt”, eventually ended with the government forced to retreat faced with no other recourse than withdrawing the CPE.

Where is the difference? Primarily that the students had organised general assemblies (GAs) open to all without distinction of category or sector, public or private, employed or unemployed, casual workers, etc. This burst of confidence in the abilities of the working class and its power, and the profound solidarity inside the struggle, created a dynamic of extension in the movement giving it a massive scale involving all generations. Furthermore, while on the one hand wide-ranging debates and discussions took place in the general assemblies, not confined to the problems of students alone, on the other hand we saw a growing presence of workers on demonstrations alongside the college and high school students.

But it’s also because in their determination and spirit of openness, while leading sections of the working class towards open struggle, the students did not let themselves be intimidated by the manoeuvres of the unions.

Instead, while the latter, especially the CGT, tried to be at the head of the demonstrations to take control, the college and high-school students got in front of the union banners on several occasions to make clear that they did not want to be lost in the background of the movement they had launched. But above all, they affirmed their desire to keep control of the struggle themselves, along with the working class, and not let themselves be conned by the union leaderships.

In fact, one of the greatest concerns of the bourgeoisie was that the forms of organisation adopted by the students in struggle – sovereign general assemblies, electing co-ordinating committees and open to all, where the student unions often had a low profile – did not spread to employed workers if they should come out on strike. It is, moreover, no coincidence that during this movement, Thibault[2] repeatedly stated that workers could learn no lessons from the students on how to organise. So, while the latter have their general assemblies and coordinations, the workers themselves should have confidence in the unions. With no resolution in sight, and with the danger that the unions could lose control, the French government had to climb down because as the last bulwark of the bourgeoisie against the explosion of massive struggles, it was at risk of being demolished.

In the movement against pension reform, the unions, actively supported by the police and the media, sensing what lay ahead, took the measures necessary to be at the centre of things and made the appropriate preparations.

Moreover, the unions’ slogan was not “withdraw the attack on pensions” but “improve the reform”. They called for a fight for renewed negotiations between the unions and the state to make the reforms more “just”, more “humane”. Despite the apparent unity of the Intersyndicale (joint union body), we saw them exploit divisions from the start, clearly intending to reduce the “risks” of things getting out of control; at the beginning of the demonstrations the FO[3] union organised in its own corner, while the Intersyndicale, which organised the day of action on March 23, prepared to “tie up a deal” on reform following negotiations with the government, announcing two more days of action on May 26th and, above all, June 24th, the eve of the summer holidays. We know that a “day of action” at this time of year usually signals the final blow for the working class when it comes to implementing a major attack. However, the final day of action produced an unexpected turnout, with more than twice as many workers, unemployed, casual workers, etc., in the streets. And, while the first two days of action had been very downbeat, as highlighted by the press, anger and unrest were evident on the 24th June when the successful mobilisation boosted the morale of the proletariat. The idea that widespread struggle is possible gained ground. Evidently the unions also felt a change in the wind; they knew that the question of “how to struggle?” was running through people’s heads. So they decided to immediately take charge of the situation and to give a lead; there was no question for them of the workers beginning to think and act for themselves, and getting out of their control. They decided on a new day of action called for 7th September, after the summer holidays. And to be quite sure of holding back the process of reflection, they went as far as sponsoring flights over the beaches in the middle of the summer displaying publicity banners calling people to the demo on the 7th.

For their part, the left parties, which fully supported the pressing need to attack working class pensions, still came and joined in the mobilisation so they wouldn’t be completely discredited.

But another event, a news story, came out during the summer and fuelled workers’ anger: “The Woerth Case” (the politicians currently in office and the richest heiress of French capital, Ms. Bettencourt, boss of L’Oreal group, connived over tax evasion and all kinds of illegal dodges). Eric Woerth is none other than the minister in charge of pension reform. The sense of injustice was total: the working class must tighten its belt while the rich and powerful carry on with “their unseemly affairs”. So under the pressure of this open discontent and growing consciousness of the implications of this reform for our living conditions, the day of action on September 7th was announced, with the unions obliged on this occasion to espouse a belief in united action. Since then, not one union has failed to call for days of action that have brought together about three million workers on demonstrations on several occasions. Pension reform has become symbolic of the sharp deterioration in living standards.

But this unity of the “Intersyndicale” was a trap for the working class. It was intended to give the impression that the unions were committed to organising a broad offensive against the reform and were providing the means for this with repeated days of action in which they could see and hear their leaders ad-nauseum, arm in arm, churning out speeches on “sustaining” the movement and other lies. What frightened the unions most of all was the workers breaking from the union straitjacket and organising themselves. That is what Thibault, secretary general of the CGT, was trying to say when he “sent the government a message” in an interview with Le Monde on 10th September: “We can launch a blockade, with the possibility of a massive social crisis. It is possible. But it’s not us who are taking a risk”, and hegave the following example to better underline the high stakes facing the unions: “We’ve even found a small non-union firm where 40 out of 44 employees came out on strike. It’s a pointer. The more intransigent the government is, the more support for rolling strikes is going to grow.

Clearly, when the unions aren’t there, the workers organise themselves and not only decide what they want to do but risk doing it massively. So to address this concern the big unions, particularly the CGT and SUD[4], have applied themselves with exemplary zeal: occupying the social stage and the media while with the same determination preventing any real expression of workers’ solidarity. In short, on the one hand a lot of hype, and on the other, action aimed at sterilising the movement with false choices, to create division, confusion, and better lead it to defeat.

Blockading the oil refineries is one of the most obvious examples of this. While the workers in this sector, whose fighting spirit was already very strong, were increasingly keen on showing their solidarity with the whole working class against the pension reform – workers moreover facing particularly drastic reductions in their own ranks ­- the CGT set about transforming this spirit of solidarity with a pre-emptive strike. Hence, the blockade of the refineries was never decided in real general assemblies where the workers could really express their views, but by union leaders, experts in manoeuvring who by stifling discussion adopted a sterilising action. Despite the strict confinement imposed by the unions, however, some workers in this sector did try to make contacts and links with workers in other sectors. But, being generally taken in by a strategy of “laying siege”, most of the refinery workers found themselves trapped by the union logic inside the factory, a real poison for broadening the struggle. Indeed, although the objective of the refinery workers was to strengthen the movement, to be a “strong arm” to make the government retreat, as it unfolded under union leadership the blockading of the depots was above all revealed to be a weapon of the bourgeoisie and its unions against the workers. Not only to isolate the refinery workers but also to make their strike unpopular, creating panic and raising the threat of widespread fuel shortages, the press generously spread its venom against these “hostage-takers, preventing people from going to work or going on holiday.” But the workers in this sector were also cut off physically; even though they wanted to offer their solidarity in the struggle, to create a balance of power to get the reforms withdrawn; this particular blockade has in fact been turned against them and the objective they originally set themselves.

There were many similar union actions, in certain sectors like transport, and preferably in areas with few workers, because at all costs the unions had to minimise the risk of extension and active solidarity. They had to pretend, to their audience, that they were orchestrating the most radical struggles and calling for union unity in the demonstrations, all the while sabotaging the situation.

Everywhere one could see the unions uniting in an “Intersyndicale” to better promote the semblance of unity, creating the appearance of general assemblies, without any real debate, confining topics to more corporatist issues, pretending in public to be fighting “for everyone” and “everyone together”... but with each sector organised in its own corner behind its small union boss, doing everything to prevent the creation of mass delegations that would seek solidarity with enterprises in the nearby area.

And the unions have not been alone in obstructing the possibility of such a mobilisation, because Sarkozy’s police, known for their alleged stupidity and anti-leftism, have provided the unions with indispensable support on several occasions through their provocations. Example: the events in Place Bellecour in Lyon, where the presence of a few “hooligans” (probably manipulated by the cops) was used as a pretext for a violent police crackdown against hundreds of young students, most of whom had only come to discuss with the workers at the end of a demonstration.

A movement full of potential

 However, there have been no reports in the media of the many inter-professional committees or general assemblies (“AG interpros”) formed during this period; committees and assemblies whose stated aim was and is to organise outside the unions and to develop discussions completely open to all workers. These assemblies are the place where the working class can not only recognise itself, but above all where it can get massively involved.

This is what scares the bourgeoisie the most: that contacts are forming and growing extensively inside the working class, between young and old, between those in work, and those out of work.

We must draw the lessons from the failure of this movement.

The first observation is that it was the union apparatus that made the attack on the proletariat possible and that the failure of the movement is not at all something that was inevitable. The truth is that the unions did their dirty work and all the sociologists and other specialists, as well as the government and Sarkozy in person, saluted their “sense of responsibility”. Yes, without doubt, the bourgeoisie is fortunate to have “responsible” unions capable of breaking up a movement of this scale while being able at the same time to make everyone believe that they did everything possible to assist its development. Again it’s the same union apparatus that has succeeded in stifling and marginalising real expressions of autonomous struggle of the working class and of all workers.

However, this failure still bears much fruit because all the efforts made by all the bourgeoisie’s forces have not succeeded in inflicting a crushing defeat, as was the case in 2003 with the fight against the reform of public sector pensions when the country’s education sector workers had to make a bitter retreat after several weeks on strike.

Hence, this movement has led to the appearance in several places of a growth of minorities expressing a clear understanding of the real needs of the struggle for the whole proletariat: the need to take the struggle into its own hands to extend and strengthen it, showing that a profound reflection is taking place, that the development of the struggle is only just beginning, and demonstrating a willingness to learn from what has happened and to stay mobilised for the future.

As one of the leaflets of the “AG interpro” of the Gare de l’Est in Paris dated 6 November said: “We should have supported the sectors on strike at the start, not restricting ourselves to the single demand on pensions when redundancies, job cuts, the destruction of public services and low wages were being fought. This could have helped to bring other workers into struggle and extended and unified the strike movement. Only a mass strike which is organised locally and co-ordinated nationally through strike committees, inter-professional general assemblies, struggle committees, where we decide our demands and actions ourselves and we are in control, can have a chance of winning.”

The power of workers lies not only in shutting down an oil depot or a factory, here or there. The power of workers lies in uniting at their workplaces, across occupations, plants, companies and categories and taking decisions together”, because“the attacks are just beginning. We have lost a battle, we have not lost the war. The bourgeoisie has declared class war on us and we still have the means of fighting it” (leaflet entitled “Nobody can struggle, take decisions and succeed on our behalf”, signed by the full-time and temporary workers of the “AG interpro” of the Gare de l’Est and Ile-de-France, cited above). We must defend ourselves by extending and developing our struggles massively and thus take control into our own hands.

This was made particularly clear with:

the real “AG interpros” that emerged in the struggle, albeit as small minorities and were determined to remain mobilised in preparing future combats;

the holding or attempted holding of street assemblies or people’s assemblies at the end of demonstrations, as happened particularly in Toulouse.

This willingness to take control of the struggle by some minorities shows that the class as a whole is beginning to question the unions’ strategy, without yet daring to draw all the consequences from its doubts and questionings. In all the GAs (whether union ones or not), most debates in their various forms have centred around essential questions about “How to struggle?”, “How to help other workers?”, “How to express solidarity?”, “Which other inter-professional GAs can we meet up with?”, “How do we combat isolation and reach out to as many workers as possible to discuss how to struggle together?” ... And in fact, a few dozen workers from all sectors, the unemployed, temporary workers and pensioners have regularly turned up each day in front of the gates of the 12 paralysed refineries, to “make up the numbers” facing the CRS riot police, to bring packed lunches for the strikers, to provide moral support.

This spirit of solidarity is an important element, revealing once again the profound nature of the working class.

Having confidence in our own forces” must be the watchword for the future.

This struggle has the appearance of a defeat; the government did not back down. But in fact it constitutes a new step forward for our class. The minorities that emerged and tried to regroup, to discuss in the “AG interpros” or the people’s street assemblies, the minorities who have tried to take control of their struggles, totally distrusting the unions, reveal the questioning that is taking place in the heads of all the workers. This reflection will continue to develop and will eventually bear fruit. It is not a case of standing by, with arms folded, waiting for the ripe fruit to fall from the tree. All those who are conscious that the only thing the future holds is growing pauperisation and the need to fight the vile attacks of capital must help prepare the future struggles. We must continue to debate, to discuss, to draw the lessons of this movement and to spread them as widely as possible. Those who have begun to build relationships of trust and fraternity in this movement, on the marches and in the GAs, must try and continue their participation (in discussion circles, struggle committees, people’s assemblies or “public platforms”) because there are still questions that need answers, such as:

What role does the “economic blockade” have in the class struggle?

What is the difference between the violence of the state and that of struggling workers?

How do we respond to repression?

How do we take control of our struggles? How do we organise them?

What is the difference between a union GA and a sovereign GA? etc.

This movement is already rich in lessons for the world proletariat. In a different way, the student mobilisations that took place in Great Britain also provide evidence of the promise of the struggles that lie ahead.

Great Britain: the younger generation returns to the struggle

On Saturday October 23rd,following the announcement of the government austerity plan to drastically cut public spending, there were many demonstrations throughout the country called by various unions. The number of people that turned out (it was quite varied, with up to 15,000 in Belfast and 25,000 in Edinburgh) revealed the depth of anger. Another expression of widespread discontent was the student rebellion against university tuition fees being increased by 300%.

Young people are already left heavily in debt with astronomical sums to pay off (as much as £80,000!) after they graduate. Not surprisingly, these new increases provoked a whole series of demonstrations from the north of the country to the south (5 mobilisations in less than a month: 10th, 24th and 30th November and 4th and 9th December). This increase has all the same been passed into law by the House of Commons on December 8th.

The centres of struggle have been widespread: in further education, in high schools and colleges, the occupations of a long list of universities, numerous meetings on campus or in the street to discuss the way forward ... students received support and solidarity from many teachers, who closed their eyes to the absence of the protesters from their classes (attendance at classes is strictly monitored) or went along to discuss with their students. The strikes, demonstrations and occupations were anything but the tame events that unions and the left-wing “officials” usually try to organise. This spiralling spirit of resistance worried the government. A clear sign of its concern was the level of police repression at the demonstrations. Most gatherings ended in violent clashes with armed police adopting a strategy of “kettling” (confining demonstrators inside police cordons), backed up with physical attacks on demonstrators, which resulted in many injured and numerous arrests, mostly in London. Meanwhile occupations took place in fifteen universities with support from teachers. On November 10th, students stormed the headquarters of the Conservative Party and on December 8th, they tried to enter the Treasury building and the High Court, and demonstrators attacked the Rolls-Royce carrying Prince Charles and his wife Camilla. The students and their supporters attended the demonstrations in high spirits, with their own banners and slogans, with some of them participating in a protest movement for the first time. Spontaneous walkouts, the taking of Conservative Party HQ at Millbank, the defiance or creative avoidance of police lines, the invasion of town halls and other public spaces are just some of the expressions of this openly rebellious attitude. The students were sickened and outraged by the attitude of Aaron Porter, president of the NUS (national union of students) who condemned the occupation of the Conservative Party headquarters, attributing it to the violence of a small minority. On 24th November in London, thousands of demonstrators were “kettled” by the police within minutes of setting off from Trafalgar Square, and despite some attempts to break through police lines, the forces of order detained thousands of them for hours in the cold. At one point, the mounted police rode directly at the crowd. In Manchester, at Lewisham Town Hall in south London, and elsewhere, we have seen similar scenes of brute force. The newspapers are playing their usual role as well, printing photographs of alleged “wreckers” after Millbank, running scare stories about revolutionary groups targeting the nation’s youth with their evil propaganda. All this shows the real nature of the “democracy” we live under.

The student revolt in the UK is the best answer to the idea that the working class in the UK remains passive faced with a torrent of attacks by the government on every aspect of our living standards: jobs, wages, health, unemployment, disability benefits as well as education.

A whole new generation of the exploited class does not accept the logic of sacrifice and austerity that the bourgeoisie and its unions are imposing. It’s only by taking control of its struggles, developing its solidarity and international unity that the working class, especially in the most industrialised, “democratic” countries, will be able to offer society a real future. It’s only by refusing to shoulder the burden of a bankrupt capitalism all over the world that the exploited class can put an end to the misery and terror of the exploiting class by overthrowing capitalism and building a new society based on satisfying the needs of the whole of humanity and not on profit and exploitation.

W 14/01/11

 


[1]. Read the article in International Review n° 125,Theses on the Spring 2006 student movement in France".

[2]. General Secretary of the CGT, the main body of affiliated trade unions in France and associated with the French Communist Party.

[3]. FO: "Force ouvrière". This union came out of a split with the CGT in 1947 at the start of the Cold War and was supported and financed by the American unions of the AFL-CIO. Up until the 1990s, this organisation was known for its "moderation" but thereafter it adopted a more "radical" stance by trying to "outflank" the CGT on the left.

[4]. SUD: "Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques". Small union on the far left of the spectrum of the forces that supervise the working class, and largely influenced by leftist groups.

 

Recent and ongoing: 

Capitalism has no way out of its crisis

The weakest of the super-indebted national economies must be rescued before they go bankrupt and ruin their creditors; austerity plans designed to contain the debt only aggravate the risk of recession and a cascade of bankruptcies; attempts at recovery by printing money merely re-launch inflation. There is an impasse at the economic level and the bourgeoisie is incapable of proposing policies with the slightest coherence.

The “rescue” of European economies

At the very moment that Ireland negotiated its rescue plan, the International Monetary Fund admitted that Greece would not be able to fulfill the plan that they and the European Union devised in April 2010. Greece’s debt would have to be restructured, even if they didn’t use this word. According to D. Strauss Khan, the boss of the IMF, Greece must be allowed to repay its debt not in 2015 but in 2024. That is, on the 12th of Never, given the course of the present crisis in Europe. Here is a perfect symbol of the fragility of some if not most European countries undermined by debt.

Of course this concession to Greece must be accompanied by supplementary measures of austerity. After the austerity plan of April 2010 - which was financed by the non-payment of pensions for two months, the lowering of indemnities in the public sector, and price rises resulting from an increase in taxes on electricity, petrol, alcohol, tobacco, etc - there are also plans to cut public employment. 

A comparable scenario unfolded in Ireland where the workers were presented with a fourth austerity plan. In 2009 public sector wages were lowered between 5 and 15%, welfare payments were suppressed and retired workers were not replaced. The new austerity plan negotiated with the rescue plan included the lowering of the minimum wage by 11.5%, the lowering of welfare payments, the loss of 24,750 state jobs and the increase in sales tax from 21 to 23%. And, as in Greece, it is clear that a country of 4.5million people, whose GNP in 2009 was 164 billion euros, will not be able to pay back a loan of 85 billion euros. For these two countries, these violent austerity plans presage future measures that will force the working class and the major part of the population into unbearable poverty.

The incapacity of new countries (Portugal, Spain, etc) to pay their debts is shown in their attempt to avoid the consequences by adopting draconian austerity measures and preparing for worse, as in Greece and Ireland.

What are the austerity plans trying to save?

A reasonable question since the answer is not obvious. One thing is certain: their aim is not to alleviate the poverty of the millions who are the first to suffer the consequences. A clue lies in the anxiety of the political and financial authorities about the risk that more countries would in turn default on their public debt. More than a risk since nobody can see how this scenario will not come to pass.

At the origin of the bankruptcy of the Greek state is a considerable budget deficit due to an exorbitant mass of public spending (armaments in particular) that the fiscal resources of the country, weakened by the aggravation of the crisis in 2008, cannot finance. As for the Irish state, its banking system had accumulated a debt of 1,432 billion euros (on a GDP of 164 billion euros) which the worsening of the crisis had made impossible to reimburse. As a consequence, the banking system had to be largely nationalised and the debt was transferred to the state. Having paid a relatively small amount of these debts of the banking system the Irish state found itself in 2010 with a public deficit corresponding to 32% of GDP! Beyond the fantastic character of such figures, we can see that whatever the different histories of these two national economies, the result is the same. In both cases, faced with an insane level of indebtedness of the state or of private institutions, it is the state which must assume the integrity of the national capital by showing its capacity to reimburse the debt and pay the interest on it.

The inability of the Greek and Irish economies to repay their debt contains a danger that extends way beyond the borders of these two countries. And it is this aspect which explains the panic at the top levels of the world bourgeoisie. In the same way that the Irish banks were supported by credit from a series of world states, the banks of the major developed countries held the colossal debts of the Greek and Irish states. There are different opinions concerning the level of the claims of the major world banks on the Irish state. Let’s take the “average”: “According to the economic daily Les Echos de Lundi, French banks have a 21.1 billion euro exposure to Ireland, behind the German banks (46 billion), British (42.3 billion) and American (24.6billion).[1] And concerning the exposure of the banks by the situation in Greece: “The French institutions are the most exposed with 55 billion euros in assets. The Swiss banks have invested 46 billion, the Germans 31 billion”.[2] The non-bailout of Greece and Ireland would have put the creditor banks in a very difficult situation, and thus the states on which they depend. It would have been even more the case for countries in a critical financial situation (like Spain and Portugal) that are also exposed in Greece and Ireland and for whom such a situation would have proved fatal.

That’s not all. The non-bailout of Greece and Ireland would have signified that the financial authorities of the EU and the IMF would not guarantee the finances of countries in difficulty. This would have led to a stampede of creditors away from these countries and the guaranteed bankruptcy of the weakest of them, the collapse of the euro and a financial storm that would make the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008 look like a mild sea breeze. In other words, the financial authorities of the EU and the IMF came to the rescue of Greece and Ireland not to save these two states, still less the populations of these two countries, but to avoid the meltdown of the world financial system.

In reality, it is not only Greece, Ireland and a few other countries in the South of Europe whose financial situation has deteriorated. “.. the following figures show the level of total debt as a percentage of GDP [January 2010]: 470% for the UK and Japan, gold medals for total indebtedness; 360% for Spain; 320% for France, Italy and Switzerland; 300% for the US and 280% for Germany.”[3] In fact, all countries, whether inside or outside the Euro zone, are indebted beyond their ability to repay. Nevertheless the Euro zone countries have the supplementary difficulty that its states are unable to create the monetary means to “finance” their deficits. This is the exclusive preserve of the European Central Bank. Other countries like the UK and the US, equally indebted, do not have this problem since they have the authority to create their own money.


 

Public and private debt in 2009 excluding financial institutions (% of the GDP)[4]

The levels of indebtedness of all these states show that their commitments exceed their ability to pay to an absurd degree. Calculations have been made which show that Greece needs a budget surplus of at least 16 or 17% to stabilise its public debt. In fact these are all countries that are indebted to a point where their national production doesn’t permit the repayment of their debt. In other words the states and private institutions hold debt that can never be honoured.[5] The table above, which shows the debt of each European country (outside of financial institutions, contrary to the figures mentioned above) gives a good idea of the immensity of the debts contracted as well as the fragility of the most indebted countries.

Given that the rescue plans have no chance of success, what else is their significance?

Capitalism can survive only thanks to plans of permanent economic support

The Greek rescue plan cost 110 billion euros and Ireland’s 85 billion. These massive financial contributions from the IMF, the Euro zone and the UK (which gave 8.5billion euros when Cameron’s government was making its own austerity plan to reduce public expenses by 25% in 2015[6]) are only money issued against the wealth of the different states. In other words the money extended to the rescue plan is not based on newly created wealth but is nothing but the result of printing money, Monopoly money.

Such support to the financial sector, which finances the real economy, is in fact a support to real economic activity. Thus on the one hand draconian austerity plans are put in place, announcing still more draconian austerity plans, and on the other, threatened by the collapse of the financial system and the blockage of the world economy, plans of support are adopted whose content is very similar to what are known as “recovery plans”.

In fact the US is going furthest in this direction: Quantitative Easing nº2, creating 900 billion dollars,[7] has no other meaning than the attempt to save the American financial system whose ledgers are full of bad debts, and to support the anaemic economic growth of the US, which cannot overcome its sizeable budget deficit.

Having the advantage that the dollar is the money of world exchange the US does not suffer the same constraints as Greece, Ireland and other European countries. That’s why, as many think, a Quantitative Easing nº3 cannot be ruled out.

Thus the support of economic activity by budgetary measures is much stronger in the US than in the European countries. But that does not stop the US from trying to drastically slash its budget deficit, as illustrated by Obama’s proposal to block the wages of federal employees. In fact one finds in every country in the world such contradictions revealed in the policies adopted.

The bourgeoisie has exceeded the limits of indebtedness that capitalism can sustain

We thus have plans of austerity and plans of recovery at the same time! What is the reason for such contradictions?

As Marx showed, capitalism suffers genetically from a lack of outlets because the exploitation of labour power necessarily leads to the creation of a value greater than the outlay in wages, because the working class consumes much less than it produces. Up until the end of the 19th century, the bourgeoisie had to offset this problem by the colonisation of non-capitalist areas where it forced the population, with various means, to buy the merchandise produced by its capital. The crises and wars of the 20th century illustrate that this way of answering overproduction, inherent to capitalist exploitation, was reaching its limits. In other words, non-capitalist areas of the planet were no longer sufficient for the bourgeoisie to realise the surplus product that was needed for enlarged accumulation. The deregulation of the economy at the end of the 1960s, manifested in monetary crises and recessions, signified the quasi-absence of the extra capitalist markets as a means of absorbing the surplus capitalist production. The only solution henceforth has been the creation of an artificial market inflated by debt. It has allowed the bourgeoisie to sell to states, households and businesses without the latter having the real means to buy.

We have often shown that capitalism has used debt as a palliative to the crisis of overproduction that has ensnared it since the end of the 1960s. But we should not confuse debt with magic. Actually debt must be progressively repaid and the interest paid systematically, otherwise the creditor will not only stop lending but risk bankruptcy himself.

Now the situation of a growing number of European countries shows that they can no long pay the part of the debt demanded by their creditors. In other words these countries must reduce their debt, in particular by cutting expenses, when 40 years of crisis have shown that the increase of the latter was an absolutely necessary condition to avoid a world recession. All states, to a greater or lesser degree are faced with the same insoluble contradiction.

The financial storms shaking Europe at the moment are thus the product of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism and illustrate the absolute impasse of this mode of production.

We will now deal with other characteristics of the present situation.

Developing inflation

At the very moment when most countries have austerity plans that reduce internal demand, including for basic necessities, the price of agricultural raw materials has sharply increased. More than 100% for cotton in a year;[8] more than 20% for wheat and maize between July 2009 and July 2010[9] and 16% for rice between April-June 2010 and the end of October 2010.[10] Metals and oil went in a similar direction. Of course, climatic factors have a role in the evolution of the price of food products, but the increase is so general that other causes must be at play. All countries are preoccupied by the level of inflation that is increasing in their economies. Some examples from the “emerging countries”:

-        officially inflation in China reached an annual rate of 5.1% in November 2010 (in fact every specialist agrees that the real figures for inflation in this country is between 8 and 10%);

-        in India inflation reached 8.6% in October;

-        in Russia it was 8.5% in 2010.[11]

The development of inflation is not an exotic phenomenon reserved for the emerging countries. The developed countries are more and more concerned: a 3.3% rate in November in the UK was seen as worrying by the government; 1.9% in virtuous Germany caused disquiet because it occurs alongside rapid growth.

What then, is the cause of this return of inflation?

Inflation is not always the result of vendors raising their prices because demand exceeds supply and therefore carries no risk of losing sales. Another factor entirely can cause this phenomenon. The increase in the money supply over the past three decades for example. The printing of money, that is the issuing of new money when the wealth of the national economy does not increase in the same proportion, leads inevitably to a depreciation of the money in circulation and thus to an increase in prices. Now, all the official statistics show that since 2008 there has been a strong increase in the money supply in the great economic zones of the planet.

This increase encourages the development of speculation with disastrous consequences for the working class. Given that demand is too weak as a result of the stagnation or lowering of wages, businesses cannot raise their market prices without losing sales. These same businesses or investors turn away from productive activity which is not profitable enough or too risky, and use the money created by the central banks for speculation. Concretely that means buying financial products, raw materials or currencies with the hope that that they can be resold with a substantial profit. Consumer products become tradable assets. The problem is that a good part of these products, in particular agricultural products, are also commodities consumed by vast numbers of workers, peasants, unemployed, etc. Consequently, as well as a lowering of income, a great part of the world population is hit by the rise in the price of rice, bread, clothes, etc.

Thus the crisis, which obliges the bourgeoisie to save its banks by means of the creation of money, leads the workers to suffer two attacks:

-        the lowering of their wages;

-        the increase in the price of basic commodities.

Prices of basic necessities have been rising since the beginning of the century for these reasons. From the same causes today, the same effects. In 2007 – 2008 (just before the financial crisis) great masses of the world population were forced into hunger riots. The consequences of the present price explosion have immediately led to the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria.

The level of inflation won’t stop rising. According to Cercle Finance from 7th December, the rate of 10 year T bonds[12] has increased from 2.94% to 3.17% and the rate of 30 year T bonds has increased from 4.25% to 4.425%. That clearly shows that the capitalists anticipate a loss of the value of the money they invest and thus demand a higher rate of return on it.

The tensions between national capitals

During the Depression of the 1930s, protectionism and trade war developed to such an extent that one could speak of a “regionalisation” of exchange. Each of the great industrialised countries reserved a zone for its domination which allowed it to find a minimum of outlets. Contrary to the pious intentions published by the recent G20 in Seoul, according to which the different participants declared a voluntary ban on protectionism, reality is quite different. Protectionist tendencies are clearly at work today behind the euphemism of “economic patriotism”. It would be too tedious to list all the protectionist measures adopted by different countries. Let us simply mention that the US in September 2010 was taking 245 anti-dumping measures; that Mexico from March 2009 had taken 89 measures of commercial retaliation against the US and that China recently decided to drastically limit the export of its “rare earths” needed for a lot of high technology products.

But, in the present period, it’s currency war that will be the major manifestation of trade war. We have already seen that Quantitative Easing Nº2 was a necessity for American capital. At the same time, to the extent that the creation of money can only lead to the lowering of its value, and thus the price of Made in USA products on the world market (relative to the products of other countries) QE is a particularly aggressive protectionist measure. The under-valuation of the Chinese yuan has similar objectives.

However, despite the trade war, the different countries have agreed to prevent Greece and Ireland from defaulting on their debt. The bourgeoisie is obliged to take very contradictory measures, dictated by the total impasse of its system.

What solutions can the bourgeoisie propose?

Why, in the catastrophic situation of the world economy do we find articles like those of the Tribune or Le Monde entitled “Why growth will come”[13] or “The US wants to believe in the economic recovery”?[14] Such headlines, which are only propaganda, are trying to send us to sleep, and above all make us think that the bourgeoisie’s economic and political authorities still have a certain mastery of the situation. In fact the bourgeoisie only has the choice between two policies, rather like the choice between the plague and cholera:

-        either it proceeds by creating money as it has done with Greece and Ireland, since all the funds of the EU and the IMF come from the printing of money by its various member countries. But then it heads towards a devaluation of currencies and an inflationist tendency that can only get worse;

-        or it tries a particularly draconian austerity in order to stabilise the debt. This is the German solution for the Euro zone, since the major part of the cost of support for countries in difficulty is borne by German capital. The end result of such a policy can only be the rapid fall into depression, as indicated by the fall of production that we have seen in 2010 in Greece, Ireland and in Spain following the adoption of austerity plans.

Recently published texts by a number of economists propose their solutions to the present impasse. But they are either pure propaganda to make us think that capitalism, despite everything, has a future, or an exercise in self-hypnosis. To take one example, according to Professor M Aglietta[15] the austerity plans adopted in Europe are going to cost 1% of growth in European Union which will be about 1% in 2011. His alternative solution reveals that the greatest economists have nothing realistic to offer: he was not afraid to say that a new “regulation” based on the “green economy” would be the solution. He only “forgot” one thing: such a “regulation” implies considerable expense and thus an even more gigantic creation of money than at present, when the bourgeoisie is particularly worried about the resumption of inflation.

The only true solution to the capitalist impasse will emerge from the more and more numerous, massive and conscious struggles of the working class against the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie. It will lead naturally to the overthrow of this system whose principle contradiction is that of the production for profit and accumulation and not the satisfaction of human needs.

Vitaz 2/1/11

 


[4]. Key to abbreviations: Etat = country; Societies non financieres = non-financial companies; Menages = Households

[5]. J. Sapir “Can the Euro survive the crisis?” Marianne, 31 December 2010.

[6]. But it is revealing that Cameron is beginning to fear the depressive effect of the plan on the British economy.

[7]. QE2 had been fixed at $600billion but the FED was obliged to renew the purchase of matured debt at $35billion a month.

[8]. Blog-oscar.com/2010/11/las-flambee-du-cours-du-coton (the figures on this site date from the beginning of November. Today they have been largely surpassed).

[9]. C. Chevré, MoneyWeek, 17 November 2010

[10]. Observatoire du riz de Madagascar; iarivo.cirad.fr/doc/dr/hoRIZon391.pdf

[12]. American Treasury Bonds

[13]. La Tribune 17 December 2010

[14]. Le Monde 30th December 2010

[15]. In the broadcast “L’éspirit public” on “France Culture” radio, 26 December 2010

 

Recent and ongoing: 

The economic crisis in Britain

The text that follows is, apart from a few minor changes, the economic part of the report on the situation in Britain for the 19th Congress of the ICC’s section in Britain. We thought it would be useful to publish it to the outside since it provides a number of factors and analyses which enable us to grasp how the world economic crisis is expressing itself in the world’s oldest capitalist power. 

The international context

In 2010 the bourgeoisie announced the end of the recession and predicted that the world economy would grow over the next two years led by the emerging economies. However, there are serious uncertainties about the global situation, reflected in differing projections of growth. The IMF in its World Economic Outlook Update of July 2010 predicted global growth of 4.5% this year and 4.25% next. The World Bank in its Global Economic Prospects report for summer 2010 envisaged growth of 3.3% this year and next and 3.5% in 2012 if things go well but of 3.1% this year, 2.9% next and 3.2% in 2012 if things do not go well. The concern is particularly centred on Europe where the World Bank’s higher estimate is dependent on “Assuming that measures in place prevent today’s market nervousness from slowing the normalization of bank-lending, and that a default or restructuring of European sovereign debt is avoided”.[1] The lower growth rate if this is not achieved will affect Europe particularly, with predicted growth rates of 2.1, 1.9 and 2.2 percent between 2010 and 2012.


Source: IMF World Economic Outlook Update, July 2010

The situation remains fragile with concern about high levels of debt and low levels of bank lending and the possibility of further financial shocks, such as that in May this year that saw global stock markets lose between 8 and 17% of their value. The scale of the bailout is itself one of the causes of concern: “the size of the EU/IMF rescue package (close to $1 trillion); the magnitude of the initial market reaction to the possibility of a Greek default and eventual contagion; and continued volatility, are indications of the fragility of the financial situation…a further episode of market uncertainty could entail serious consequences for growth in both high-income and developing countries.”[2] The prescription of the IMF, as one might expect, is to reduce state spending, with the inevitable result that the working class will face austerity: “high-income countries will need to cut government spending (or raise revenues) by 8.8 percent of GDP for a 20 year period in order to bring debt levels down to 60 percent of GDP by 2030.

For all their appearance of objectivity and sober analysis, these recent reports by the IMF and World Bank suggest there is a depth of uncertainty and fear within the ruling class about its ability to overcome the crisis. The possibility of other countries following Ireland back into recession remains real. 

The evolution of the economic situation in Britain

This section draws on official data to give an overview of the course of the recession and the response from the government. However, it is important to begin by recalling that the crisis began within the financial sector, stemming from the crisis in the US housing market and encompassing the major banks and financial bodies around the globe that had become involved in lending where there was a real risk of the loans not being paid back. This was at its most extreme in the sub-prime mortgage market in the US, the contagion from which spread through the financial system because of the trading that developed based on the financial instruments derived from these loans. However, other countries, notably Britain and Ireland, had contrived to produce their own housing bubbles that contributed, together with a massive rise in unsecured personal borrowing, to create a level of debt that in Britain ultimately exceeded the country’s annual GDP. The crisis that developed flowed across into the ‘real’ economy leading to recession. The whole situation evoked a very forceful response from the British ruling class that poured unprecedented sums of money into the financial system and cut interest rates to a historic low.

Official figures show that Britain went into recession in the second quarter of 2008 and came out in the fourth quarter of 2009 with a peak to trough fall of 6.4% of GDP.[3] This figure, which was recently revised downwards, makes this recession the worst since the Second World War (the recessions of the early 1990s and 1980s saw falls of 2.5% and 5.9% respectively). Growth in the second quarter of 2010 was 1.2%, increasing significantly from the 0.4% of the fourth quarter 2009 and 0.3% of the first quarter 2010. However, it is still 4.7% below the pre-recession level as can be seen in the graph above.

The manufacturing sector has been the most affected by the recession, registering a peak to trough decline of 13.8% between the fourth quarter in 2007 and the third quarter of 2009. Since then manufacturing has expanded by 1.1% in the last quarter of 2009 and by 1.4% and 1.6% in the two quarters since.

The construction industry showed a sharp rebound in growth of 6.6% in the second quarter of 2010, contributing 0.4% to the overall growth rate for that quarter. However, this follows very substantial declines in both house building (down 37.2% between 2007 and 2009) and commercial and industrial work (down 33.9% between 2008 and 2009).

The service sector recorded a peak to trough fall of 4.6% with business and financial services falling by 7.6% “much stronger than in earlier downturns, making the largest single contribution to the fall”.[4] In the last quarter of that year it returned to growth of 0.5% but in the first quarter of 2010 this fell to 0.3%. Although the decline in this sector was less than in others, its dominant position in the economy meant that it was the largest contributor to the overall decline in GDP during this recession. The decline in the service sector was also greater in this recession than those of the early 1980s and early 1990s where the falls were 2.4% and 1% respectively. More recently, the business services and finance sector has shown stronger growth and contributed 0.4 percentage points to the overall GDP figure.

As might be expected both exports and imports declined during the recession. This was most marked in the trade in goods (although the balance actually improved slightly): “In 2009 the deficit fell by £11.2 billion to £81.9 billion. There was a record fall in exports of 9.7 per cent – from a record £252.1 billion to £227.5 billion. However, this was accompanied by a fall in imports of 10.4 per cent, the largest year-on-year fall since 1952, which had a much larger impact since total imports are significantly larger than total exports. Imports fell from a record £345.2 billion in 2008 to £309.4 billion in 2009. These large falls in both exports and imports were a result of a general contraction of global trade associated with the worldwide financial crisis which began late in 2008.”[5] The decline in services was smaller, with imports falling by 5.4% and exports by 6.9% with the balance, which remained positive, going from £55.4bn in 2008 to £49.9bn in 2009. The total trade in services in 2009 was £159.1bn in exports and £109.2bn in imports, which is significantly less than that of the trade in goods.

Between 2008/9 and 2009/10 the current account deficit doubled from 3.5% of GDP to 7.08%. The Public Sector Net Borrowing Requirement, which includes borrowing for capital spending, went from 2.35% of GDP in 2007/8, to 6.04% in 2008/9 and 10.25% in 2009/10. In 2008 it was £61.3bn and in 2009 £140.5bn. Total government net debt was calculated to be £926.9bn in July this year or 56.1% of GDP, compared to £865.5bn in 2009 and £634.4bn in 2007. In May 2009 Standard and Poor raised the possibility of downgrading Britain’s debt status from the highest triple A rating, which would have led to significant increases in borrowing costs.
 

The number of companies going bankrupt increased during the recession, rising from 12,507 in 2007 (which was one of the lower figures for the decade) to 15,535 in 2008 and 19,077 in 2009. The number of acquisitions and mergers rose during the second half of the decade to reach 869 in 2007 before falling over the next two years to 558 and 286 respectively. Figures for the first quarter of 2010 do not suggest any increase is taking place. This suggests that while there has been destruction of the capital associated with the businesses going insolvent this has not yet led to a general process of consolidation as might be expected coming out of a crisis, which itself may indicate that the real crisis remains with us.

During the crisis the pound fell sharply against a number of other currencies, losing over a quarter of its value between 2007 and the start of 2009, prompting the Bank of England to comment “The fall of more than a quarter since mid-2007 is the sharpest over a comparable period since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s[6] There has been a recovery since but the pound remains about 20% below its 2007 exchange rate.

House prices fell sharply after the bursting of the property bubble and although they began to rise again this year they remained substantially below their peak and in September fell again by 3.6%. The number of sales remains at a historic low.

The stock market suffered sharp falls from mid 2007 and, although it has recovered since then, there is still uncertainty. The concerns about the debts of Greece and other countries prior to the intervention of the EU and IMF led to a significant fall in May this year as the graph below shows.


 

Source: The Guardian

Inflation rose to nearly 5% in September 2008 before falling to below 2% a year later. It has since risen to over 3% during 2010, above the Bank of England's target of 2%.

Unemployment is estimated to have increased by about 900,000 during the recession, which is considerably less than in previous recessions. In July 2010 the official figures were 7.8% of the workforce totalling some 2.47 million people.

State intervention

The British government intervened robustly to limit the crisis, initiating a range of policies that were taken up by many other countries. Gordon Brown basked in this glory for a few months, famously stating that he had saved the world in a slip of the tongue during a debate in the House of Commons. There were a number of strands to the state’s intervention:

-          cuts in the Bank of England base interest rate. Between December 2007 and March 2009 the rate was progressively cut from 5.5% to 0.5%, bringing it down to the lowest rate on record and below the rate of inflation;

-          intervention to directly support the banks, leading to nationalisation or part nationalisation. This started with Northern Rock in February 2008 and was followed by Bradford and Bingley. In September the government brokered the take-over of HBOS by Lloyds TSB. In October £50bn was made available to the banks for recapitalisation. In November 2009 a further £37bn investment resulted in the de-facto nationalisation of RBS/Nat West and the partial nationalisation of Lloyds TSB/HBOS;

-          quantitative easing, also known as the asset purchase facility. In March 2009 plans to inject £75bn over three months were announced. This was gradually increased and at present the total stands at £200bn. The Bank of England explains that the purpose of quantitative easing is to put more money into the economy to keep the rate of inflation at its target of 2% and this became necessary when further reductions of the base rate were no longer possible after it had been reduced to 0.5%. This is achieved by the bank purchasing assets (mainly gilts) from private sector institutions and crediting the sellers’ account, effectively creating new money. This sounds simple, but according to the Financial TimesNo one is sure whether or how quantitative easing and other unorthodox monetary policies works[7]

-          intervention to encourage consumption. In January 2009 VAT was cut from 17.5% to 15% and in May 2009 the car scrappage scheme was introduced. The increase in the guarantee on bank deposits to £50,000 in October 2008 can be seen as part of this since its aim was to reassure consumers that their money would not just disappear in the event of a bank collapse.

The result was the containment of the immediate crisis with no further bank collapses. The price was a substantial increase in debt as noted above. Official figures give the cost of government intervention as £99.8bn in 2007, £121.5bn in 2009 and £113.2bn in July this year. These figures do not include the cost of purchasing assets such as the stakes in the banks or the expenditure on quantitative easing (which would add another £250bn or so to the total) on the grounds that these assets will only be held temporally by government before being sold back. Whether this is so remains to be seen, although Lloyds TSB has paid back some of the money it received.

The interventions have also been partly credited for the lower than expected rise in employment during the recession. This will be dealt with in more detail below.

However, the longer-term prospects seem more questionable:

-          interventions to manage inflation and theoretically encourage spending have not brought the headline rate to target, although it is suggested that the underlying trends are lower than the headline rate suggests. However, the cost of food is rising globally so may affect the rate over time, particularly as it affects those who are less well off;

-          the efforts to inject liquidity into the system, by reducing the cost of borrowing and increasing the supply of money, have not produced the increase in lending that was hoped for, leading to repeated calls from politicians for the banks to do more;

-          the impact of the VAT cut and car scrappage scheme contributed to the initial recovery at the end of 2009 but have now ended. There was a slight fall in car sales in the first quarter of 2010 but the car scrappage scheme was still in place then. Overall, there have been reductions in most areas of household consumption, growth in personal debt has begun to reduce and the rate of savings has increased. Given the central role played by debt-funded household consumption in the boom this clearly has implications for any recovery.

The consensus forecasts for GDP growth in 2010 and 2011 in Britain are 1.5% and 2.0% respectively. This is above the 0.9% and 1.7% predicted for the Euro Area but below the 1.9% and 2.5% forecast for the OECD as a whole[8] and below the forecasts for Europe from the IMF quoted at the start of this report.

However, to grasp the real significance of the crisis it is necessary to penetrate below these surface phenomena to examine aspects of the structure and functioning of the British economy.

Historical and structural issues

Changes within the composition of the British economy: from production to services

To understand the situation of British capitalism and the significance of the recession it is necessary to look at the main structural changes within the economy over recent decades. The article published in Bilan in 1934/1935 (n° 13 and 14)[9] noted that in 1851 24% of men were employed in agriculture. By 1931 this had shrunk to 7% and that in the same period the proportion of men employed in industry declined from 51% to 42%. Today this has undoubtedly gone much further. In the 1930s Britain still had an empire, albeit decaying, that it could draw on. This has not been the case since the Second World War. The historical trend has been a shift away from production towards services and within this sector to finances in particular as the two charts below show.

 
Both of these are taken from the Blue Book for 2010, which sets out the national accounts. It made the following comments about these two charts: “In 2006, the latest base year, just over 75 per cent of total gross value added was from the services sector, compared to 17 per cent from the production sector. Most of the remainder was attributed to the construction sector.[10] In 1985 the service sector made up 58% of GVA. “An analysis of the 11 broad industrial sectors shows that in 2008 the financial intermediation and other business services sector provided the largest contribution to gross value added at current basic prices, at £420 billion out of a total of £1,295.7 billion (32.4 per cent). The distribution and hotels sector contributed 14.2 per cent; the education, health and social work sector accounted for 13.1 per cent; and the manufacturing sector 11.6 per cent.[11] Note that in two years from 2006 to 2008 the contribution of the manufacturing sector shrank by around a third (from 17% to 11.6%).
Some idea of the pace of these developments over the last 30 years is given in the table below entitled “Structural change in UK Services” which attempts to quantify the development within the various sectors that make up the service sector. “Total service output has more than doubled during this period, but in the business services and finance sector output grew almost five-fold.[12] In comparison, the same table for manufacturing shows that the sector grew by just 18.1% during the same period with wide variations between industries.

 

Source: Economic and Labour Market Review
The service sector as a whole is more profitable than the manufacturing sector as the table below shows. In the first quarter of 2010 the net rate of return in manufacturing was 6.4% and in services it was 14.4%. However, these are the lowest rates of return since 1991 and 1995 respectively.

 

The rise of the financial sector

The figures published about the profitability of the service sector cited above are for private non-financial companies and one particular feature of the situation in Britain is the significance of the financial sector, so this needs further examination. Five of the top ten banks in Europe in 2004 by capitalisation, including numbers one and two, were based in Britain. Globally, the four largest British banks are in the top seven banks (the US banks Citicorp and UBS are the top two). According to the Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England: “As a share of whole-economy output, the direct contribution of the UK financial sector rose to 9% in the last quarter of 2008. Financial corporations’ gross operating surplus (GVA less compensation for employees and other taxes on production) increased by £5.0bn to £20bn, also the largest quarterly increase on record.”[13] This reflects the trend in Britain for over a century and a half: “Over the past 160 years, growth in financial intermediation has outstripped whole economy growth by over 2 percentage points per year. Or put differently, growth in financial sector value added has been more than double that of the economy as a whole since 1850”.[14] From accounting for about 1.5% of the economy’s profits between 1948 and 1970 the sector has grown to account for 15%. This is a global phenomenon with pre-tax profits of the top 1,000 world banks reaching £800bn in 2007/8, an increase of 150% from 2000/1. Crucially, the return on capital in the banking sector has far outstripped that in the rest of the economy as the chart below shows.

 

The weight of the banking sector within the economy can be gauged by comparing its assets to the total GDP for the country. This can be seen in the chart above. By 2006 British banks’ assets were over 500% of national GDP. In the US assets rose from 20% to 100% of GDP over the same period, thus the weight of the banking sector in Britain is proportionately far greater. However, its capital ratio (this is the capital held by the bank in comparison to that lent) did not keep pace, falling from 15-25% at the start of the 20th century to about 5% at the end. This increased sharply over the last decade and just before the crash leverage of the major global banks was about 50 times equity. This underlines that the global economy has been built on a tower of fictitious capital over the last few decades. The crisis of 2007 threatened to topple the whole edifice and this could have been catastrophic for Britain given its reliance on this sector. This is why the British bourgeoisie had to respond as it did.

The nature of the service sector

It is also worth looking at the service sector as a whole more closely. The sector is broken down in various ways in official publications providing greater or lesser detail. Here we will refer to those listed in the table above (“Structural change in UK services”) although it is worth noting that sometimes construction, which is a productive activity, is included within the service sector. The bourgeoisie records the value each industry is supposed to add to the economy but this does not tell us whether they actually produce surplus value or, while performing a necessary function, they do not add value.
Some of these sectors are what Marx described as costs of circulation.[15] Within this he distinguishes between those that relate to the transformation of the commodity from one form to another, that is from the commodity form to the money form or vice versa, and those that are a continuation of the productive process.
Changes in the form of the commodity, although they are a necessary part of the total production process, do not add value and are a cost against the surplus value that is extracted. In the list we are considering this includes retail and wholesale distribution (other than where this comprises transport of commodities – see below), hotels and restaurants (to the extent that they are the point of sale of finished commodities– the preparation of meals may be seen as a productive process producing surplus value), large parts of communications (where these are concerned with purchases of raw materials or the sale of finished products), business services and computers (where these are concerned with things like ordering and stock control and market strategy). The whole marketing and advertising industry, which is not separately identified here, falls under this category since it is concerned with maximising sales.
Marx argues that those activities that are a continuation of the productive process include activities like transport that involve getting the commodity to its point of consumption and others, such as storage, that are concerned with the preservation of the value of the commodity. These activities tend to increase the cost of the commodity without adding to its use value; they are unproductive costs so far as society is concerned but may produce surplus value for the individual capitalist. In our list this category includes transport and air transport and retail and wholesale distribution where these involve the transportation or storage of commodities.
A third area concerns those activities linked to appropriating a share of the total surplus value through interest or rent. Many of the activities within business services and finance, financial intermediation and services, computer activities and auxiliary finance are aspects of the administration of the stock market and banking where fees and commissions are charged as well as interest. Financial bodies also invest money and speculate on their own account. Ownership of dwellings is probably related to lettings and hence the receipt of surplus value in the form of rent.
A fourth area is the activity of the state, which covers most of the last five in our list. Since these are funded from surplus value through taxation of industry none of these produce surplus value, although state orders may produce profits for individual businesses. In International Review n°114 we pointed out that the way the bourgeoisie produces its national accounts tends to overestimate GNP (Gross National Product) because “national accounting partly counts the same thing twice. In practice, the selling price of products in the market incorporates the taxes that are used to pay national expenditure, namely the costs of non-market services (teaching, social security, public sector personnel…). The bourgeois economy calculates the value of these non-market services as being equal to the sum of wages paid to personnel who provide them. Now, in national accounting, this sum is tacked on to the added value produced in the market sector (the only productive sector), even though it is already included in the selling price of market products…[16]
Taking the service sector as a whole, it is clear that it does not actually add the value to the economy that is claimed for it. Some parts reduce the total surplus value produced, others, notably the financial and business services, take a share in the surplus value produced, including that produced in other countries.
What are the reasons for the changes in the structure of the British economy? In the first place, increasing productivity means that a growing mass of commodities is produced by a falling number of workers. This is the reality behind the figures from Bilan quoted above. Secondly, the growing organic composition and the falling rate of profit results in the shift of production to areas with cheaper costs for labour and constant capital.[17] Thirdly, the same factors prompt capital to move into activities where the returns are greater, notably in banking and finances, where Britain’s initial dominance (Bilan referred to Britain as the “world’s banker”) allowed it to extract more surplus value. The deregulation of this sector in the 1980s did not reduce the costs but rather strengthened the dominance of the major banks and financial companies and the reliance of the bourgeoisie on the profits they produce. Fourthly, as the mass of commodities grows the contradiction between the scale of production and the capacity of the market increases, drawing in more resources to effect the transition of capital from its commodity form to its money form. Fifthly, the growing complexity of the economy and the social strains this produces results in the growth of the state, which aims to manage the whole of society in the interests of the national capital. This includes the direct forces of control, but also those parts of the state tasked with producing workers with the right skills, with keeping them reasonably healthy and with managing the various social problems that arise from a society based on exploitation.

Conclusion

Two somewhat contradictory conclusions can be drawn from this part of the report. The first and most important is that the evolution of British capitalism left it exposed to the full force of the crisis when it broke and there was a real danger that the collapse of the financial sector would cripple the economy. The perspective was of a sharp acceleration of the decline of the global strength of British capitalism with all the consequences at the economic, imperialist and social level this would entail. It is no exaggeration to say that the British bourgeoisie looked into the abyss in 2007 and 2008. The response confirmed again the continuing skill and determination of the ruling class as it united to throw all of its forces into combating the immediate danger: the longer term consequences would have to be left for another day.
The second conclusion is that it would be a mistake to write off the manufacturing sector. There are two reasons for saying this. Firstly, it still makes an important contribution to the overall economy, even if the rate of profit is lower. The contribution of 17% or even 11.6% to the total economy is not insignificant (and in reality is probably larger once the non-productive parts of the service sector are taken into account), and while the balance on the trade in goods has remained negative for many decades, it accounts for the major part of exports from Britain. Secondly, the present crisis exposes the danger of over reliance on one part of the economy. This explains why the Cameron government is giving prominence to the role that manufacturing can play in any recovery and why the promotion of British trade has recently become a more important part of Britain’s foreign policy. Whether this is realistic is another matter as it will require attacks on the costs of production beyond anything achieved by Thatcher and will go against both the historical and more immediate trends of the global economy. Britain cannot compete directly with the likes of China so will have to look for particular niches.
All of this brings us to the question “What hope for an economic recovery?”
 

What hope for an economic recovery?

The global context

“…recent data indicate the global recovery is slowing after an initially rapid recovery. Output in the west is still far below pre-2008 trends. Stubbornly high US unemployment is blighting lives and souring politics. Europe narrowly avoided sparking a second worldwide crisis in May when its big economies agreed a bail-out fund for Greece and other highly indebted countries at risk of sovereign default. Japan has intervened in currency markets for the first time in six years to stop an appreciation of the yen hurting its exports” These are the words of an article in the Financial Times[18] on the eve of the bi-annual gathering of the IMF and World Bank in early October and reflect the concerns of the bourgeoisie.
We can note that the recovery plans in Europe had so far failed to produce very strong rates of growth and emphasised above all the growth of national debt that in some countries has led to questions about the state’s ability to repay its debts. Greece is at the forefront of this group of countries but Britain is also included amongst those where the level of debt presents a risk. The graph below, despite its reassuring title, shows that in the US and many European countries the level of debt poses a risk. Britain may not have as much total debt as some countries (the horizontal axis) but its current account deficit is the highest (the vertical axis), indicating the rapidity with which it has recently been accumulating debt.

 
Two different strategies have been adopted to deal with the recession: that favoured by the US of continuing to use debt; and that increasingly being adopted across Europe of cutting the deficit and imposing programmes of austerity. The US is in a position to do this because the continuing role of the dollar as the global reference currency allows it to fund its deficit by printing dollars, an option unavailable to its rivals. Other countries are more constrained by their debts and this fact in itself presents some elements towards answering the question we have posed on the limits of debt. A recent international development has been an increase in efforts to use exchange rates to gain advantage. One cause of this is the effort to use exports to restore the economy. A second cause is the struggle between surplus and deficit countries over exchange rates. This is led by China and the US where a devaluation of the dollar against the yuan would not only reduce the competitiveness of Chinese goods but would also devalue its massive holdings of US dollars (this is one of the reasons it has used some of its reserves to buy assets in a number of countries, including Britain). There is a suggestion that quantitative easing plays a role in devaluing currencies since it increases the supply of money, which gives a new perspective to the recent announcement by Japan of a further round of QE and the suggestion that the US and Britain are considering the same. What this poses is the loss of the unity seen in the midst of the crisis and its replacement by the attitude of looking after number one. Commenting on these developments a columnist in the Financial Times recently wrote, “As in the 1930s, everyone is looking to export their way out of trouble, which everyone, by definition, cannot do. So global imbalances are on the rise again, as is the risk of protectionism.”[19] The pressures are growing but we cannot yet say whether the bourgeoisie will succumb to them.
What this means is that all options carry real dangers and there is no obvious route out of the crisis. The lack of solvent demand will renew the pressure that has led to the escalation of debt and reanimate the protectionist reflex that has been long contained, while austerity policies risk further reducing demand and thus provoking a further recession, greater protectionism and strengthening pressure to return to the use of debt. In this perspective the resort to further debt seems the most immediately obvious since it will be a continuation of developments over the last decades, but it poses the question of whether there are limits to debt and, if there are, what they are and whether we are at those limits. For this report, we can conclude from recent developments and the crisis sparked off by Greece that there are limits to debt – or rather a point at which the consequences of increased debt begin to undermine its effectiveness and destabilise the world economy. If Greece was unable to make its payments, not only would there have been a serious depression within the country but there would also have been a significant disruption of the international financial system. The fall in the stock market prior to the EU/IMF bailout shows the sensitivity of the bourgeoisie to this.

The options for British capitalism

The British bourgeoisie is at the forefront of those choosing austerity with its plan to eliminate the deficit in four years requiring cuts of around a quarter in state spending. Beyond the state sector, its plan to cut benefits to make work more attractive is clearly aimed at lowering the cost of labour throughout the economy in an effort to increase the competitiveness and profitability of the British capitalism. This is being sold under the flag of the national interest and an attempt to suggest that the crisis was the fault of the Labour Government rather than global capitalism (we will look at this ideological campaign in more detail in the part of this report that deals with the life of the bourgeoisie).
In previous reports we have analysed that British capitalism has recently produced surplus value by increasing the rate of absolute exploitation of the working class and has realised it through an increase of debt, in particular of private debt fuelled by the housing boom and the explosion of unsecured lending. Building on this, the report to the last WR congress emphasised the overall importance of the service sector while the current report has confirmed this but clarified that it does not stem from the sector as a whole and has emphasised the particular role played by the financial sector. On the basis of this framework, it is worth considering how the three elements of the response to the crisis – debt, austerity and exports – relate to the situation facing Britain.
Prior to the crisis personal debt underpinned economic growth for several years, both directly through the debt accumulated by households in Britain and indirectly through the financial institutions’ role in the global debt market. Once the crisis broke state debt was used to protect these financial institutions and, to a much lesser extent, to offer protection to households (the increase in protection to savings to £50,000) while the rate of growth of personal debt declined and some individuals were pushed into insolvency. At present the level of private debt is falling very slightly while savings are increasing and the government has announced its determination to halve the deficit. Unless there is a reversal of these developments it seems unlikely that debt will contribute to any recovery. The austerity ahead may have two opposing impacts on the working class. On the one hand it may push many to limit expenditure and to try to repay debts in order to protect themselves. On the other hand it may drive others to resort to debt to make ends meet. However, this is likely to come up against the reluctance of banks to lend. The financial sector was dependent on the development of global debt for much of its growth prior to the crash and at present there are attempts to find alternatives, resulting, for example, in the increased activity in food markets. However, such activity still ultimately depends on the presence of solvent demand, which returns us to our starting point. If the US continues on the path of increasing debt, British capitalism may be able to benefit given its position within the global financial system; which suggests that for all the rhetoric of the likes of Vince Cable,[20] action will not be taken to rein in the bankers and that the strategy of deregulation begun under Thatcher will continue.
Austerity seems to be the main strategy at present. The overt aim is to reduce the deficit, with the implicit promise that once this has been done things will return to normal. But to have any lasting impact on the competitiveness of British capital permanent changes will need to be made. Hopes may be placed on a dramatic increase in productivity, but this has failed to materialise for decade after decade. Unless there is substantial investment in areas related to rising productivity, such as research and development, education and infrastructure, this is unlikely to happen. The evidence already points to cuts in these areas so the more likely option will be an effort to permanently reduce the proportion of surplus value taken by the state and the proportion of the total value produced assigned to the working class. In short, a reduction in the size of the state and lower wages. However, to be effective the scale of attacks on the working class required will be massive, while a reduction in the size of the state goes against the trend seen throughout the period of decadence where the state is required to increase its domination of society in order to defend its economic and imperialist interests and to prevent the contradictions at the heart of bourgeois society from tearing it apart.
Exports can only play a role if the bourgeoisie is successful in its efforts to make British capitalism more competitive. This will come up against the efforts of all of its rivals to do the same. The service sector in Britain is profitable and it may be possible to increase its relatively low level of exports. However, this runs into the difficulty that the most profitable parts of this sector seem to be those linked to the global financial system, which makes it development dependent on a global recovery.
In summary, there is no easy path for British capitalism. The most likely direction seems to be a continued reliance on its position within the global financial system alongside a programme of austerity to bolster profits. In the longer term however, it can only face a continued deterioration of its position.
 

The impact of the crisis on the working class

The impact of the crisis on the working class provides the objective basis for our analysis of the class struggle. This section will concentrate on the material situation of the working class. The questions of the ideological offensive of the ruling class and the development of class consciousness will be taken up other parts of the report…
One of the immediate impacts of the crisis on the working class was an increase in unemployment. The rate rose steadily during most of 2008 and 2009, increasing the total by 842,000 to 2.46 million or 7.8% of the working population. However, this was below the increases seen in the recessions in the early 80s and 90s when the rates rose to 8.9% (an increase of 932,000) and 9.2% (an increase of 622,000) respectively. This is despite the fact that the fall in GDP has been greater in the present recession than the previous two.

 
One recent study has suggested that the fall in GDP in this recession might have been expected to increase unemployment by a million more than it actually has,[21] which poses the question of why this has not happened. The study cited suggests this was due to “firms’ strong financial position at the start of the recession and the smaller financial squeeze on firms in this recession”, which in turn was due to three factors: “Firstly policies aimed at assisting the banking system, cutting interest rates and the large government deficit creating a strong stimulus. Secondly, the flexibility of workers in allowing real falls in wage costs to firms aided by low interest rates which sustained real wage growth for consumers. Finally, firms holding on to valuable labour, whilst facing the pressure on profits and the severity of the financial crisis.”
The evidence certainly supports the argument about falls in wage costs, which were achieved through reductions in the hours worked (and thus paid) and in below inflation pay rises. Part time working has increased since the late 70s when it was just over 16% of the workforce and reached 22% in 1995. It has risen further in this recession with the majority taking part time work because they had no alternative.[22] The number of such under-employed people rose to over 1 million. There has been a small fall in the average hours worked each week, from 32.2 to 31.7, but across the workforce this equates to 450,000 jobs with average hours.
The reduction in real wages stemmed from both low settlements and rising inflation??. The overall result was that firms saved about 1% of real wage costs.
However, this is not the whole picture. While recent years have seen efforts to force people off benefits and while there has been no increase during the present recession, the legacy of the use of things like incapacity benefit to mask unemployment continues to have an impact, as the graph below shows.

 
Further, in the last two recessions unemployment continued to rise long after the recession formally ended. In the 1980s it took 8 years for employment levels to reach those at the start of the recession and in the 1990s it took nearly nine years. While the rate of increase in this recession may have levelled off sooner than in the previous two there are reasons why this may only be a temporary interlude since not only will the austerity measures lead to hundreds of thousands of state employees being sacked but the possible double-dip recession these measures may produce, coupled with the uncertain global situation means that unemployment may well begin to increase again. Annual growth rates of 2% are considered necessary before employment starts to rise and of 2.5% if modest population growth is also allowed for. None of the projections for Britain are currently at this level.
Those who become unemployed remain out of work for longer as the number of vacancies remains substantially below the number looking for work. The longer the period of unemployment the more likely the person is to become unemployed again in the future. By the start of 2010 700,000 people were classed as long term unemployed, having been without a job for 12 months or more. It is worth noting here the impact of unemployment on those affected: “An indication of the real cost of this flexibility was provided in a recent study of the impact of the recession on mental health. This found that 71% of people who have lost a job in the past year have experienced symptoms of depression, with those aged 18-30 most affected. Around half said they have experienced stress or anxiety.”[23]
One aspect of the reduction in wages and the general worsening of conditions is a fall in consumption. Although some of the studies cited suggest there has been little reduction others suggest there was a fall of 5% during 2008 and 2009. Quite obviously for most people this is not a matter of choice but the simple consequence of losing a job, working fewer hours or taking a direct pay cut.
Official figures show falls in child and pensioner poverty during the period of the Labour government and average living standards rising at 2% a year. However this has slowed in recent years. At the same time inequality has grown and poverty amongst working age adults is at its highest level since 1961.[24] Overall, poverty has increased by between 1% and 1.8% over the last four or five years (0.9 or 1.4 million people) to 18.1% or 22.3% (the difference depends on whether income is measured before or after housing costs).

 
Although there has recently been a slight decline in the level of personal debt (at the rate of 19p a day), in July this year the annual growth rate was still 8% and the total owed was £1,456bn,[25] which as we have pointed out before is more than the total produced in the country each year. This comprises £1,239bn in secured lending on homes and £217bn consumer credit lending. It is estimated that average families have to spend 15% of their net income to service debt payments.
This situation has resulted in an increase in the number of personal bankruptcies and Individual Voluntary Arrangements. This increased significantly from 67,000 in 2005 to between 106,000 and 107,000 in during 2006 to 2008 before jumping again to reach 134,000 in 2009. The first quarter of this year saw another 36,500, which if continued would mean a further increase.[26] This rate is very substantially above that seen in previous recessions, although legal changes make direct comparisons difficult.[27]
Accompanying the fall in the growth of personal debt, the ONS reports an increase in the rate of household saving from -0.9% at the start of 2008 to 8.5% at the end of 2009.[28] It seems that many workers are trying to prepare for the hard times ahead.

Perspectives

Although the impact of the crisis on the working class is greater than the publications of the bourgeoisie tend to present it as, it has nonetheless been relatively contained both at the level of employment and of income. In part this is due to circumstances, in part to the strategy adopted by the bourgeoisie including the use of debt, and in part to the response of the working class, which seems to have focussed more on surviving the recession than combating it. However, it is unlikely that this situation will continue. Firstly, the overall global economic situation will remain very difficult, as the bourgeoisie is unable to resolve the fundamental contradictions undermining the foundations of its economy. Secondly, the strategy of the British ruling class has now switched to one of imposing austerity, partly because of the global situation. It could conceivably return to the use of debt in the short term but the cost would be to worsen the long-term problems. Thirdly, the impact on the working class will increase in the period ahead and so will contribute to further developing the objective conditions for a development of the class struggle.
 
10/10/10
 


[1]. World Bank, Global Economic Prospects, Summer 2010, Key Messages.
[2]. Ibid, p.3.
[3]. Much of the data in this section is taken from the Economic and Labour Market Review of August 2010, published by the Office for National Statistics. Other data is taken from the Blue Book, that deals with the UK’s national accounts, the Pink Book that deals with the balance of payments and Financial Statistics, all of which are published by the ONS.
[4]. Economic and Labour Market Review, August 2010, p.57.
[5]. ONS Pink Book, 2010 Edition, p.34.
[6]. Bank of England, Inflation Report, February 2009, p.17
[7]. Financial Times, “That elusive spark”, 06/10/10.
[8]. These figures are from the Economic and Labour Market Review, September 2010, p.19. The Review took the forecasts for the Euro area and the OECD from the OECD’s Economic Outlook of November 2009.
[9]. Republished in World Revolution n° 312 and 313.
[10]. Blue Book 2010, p.22.
[11]. Ibid, p.88.
[12]. Economic and Labour Market Review, August 2010, p.57.
[13]. Andrew Haldane, “The Contribution of the Financial Sector: Miracle or Mirage”, Bank of England, July 2010.
[14]. Ibid.
[15]. See Capital, Vol. II, Chapter VI, “Costs of Circulation”.
[16]. IR no.114, “The reality of ‘economic prosperity’ laid bare by the crisis”, p.16.
[17]. The development of production in China and other low-cost producers is credited with keeping the rate of global inflation relatively stable over recent decades and with reducing the costs of labour throughout the world, including in the developed countries, since the supply of workers has massively increased (it has been suggested that the entry of China into the world economy has doubled the supply of labour). Consequently, not only is the rate of profit likely to be higher in the low wage economies themselves, it is also likely to decrease the cost of labour and push up the rate of profit in the developed countries too, resulting in the increase in the average rate of profit that we have noted in a number of articles in the International Review. Whether this is sufficient to create the necessary mass of profit is another matter however.
[18]. “That Elusive Spark”, 06/10/10.
[19]. John Plender, “Currency demands make a common ground elusive”, 06/10/10.
[20]. Member of the Liberal Democrat Party and Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in the coalition government.
 
[21]. “Employment in the 2008-2009 recession”, Economic and Labour Market Review, August 2010.
[22]. See: Economic and Labour Market Review, September 2010, p.15.
[23]. Guardian, 01/04/10
[24]. Institute for Fiscal Studies, Poverty and Inequality in UK 2010.
[25]. The figures in this paragraph are taken from Debt Facts and Figures for September 2010 compiled by Credit Action.
[26]. Source: ONS, Financial Statistics, August 2010, p.120.
[27]. Economic and Labour Market Review, August 2010, p.61. Between 1979 and 1984 the increase was from 3,500 to 8,229 and between 1989 and 1993 it was from 9,365 to 36,703.
[28]. Ibid, p.60.

 

 

Life of the ICC: 

General and theoretical questions: 

The Hungarian Revolution of 1919 (ii): The example of Russia 1917 inspires the workers in Hungary

The example of Russia 1917 inspired the workers in Hungary

In the previous article in this series,[1] we saw how the Social Democratic party, the main rampart of capitalism, carried out a despicable manoeuvre in order to deal with the developing workers' struggle. This manoeuvre aimed at making the communists appear to be responsible for a mysterious attack perpetrated against the editorial board of the Social Democratic paper Népszava. The intention was to criminalise them and so unleash a wave of repression, initially against the communists but then going on to annihilate the new-born workers' councils and destroy any revolutionary spirit in the Hungarian proletariat.

In this second article we will see how this manoeuvre failed and how the revolutionary situation continued to mature so that the Social Democratic party tried another manoeuvre, which was risky but which in the end was a success for capitalism: to ally with the Communist Party, “take power” and organise “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This blocked the dynamic of rising struggles and the development of proletarian self-organisation and led the revolution into an impasse that resulted in its utter defeat.

March 1919: the crisis of the bourgeois republic

The truth about the attack on the newspaper soon came out. The workers felt that they had been tricked and their indignation grew even more when the torture inflicted upon the communists came to light. The credibility of the Social Democratic party was seriously damaged and this increased the popularity of the Communists. Struggles around specific demands grew in number from the end of February: the peasants seized the land without waiting for the eternal promise of “agrarian reform”,[2] more and more workers flocked to the Budapest workers' council and tumultuous discussions led to bitter criticism of the Social Democratic and union leaders. The bourgeois republic, that had created so many illusions in October 1918, was now a disappointment. The 25,000 soldiers who had been sent home from the front were shut up in their barracks and organised themselves into councils; during the first week of March, not only did the assemblies in the barracks re-elect their representatives – with a significant increase in the number of Communist delegates – they also passed motions stating that, “government orders will not be obeyed unless formerly ratified by the Budapest soldiers' council”.

On 7th March, an extraordinary session of the workers' council of Budapest adopted a resolution which, “demanded the socialisation of all the means of production and that they be placed under the direction of the councils”. Although socialisation without first destroying the bourgeois state apparatus is bound to be a limping measure, this declaration nevertheless expressed the enormous self-confidence of the councils and was a response to two urgent questions: 1) the bosses' sabotage of production, which was completely disorganised by the war effort; 2) the tragic lack of foodstuffs and of goods to satisfy basic needs.

Events took a radical turn. The metal workers' council presented the government with an ultimatum; it gave it five days to hand over power to the proletarian parties.[3] On 19th March, there took place the biggest demonstration seen up to then, which was called by the workers' council of Budapest; the unemployed demanded an allowance and a ration card, as well as the abolition of rents. On 20th, the typographers went on strike; this became generalised from the following day and made two demands: the liberation of the Communist leaders and a “workers' government”.

Although this demonstrates that there was a maturation towards a revolutionary situation, it also shows that the political level was still far below what was necessary for the proletariat to take power. In order to take power and keep it, the proletariat must be able to count on two indispensable factors: the workers' councils and the communist party. In March 1919 the workers' councils in Hungary had just taken their first steps, they had just begun to feel their power and autonomy and they were still trying to free themselves from the stifling control of Social Democracy and the unions. Their two main weaknesses were:

-        their illusions in the possibility of a “workers' government” which would unite the Social Democrats and the Communists. As we will see, this was to be the death knell of a revolutionary development of the situation;

-        they were still organised according to economic sectors: councils of metal workers, of typographers, of textile workers, etc. In Russia, from 1905 onwards, the councils were organised horizontally, regrouping the workers as a whole across divisions of sector, region, nationality, etc; in Hungary there existed both councils based on sector and also horizontal councils within towns, which meant that there was a risk of corporatism and dispersion.

In the first article in this series, we stressed that the Communist Party was still very weak and heterogeneous, that the debate had only just begun to develop within it. It was weakened by the absence of a solid international structure to guide it – the Communist International had only just celebrated its first congress. For these reasons, as we will see, it had enormous weaknesses and an absence of clarity that was to make it an easy victim of the trap that Social Democracy laid for it.

The merger with the Social Democratic party and the proclamation of the Soviet Republic

Colonel Vix, the representative of the Entente,[4] issued an ultimatum, which stipulated that there be created a demilitarised zone within Hungarian territory, to be governed directly by allied command. It was to be 200 kilometres wide, which meant that it would occupy a third of the country.

The bourgeoisie never confronts the proletariat openly. History teaches us that it tries to trap it between two fronts, the left and the right. Here we see the right opening fire with the threat of military occupation; this was to be concretised from April onwards with a full-blown invasion. For its part, the left went into action immediately afterwards with a pathetic declaration by President Karolyi: “Our homeland is in danger. The most serious moment in our history is upon us. (...) The time has come for the Hungarian working class to use its force - the only organised force in the country - and its international relations to save its homeland from anarchy and dismemberment. I therefore propose that a Social Democratic government be formed that will confront the imperialists. The stakes of this struggle are the fate of our country. In order to wage such a struggle it is indispensable that the working class recover its unity and that the agitation and disorder brought about by the extremists, cease. With this in mind, the Social Democrats must find common ground for an agreement with the Communists”.[5]

This crossfire in which the working class was caught up; the right with its military occupation, and the left with the appeal for national defence, converged on the same aim: to save capitalist domination. The military occupation – the worst affront that can be inflicted on a nation state – was really intended to crush the revolutionary tendencies of the Hungarian proletariat. In addition, it enabled the left to drive the workers towards the defence of the fatherland. This kind of trap had been used before; in Russia in October 1917, when the Russian bourgeoisie realised that it was unable to crush the proletariat, it preferred to let German troops occupy Petrograd; at the time the working class parried this manoeuvre well by embarking on the seizure of power. The right-wing Social Democrat Garami revealed the strategy that was to follow in the wake of Count Karolyi's appeal: “entrust the government to the Communists, await the total failure that will be theirs and then, and only then, when rid of these dregs of society, can we form an homogenous government”.[6] The centrist wing of the party[7] adopted the following policy: “As Hungary has essentially been sacrificed by the Entente, which has obviously decided to annihilate the revolution, it would seem that the only tools that the latter has at its disposal are Soviet Russia and the Red Army. To win the support of the latter, the Hungarian working class must essentially wield power and Hungary must become a real popular and soviet republic.” adding that “in order to ensure that the Communists do not abuse this power, it would be better to wield it with them![8]

The left wing of the Social Democratic party defended a proletarian position and tended to evolve towards the Communists. Garami's right-wingers and Garbai's centrists manoeuvred cleverly against them. Garami resigned from all of his responsibilities. The right wing agreed to be sacrificed in favour of the centrist wing which, “declaring its agreement with the communist programme” positioned itself to seduce the left.[9]

Following this U-turn, the new centrist leadership proposed the immediate merger with the Communist Party and nothing less than the seizure of power! A delegation of the Social Democratic Party went to meet Bela Kun in prison and made the proposal to unite the two parties, to form a “workers' party”, to exclude all  “bourgeois parties” and to form an alliance with Russia. The talks took place in the space of one day, at the end of which Bela Kun draw up a six-point statement which, among other things, underlines, “The directive committees of the Hungarian Social Democratic party and of the Hungarian Communist Party have decided in favour of the total and immediate unification of their respective organisations. The name of the new organisation is to be Unified Socialist Party of Hungary (PSUH). (...) The PSUH will immediately take power in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This dictatorship is to be exercised by the councils of workers, peasants and soldiers. There will be no more National Assembly (...). A military and political alliance will be concluded with Russia as completely as is possible.[10]

President Karolyi, who followed these negotiations closely, handed in his resignation and made a declaration addressed “to the world proletariat to obtain help and justice. I resign and hand over power to the proletariat of the Hungarian people.”[11]

During the demonstration of 22nd March, “the ex-Regent, Archduke Franz-Joseph, Philippe-Egalité himself, he too came to take his place at the side of the workers at the demonstration.”[12] The new government, formed the day before with Bela Kun and other Communist leaders, who had been recently freed, was presided over by the centrist Social Democrat Garbai.[13] It had a centrist majority with two places reserved for the left wing and two others for the Communists, one of whom was Bela Kun. So there began a very risky operation which consisted in holding the Communists hostage to Social Democratic policies and in sabotaging the newly formed workers' councils by means of the poisoned framework of the “seizure of power”. The Social Democrats left the leading role to Bela Kun who – completely caught in the trap – became the spokesman and the guarantor for a series of measures that could only destroy his credibility.[14]

“Unity” creates division within the revolutionary forces

The declaration of the “unified” party managed in the first place to halt the regroupment of the left Social Democrats with the Communists, who had been cleverly seduced by the radicalisation of the centrists. But the worst thing was that there was opened up a Pandora's box among the Communists, who split up into various tendencies. The majority, around Bela Kun, became hostage to the Social Democrats; another tendency, formed around Szamuelly, remained within the party but tried to carry out an independent policy; the majority of the anarchists split to form the Anarchist Union, which still supported the government but with an oppositional stance.[15]

The Party, that had been formed only a few months previously and had only just begun to develop its organisation and intervention, dissolved completely. Debate became impossible and its old members were in permanent opposition to one another. They did not have the support of a framework of principles or independent analysis, but were constantly dragged onwards by the evolution of events and the subtle manoeuvres of the centrist Social Democrats.

The disorientation about what was really happening in Hungary even affected Lenin, a militant with considerable experience and lucidity. In his complete works there is a transcription of the discussions with Bela Kun on 22nd and 23rd March 1919.[16] Lenin asks Bela Kun: “Please inform us what real guarantees you have that the new Hungarian government will actually be a communist, and not simply a socialist, government, i.e. one of the traitor-socialists. Have the Communists a majority in the government? When will the Congress of Soviets take place? What does the socialists’ recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat really amount to?” Lenin asks the right basic questions. However, as everything depends on personal contact and not on collective international debate, Lenin concludes: “Comrade Bela Kun's reply was quite satisfactory and dispelled all our doubts. It appears that the Left Socialists had visited Bela Kun in prison to consult him about forming a government. And it was only these Left Socialists, who sympathised with the Communists, and also people from the Centre who formed the new government, while the Right Socialists, the traitor-socialists, the irreconcilables and incorrigibles, so to speak, left the Party and not a single worker followed them.” We can see from this that Lenin was at least badly informed or else he did not evaluate the situation correctly, because the Social Democratic centre was in the majority in the government and the left Social Democrats were in the hands of their centrist “friends”.

Carried away by a debilitating optimism, Lenin concludes: “The bourgeoisie itself has handed over power to the Communists in Hungary. The bourgeoisie has shown to the whole world that when there is a serious crisis, when the nation is in danger, it is unable to govern. The only power that the people really want is the power of the councils of worker, soldier and peasant deputies.

Once hoisted to power, the workers' councils are sabotaged

In reality this power existed only on paper. In the first place, it was the Unified Socialist Party that took power without any participation whatsoever on the part of the Budapest council or any other council in the country.[17]  Although the government formally declared itself to be “subordinate” to the Workers' Council of Budapest, in fact it was the one who issued decrees, orders and decisions of every kind, as the facts attest, and the Council had no more than a relative right of veto. The workers' councils were tied up in the straitjacket of parliamentary practice. “Proletarian affairs continued to be administered – or more precisely sabotaged – by the old bureaucracy and not by the workers' councils themselves, which therefore never managed to become active organisms.[18]

The most brutal blow against the councils was the government's call for elections in order to form a “National Assembly of Workers' Councils”. The electoral system imposed by the government was to concentrate the elections on two dates (7th and 14th April 1919), “following the modalities of formal democracy (vote using electoral lists, with cubicles, etc)[19]. This is a reproduction of the mechanism typical of bourgeois elections, which simply sabotages the very essence of the workers' councils. Whereas in the case of bourgeois democracy the elected organs are the result of a vote made by a sum of atomised individuals who are completely separated one from another, the Workers' Councils are based on a radically new and different concept of political action: decisions and action to be taken are thought out and discussed during debates in which a huge and organised mass participates and the latter do not just make the decisions but they themselves carry them out.

The triumph of the electoral manoeuvre was due to the clever manoeuvres of the Social Democrats, who exploited the confusions existing not only within the masses but also within the majority of its Communist militants and especially in Bela Kun's group. Years of participation in elections and in parliament – activities that were necessary for proletarian groups during the ascendant period of capitalism – had produced habits and a vision belonging to a past that had decisively ended and which impeded a clear reply to the new situation; one that necessitated a complete break with parliamentarism and electoralism.

The electoral mechanism and the demand for discipline to the “unified” party meant that, as Szanto put it, “in presenting the candidates for election to the councils, the Communists were obliged to defend the Social Democratic cause and even so, many of them were not elected”; and he adds that this enabled the Social Democrats to give vent to “a revolutionary and communist verbiage that made them seem more revolutionary than the Communists![20]

This policy produced lively resistance. The April elections were contested in the 8th district of Budapest and Szamuelly managed to get the official list of his own party annulled (!) and to impose elections based on debate at mass assemblies. This gave the victory to a coalition of dissidents from the PSUH and to the anarchists, regrouped around Szamuelly.

Other attempts to bring to life real workers' councils took place in mid-April. A movement of the district councils managed to hold a Conference of District Councils in Budapest, which harshly criticised the “soviet government” and put forward a series of proposals regarding provisioning, the counter-revolutionary repression, the relationship with the peasantry, the continuation of the war; and it proposed – just one month after the elections! - new elections to the councils. Held hostage to the Social Democrats, Bela Kun made an appearance at the last session of the conference in the role of duty fireman and with a speech brimming with demagogy: “We are already so far to the left that it is impossible to go further. To veer still further to the left could only be counter-revolution.[21]

Economic re-organisation based on the unions against the councils

The attempt at revolution came up against economic chaos, scarcity and the sabotage of the bosses. Although it is true that the proletarian revolution's centre of gravity is the political power of the councils, this does not in any way mean that it can afford to neglect the control of production. Just because it is impossible to begin the revolutionary transformation of production towards communism until the revolution is victorious internationally, we should not conclude that the proletariat does not need to carry out an economic policy from the very beginning of the revolution. This has to deal with two main issues in particular: the first is to adopt all possible measures to reduce the exploitation of the workers and to guarantee them the maximum free time so that they can devote their energy to the active participation in the workers’ councils. With this in mind, under pressure from the Workers' Council of Budapest, the government took measures such as eliminating piecework and reducing the working day, with the aim of “enabling the workers to participate in the political and cultural life of the revolution.[22]  The second issue is the struggle to guarantee supplies and prevent sabotage in order to prevent hunger and the inevitable economic chaos from sounding the death knell of the revolution. In the face of this problem, from January 1919 the workers formed factory councils and councils by sector; and, as we saw in the first article in this series, the Budapest Council adopted an audacious plan to control supplies satisfying basic needs. But the government, which should have been supporting them, carried out a systematic policy of taking production and supplies out of their hands and handing it over increasingly to the unions. Bela Kun made serious mistakes here. In May 1919, he declared: “Our industrial apparatus is based on the unions. The latter must be emancipated and transformed into powerful corporations that encompass first the majority and then all of the individuals in a given branch of industry. The unions participate in technical management and their activity tends to gradually take on the task of management as a whole. In this way they guarantee that the main economic organs of the regime and the working population pull together and that the workers get used to conducting economic life.[23] Roland Bardy criticises this analysis: “Imprisoned in an abstract framework, Bela Kun was unable to realise that the logic of his position led to handing back to the socialists the power that had been gradually taken from them (...) For a long period the unions would be the bastion of reformist Social Democracy and would constantly come into direct competition with the soviets.”[24]

The government managed to ensure that only the unionised workers and peasants had access to the co-operatives and to the stewardship of consumption. This gave the unions an essential lever of control. Bela Kun theorised this: “the communist regime is that of an organised society. Anyone who wants to live and to be successful must belong to an organisation, so the unions should not place obstacles to membership.[25] As Bardy points out: “Opening up the unions to everyone was the best way to destroy the proletarian majority within them and, in the long term, make it possible to 'democratically' re-establish class society” in fact, “the old bosses, investors and their powerful valets, did not actively participate in production (industry and agriculture) but rather in the administration or in the legal institutions. By enlarging this sector it was possible for the old bourgeoisie to survive as a parasitic class and to have access to the distribution of produce, without even being actively integrated into the productive process.[26] This system favoured speculation and the black market, without ever managing to resolve the problems of famine and scarcity, which caused such suffering to the workers in the large cities.

The government encouraged the formation of large-scale agricultural exploitation directed by a system of “collectivisation”. This was a big swindle. “Commissars of production” were placed at the head of the collective farms. When they were not arrogant bureaucrats, these were...the old landowners! The latter continued to occupy their properties and insisted that the peasants continue to call them “master”.

The collective farms were supposed to spread the revolution to the countryside and guarantee supplies but they did neither. The day workers and poor peasants were profoundly disappointed by the reality of the collective farms and took an increasing distance from the regime. Their managers demanded a deal that the government was unable to guarantee: to supply agricultural products in exchange for fertiliser, tractors and machines. So they sold their produce to speculators and hoarders with the result that hunger and scarcity reached such levels that, in desperation, the Workers' Council of Budapest organised the transformation of parks and gardens into zones for agricultural production.

The evolution of the international revolutionary struggle and the situation in Hungary

The only hope for the Hungarian proletariat to break out of the trap in which it was caught lay in the development of the international proletarian struggle. There was great hope in the period from March to June 1919 in spite of the massive blow represented by the crushing of the Berlin insurrection in January.[27] In March 1919 the Communist International was formed, April saw the proclamation of the Republic of Bavarian Councils, which was tragically crushed by the Social Democratic government. Revolutionary agitation in Austria, where workers' councils were strengthened, was also aborted by the manoeuvring of a provocateur, Bettenheim, who incited the young Communist Party to a premature insurrection that was easily crushed (May 1919). In Great Britain the huge strike of the Clyde shipbuilders broke out. Workers' councils were formed and this gave rise to mutinies in the army. Strike movements took place in Holland, Norway, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy and even in the United States. But these movements were still too immature. This situation also gave a significant margin for manoeuvre to the French and British army, which remained mobilised at the end of the world war and were now charged with the dirty work of policemen to crush the revolutionary nuclei. Their intervention was concentrated on Russia (1919-20) and Hungary (from April 1919). When the first mutinies broke out in the army and in the face of campaigns against the war being waged against revolutionary Russia, these troops were rapidly replaced by colonial troops that were much more resilient when used against the proletariat.

As regards Hungary, the French command drew the lessons of the soldiers' refusal to repress the Szeged insurrection. France took a back seat and encouraged the neighbouring states to move against Hungary: Rumania and Czechoslovakia were to be the spearhead of these operations. These states combined the job of policeman with the conquest of territory at the experience of the Hungarian state.

Soviet Russia was under siege and unable to supply any military support. The attempt of the Red Army and Nestor Makhno’s guerrillas to launch a western offensive in June 1919 in order to open up a communication route with Hungary, came to nothing because of General Denikin's violent counter-attack.

But the main problem was that the proletariat's enemy was inside its own house.[28] On 30th March, the government of the “workers' dictatorship” pompously created the Red Army. It was the same old army under a new name. All the posts in the command structure remained in the hands of the old generals, who were supervised by a body of political commissars dominated by the Social Democrats and from which the Communists were excluded.

The government rejected a proposal from the Communists to dissolve the police force. The workers, however, took it upon themselves to disarm the guards; several Budapest factories passed resolutions on this point and they were immediately put into action: “So, only the Social Democrats were allowed to give permission but they did not authorise their disarmament. It was only after a long period of resistance that they agreed to sack the police and the security guards.[29] The formation of the Red Army was then decreed, integrating into its ranks the sacked police officers!

In this way, the army and the police, the backbone of the bourgeois state, remained intact thanks to these little manoeuvres. So it is not surprising that the Red Army disintegrated so easily in the face of the April offensive launched by Rumanian and Czech troops. Several regiments even went over to the enemy.

On 30th April, when invading troops were at the gates of Budapest, the mobilisation of the workers managed to reverse the situation. The anarchists and Szamuelly's group carried out powerful agitation. The 1st May demonstration was a massive success, there were slogans demanding “the armament of the people” and Szamuelly's group called for “all power to the workers' councils”. On 2nd May there was a huge meeting demanding the voluntary mobilisation of the workers. Within a few days in Budapest alone 40,000 of them had enrolled in the Red Army.

The Red Army, reinforced by the incorporation of masses of workers and by the arrival of international brigades of French and Russian volunteers, launched a huge offensive which obtained a series of victories over the Rumanian, Serbian and particularly over the Czech troops, which suffered an enormous defeat and whose soldiers deserted en masse. In Slovakia the actions of the workers and rebel soldiers led to the formation of a workers' council which, supported by the Red Army, proclaimed the Slovak Republic of Councils (16th June). The Council concluded an alliance with the Hungarian Republic and published a Manifesto addressed to all Czech workers.

This success alerted the world bourgeoisie: “On 8th June, the Paris Peace Conference, alarmed by the success of the Red Army, issued another ultimatum to Budapest, in which it demanded that the Red Army stop advancing and invited the Hungarian government to Paris to 'discuss Hungary's borders'. There was a second ultimatum, in which the use of force was threatened if the ultimatum was not respected.[30]

The Social Democrat Bohm, with the support of Bela Kun, began negotiations “at any cost” with the French state, which demanded that the first step be to abandon the Slovak Republic of Councils: this was accepted on 24th June. This Republic was crushed on 28th of the same month and all its known militants were hanged the day after.

At this point the Entente changed tactic. The demands of the Rumanian troops and their territorial pretensions had acted as a spur to tighten up the ranks of the Red Army, which had contributed to its May victories. A provisional Hungarian government was hastily formed around two brothers of the former president Karolyi, which was based in the zone occupied by the Rumanians, but it was then forced to withdraw reluctantly in order to give the impression of an “independent government”. At this point the right wing of Social Democracy re-appeared, giving its open support to this government.

On 24th January there was an attempted uprising in Budapest, organised by the right wing social democrats. The government negotiated with the insurgents and gave way to its demand to ban Lenin's Boys, the international brigades and the regiments controlled by the anarchists. This repression precipitated the disintegration of the Red Army: violent confrontations broke out within its ranks and desertions and mutinies became increasingly frequent.

The final defeat and brutal repression

The working population of Budapest was utterly demoralised. Many workers fled the city with their families. In the countryside the peasant revolts against the government increased. Rumania made a new push in its military offensive. From the middle of June the Social Democrats re-united and demanded that Bela Kun resign and that a new government be formed without the participation of the Communists. On 20th July, Bela Kun launched a desperate military offensive against the Rumanian troops with what was left of the Red Army, which finally surrendered on 23rd. On 31st July, Bela Kun at last resigned and a new government of Social Democrats and unions was formed, which unleashed a brutal repression against the communists, the anarchists and every militant worker who was unable to flee. Szamuelly was assassinated on 2nd August.

On 6th August this government was in its turn overthrown by a handful of army officers who did not come up against any resistance. Rumanian troops entered Budapest. The prisoners were subjected to forms of torture worthy of the Middle Ages, before being murdered. Wounded soldiers were thrown out of the hospitals and dragged onto the streets, where they were subjected to all kinds of humiliation before being killed. In the villages, the troops forced the peasants to organise trials against their neighbours who were under suspicion, and to torture and kill them. Any refusal was punished by setting fire to their houses with the occupants inside.

Whereas 129 counter-revolutionaries were executed during the 133 days that the Soviet Republic lasted, more than 5,000 people were assassinated between 15th and 31st August. There were 75,000 arrests. Mass trials began in October; 15,000 workers were tried by military tribunals, which gave out the death penalty and hard labour.

Between 1920 and 1944, the vicious dictatorship of Admiral Horty was supported by democrats in the west, in spite of his fascist sympathies, in gratitude for services rendered against the proletariat.

C.Mir 4/9/10

 

Part 1



[2]. By means of a co-ordinated action, the peasant committees seized the land from the highest aristocrat in the country, Count Esterhazy.

[3]. This shows the growing politicisation of the workers' movement but also its weaknesses in terms of consciousness because they were demanding a government composed of the Social Democratic traitors together with the Communists, who had been imprisoned thanks to the manoeuvres of the former.

[4]. During the First World War, the Entente regrouped the imperialist camp composed of Great Britain, France and Russia, at least up until the October Revolution.

[5]. Roland Bardy, 1919, the Commune of Budapest, p.83. Most of the information used in this article is taken from the French edition of this work, which contains copious documentation.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. The centrist wing of the Hungarian party was composed of cadres that were as reactionary as those of the right wing but they were much more cunning and able to adapt to the situation.

[8]. Roland Bardy, op. cit., p.84.

[9]. Bela Szanto, in his book The Hungarian Revolution of 1919, p 88 of the Spanish edition, chapter entitled, “With whom should the communists have united?”, quotes a Social Democrat, Buchinger, who admits that “uniting with the Communists on the basis of their programme as a whole was done without the slightest conviction”.

[10]. Roland Bardy, op. cit., p.85.

[11]. Ibid., p.86.

[12]. Ibid., p.99.

[13]. In February 1919, this individual declared: “the Communists should be sent before a firing squad” and in July 1919 he stated: “I am unable to take my place in the mental universe on which the dictatorship of the proletariat is based” (Szanto, op. cit., p.99).

[14]. Bela Szanto (op. cit., p 82 of the Spanish version) reports that on the following day, Bela Kun admitted to his party comrades: “Things are going too well. I couldn't sleep, I kept wondering all night how they could trip us up”, chapter entitled, “ Forward towards the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

[15]. Within the Anarchist Union there was a tendency organised autonomously, which called itself Lenin's Boys and which called for the “defence of the power of the workers' councils”. It was to play a significant role in the military actions in defence of the revolution.

[16]. Volume 29 of the English edition, p. 227 and p. 242. The documents are entitled “Record of wireless message to Bela Kun, March 23, 1919” and “Communication on the wireless negotiations with Bela Kun”.

[17]. The Workers' Council of Szeged – a town in the “demilitarised” zone although it was in fact occupied by 16,000 French soldiers – took revolutionary action. On 21st March, the Council organised the insurrection and occupied all strategic points. The French soldiers refused to fight against them and so their army command decided to retreat. On 23rd the council elected a governing council composed of a glass worker, a building worker and a lawyer. On 24th it contacted the new government of Budapest.

[18]. Szanto, op. cit., p.106, chapter entitled, “Contradictions in theory and practice and their consequences”.

[19]. Roland Bardy, op. cit., p.101.

[20]. Bela Szanto, op. cit., p.91, chapter entitled “With whom should the Communists have united?”

[21]. Roland Bardy, op. cit., p.105.

[22]. Ibid., p.117.

[23]. Ibid., p.111.

[24]. Ibid., p.112.

[25]. Ibid., p.127.

[26]. Ibid., p.126.

[27]. See the fourth article in our series on the German Revolution in International Review, n°. 136. https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2009/136/german-revolution-1919

[28]. Bela Szanto, op. cit., p 146: “The counter-revolution was so strong that in its magazines and pamphlets it was able to claim as its own, men who were at the head of the workers' movement or who held important positions in the dictatorship of the councils.

[29]. Idem, p.104, chapter entitled “Contradiction in theory and in practice and their consequences”.

[30]. Alan Woods, The Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, the Forgotten Revolution. https://www.marxist.com/hungarian-soviet-republic-1919.htm

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The Communist Left in Russia: Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Part 3)

We saw in the previous part of the Manifesto (published in International Review n°143) how it violently opposed any united front with the social democrats. In contrast, it called for a united front of all genuine revolutionary elements, among which it included the parties of the Third International as well as the Communist Workers’ Parties (KAPD in Germany). Faced with the national question that arose in the soviet republics, dealt with in the third part of this document, it advocated making a united front with the CPs of these republics which, according to the CI, “will have the same rights as the Bolshevik Party”.

However, the most important point discussed in this penultimate part of the Manifesto is that concerning the NEP.

The position of the Manifesto on this question is the following: “The NEP is the direct result of the situation of the productive forces in our country […] What capitalism did to smaller producers and landowners in agriculture and industry in the advanced capitalist countries (in England, the United States, Germany), the proletarian power must do in Russia.” In fact, this is not very different from Lenin’s view that the NEP was a form of state capitalism. In 1918, Lenin already argued that state capitalism constituted a step forward, a step towards socialism for the backward economy of Russia. In his speech at the Congress of the Bolshevik Party in 1922 he returned to this theme, stressing the fundamental difference between state capitalism under the direction of the reactionary bourgeoisie, and state capitalism administered by the proletarian state. The Manifesto sets out a series of suggestions for the “improvement” of the NEP, including independence from foreign capital.

Where the Manifesto diverges from Lenin and the official position of the Bolshevik Party is in stressing that: “The greatest peril linked to the New Economic Policy resides in the fact that the conditions of life of a very large number of leading cadres have begun to change rapidly.” It advocates measures for the regeneration of the soviet system: “In order to prevent the process of the degeneration of the New Economic Policy into a new policy of exploitation of the proletariat, it is necessary to lead the proletariat towards the accomplishment of the great tasks which are in front of it by a consistent realisation of the principles of proletarian democracy, which will give the working class the means to defend the conquests of the October revolution against all dangers wherever they come from. The internal regime of the party and the relationship of the party with the proletariat must be radically changed in this sense.”

The national question

The achievement of the united front tactic was especially difficult because of the national and cultural variety of peoples in the USSR.

The pernicious influence of the leading group of the RCP (B) is particularly revealed on the level of the national question. To any criticism and all protests: endless proscriptions (“systematic division of the workers’ party”); nominations which sometimes have an autocratic character (unpopular people who don’t have the confidence of local party comrades); orders given to the republics (to peoples who for decades and centuries have lived under the uninterrupted yoke of the Romanovs, personifying the domination of the Great Russian Nation), giving new vigour to chauvinist tendencies within the working masses, even penetrating into the national organisations of the Communist Party.

In these Russian republics the Russian revolution was indubitably accomplished by the local proletariat with the active support of the peasants. And if such and such national communist party developed an important and necessary work, this consisted primarily of supporting local organisations of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and its local supporters. But once the revolution was accomplished, the praxis of the party, of the leading group of the RCP (B), inspired by defiance towards local demands, ignored local experiences and imposed on the national communist parties various controllers, often of different nationalities, which exasperates chauvinist tendencies and gives the impression to the working masses that these territories are submitting to a regime of occupation. The realisation of the principles of proletarian democracy, with the institution of local state organisations and the party, will eliminate the roots of differences between workers and peasants in all nationalities. To effect this “united front” in the republics which have accomplished the social revolution, to effect proletarian democracy, means the institution of a national organisation within the International with communist parties having the same rights as the RCP (B) and constituting a particular section of the International. But since all the socialist republics have certain common tasks and that the communist party on the whole develops a leading role, one must convoke - for discussion and decisions on the common problems of all the nationalities of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - periodic general conferences of the party which elect, with a view to stable activity, an executive of the communist parties of the USSR. Such an organisational structure of the communist parties of the USSR can uproot, and without doubt will uproot, the distrust within the proletariat and it will moreover lend enormous importance to the agitation of the communist movement in every country.

The NEP (New Economic Policy)

The NEP is the direct result of the situation of the productive forces in our country. 

And really, suppose that our country is covered by a thick forest of factory chimneys, the land cultivated by tractors and not by ploughs, that wheat is harvested using reapers not a sickle, threshed with a threshing machine and not a sickle, winnowed by a winnowing machine, not a shovel; all these machines driven by a tractor - in these circumstances would we need a New Economic Policy? Not at all.

And imagine now that last year in Germany, France and England there was a social revolution, and that here in Russia the club and the plough have not been retired, replaced by Queen machine, but reign supreme. Just as they reign today (especially the plough), and the lack of animals requires a man to harness himself with his children, his wife following the plough. Would we then need a New Economic Policy? Yes.

And for what? For the same thing, to support a peasant family culture with its plough and, by this, to replace the plough with the tractor, and so change the material basis of a rural petty bourgeois economy in order to expand the economic base of the social revolution. 

What capitalism did to smaller producers and landowners in agriculture and industry in the advanced capitalist countries (in England, the United States, Germany), the proletarian power must do in Russia.

But how to accomplish this task? By ordering, shouting: “Hey you, petty bourgeois, disappear!”? You can make as many decrees as you like ordering a petty bourgeois element to disappear, the petty bourgeoisie still lives, like a fighting cock. And what would the pure proletarians do without it in a country like Russia? They would starve! Could we gather all the petty bourgeois elements into a collective commune? Impossible. So it will not be by decrees that we will fight the petty bourgeoisie, but by submitting it to the needs of a rational, mechanised, homogeneous economy. By the free struggle of economies based on the use of machines and new technical improvements against all other archaic modes of production that still dominate in a small artisanal economy. We cannot build communism with a plough.

But imagine that the socialist revolution took place in Germany or England. Would a New Economic Policy be possible at any time of the revolutionary process? 

It depends entirely on the importance and scale of petty bourgeois production. If its role in the life of the country is insignificant, we can dispense with the New Economic Policy and, by speeding up the legislative activity of the proletarian dictatorship, introduce new work methods. 

And where petty bourgeois production exerts a considerable influence on the economic life of the country, and the industry of the city and the countryside cannot do without it, the New Economic Policy will take place. The more large industries depend on small-scale production, the larger the scale of the NEP will be and its duration determined by the speed of the triumphant march of national socialist industry. 

In Russia, the New Economic Policy will last for a long time - not because anyone wants it to, but because one cannot do otherwise. Until our socialist industry ceases to depend on petty bourgeois production and property, there will be no question of suspending the NEP. 

The NEP and the countryside

The question of changing economic policy, of suspending the NEP, will be put on the agenda after the disappearance of petty bourgeois domination in agriculture. 

Currently, the strength and power of the socialist revolution are totally conditioned by the struggle for industrialisation, for the tractor over the plough. If the tractor tears the Russian land from the plough, socialism will win, but if the plough chases away the tractor, capitalism will win. The New Economic Policy will only disappear with the plough.

But before the sun rises, the dew can put out your eyes;[1] and for our eyes, and those of the socialist revolution, to stay healthy and safe, we must follow the right line towards the proletariat and the peasantry.

Our country is agrarian. We must not forget that the peasantry here is strongest and must be attracted to our side. We cannot abandon it to bourgeois ideology, because it would be the death of soviet Russia and paralyse the world revolution for a long time. The form of peasant organisation is a matter of life and death for the Russian and international revolution.

Russia entered the path of socialist revolution with 80% of its population still living on individual holdings. We pushed the peasant to expropriate the expropriators, to seize the land. But he did not understand this expropriation as the industrial worker understands it. His rural being determined his consciousness. Every peasant, with his individual holding, dreamed of increasing it. Landholdings did not have the same internal organisation as industrial enterprises in the cities, which is why it was necessary to "socialise the land” even though this was a regression, a decline of the productive forces, a step backwards. By expropriating more or less the expropriators, we could not think of immediately changing a mode of production with the existing productive forces, the peasant with his individual holding. We must never forget that the shape of the economy is entirely determined by the degree of development of productive forces, and our wooden plough cannot in any way be predisposed to the mode of socialist production.

There is no reason to believe that we can influence an owner by our communist propaganda and that he will then feel at home in a commune or a collective.

For three years, proletariat and bourgeoisie battled to win over the peasantry. Whoever gained ascendancy over the latter won the fight. We won because we were the strongest, most powerful. We must strengthen that power, but at the same time realise one thing: it will not be consolidated by the quality or quantity of speeches by our chatterboxes, but by the growth of the productive forces, by the triumph of the winnower over the shovel, the mower over the scythe, the combine harvester over the sickle, the tractor over the plough. In this way the socialised economy will triumph over petty bourgeois production and property.

Who can prove that the peasant is opposed to mowers, winnowers, reapers, binders and tractors? No one. No one can prove that the peasant will never adopt socialised forms of economy, but we know he will arrive on a tractor and not by yoking himself to the plough.

G.V. Plekhanov tells of a native African tribe that had it against the Europeans and considered abominable everything they did. The imitation of European manners, customs and ways of working was seen as a cardinal sin. But the same natives, who used stone axes, having seen the Europeans handle axes of steel, soon began to obtain the latter, despite chanting magic spells and hiding.

Certainly, for the peasant, all that the communists do and all that tastes of the commune is abominable. But we must force him to substitute the tractor for the plough, just like the natives substituted the steel axe for the stone. It is much easier for us to do this than for the Europeans in Africa.

If we want to develop the influence of the proletariat in the peasant milieu, we shouldn’t remind the cultivator too often that it's the working class that gave him the land, because he may well answer: “Thank you, my good man, and now, why are you here? To levy a tax in kind? This tax, you will have it, but don't say yesterday you did a lot of good things, tell us what good things you can do today. Otherwise, my colonel, fuck you!" 

All the counter-revolutionary parties, from the Mensheviks to the SRs and the monarchists included, based their pseudo-scientific theories of the inevitable coming of a bourgeois paradise on the thesis that in Russia capitalism has not yet exhausted all its potential, that there remains great potential for development and prosperity, that it will gradually embrace all agriculture by introducing industrial working methods. This is why, they concluded, if the Bolsheviks made a coup d’etat, if they took the power to build socialism without waiting for the necessary material conditions, they must either transform themselves into a true bourgeois democracy, or the forces developed inside would explode politically, overthrowing the communists resistant to economic laws and putting in place a coalition of Martov, Chernov, Miliukov, whose regime would give a free reign to the development of the country’s productive forces.

Of course, everyone knows that Russia is a country more backward than England, the United States, Germany, France etc. But everyone must understand: if the proletariat in this country was strong enough to take power, to expropriate the expropriators, remove the stubborn resistance of the oppressors supported by the bourgeoisie of the entire world, then this proletariat is certainly strong enough to supplant the anarchic capitalist mechanisation of agriculture through a consistent and planned mechanisation favourable to industry and the proletarian power, supported by the conscious aspirations of the peasants to see their work made easier.

Who says this is easy to do? No one. Especially after the immense devastation that the SRs, Mensheviks, bourgeoisie and landowners have created by triggering the civil war. It is hard to do but it will be done, even if the Mensheviks and SRs, allied with Cadets and the monarchists, will leave no stone unturned in pushing for the return of the bourgeoisie.

We need to ask this question in a practical setting. Not long ago, comrade Lenin wrote a letter to émigré American comrades thanking them for the technical assistance they had lent us in organising model sovkhozes and kolkhozes using American tractors for ploughing and harvesting. And Pravda published a report of the work of such a commune in Perm.

Like any communist, we are delighted that the proletarians of America come to our aid, where it is needed most. But our attention was involuntarily drawn to a fragment of this report saying that the tractors had been idle for a long time because: 1) gasoline had proved impure and 2) they had been obliged to import it from afar, with delays; 3) drivers in the village had taken a long time learning how to handle the tractors, 4) roads and especially bridges were not good for the tractors.

If the mechanisation of agriculture determines the fate of our revolution and is a matter of concern for the world proletariat, it should develop on a more solid foundation. Without renouncing aid of such a magnitude (that we grant our overseas comrades) or diminishing its importance, we have yet to think about the results it will enable us to obtain.

If the mechanisation of agriculture determines the fate of our revolution and is therefore not alien to the proletariat of the world, it must develop on a firmer basis. Without renouncing aid of this magnitude (which our overseas comrades have granted us) or diminishing its importance, we have yet to think about the results it will help us obtain.

First we need to draw attention to the fact that these tractors are not produced in our factories. Perhaps they don’t have to be produced in Russia, but if this assistance takes the scope, our agriculture will be linked to the industry of the United States.

Now we must ask what type of tractor, what engine is applicable to Russian conditions. 1) It must use oil as fuel and not be unreliable due to poor quality of gasoline; 2) it must be easy to use so that not only professional drivers know how to drive it and so we can easily train drivers as needed; 3) you must have strength levels: 100, 80, 60, 40, 30, 25, depending on the type of soil, to plough virgin or already cultivated land; 4) it must be a universal motor for ploughing, threshing, mowing, transportation of wheat; 5) it needs to be manufactured in Russian factories and not go in search of parts overseas; otherwise instead of an alliance of city and countryside, there will be an alliance of the countryside and foreign traders; 6) it must use a local fuel.

After the horrors of war and famine, our country promises to the machine in agriculture a triumph larger and more imminent than anywhere in the world. For now, even the simple wooden plough, the main tool of work in our countryside, is lacking, and where there are any, there are no animals to harness. Machines could do things impossible to imagine.

Our experts believe that blind imitation of the United States would be harmful to our economy; they also think that despite everything, mass production of engines essential to our agriculture is possible with our technical means. This task is even easier to solve as our steel industry is always complaining about lack of orders, with factories operating at half their capacity, and therefore at a loss; so give them orders.

Mass production of a simple universal agricultural machine, that trained mechanics could quickly drive, which would use oil and not be at the whim of poor quality gasoline, must be organised in the regions of Russia where it is easy to transport oil either by train or by boat. One could use oil motors in the south of Russia, Ukraine, central Russia, in the Volga and Kama regions; it would not work in Siberia because the transport of oil would be very expensive. The vast area of Siberia is a problem for our industry. But there are other types of fuel in Siberia, including wood; this is why steam engines could occupy an important place. If we succeed in solving the problem of wood distillation, of extracting wood spirit in Siberia, we could use wood engines. Which of the two engines will be the most cost-effective, technical specialists will decide based on practical results.

On 10 November 1920, Pravda, under the heading “Gigantic Enterprise” reported the news of the constitution of the “International Society of Aid for the Renaissance of Industry and Agriculture in the Urals”. Some very important state trusts and “International Workers’ Aid” control this society which already disposes of capital of two million gold roubles and is entering into business with the American firm “Keith” by acquiring a large number of tractors; a business evidently judged advantageous.

The participation of foreign capital is necessary, but in what domain? Here, we want to submit to everyone the following questions: if “International Workers’ Aid” can help us thanks to its relationship with the firm “Keith”, why can’t it, with any other firm, organise amongst ourselves, in Russia, the production of machines which are necessary for our agriculture? Wouldn’t it be preferable to use the two million gold roubles that the Society possesses in the production of tractors here, amongst us? Is it really necessary to give our gold to the firm “Keith” and to link to the latter the fate of our agricultural economy?

In a technical book, we read that to subject agricultural regions in occupied countries to their certain economic domination, German firms came with tractors, ploughed the land and then sold the machines to the farmers for a penny. It goes without saying that these firms thereafter asked a high price, but the tractors were sold already. This was conquest without losing a single drop of blood. 

The willingness of the Keith firm to help us and give us credit looks similar and we should be very careful. 

While it is relatively unlikely that the Keith firm can provide us with tractors adapted to Russian conditions, even poorly adapted tractors will be a guaranteed success given the deplorable conditions of our agriculture, because anything would succeed in such a situation. If the necessary production of engines adapted to Russian conditions is possible anyway, why do we need the Keith firm? Because, as far as we know, it is not definitive that we cannot organise production of the necessary machinery ourselves.

If the ideas and calculations of the Petrograd engineers are actually correct, the two million gold roubles awarded by this Society would be a much more solid investment for an economic recovery in the Urals than the Keith firm’s aid.

In any case, we must discuss this question seriously, because it has a significance that is not only economic but also political, not only for soviet Russia but also the world revolution. And we cannot solve it at a stroke. We need to know what we could do with this gold, and think: if the right people and the authorities decide it is not even worth a try and it is better to go directly overseas, so be it.

We're afraid of having “staircase wit”:[2] first we give the gold to Mr Keith, then we make our disapproval public, all the while boasting that we are not afraid to admit our mistakes.

If we mechanise agriculture in Russia, by producing the necessary machinery in our factories rather than purchasing them from the foreign Keith firm, city and countryside will be indissolubly linked by the growth of the productive forces, brought closer to one another; we will then need to consolidate this ideological reconciliation by organising “unions of a particular type” (after the RCP programme). These are the indispensable conditions for the peaceful abolition of capitalist relations, enlargement of the basis of the socialist revolution with the help of a new economic policy.[3]

Our socialist revolution will destroy petty bourgeois production and ownership not by declaring socialisation, municipalisation, nationalisation, but by a conscious and consistent struggle of modern methods of production at the expense of outdated, disadvantageous methods, by the progressive introduction of socialism. This is exactly the essence of the leap from capitalist necessity to socialist freedom.

New economic and political policy put simply

And whatever "right-thinking" people say, it is firstly the active working class and secondly the peasantry (and not the communist officials, even the best and the brightest) who are able to implement this policy.

The New Economic Policy determined by the state of productive forces of our country hides within it dangers for the proletariat. We must not only show that the revolution stands up to a practical examination on the level of the economy and that socialist economic forms are in fact better than capitalist ones, but we must also affirm our socialist position without engendering an oligarchic caste which keeps economic and political power above all due to a fear of the whole working class. To prevent the risk of the degeneration of the New Economic Policy into a new policy for exploitation of the proletariat, it is necessary to lead the proletariat to the accomplishment of the great tasks in front of it by a consistent realisation of the principles of proletarian democracy, which will give the working class the means to defend the conquests of the October revolution against all dangers wherever they come from. The internal regime of the party and the relationship of the party with the proletariat must be radically changed in this sense.

The greatest peril linked to the New Economic Policy resides in the fact that the conditions of life of a very large number of leading cadres have begun to change rapidly. When such a situation arrives at a point where the members of the administration of certain trusts, for example the Sugar Trust, receive a monthly salary of 200 gold roubles, get a free or modestly priced fine apartment, have a car for their travelling and have other possibilities for the necessities of life at low prices, whereas the workers, although communist, beyond the modest food rations accorded to them by the state receive only 4 to 5 roubles a month on average (and from this they must also pay rent and electricity), it is really quite obvious that there is now a profound difference in the mode of life of one and the other. If this state of things doesn’t change very quickly but exercises its influence ten or twenty years hence, the economic condition of the one and the other will determine their consciousness and they will collide from two opposing camps. We must understand that even if the - often renewed - leading posts are occupied by persons of very low social origins, they occupy a position which is in no way proletarian. They form a very slender social layer. Influenced by their economic condition they consider themselves the only ones appropriate for certain reserved tasks, the only ones capable of transforming the economy of the country, of satisfying the demands of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the factory councils, of workers’ delegates, with the help of the verse: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”.

In reality, they consider these demands as expressions of the influence of petty-bourgeois elements, of counter-revolutionary forces. Thus, here, without any doubt, a danger threatens the conquests of the proletariat and it comes from a side where one would least expect it. For us the danger is that proletarian power degenerates into the hegemony of a powerful group deciding to take political and economic power into its own hands, naturally under the pretence of very noble intentions“in the interests of the proletariat, of the world revolution and other very high ideals”. Yes, the danger of an oligarchic degeneration really exists. 

But in countries where petty-bourgeois production has a decisive influence, where economic policy helps to accelerate and strengthen the most individualistic views of the petty-bourgeois landowner, we must exert constant pressure on the foundations of the petty bourgeois element. And who will do this? Will it be the same officials, these saviours of distressed humanity? Even if they have all the wisdom of Solomon - or Lenin - they will still not be able to do it. Only the working class is capable of this, led by the party that lives its life, suffers its sufferings, its maladies, a party that is not afraid of the active participation of the proletariat in the life of the country. 

It is harmful and counter-revolutionary to tell fables to the proletariat to lull its consciousness. But what are we told? “Stay silent, attend demonstrations when you are invited, sing the Internationale when necessary, the rest will be done without you by brave boys, almost workers like you, but who are smarter than you and know everything about communism, so stay quiet and soon you will enter the socialist kingdom”. This, we are told, is revolutionary socialism pure and simple. It is they who defend the idea that brilliant individuals, full of dynamism and armed with diverse talents, from all classes of society (and this seems to be the case) can take this grey mass (the working class) to a high and perfect kingdom, where there will be neither disease nor punishments, nor sighing, but life everlasting. This is exactly the style of the Socialist-Revolutionary “holy fathers”.

We need to replace existing practice with a new practice based on autonomous working class activity and not on intimidation by the party. 

In 1917, we needed a developed democracy and in 1918, 1919 and 1920, it was necessary to cut out all the apparatus leaders and replace them with the autocratic power of officials appointed from above who decreed all; in 1922, faced with very different tasks than before, it is beyond doubt that we need other forms of organisation and working methods. In the factories and plants (domestic) we must organise councils of workers’ deputies to serve as the main nuclei of state power; we must put into practice the point of the RCP programme that says: “The Soviet state brings together the state apparatus and the masses and an element in this is the fact that the production unit (factory, plant) becomes the main nucleus of the state instead of the district" (cf. the RCP program, policy division, item 5). It is these main nuclei of state power in the factories and plants that must be restored in councils of workers’ deputies, which will take the place of our wise comrades who are currently leading the economy and the country.

Perhaps some attentive readers will accuse us of factionalism (article 102 of the Criminal Code), of undermining the sacred foundations of proletarian power. There is nothing to say to such readers. 

But others say: “Show us a country where workers enjoy the same rights and freedoms as in Russia”. That said, they think they deserve the Order of the Red Flag for crushing a faction, without pain and bloodshed at that. To these, we can say something. Show us then, dear friends, a country where power belongs to the working class? Such a country does not exist, so the question is absurd. The problem is not to be more liberal, more democratic than an imperialist power (which would be no great merit); the problem is to solve the tasks facing the only country in the world that made the coup of October, to prevent the NEP (New Economic Policy) from becoming an “NEP” (New Exploitation of the Proletariat), so that in ten years the proletariat, fooled again, is not forced to resume its perhaps bloody struggle to overthrow the oligarchy and ensure its major conquests. The proletariat can ensure this by directly participating in solving these tasks, establishing a workers’ democracy, putting into practice one of the main points of the RCP programme that says: “bourgeois democracy restricts itself to formally declaring rights and political freedoms”, namely freedom of association, press, equality for all citizens. But in reality, administrative practice and especially the economic enslavement of the workers does not allow them to fully enjoy these rights and freedoms.

Instead of formally proclaiming them, proletarian democracy puts them into practice, above all for classes of people formerly oppressed by capitalism, i.e. the proletariat and peasantry. For this, the soviet power expropriated the premises, printing works, paper depots of the bourgeoisie, and put them at the disposal of workers and their organisations.

The task of the RCP (Bolshevik) is to enable the broad masses of working people to enjoy democratic rights and freedoms on a more and more developed material basis (cf. the RCP programme, policy division, item 3).

It would have been absurd and counter-revolutionary to claim the achievement of these programmatic theses in 1918, 1919 or 1920; but it is even more absurd and counter-revolutionary to pronounce against their realisation in 1922.

If we want to improve the position of soviet Russia in the world, or restore our industry, or expand the material basis of our socialist revolution by mechanising agriculture, or face the dangerous effects of a New Economic Policy, inevitably it comes back to the working class which alone is capable of doing everything. The less it is strong, the stronger it must organise itself

And the good boys who occupy the offices cannot resolve such grand tasks.

Unfortunately the majority of the leaders of the RCP doesn’t think in the same way. To all questions of workers’ democracy, Lenin, in a speech made to the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, responded thus: “To every union which poses, in general, the question of whether the unions should participate in production I would say: stop such chattering (applause), rather answer practically and tell me (if you occupy a responsible post, if you have the authority, if you are a militant of the communist party or a union): have you organised production well, in how many years, how many people do you have under you, a thousand, tens of thousands? Give me a list of those to whom you have confided an economic work that you have brought to a conclusion, instead of you attacking twenty things at once and not finishing any of them because of lack of time. Among us, with our soviet morals, we don’t always conclude things well, one talks of success over a number of years; we are afraid of learning in comparison with the merchant who pockets a 100% profit and more, you prefer to write a fine resolution on raw materials and are proud of the title of communist party or union representative of the proletariat. I ask your pardon. What do you call the proletariat? It is the class that works in industry. But where is this great industry? What is this proletariat then? What is your industry? Why is it paralysed? Because there are no longer any raw materials. Have you been able to procure any of them? No. You write an enactment resolution to collect them, and you are in the soup; and the people will say that that is absurd; thus you resemble the geese who, in antiquity, saved Rome”, and who, to continue the speech of Lenin (according to the moral of the well known fable of Krylov) must be guided to market with a big stick in order to be sold.

Suppose that the point of view of the former Workers’ Opposition on the role and tasks of trade unions is wrong. That this view expresses not the position of the working class in power, but that of a professional ministry. These comrades want to take back the management of the economy by snatching it from the hands of soviet officials without involving the working class in that management through proletarian democracy and the organisation of councils of workers’ deputies intended as the main nuclei of state power. They simply call for the proletarianisation of these bureaucratic nests. And they are wrong.

We cannot share Lenin’s words about proletarian democracy and the participation of the proletariat in the popular economy. The greatest discovery made by comrade Lenin is that we no longer have a proletariat. We rejoice with you, comrade Lenin! You are thus the leader of a proletariat which doesn’t even exist! You are the leader of the government of a proletarian dictatorship without a proletariat! You are the leader of the communist party but not of the proletariat!

Contrary to comrade Lenin, his colleague on the central committee and the political bureau, Kamenev, has quite another opinion. He sees the proletariat everywhere. He said: "1) The balance sheet of the conquest of October is that the organised working class as a whole has at its disposal the immense riches of all domestic industry, transport, timber, mining, let alone political power. 2) Socialised industry is the principal possession of the proletariat”,etc. etc. One can cite many other examples. Kamenevsees the proletariat in the functionaries who, since Moscow, have set themselves up through bureaucratic channels and he himself is, according to his own opinion, much more proletarian than no matter what worker. When talking about the proletariat, he doesn’t say: “THEM”, but “WE, the proletariat...” Too many proletarians of the Kamenev type participate in the management of the popular economy; that’s why he comes on like a proletarian with strange speeches about proletarian democracy and the participation of the proletariat in economic management! “Please” says Kamenev, “what are you talking about? Are we not the proletariat, a proletariat organised as a compact unity, as a class?

Comrade Lenin considers all discussion on the participation of the proletariat in the management of the popular economy as useless chatter because there is no proletariat; Kamenev is of the same opinion, but because the proletariat “as a compact unity, as a class” already governs the country and the economy since all the bureaucrats are considered by him as proletarians. They, naturally, are in agreement and, already on some points, they particularly understand each other well because since the October revolution Kamenev has entered into a contract not to take a position against comrade Lenin and not to contradict him. They agree on the fact that the proletariat exists - naturally not only the one seen by Kamenev - but also on the fact that its low level of preparation, its material condition, its political ignorance dictates “that the geese are kept far away from the economy with a big stick”. And in reality that is what has happened.

Comrade Lenin has here applied the fable in a rather improper fashion. The geese of Krylov cried that their ancestors saved Rome (their ancestors, comrade Lenin) whereas the working class doesn’t talk of its ancestors but of itself, because it (the working class, comrade Lenin) has accomplished the social revolution and from this fact it wants to control the country and the economy itself. But comrade Lenin has taken the working class for Krylov’s geese and waving his stick, he says to it: “Leave your ancestors in peace! You, on the other hand, what have you done?” What can the proletariat respond to comrade Lenin?

You can calmly threaten us with a stick, we will however say loud and clear that the coherent and unhesitating realisation of proletarian democracy is today a necessity that the Russian proletarian class feels to its very marrow; because it is a force. Come what may, but the devil will not always be at the door of the poor worker.

(To be continued)

Part 1

Part 2

 

 


[1]. Russian proverb

[2]. A French expression meaning to think of a clever riposte too late after a witty remark or insult has been made [ICC note].

[3]. It goes without saying that existing forms of organisation of the peasantry are historically inevitable in the transitional period [ICC note].

 

 

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Working class history

International Review no.145 - 2nd Quarter 2011

Only the proletarian revolution can save humanity from the disaster of capitalism

Social revolts in North Africa and the Middle East, nuclear catastrophe in Japan, war in Libya 

The last few months have been rich in historic events. Although the revolts in North Africa and the Middle East are not directly linked to the tsunami which ravaged Japan and the nuclear crisis which ensued, all these events highlight the alternative which, more than ever, is facing humanity: socialism or barbarism. While the echo of the uprisings is still ringing in numerous countries, capitalist society is proving lamentably unable to deal with nuclear power. On the other hand, the heroism of the Japanese workers who are putting their lives at risk at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is a striking contrast to the disgusting hypocrisy of the imperialist powers in Libya. 

The mobilisation of the masses brings down governments

For several months, protest movements, unprecedented in their geographic spread,[1] have been shaking a whole series of countries. The initial revolts in the Mahgreb were rapidly emulated over the next few weeks, with demonstrations in Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Iran, Sub-Saharan Africa etc. It is impossible to make a strict identity between all these movements, both in terms of their class content and of the response of the bourgeoisie, but a common factor is the economic crisis, which since 2008 has plunged whole populations into an increasingly unbearable poverty and made the corrupt and repressive regimes in the region more and more resented.

The working class has not yet presented itself in these events as an autonomous force capable of assuming the leadership of the movements, which have often taken the form of revolts by the whole non-exploiting population, from ruined peasants to middle strata on the road to proletarianisation. But, on the one hand, the influence of the working class on the consciousness expressed in these movements has been tangible, both in the slogans and the forms of organisation they have thrown up. A tendency towards self-organisation, for example, appeared in the neighbourhood protection committees set up in Egypt and Tunisia to face up to police repression and the bands of thugs cynically released from prison to sow chaos. Above all, many of these revolts openly sought to widen the movement through mass demonstrations, assemblies and attempts to coordinate and centralise decision-making. At the same time, the working class sometimes played a decisive role in the way events unfolded. It was in Egypt, where the working class is the most concentrated and experienced in the region, that workers’ strikes were the most massive. Their rapid extension and the rejection of control by the official unions played a major role in pushing the military leaders, under pressure from the USA, to get rid of Hosni Mubarak.   

Mobilisations are continuing and the wind of revolt is blowing through other countries; the bourgeoisie is having a difficult time putting a stop to it all. Above all in Egypt and Tunisia, where the “peoples’ spring” is supposed to have triumphed, there are still strikes and confrontations with the “democratic” state. All of these revolts constitute a formidable bank of experience on the road that leads to revolutionary consciousness. Nevertheless, while the wave of revolts, for the first time in a long while, has explicitly linked political issues to the economic question, the response to this question has come up against the illusions which still weigh on the working class, in particular the democratic and nationalist mirage. These weaknesses have often allowed the democratic pseudo-opposition to present itself as an alternative to the corrupt cliques in power. In fact, these “new governments” are often still so stuffed with members of the old teams that it’s a joke. In Tunisia, the population has even forced part of the government to resign when it appeared too obviously as an exact re-edition of the Ben Ali regime. In Egypt, the army, Mubarak’s historic power-base now holds all the command posts of the state and is already manoeuvring to ensure its position in the new arrangement. In Libya, the “Interim National Council” is led by...Gaddafi’s former interior minister, Abdel Fattah Younes, and a gang of former high officials who, having organised repression for their master and having benefited from his pecuniary generosity, have suddenly discovered a taste for human rights and democracy.        

In Libya, imperialist war rages on the ruins of a popular revolt

On the basis of these weaknesses, the situation in Libya has evolved in a particular way, given that what at the beginning made its appearance as an uprising of the population against the Gaddafi regime has been transformed into a war between several bourgeois factions, which has now seen the intervention of the great imperialist powers, making it even more of a bloody and surreal cacophony. The displacement of the struggle onto the terrain of bourgeois interests, into a battle for control of the Libyan state by one or another of the contending factions, was made all the easier by the fact that the working class in Libya is very weak. Local industry is notably backward and is more or less reduced to the production of oil, directly piloted by the Gaddafi clique which has never succeeded in placing the national interest above its own particular interests. The working class in Libya is largely made up of foreign workers, some of whom may have been involved in the events at the beginning but ended up fleeing the massacres, not least because of the difficulty of recognising itself in a “revolution” with a nationalist accent. Libya provides a negative and tragic illustration of the necessity for the working class to occupy a central position within popular revolts; its effacement to a great extent explains the evolution of the situation.

Since 19th March, after several weeks of massacres, under the pretext of a humanitarian intervention “to save the martyred Libyan people”, a rather uneasy coalition, made up of Canada, the USA, Italy, France, Britain and others has directly engaged its military forces in support of the Interim National Council. Every day, missiles are launched and planes take off to lay a carpet of bombs in all the regions inhabited by the armed forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime. In short, it’s war. What strikes you right away is the incredible hypocrisy of the great powers, which on the one hand brandish the rather worn flag of humanitarianism and, at the same time, do nothing about the slaughter of the masses in revolt in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria etc. Where was this coalition when Gaddafi massacred 1000 prisoners in the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in 1996? In truth, this regime has been imprisoning, torturing, terrorising, executing, and making opponents disappear for the past 40 years with complete impunity. Yesterday, where was this coalition when Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt or Bouteflika in Algeria were shooting at crowds during the January and February uprisings? Behind this ignoble rhetoric, the dead continue to pile up in the morgues. And NATO is already envisaging prolonging operations for several weeks in order to ensure the triumph of peace and democracy. 

In reality, each power is intervening in Libya for its own reasons. The cacophony of the coalition, which hasn’t even been able to set up a chain of command, illustrates the degree to which these countries have joined this adventure in dispersed order with the aim of strengthening their own position in the region, like vultures picking over a corpse. From the USA’s point of view, Libya does not represent a major strategic interest because it already has powerful allies in the region, notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This explains their initial confusion during the negotiations at the UN. Nonetheless the USA, with its historic support for Israel, has a disastrous image in the Arab world, one which has hardly been improved by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. On top of this the revolts have begun to give rise to governments which are more amenable to anti-American opinion; and if the US is to ensure its presence in the region, it has to polish up its image in the eyes of these new cliques. And above all the US government can’t give a free hand to Britain and France. The latter also need to improve their image, especially Britain, given its involvement in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The French government, despite its numerous gaffes, does have a certain popularity in the Arab countries, acquired under De Gaulle and reinforced by its refusal to take part in the Iraq war in 2003. An intervention against Gaddafi, who is much too uncontrollable and unpredictable for his neighbours’ taste, is bound to be appreciated by the latter and will make it possible for France to increase its influence. Behind their fine phrases and broad smiles, each bourgeois faction is intervening for its own interests and, along with Gaddafi, they are all taking up their positions in this sinister danse macabre.

In Japan as everywhere else, nature produces phenomena, capitalism produces catastrophes

Several thousand miles from Libya, in the world’s third-ranking economic power, capitalism also sows death and demonstrates that nowhere, even at the heart of the industrialised countries, is humanity protected from the irresponsibility and negligence of the bourgeoisie. Its tame media have, as ever, presented the earthquake and tsunami which ravaged Japan as a product of fate that no one could do anything about. It is of course impossible to prevent nature from unleashing its powers, but installing populations in danger zones in wooden houses has nothing to do with fate, and neither has the use of ageing nuclear power stations in the middle of this whole environment.

The bourgeoisie is directly responsible for the murderous scale of this catastrophe. For the needs of production, capitalism has concentrated populations and industries to a delirious degree. Japan is a caricature of this historical phenomenon: tens of millions of people massed together in a thin strip of land which is particularly subject to earthquakes and thus to tsunamis. Obviously, earthquake resistant structures have been erected for the rich and as office buildings: concrete would have sufficed to hold back the wave for many, but the working class has to live in wooden rabbit-hutches in the most dangerous areas. At the very least the population could have been installed further away from the coast, but Japan is an exporting country and, to maximise profit, it is better to build factories near the ports. Some factories were also swept away by the waters, adding industrial catastrophe to the nuclear disaster. In this context, a humanitarian crisis is threatening one of the centres of world capitalism and this will increase the scale of the hecatomb. With much infrastructure and equipment out of commission, tens of thousands of people have been abandoned to their lot, without food and water.  

But the bourgeoisie’s irresponsibility doesn’t end there: it has built 17 nuclear plants in the area, all of dubious safety. The situation round the Fukushima plant, which has been so severely damaged, remains uncertain, but the confused communications issued by the authorities makes us fear the worst. It already seems to be true that a nuclear disaster on the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl explosion is unfolding before the eyes of a powerless government, reduced to the equivalent of using sticking plaster and sacrificing many workers. The construction of these plants on risky coastlines doesn’t seem to be the most brilliant idea, especially when they have been in service for several decades and have had a minimum level of maintenance. It is incredible to note that the Fukushima plant has already been the victim of several hundred incidents linked to poor safety levels, which has resulted in the resignations of a number of scandalised officers.

It’s not nature that is responsible for these catastrophes; the laws of capitalism, which have become an absurdity, are responsible from start to finish, in the poorest countries and in the most powerful ones. The situation in Libya and the events in Japan clearly show that the only future the bourgeoisie can offer us is growing and permanent chaos. But the revolts in the Arab countries, for all their weaknesses, do show us a different way ahead – the struggle of the exploited against the capitalist state, the only way out of the generalised catastrophe threatening humanity.

V 27/3/11   

 

 


[1]. In fact, not since 1848 or 1917-19 have we seen such an extensive wave of simultaneous revolts. See the next article in this issue: “What is happening in the Middle East”. 

 

Recent and ongoing: 

What is happening in the Middle East?

The current events in the Middle East and North Africa are of major historic importance, the consequences of which are difficult to discern. Nevertheless, it is important to develop a discussion about them that will enable revolutionaries to elaborate a coherent framework of analysis. The points that follow are neither that framework in itself, still less a detailed description of what has been taking place, but simply some basic reference points aimed at stimulating the debate.[1]  

1.       Not since 1848 or 1917-19 have we seen such a widespread, simultaneous tide of revolt. While the epicentre of the movement has been in North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but also Algeria and Morocco), protests against the existing regimes have broken out in Gaza, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, while a number of other repressive Arab states, notably Syria, have been on high alert. The same goes for the Stalinist regime in China. There are also clear echoes of the protests in the rest of Africa: Sudan, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Swaziland.... We can also see the direct impact of the revolts in the demonstrations against government corruption and the effects of the economic crisis in Croatia, in the banners and slogans of student demonstrations in the UK and workers’ struggles in Wisconsin, and no doubt in many other countries as well. This is not to say that all these movements in the Arab world are identical, either in their class content, their demands, or in the response of the ruling class, but there are evidently a number of common features which make it possible to talk about the phenomenon as a whole.

2.       The historical context in which these events are unfolding are the following:

-         a profound economic crisis, the most severe in the history of capitalism, which has hit the weaker economies of the Arab world with particular force, and which is already plunging millions into abject poverty, with the prospect of even worse conditions ahead. The youth, which, in contrast to many of the “ageing” central countries, makes up a very large percentage of the total population, has been hit especially hard, with unemployment and the lack of any visible future the lot of educated and uneducated young people alike. In every case, it has been the young people who have been in the forefront of these movements;

-         the unbearably corrupt and repressive nature of all the regimes in the region. While for a long time the ruthless activity of the secret police or the armed forces has kept the population in a state of atomisation and fear, these very weapons of the state have now served to generalise the will to gather together and resist. This was very clear in Egypt, for example, when Mubarak dispatched his army of thugs and policemen in civilian clothes to terrorise the masses holding Tahrir Square: these provocations merely strengthened the latter’s resolve to defend themselves and drew thousands more into the protests. Similarly, the outrageous corruption and greed of the ruling cliques, who have amassed huge private fortunes while the vast majority struggled to survive from day to day, further fuelled the flames of rebellion once populations had begun to overcome their fears;

-         this sudden loss of fear, commented on by many of the participants, is a product not only of changes at the local and regional level, but also of a climate of growing discontent and overt class struggle at the international level. Everywhere, faced with the economic crisis, the exploited and the oppressed have been increasingly unwilling to make the sacrifices demanded of them. Here again, the role played by the new generation has been essential, and in this sense the youth rebellion in Greece two years ago, the student struggles in the UK and Italy, the fight against pension reforms in France have also had their impact in the “Arab” world, especially in the age of Facebook and Twitter when it is much harder for the bourgeoisie to maintain a consistent black-out of struggles against the status quo. 

3.       The class nature of these movements is not uniform and varies from country to country and according to different phases. On the whole, however, we can characterise them as movements of the non-exploiting classes, social revolts against the state. The working class has, in general, not been in the leadership of these rebellions but it has certainly had a significant presence and influence which can be discerned both in the methods and forms of organisation thrown up by the movement and, in certain cases, by the specific development of workers’ struggles, such as the strikes in Algeria and above all the major wave of strikes in Egypt which were a key factor in the decision to dump Mubarak (and which we have written about in these pages). In the majority of these countries, the proletariat is not the only oppressed class. The peasantry, and other strata deriving from even older modes of production, although largely fragmented and ruined by decades of capitalist decline, still have a weight in the rural areas, while in the cities, where the revolts have always been centred, the working class exists alongside a large middle class which is on the road towards proletarianisation but still has its specific features, and a mass of slum dwellers who are made up partly of proletarians and partly of small traders and more lumpenised elements. Even in Egypt, which has the most concentrated and experienced working class, eyewitnesses in Tahrir Square emphasised that the protests had mobilised “all classes”, with the exception of the upper echelons of the regime. In other countries the weight of the non-proletarian strata has been much stronger than it has been in the majority of struggles in the central countries. 

4.       In trying to understand the class nature of these rebellions, we therefore have to avoid two symmetrical errors: on the one hand, a blanket identification of all the masses in movement with the proletariat (a position most characteristic of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste), and on the other hand a rejection of anything positive in revolts which are not explicitly working class. The question posed here takes us back to previous events, such as those in Iran at the end of the 1970s, where again we saw a popular revolt in which, for a while, the working class was able to assume a leading role, though this in the end was not sufficient to prevent the recuperation of the movement by the Islamists. At a more historical level, the problem of the relationship between the working class and more general social revolts is also the problem of the state in the period of transition, which emerges from the movement of all the non-exploiting classes but in the face of which the working class needs to maintain its class autonomy.   

5.       In the Russian revolution, the soviet form was engendered by the working class but it also provided a model of organisation for all the oppressed. Without losing a sense of proportion – because we are still a long way from a revolutionary situation in which the working class is able to provide clear political leadership to the other strata – we can see that working class methods of struggle have had an impact on the social revolts in the Arab world:

-         in tendencies towards self-organisation, which appeared most clearly in the neighbourhood protection committees that emerged as a response to the Egyptian regime’s tactic of unleashing criminal gangs against the population, in the “delegate” structure of some of the massive meetings in Tahrir Square, in the whole process of collective discussion and decision making;

-         in the seizing of spaces normally controlled by the state to provide a central focus for assembling and organising on a massive scale; 

-         in a conscious assumption of the necessity for massive self-defence against the thugs and police dispatched by the regimes, but at the same time a rejection of gratuitous violence, of destruction and looting for their own sake; 

-         in deliberate efforts to overcome sectarian and other divisions which have been cynically manipulated by the regimes: divisions between Christian and Muslim, Shia and Sunni, religious and secular, men and women;

-         in the numerous attempts to fraternise with the rank and file soldiers.

It is no accident that these tendencies developed most strongly in Egypt where the working class has a long tradition of struggle and which, at a crucial stage in the movement, emerged as a distinct force, engaging in a wave of struggles which, like those in 2006-7, can be seen as “germs” of the future mass strike, containing a certain number of its most important characteristics: the spontaneous extension of strikes and demands from one sector to another, the intransigent rejection of state trade unions and certain tendencies towards self-organisation, the raising of both economic and political demands. Here we see, in outline, the capacity of the working class to come forward as the tribune of all the oppressed and exploited and offer the perspective of a new society.

6.       All these experiences are important stepping stones towards the development of a genuinely revolutionary consciousness. But the road in that direction is still a long one, and is obstructed by many and obvious illusions and ideological weaknesses:

-         illusions, above all, in democracy, which are extremely strong in countries which have been governed by a combination of military tyrants and corrupt monarchies, where the secret police is omnipresent and the arrest, torture and execution of dissidents is commonplace. These illusions provide an opening for the democratic “opposition” to come forward as an alternative team for managing the state: El Baradei and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Transition Government in Tunisia, the National Council in Libya... In Egypt, illusions in the army as being “with the people” are particularly strong, although recent repressive actions by the army against demonstrators in Tahrir Square will certainly lead to reflection on the part of a minority. An important aspect of the democratic myth in Egypt is the demand for independent trade unions, which no doubt involves many of the most militant workers who have quite rightly called for the dissolution of the discredited official unions;

-         illusions in nationalism and patriotism, exhibited in the very widespread adoption of the national flag as the symbol of the “revolutions” in Egypt and Tunisia, or, as in Libya, of the old monarchist flag as an emblem of all those opposed to Gaddafi’s rule. Again, the branding of Mubarak as an agent of Zionism on a number of banners in Egypt shows that the question of Israel/Palestine remains as a potential lever for diverting class conflict towards imperialist conflict. That said, there was little interest in raising the Palestinian question, given the fact that the ruling class has so long used the sufferings of the Palestinians as a way of diverting attention from the sufferings they imposed on their own populations; and there was surely an element of internationalism in the waving of the flags of other countries as an expression of solidarity with their rebellions. The sheer extent of the revolts across the “Arab” world and beyond is a demonstration of the material reality of internationalism, but patriotic ideology is very adaptable and in these events we are seeing how it can morph into more popular and democratic forms;

-         illusions in religion, with the frequent use of public prayers and the use of the Mosque as an organising centre for rebellion. In Libya, there is evidence that more specifically Islamist groups (homegrown rather than linked to al Qaida as Gaddafi claims) played a significant role in the revolt from the beginning. This, together with the role of tribal loyalties, is a reflection of the relative weakness of the Libyan working class and the backwardness of the country and its state structures. However, given the extent to which radical Islamism of the Bin Laden variety has posed itself as the answer to the misery of the masses in the “Muslim lands”, the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, and even in Libya and the Gulf states like Yemen and Bahrain have shown that the Jihadi groups, with their practice of small terrorist cells and their noxious sectarian ideologies, have been almost entirely marginalised by the massive character of the movements and their genuine efforts to overcome sectarian divisions. 

7.       The current situation in North Africa and the Middle East is still in a state of constant flux. At the time of writing there are expectations of protests in Riyadh, even though the Saudi regime has already decreed that all demonstrations are contrary to sharia law. In Egypt and Tunisia, where the “revolution” has supposedly triumphed already, there are continuous clashes between protestors and the now “democratic” state, which is administered by more or less the same forces that ran the show before the “dictators” departed. The strike wave in Egypt, which quickly won many of its demands, seems to have abated. But neither the workers’ struggle nor the wider social movement have suffered any set-back in those countries, and there are signs of a widespread discussion and reflection going on, certainly in Egypt. However, events in Libya have taken a very different turn. What appears to have begun as a genuine revolt from below, with unarmed civilians courageously storming military barracks and torching the HQ of the so-called Peoples’ Committees, especially in the east of the country, has been rapidly transformed into a full-scale and very bloody “civil war” between bourgeois fractions, with the imperialist powers hovering like vultures over the carnage. In marxist terms, in fact, this is an instance of the transformation of an incipient civil war – in its real sense of a direct and violent confrontation between the classes – into an imperialist war. The historical example of Spain – despite considerable differences in the global balance of class forces, and in the fact that the initial revolt against Franco’s coup was unmistakably proletarian in nature – shows how the national and international bourgeoisie can indeed intervene in such situations to both pursue its factional, national and imperialist rivalries and to crush all possibility of social revolt. 

8.       The background to this turn of events in Libya is the extreme backwardness of Libyan capitalism, which has been ruled for over 40 years by the Gaddafi clique predominantly through the terror apparatus directly under his command. This structure mitigated against the development of the army as a force capable of putting the national interest above the interest of a particular leader or faction, as we saw in Tunisia and Egypt. At the same time, the country is torn by regional and tribal divisions and these have played a key role in determining support or opposition to Gaddafi. A “national” form of Islamism also seems to have been a factor in the revolt from the beginning, although the rebellion was originally more general and social rather than being merely tribal or Islamic. The principal industry in Libya is oil and the turmoil there has had a very severe effect on world oil prices. But a large part of the workforce employed in the oil industry are immigrants from Europe, the rest of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa; and although there were early reports of strikes in this sector, the massive exodus of “foreign” workers is a clear sign that they see little to identify with in a “revolution” bearing aloft the national flag. In fact there have been reports of persecution of black workers at the hands of “rebel” forces, since there were widespread rumours that some of the mercenaries hired by the regime to crush the protests were recruited in black African states, thereby casting suspicion on all black immigrants. The weakness of the working class in Libya is thus a crucial element in the negative development of the situation there.

9.       Clear evidence that the “rebellion” has become a war between bourgeois camps is provided by the very hasty desertion of the Gaddafi regime by numerous high-ranking officials, including foreign ambassadors, army and police officers and civil servants. The military commanders in particular have come to the fore in the “regularisation” of the anti-Gaddafi armed forces. But perhaps the most striking sign of this change is the decision of most of the “international community” to rally to the side of the “rebels”. The Transitional National Council, based in Benghazi, has already been recognised by France as the voice of the new Libya, and a small scale military intervention has already taken shape in the sending of “advisers” to aid the anti-Gaddafi forces. Having already intervened diplomatically to accelerate the departure of Ben Ali and Mubarak, the US, Britain and others were emboldened by the wobbling of the Gaddafi regime at the beginning: William Hague, for example, prematurely announced that Gaddafi was on his way to Venezuela. As Gaddafi’s forces started to regain the upper hand, talk grew louder of imposing a No Fly zone or using other forms of direct military intervention. At the time of writing, however, there seem to be deep divisions within the EU and NATO, with Britain and France most strongly in favour of military action and the US and Germany most reluctant. The Obama administration is not opposed to military intervention on principle, of course, but it will not relish exposing itself to the danger of being drawn into yet another intractable mess in the Arab world. It may also be the case that some parts of the world bourgeoisie are wondering whether Gaddafi’s “cure” of mass terror may be a way of discouraging further unrest throughout the region. One thing is certain however: the Libyan events, and indeed the whole development of the situation in the region, have revealed the grotesque hypocrisy of the world bourgeoisie. Having for years vilified Gaddafi’s Libya as a hotbed of international terrorism (which it was, of course), Gaddafi’s recent change of heart and decision to jettison his weapons of mass destruction in 2006 warmed the hearts of the leaders of countries like the US and Britain which were struggling to justify their stance over Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMDs. Tony Blair in particular showed indecent haste in embracing yesterday’s “mad terrorist leader”. Only a few years later, Gaddafi is again a mad terrorist leader and those who supported him have to scramble no less hastily to distance themselves from him. And this is only one version of the same story: nearly all the recent or current “Arab dictators” have enjoyed the loyal backing of the US and other powers, who have up till now shown very little interest in the “democratic aspirations” of the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. The outbreak of street protests, provoked by price rises and shortages of basic necessities and in some cases violently repressed, against the US-imposed government of Iraq, including the current rulers of Iraqi Kurdistan, further exposes the empty promises manufactured by the “democratic west”.

10.    Certain internationalist anarchists in Croatia (at least before they began to take part in the protests going on in Zagreb and elsewhere) intervened on libcom.org to argue that the events in the Arab world looked to them like a rerun of the events in eastern Europe in 1989, in which all aspirations for change were side-tracked into the terminus of “democracy”, and which brought absolutely nothing for the working class. A very legitimate concern, given the evident strength of democratic mystifications within this new movement, but missing the essential difference between the two historic moments, above all at the level of the configuration of class forces on a world scale. At the time of the collapse of the eastern bloc, the working class in the west was reaching the limits of a period of struggles which had not been able to develop at the political level; the collapse of the bloc, with its attendant campaigns about the death of communism and the end of class struggle, and the inability of the working class of the east to respond on its own class terrain, thus helped to plunge the working class internationally into a long retreat. At the same time, although the Stalinist regimes were in reality victims of the world economic crisis, this was far from obvious at the time, and there was still enough room for manoeuvre in the western economies to fuel the illusion that a bright new dawn for global capitalism was opening up. The situation today is very different. The truly global nature of the capitalist crisis has never been more apparent, making it much easier for proletarians everywhere to understand that, in essence, they are all faced with same problems: unemployment, rising prices, a lack of any future under the system. And over the past seven or eight years we have been seeing a slow but genuine revival of workers’ struggles across the world, struggles usually led by a new generation of proletarians which is less scarred by the set-backs of the 80s and 90s, and which is giving rise to a growing minority of politicised elements, again on a global scale. Given these profound differences, there is a real possibility that the events in the Arab world, far from having a negative impact on the class struggle in the central countries, will feed into its future development:

-         by reaffirming the power of massive and illegal action on the streets, its capacity to shake the composure of the rulers of the earth;

-         by destroying bourgeois propaganda about “the Arabs” as a uniform mass of unthinking fanatics and showing the capacity of the masses in these regions to discuss, reflect, and organise themselves; 

-         by further undermining the credibility of the leaders of the central countries whose venality and lack of scruple has been highlighted by their twists and turns towards the Arab world. These and other elements will initially be much more evident to the politicised minority than the majority of workers in the central countries, but in the long run they will contribute to the real unification of the class struggle across national and continental boundaries. None of this, however, lessens the responsibility of the working class in the advanced countries, who have had years of experience of the delights of “democracy” and “independent trade unionism”, whose historic political traditions are deeply if not yet widely entrenched, and who are concentrated at the heart of the world imperialist system. The capacity of the working class in North Africa and the Middle East to break with democratic illusions and provide a distinct way forward for the disinherited mass of the population is still fundamentally conditioned by the ability of workers in the central countries to provide them with a clear example of self-organised and politicised proletarian struggle.

ICC, 11th March 2011

 


[1]. This document was written on 11 March, i.e. more than a week before the intervention of the “coalition” in Libya. This is why it doesn’t refer to it, although it does foresee it.

Geographical: 

Recent and ongoing: 

Rubric: 

Revolt in the Middle East

Contribution to a history of the workers' movement in Africa (part 1): Pre-1914

For many generations Africa has been synonymous with catastrophes, wars and permanent massacres, famine, incurable sicknesses, corrupt governments; in brief, endless absolute misery. At best, when its history is talked about (outside of folklore or “exotic” aspects), it is to point out its “worthy” Senegalese or Maghrebi sharpshooters, the celebrated auxiliaries of the French colonial army during the two world wars and the time of the maintenance of order in the old colonies. But never are the words “working class” used and still less are questions raised concerning its struggle, quite simply because it has never really entered the heads of the masses at the world or African level.

However, the world proletariat is very much present in Africa and has already shown by its struggles that it is part of a working class that bears a historic mission. However its history has been deliberately obscured by the old colonial bourgeoisie and then smothered by the new African bourgeoisie after “decolonisation”.

Consequently, the main aim of this contribution is to provide some elements to attest to the very real living history of the workers’ movement in Africa through its combats against the exploiting class. Admittedly, this is the history of a working class contained within a historically underdeveloped continent.

But how and why has the history of the proletariat in Africa been concealed?

Has Africa a history? Not so long ago, this question would have been answered in the negative. In a now famous passage written in 1965, the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper compared the history of Europe to that of Africa and basically concluded that the latter didn’t exist. The African past, he wrote, presented no interest outside ‘the tribulations of barbaric tribes in a certainly picturesque part of the globe, but without the least importance’. To be sure Trevor-Roper could be termed as a conservative, but at the same time the Hungarian Marxist, Endre Sik, more or less defended the same point of view. In 1966 he wrote: ‘Before making contact with Europeans, the majority of Africans still led a barbaric and primitive existence and a number among them hadn’t even gone beyond the most primitive stage of barbarity.[...] Is it also pointless to talk of their “history” – in the scientific meaning of the word – before the arrival of the European invaders?

These are particularly blunt remarks but they were shared up to a point by a majority of historians.”[1]

This is how, through their racist contempt, the thinkers of the colonial European bourgeoisie decreed the non-existence of the history of the black continent and, consequently, why the working class here had no history in the eyes of the world.

But above all, what is still striking reading these remarks, is to see the unity in the a-historical prejudices regarding Africa from these “renowned thinkers” of the two ex-imperialist blocs; the “democratic” bloc of the west and the “socialist” bloc of the east. In fact the one described as a “marxist”, Endre Sik, is nothing other than a dyed-in-the-wool stalinist whose arguments are no less fallacious than those of his rival (or colleague), the Englishman Trevor-Roper. Through their denial of the history of Africa (and of its class struggle), these gentlemen, representatives of the dominant class, express a yet more barbaric vision than that of the “barbarity of the tribulations of the African tribes”. In reality, these authors are part and parcel of the group of “scholars” who gave their “scientific benediction” to the overtly racist theses of the colonising countries. This isn’t the case with the author Henri Wesseling who criticises their words and distinguishes himself from his “historian” colleagues in these terms:

“[...] The truth is quite different. A certain number of Africans, such as the Khedive of Egypt, the Sultan of Morocco, the Zulu King Cetshwayo, the King of the Matabeles, the Almami Samori and King Makoko of the Batekes, had considerable influence over the course of things.”

Certainly by his reaction, Henri Wesseling gains some distinction in re-establishing the real history faced with well-intentioned falsification. Nevertheless,, other “scientists” who, having admitted to the reality of the history of Africa and that of the working class, persist with a very ideological vision of history and in particular of the class struggle. In fact they exclude any possibility of a proletarian revolution on the continent with arguments no less dubious than those used by the racist historians.[2]

“[...] Obstinate, the African workers are the same with proletarianisation: the fact of their permanent resistance to full wage labour [...] expresses the fragility of the imported theory of a working class bearing a historic mission. Africa is not a terrain for proletarian revolutions and the somewhat catastrophic copies of this model have all been, more or less, a violent affront to the living, social dimension of the ‘proletariat,’

Let’s say immediately that the authors of this quote are university sociologists comprising Anglophone and Francophone researchers. Moreover, the title of their work, The working classes of black Africa, says a lot about their fundamental preoccupations. On the other hand, if it’s clear that they don’t deny the history of the African continent as do their historian colleagues, their approach comes from the same ideology which takes its point of view from “scientific proof” without it confronting real history. Already, by talking about “catastrophic copies of this model”, they (involuntarily?) confuse the proletarian revolution of 1917 in Russia with coup d’états of the stalinist type or with the “national liberation” struggles that appeared throughout the world following the second imperialist world butchery under the labels “socialist” or “progressive”. It’s these same models that violently confronted the working class which put up a resistance to them; whether in China, Cuba, in the old countries of the Soviet bloc or in the “Third World” in general and Africa in particular. But above all, these sociologists squarely turn to the counter-revolution when they warn against an “imported theory of a working class bearing a historic mission”, their logical conclusion from which is that Africa is not a terrain for proletarian revolutions. Thereby, these groups of “scholars”, in denying any possibility of revolutionary struggle on the African continent, seem to exclude the extension of any other revolution (“exported”) in Africa. Straightaway they close the door to any perspective of emerging from the capitalist barbarity of which the exploited classes and the African populations in general are victims. Finally, they shed no light on the real history of the working class.

What concerns us, with all due deference to “our” sociologists, is that the working class remains the only class bearing a historic mission faced with the bankruptcy of capitalism which worsens every day, including in Africa as the historian Iba Der Thiam[3] attests when he gives an account of workers’ struggles from the beginning of the 19th century to the start of the 1930s:

In the union domain, the period 1790-1929 was, as we’ve seen, a decisive stage. A period of rousing and awakening, and then affirmation, it was a new occasion for the working class to demonstrate its determination and its spirit of struggle and self-sacrifice.

From the appearance of a pre-union consciousness, up to the eve of the world economic crisis, we’ve followed all the phases, from a development of consciousness whose speed of progress compared to the long road of the French working class in the same domain, appears quite exceptional.

The idea of the strike, that’s to say a means of struggle, a form of expression consistent with refusing to work and provisionally interrupting the normal run of economic life in order to assert one’s rights, forcing the bosses to be concerned over wage claims for example, or to accept negotiations with the strikers or their representatives, made, over some fifteen years, considerable progress, even acquiring rights of freedom, notwithstanding the dispositions of a restrictive legislation and was recognised, if not as a legal practice, then at least a legitimate one.

“[...] The bosses’ resistance, apart from some exceptions, only rarely showed an extreme intransigence. From the base of a lucid realism, the owners of the means of production did not, in general, show any reticence in advocating and seeking dialogue with the strikers, but even managed to push the Governor to speed up the procedures for mediation, and were quite ready, when their interests were seriously threatened, to make common cause with the workers, in the conflicts which opposed them to the railways for example, where it is true, the role of the state in the capital was considerable.”

Not only is this exposé sufficiently full enough to characterise a working class bearing hope, but it has a history in Africa that it shares moreover with the bourgeoisie through the historic confrontations of classes, just as happened throughout the world since the proletariat was constituted as a class under the capitalist regime.

Before pursuing the history of the African workers’ movement, we draw the attention of readers to the fact that we are going to come up against difficulties linked to the denial of the history of Africa by historians and other scholars of the old colonial powers. In fact, this was shown, for example, by the colonial administrators with their policy of systematic censure of the most important events and movements of the working class. Due to this, we are reduced to basing ourselves on rare sources of more or less famous authors whose rigour of work seems to us globally proven and convincing. On the other hand, if we largely recognise the seriousness of the researchers who provide these reference sources, we do not necessarily share some of their interpretations of historic events.

Some elements of context

Senegal was the oldest of the French colonies in Africa, France having been established there from 1659 to 1960.

A historian has located the beginning of the African workers’ movement at the end of the 18th century, hence the title of his work History of the African union movement 1790-1929.

The first professional workers (artisans, carpenters, joiners, masons, etc.) were Europeans settling in Saint-Louis Senegal (the old capital of the African colonies).

Before the Second World War, the working population of the Francophone colony of French Western Africa (FWA) was essentially based in Senegal, between Saint-Louis and Dakar which were respectively the capital of FWA and the capital of the federation which brought together FWA, French Equatorial Africa (FEA), Cameroon and Togo. Dakar was the “economic lungs” of the FWA colony, with the port, the railway and the greatest number of state workers and service employees.

At the numerical level, the working class has always been historically weak in Africa generally, evidently due to the weak economic development of the continent, which is explained in its turn through the weak investment made by the colonising countries. In 1927, the Governor of the colony estimated the number of workers to be 60,000. Certainly, some say that half the numbers of workers were excluded from this figure, not least the day-workers and other apprentices.

Since the first struggles up to the 1960s, the proletariat has always systematically confronted the French bourgeoisie which holds the means of production alongside the colonial administration. That means that the Senegalese bourgeoisie was born and evolved in the shadow of its “big French sister” (at least up to the 1960s).

Class struggle in Senegal

The history of the African union movement has yet to be totally written [...] The fundamental reason for this failure seems to us to lie, on one hand, in the lack of research into the different segments of the African working class in a perspective which is both synchronic and diachronic; and on the other hand, in the absence of a systematic study of the different social conflicts which have been recorded, social conflicts each one of which shows the layers of information on the preoccupations of the workers, their forms of expression, the reactions of the colonial administration and the bosses, those of the political class, all the consequences that these events have had on the domestic history of the colonies at the four levels of the economic, social, political and cultural [...].”[4]

As Iba Der Thiam emphasises, several factors explain the difficulties of writing a history of the workers’ movement in Africa. Otherwise, the major obstacle which researchers have come up against is undoubtedly linked to the fact that the real holders of the information on the working class, that is the French colonial authorities, have for a long time been cautious of opening up the state archives. And for good reason: they have an interest in hiding things.

In fact, with the partial release of the colonial archives of FWA (following the fall of the Berlin Wall), we learnt that not only had the working class existed in Africa since the 19th century but, quite naturally, it had undertaken often victorious combats against its class enemy. 1855 marked the first expression of a workers’ organisation where, at Saint-Louis Senegal, a group of 140 African workers (carpenters and masons) decided to fight against the demands of their European masters who were imposing unacceptable working conditions on them. Similarly, one can read in the archives of the existence of a (clandestine) union of “Carpenters of the Haut-Fleuve” in 1885. Above all a number of important strikes and tough confrontations took place between the working class and the colonial French bourgeoisie, like the general strike accompanied by riots in 1914 at Dakar where, for 5 days, economic and social life was totally paralysed and the Federal Governor of FWA , William Ponti, recognised (in his secret notes) that “The strike was perfectly organised and was a total success. There were also numerous other successful strikes, notably that of April 1919 and 1938 by railworkers (European and African united) but also where the state had recourse to police repression before being forced to meet the demands of the strikers. And we can add the example of the six month-long general strike (October 1947 to March 1948) by the railworkers of the whole of FWA, where the strikers were fired on by the PS (SFIO) government before ending up winning the fight.

Finally, there is also the famous world-wide “May ‘68” which spread in Africa and to Senegal, abruptly breaking the patriotic or “national consensus” which had reigned since the “independence” of the 60s. And where, through their struggles on a proletarian terrain, workers and young schoolchildren violently confronted the pro-French regime of Senghor demanding an amelioration of their conditions of life and study. After this the workers’ movement again took the road of struggle that it had known since the beginning of the 20th century but which had been blocked by the triumphant perspective of “national independence”.

These are some examples to illustrate the real existence of a combative working class that is often conscious of its own class interests, while certainly meeting immense difficulties of all sorts since its birth.

Birth of the African proletariat

We should straightaway make clear that this is a proletariat emerging under a colonial capitalist regime and that, without having accomplished its own revolution against feudalism, the African bourgeoisie also owes its existence to the presence of European colonialism on its soil.

In other words, what we are seeing is the birth of the proletariat, the motor of the development of the productive forces under the reign of capitalism triumphant over the feudal regime, the old, dominant system, the residues of which are still quite visible today in many areas of the black continent.

During the course of the centuries preceding the arrival of the colonisers onto their continent, African societies, as all the other human societies, used labour and manpower in conditions that were peculiar to them [...]

The economy was essentially agricultural; predominately made up of provisions and supply, because in using rudimentary techniques there was only rarely any great surplus to be made. Equally an economy based on hunting, fishing and gathering, to which we could add in some cases exchange activities of a relative breadth unfolded, because of the weakness and want of the means of communications, inside the group, the region, and more rarely the kingdom, in the markets at regular intervals.

In such a context, the methods of production were often handed down and rarely secreted sufficiently vigorous and conflictual antagonisms in order to determine the existence of real social classes in the marxist sense of the term.

“[...] As much as possessions in pre-colonial Senegalese-Gambian societies were different from the European notion, so that of work was even more so. In fact, if in modern societies based on industrial development and wage labour, labour is negotiated as economic wealth, and as such, greatly submits to the ineluctable laws of the market where the relations between supply and demand determine the price of services, in pre-colonial negro-African societies, work appears to us not to have an autonomous function, independent of the person. It is a sort of community activity logically unfolding from the laws of collective life, an activity imposed by social regulation and economic necessities [...].

The colonial conquest, essentially based on the spirit of power, the quest for the accumulation of profit through the exploitation of human, material and mineral resources, largely had recourse to indigenous labour and did not hesitate to call on the means put at its disposition of the exercise of state power in order to use the work of local populations, first of all free before introducing wages and thus creating the conditions and new relations as much for work as for the worker.[5]

On the whole, the author’s account is sufficiently clear and relevant in its theoretical approach and in describing the historic context of the birth of the proletariat in Africa. Indeed, it is convincing in its argument to demonstrate that labour in pre-colonial negro-African or Senegalese-Gambian societies did not have the same meaning as in modern western societies. Similarly, in relation to wage labour, we can actually say that the notion of wage labour was without doubt introduced into Senegal by the French colonial system the day it decided to “wage” the men it exploited in order to assure its profits and spread its domination over the conquered territory. Thus it started up the first agricultural and industrial depots, mines, railways, waterways, roads, factories, print works, etc. In other words, this is how French colonial capitalism introduced new relations of production in its first African colony creating accordingly the conditions for the birth of the working class. But it was first of all under the regime of obligatory work (the monstrous “corvée system”) that the workers were exploited. That is to say at this time they were not able to negotiate the sale of their labour, as this quote shows:

Regarding civil works, Blanchot for example required the Mayor of the corvée of the workers to be responsible for assuring the construction of the quays from January 1st 1790, then the landing-stage at Saint-Louis. The numbers needed were originally composed of ‘20 persons with food and a resident who will be responsible for mustering them, taking them to work and making sure that they stay there.’ First of all it was an obligatory requisition which no-one could escape from, once designated, under pain of sanction. Then the work was almost free. The workers were chosen, summoned, used and supervised without any condition of price, wage or any sort of discussion on the modalities of their utilisation, even of challenging the circumstances of the choice of which they’d been the object. This dependence of the worker on his employer was attested to by Order number 1 of December 18 1789 instituting the corvée assigned to the construction of the quays and the landing-stage, which set no time limit and could, consequently, last as long as necessary. Further, allusion was made to a ‘gratuity’ of two bottles of spirits and, to clearly show that there was no question of a wage attached to the remuneration or simply compensation for the work furnished, the text makes it clear that it is a simple favour due to the good will of the authorities to the exclusion of any obligation moral or otherwise and which could be denied when the work was late through negligence.[6]

Obligatory requisition with no negotiation, on price or on conditions of work, in brief a total dependence of the employee on the employer who, mostly, offered his exploited, as “food”, a gratuity in the form of bottles of spirits. Such were the rules and conditions in which the proletariat, future wage labour, emerged under French colonial capitalism in Senegal.

Four years later, in 1794, the same Blanchot (now the commanding officer of Senegal) decided on a new “gratuity” by giving the order to furnish the requisitioned workers with “couscous and the lash”. Certainly we can see “some amelioration” of the gratuity going from two bottles of spirits to couscous, but it still wasn’t a question of “compensation” and still less a proper wage to speak of. It was necessary to wait until 1804 for remuneration as compensation for work done to officially exist. That was the year when the economy underwent a serious crisis due to the war effort then sustained by the colonial system for the conquest of the empire of Fouta (the neighbouring region of Saint-Louis). In effect, the war meant the provisional halt of river commerce, which led to shortages of products and price speculation on basic necessities, which in turn caused a rise in the cost of living, and with it, strong social tensions.

1804: the establishment of the proletariat and the first expression of class antagonisms

To deal with the deterioration of the social climate, the commanding officer of the town of Saint-Louis issued the following order:

“[...] as a consequence of the decree of the Council of the Colony on complaints regarding the high price of the workers who have successively provided their days of work at exorbitant and intolerable prices for a long time [...]. The foremen, workers, carpenters or masons must henceforth be paid a salary of one bar of iron per day or 4 francs 16 sols; the mates, three-quarters of a bar or 3 francs 12 sols, the labourers, a quarter of a bar or 1 franc 4 sols.

In this document, which is one of the oldest written that we possess on wage labour, we learn that the town of Saint-Louis had at this time, that’s to say in 1804, ‘workers, carpenters, caulkers and masons’ employed by private individuals, according to the norms and in circumstances which are unfortunately not indicated, aside from the growth of salaries paid to these personnel.”[7]

To avoid arbitrating conflict between employers and employees, the state decided to regulate their relations by fixing the total amount of wages according to categories and level of qualification. Let’s note moreover that this act of the colonial state was first of all directed against the employees because it responded to the grievances lodged with the Chief of the colony by the employers who complained about the “exorbitant price” of a day’s work by the workers.

In fact, to cope with the effects of the crisis, the workers had decided to raise the price of their work to preserve their reduced purchasing power resulting from the increased cost of living. And before this time, the establishment of working conditions was still a purely private affair, exclusively in the hands of socio-economic negotiators, that’s to say, without any formal state legislation.

Still, this open intervention of state authority was the first of its kind in a conflict between employers and employees. More generally, this time (1804) attests to the reality of the first open expression in the colony of an antagonism between the two principal historic social classes that confront one another under capitalism: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This date also marks the history of labour in Senegal, which was formally recognised by the establishment of wages, finally allowing the workers to sell their labour “normally” and be paid as such.

Concerning the “ethnic composition” of the (qualified) workers, they were overwhelmingly of European origin, and similarly, the employers were almost exclusively from the metropole. Among the latter figured Potin, Valantin, Pellegrin, Morel, D’Erneville, Dubois, Prevost, etc., who were the “cream of the commercial bourgeoisie” of the colony. Finally, let’s note in passing the extreme numerical weakness of the working class (some thousands) as a consequence of the low level of economic development of the country; and this a century-and-a-half after the first arrival of colonists in this zone. Furthermore, this was essentially a colonial trading post based on trade in raw materials and ebony.[8]

The manpower crisis of the colonial trading post

The principal activity of Senegal was the slave trade and the exploitation of products such as gum, ivory, gold, yellow wax, hides drawn by the Saint-Louisian and other merchants on the river or along the west coast of Africa but as long as its economic importance remained secondary the availability of manpower was never a concern. In order to carry out the rare works of fitting out equipment or summary infrastructures, the Governor, at his own discretion, could call on extra assistance from the military or civilian sectors and, in work that didn’t need specialised workers could often, if not always, call on the workers in the most servile conditions.

But the suppression of slavery had profoundly changed the givens of the situation. The principal economic resource of the colony was henceforth threatened with drying up. France had further lost some of its agricultural colonies with the attempted European colonisation of Cape Verde having failed and the Government of the Restoration then thought it necessary to initiate the development of agriculture in Senegal by growing a certain number of local products likely to feed French industry, turning around the commercial activities of the colony and giving work to the indigenous free labour force.[9]

It is necessary to underline straightaway that the suppression of slavery responded first and foremost to an economic need rather than any humanitarian consideration. In fact, the colonial bourgeoisie lacked a workforce due to the fact that a large proportion of the men and women of working age were slaves in the hands of their local masters. The suppression of slavery took place in two stages.

In the first stage, a law dating from April 1818 forbade only the maritime commerce of slaves and their transportation to America, but not inside the territories which remained free for the colonial merchants. However, it was quickly realised that this was still insufficient to remedy the shortage of workers. So the Chief of the colony personally asked the head of the First Battalion to provide “men of the corvée on request who would be used for diverse purposes”. Thanks to these measures, the colonial authorities and merchants could temporarily overcome the labour shortage. For their part, the available labourers became aware of the benefits they could derive from the scarcity of labour by becoming more demanding towards the employers. And this provoked a new confrontation over the price of labour between the workers and their bosses, resulting in a new intervention by the colonial authorities who proceeded with the “regulation” of the market in favour of the merchants.

In the second stage, in February 1821, the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, while considering a policy of active immigration by people of European origin, ordered the end of slavery in “all its forms”.

In fact, once again for the colonial authorities it was a matter of finding the necessary hands for the development of the agricultural economy:

For the Governor, it was a question of the redemption of individuals kept in slavery in the regions close to the west African possessions; of their emancipation by a certifiable act on the condition that they worked for the contractor for a certain period of time. This would be [...] a sort of liberty apprenticeship, familiarising the native with European civilisation, giving him a taste of new industrial cultures while reducing the number of captives. One thus obtained [...] labour while keeping in with the plans of the abolitionists.[10]

In other words, it was above all a question of “civilising” to better exploit the “emancipated” and it was in no way liberation in the name of a humanitarian vision. Moreover, as if that wasn’t enough, two years later in 1823, the colonial administration set up a “regime of time-serving”, that’s to say a sort of contract linking the employee to the employer for a long period.

The time-servers were used for a period which could go up to 14 years in the public workshops, in the administration, the agricultural plantations (there were 300 out of 1500 used by Baron Roger), in hospitals where they worked as messengers, nurses or domestics, in local security, and in the army; in the regiment of Marine Infantry they numbered 72 in 1828, 115 four years later, 180 in 1842, while the numbers of those redeemed counted 1629 in 1835, 1768 in 1828, 2545 in 1839. At this time the village of Saint-Louis alone counted about 1600 time-servers among its inhabitants.”[11]

In this regard, let’s underline the beginning of the formal existence of long-term contracts (14 years) similar to a CDI (contract of indeterminate length) of today. We see here the permanent need for workers that corresponds to the rhythm of the economic development of the colony. Similarly, the regime of time-servers had been conceived with the aim of the accelerating agricultural colonisation and this policy is shown in the consequent start of the development of the productive forces and more generally of the local economy. But the balance-sheet was very contradictory because, if it allowed a real increase in commercial traffic (import/export), which went from 2 million francs in 1818 to 14 million in 1844, the policy of agricultural industrialisation on the other hand hit a brick wall. In fact the plan initiated by Baron Roger for the development of agriculture was abandoned by his successors (three years after it was launched) because of differing economic orientations within the state. Another factor weighing on the decision to cancel the plan for the development of agriculture was the refusal of a great number of the previous farmers, who had become paid employees, to return to the land. However, the two aspects of this policy, i.e. the redemption of slaves and the “regime of time-servers”, were maintained up to 1848, the time of the decree for their total suppression.

Such was the situation towards the middle of the 19th century, a situation characterised by the now established wage labour, the attribute of a defenceless proletariat with almost no rights, which, if it was aware of any unity or combination, if it thus had a pre-union consciousness, had never yet dared to assert itself in a conflict with its employers who were backed up by an authoritarian government.”[12]

Thus was constituted the basis of a waged proletariat, evolving under the regime of modern capitalism, the precursor of the African working class and which, henceforth, would make its apprenticeship in the class struggle at the beginning of the second half of the 19th century.

Embryonic forms of class struggle in 1855

The emergence of the working class

According to available sources,[13] 1855 saw the appearance of the first professional organisation aiming to defend the specific interests of the proletariat. Its constitution followed a movement launched by a native carpenter (a habitant of Saint-Louis) who led 140 workers to draw up a petition against the European master craftsmen who were imposing unacceptable conditions of work. In fact:

The first artisans who undertook the great colonial works were European or military engineers who were assisted by auxiliaries and indigenous workers. These were carpenters, joiners, masons, blacksmiths and shoemakers. These were the technically more qualified personnel benefitting, in a certain number of cases, from a more or less elementary training. They prevailed in the existing corporations of which they made up the leading elite; it was without doubt these who decided the markets, fixed the prices, allocated the tasks, chose the workers that they hired and paid a tariff largely inferior to that they claimed back from the employers.” [14]

In this clash we see that the first expression of the “class struggle” in the colony opposed two fractions of the same (working) class and not the bourgeoisie and proletariat directly; in other words, a so-called base fraction of workers (dominated), in struggle against another so-called “ruling elite” (dominant) fraction of workers. Another feature of this context is the fact that the exploiting class was derived exclusively from the colonial bourgeoisie, due to the absence of a “native bourgeoisie”. In brief, we have a working class constituting itself under a developing colonial capitalism. Therefore it is understandable why the first expression of working class struggle could not avoid being marked by a triple connotation, “corporatist”, “ethnic” and “hierarchical”. This is illustrated in the case of the leader of this group of indigenous workers, himself a master carpenter, and as such a trainer of numerous young apprentice workers under him, while at the same time working under the European master joiners who decided everything (cf. the preceding quote).

In this context, the decision of the native leader to join with the rank and file African workers (less qualified than him) in order to face up to the arrogant attitude of the western master artisans is understandable and can be interpreted as a healthy reaction in defence of proletarian interests.

Moreover, according to archive sources, this same indigenous master craftsman was later involved in the constitution in 1885 of the first African union, even though the 1884 law of Jules Ferry authorising the creation of unions had excluded their establishment in the colonies. For this reason the union of native workers had to exist and function in clandestinity, leading to a lack of information on its history, as the following passage shows:

The K30 series of the Archives of the Republic of Senegal include an unpublished manuscript which hasn’t previously been quoted by any source and which was filed in a folder on which someone had written: union of the carpenters of the Haut-Fleuve. Unfortunately, this extremely important piece of the archives on the history of the union movement in Senegal is unaccompanied by any other document likely to throw some light or understanding on the question.[15]

So, despite the ban on any form of proletarian expression and despite the systematic censure of the real history of the workers’ movement in the colonies, this record could show the existence of the first embryonic organisations of class struggle of a union type. Admittedly, this was a “corporatist union”, of carpenters, but in any case the capitalist state at this time forbade any sort of inter-professional association.

This is what investigations into the writings related to this theme and period allow us to understand today about the expressions of working class struggle in this period from 1855 to 1885.

Immigrant Senegalese struggles in the Belgian Congo in 1890/1892

Let’s recall first of all that when the suppression of the regime of time-servers was enacted in 1848, this system, which was far from having completely disappeared, tried to adapt to the new situation by progressively transforming itself. But this solution in no way resolved the thorny issue of labour.

The colonial economic milieu could thus not buy slaves that they could work into the ground and the plantations risked being abandoned because of the lack of hands, pushing the administrative leadership and the political authorities to authorise the immigration of recently liberated African workers towards regions where their services would be appreciated, on a salary and with conditions discussed in agreement with the bosses. In order to effect this request, the Governor published the decree of March 27 1852, reorganising the emigration of workers in the colonies; thus on July 3 1854, a ship named ‘Le cinq freres’ chartered to ensure the transport of 3000 workers destined for the plantations of Guyana, cast anchor at Dakar and made contacts with the aim of hiring 300 Senegalese. The conditions stated were the following: “an expatriation of six years against a gift to the value of 30 to 50 francs, a wage of 15 francs per month, lodgings, food, medical care, the pleasure of a small garden and free repatriation at the end of their stay in the Americas.’”[16]

We see here, with the case of the 300 Senegalese destined for the plantations of Guyana, that the working class really existed, to the point of constituting “a reserve of labour”, a part of which the bourgeoisie could export.

Indeed, having demonstrated their competence and efficiency, for example in undertaking (in 1885) the hard work of constructing the Dakar/Saint-Louis railway, the workers of this French colony aroused a particular interest among the colonial economic milieux, either as exploitable labour on site, or as a labour force to be exported to foreign competitors.

In this same context and in similar conditions, a great number of Senegalese workers were recruited and sent to the Belgian Congo to work in various sites and depots, notably on the Congolese railway of Matadi.

But, from their arrival, the immigrant workers came up against harsh conditions of work and existence and immediately saw that the Belgian colonial authorities had no intention of honouring their contracts. In fact, as they noted themselves in a letter of protest addressed to the Governor of Senegal, they were “badly fed, inadequately lodged, underpaid, sick and badly looked after”, they died like flies and they thought that cholera was striking them because “we are burying 4 or 5 people a day”. A petition of February 1892, addressed to the French and Belgian colonial authorities, firmly demanded their collective repatriation to Senegal, concluding: “Now none amongst us wants to stay in Matadi”.

The workers were thus victims of a particularly odious form of exploitation by colonial capitalism which imposed such barbarous conditions upon them that, during this time, the two colonial states passed the buck, or shut their eyes firmly to the fate of the immigrant workers:

Encouraged by impunity, the Belgian authorities did nothing to ameliorate the condition of the unfortunate protesters. The distance between the Belgian Congo and Senegal, arguments over precedence which prevented the representative of the French government in the region interceding on their behalf, the complicities which benefitted the railway company of the Lower Congo at the rue Oudinot (cf. Ministry of the Colonies), the cynicism of some of the colonial milieu that found the bad luck of the poor Senegalese amusing, exposed the Senegalese workers to almost total abandonment and more or less disarmed without any means of defence, taxable and forced, they were at their mercy.[17]

Through their combativity, by refusing to work in the conditions imposed on them and by firmly demanding their evacuation from the Congo, the immigrants from the French colony obtained some satisfaction. Also, on their return to the country, they were able to count on the support of the population and their comrade workers by thus obliging the Governor to engage in new reforms aiming to protect the workers, beginning with the establishment of new emigration rules. In fact, the drama the immigrants suffered in the Congo gave rise to debates and developments of consciousness in relation to workers’ conditions. It was in this context, between 1892 and 1912, that a whole series of measures was taken on behalf of employees, for example a weekly break, workers’ pensions, medical assistance, in short real reforms.

Furthermore, based on their “Congolese experience”, the old immigrants were particularly conspicuous during a new recruitment drive for new railway yards in Senegal by being very demanding over working conditions. In this sense, in 1907 they decided to create a professional association called the “Workers’ Association of Kayes” with the aim of better defending their working and living conditions faced with the appetites of the capitalist vultures. And the colonial authority, taking account of the balance of power at that time which was about to escape their control, agreed to legalise the railworkers’ association.

In fact, the birth of this association among the railworkers is hardly surprising when one considers that, since the opening of the network in 1885, this sector had become one of the most important industrial complexes of the colony, both in its turnover and the number of employees. Similarly, we shall see later that the railworkers are in all the battles of the working class in French Western Africa.

More generally, the period following the return of immigrants to the country (between 1892 and 1913) was marked by strong social unrest, notably in the public sector where clerks and workers of the post and telephone service protested against deteriorating working conditions and low wages. In this context, civil servants and those close to them decided to create their own associations to defend themselves by “all means at their disposal”, soon followed by commercial employees who took the opportunity to demand that the law on a weekly rest period apply to their sector. In short, there was a seething combativity among workers in both the private and public sectors, which increasingly worried the colonial authorities. Indeed, not only could these burning social problems not be settled by the end of 1913, but they reached their climax in the context of the crisis resulting from the First World War.

Lassou, March 2011 (to be continued).

 


[1]. Henri Wesseling, The division of Africa, 1991, Denoel Editions, 1996 for the French translation.

[2]. M. Agier, J. Copans and A. Morice, Working Classes of Black Africa, Karthala-ORSTOM, 1987.

[3]. History of the African union movement 1790-1929, Editions L’Harmattan, 1991.

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. Ibid.

[6]. Ibid

 

[7] .Ibid.

[8]. “Ebony” was a euphemism coined by the Negroes to describe the black slaves deported to the Americas (Wikipedia).

[9]. Thiam, op. cit.

[10]. Ibid.

[11]. Ibid

[12]. Ibid

[13]. Mar Fall, The State and the Union Question in Senegal L’Hartmattan, Paris, 1989.

[14]. Thiam, op. cit.

[15]. Ibid

[16]. Ibid

[17]. Ibid.

Geographical: 

Deepen: 

Rubric: 

Class Struggle

What are workers' councils? (Part 5) 1917 – 1921: The soviets and the question of the state

In the previous article in this series we saw how the soviets, having seized power in October 1917, gradually lost it to the point where it was no more than a facade, kept alive artificially to hide the triumph of the capitalist counter-revolution that had taken place in Russia. The aim of this article is to understand what caused this to happen and to draw lessons that will be indispensable for revolutionaries in the future.

The nature of the state born out of revolution

Marx and Engels, analysing the Paris Commune of 1871, drew some lessons on the question of the state that we can summarise here:

1) It is necessary to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus from top to bottom;

2) The state will re-emerge after the revolution and there are two main reasons for this:

a) the bourgeoisie has not yet been completely defeated and eradicated;

b) non-exploiting classes (petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, those on the fringes of society...) whose interests do not coincide with those of the proletariat, will still remain in the transitional society.

This article does not aim to analyse the nature of the new state;[1] however to illustrate the subject we are dealing with, we must show that while the new state is not identical to those that preceded it in history, it still retains characteristics that constitute an obstacle to the development of the revolution; which is why, as Engels had already pointed out and as Lenin had made clear in State and Revolution, the proletariat must on the very day of the revolution begin the process of eliminating the new state.

After taking power, the main obstacle that the soviets would run into in Russia was the newly emerged state, which “despite the appearance of its greater material power [...] was a thousand times more vulnerable to the enemy than other working class organs. Indeed, the state owes its greater physical power to objective factors which correspond perfectly with the interests of the exploiting classes but can have no association with the revolutionary role of the proletariat[2]; “The terrible threat of a return to capitalism will come mainly in the state sector. This, all the more so as capitalism is found here in its impersonal, so to speak, ethereal form. Statification can help to conceal a long-term process opposed to socialism.”[3]

In the previous article, we described the factors that contributed to the weakening of the soviets: civil war, famine, the general chaos in the whole economy, the exhaustion and the gradual decomposition of the working class, etc. The “silent conspiracy” of the soviet state, which would also contribute in weakening the soviets, operated in three ways:

1) the growing weight of the state institutions par excellence: the army, the Cheka (political police) and the unions;

2) the “inter-classism” of the soviets and the growing bureaucratisation that it gave rise to, and

3) the gradual absorption of the Bolshevik Party into the state. We dealt with the first point in the previous article; this article will focus on the last two.

The relentless strengthening of the state

The soviet state excluded the bourgeoisie but was not exclusively the state of the proletariat. It included non-exploiting classes such as the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the various middle strata. These classes tended to defend their own narrow interests, which inevitably placed obstacles on the road to communism. This unavoidable “interclassism” was a key factor driving the new state, a process which would be denounced by the Workers’ Opposition in 1921: it meant that the “the Soviet policy had different goals and had a distorted relationship with the working class[4] and it became the breeding ground of the state bureaucracy.

Shortly after October, former Tsarist officials began occupying positions in the soviet institutions, especially when quick decisions were needed to deal with urgent problems. Thus, for example, faced with the impossibility of organising the supply of essential goods in February 1918, the People’s Commissariat had to resort to using commissions that had been established by the former Provisional Government. The members agreed on condition that they did not have to rely on the Bolsheviks, which the latter accepted. Similarly, in reorganising the education system in 1918-19, former Tsarist officials had to be called on, and they would gradually amend the proposed school curriculum.

In addition, the best proletarian elements were gradually converted into bureaucrats remote from the masses. The imperatives of the war drew many leading workers into playing the role of political commissars, inspectors or military leaders. The most able workers took the leading role in the economic administration. The former imperial bureaucrats and those newly arriving from the proletariat formed a bureaucratic layer that identified with the state. But this organ had its own logic, and its siren song managed to seduce such experienced revolutionaries as Lenin and Trotsky.

The former officials from the bourgeois elite were imbued with this logic, and they penetrated the soviet fortress through the door that the new state opened to them: But thousands of those who, through custom and culture, were more or less closely attached to the expropriated bourgeoisie were very soon offered the opportunity to re-enter the ‘revolutionary stronghold’ - by the back door as it were - and to resume their role as managers of the labour process in the ‘Workers’ State’.... Many were soon to be appointed (from above) to leading positions in the economy. Merging with the new political-administrative ‘elite’, of which the Party itself formed the nucleus, the more ‘enlightened’ and technologically skilled sections of the ‘expropriated class’ soon resumed dominant positions in the relations of production.[5]. As the Soviet historian Kritsman points out, “in their administrative work the representatives of the old intelligentsia showed off-handedness and hostility towards the public.[6]

But the main danger came from the state machine itself, with its increasing but imperceptible weight of inertia. As a consequence of this, even the most dedicated public servants tended to become detached from, and were distrusted by, the masses, adopting expedient methods, imposing unwanted measures, and carrying out duties affecting thousands of people as nothing more than administrative tasks, ruling by decrees. “The party, turning from the task of destruction to that of administration, discovers the virtues of law and order and of submission to the rightful authority of the revolutionary power.[7]

The bureaucratic logic of the state suited the bourgeoisie perfectly; as an exploitative class, it can safely delegate power to a specialised body of professional politicians and officials. But it is fatal for the proletariat to put its trust in specialists at any time; it must learn directly from its mistakes and by taking decisions and putting them into practice itself it will begin to transform itself in the process. The logic of proletarian power is not in delegating power, but in direct involvement in exercising it.

The revolution in Russia was faced with a dilemma in April 1918: the world revolution had not advanced and the imperialist invasion threatened to crush the soviet bastion. The whole country had descended into chaos, “the administrative and economic organisation was running down at an alarming rate. The danger to the revolution came not from organised resistance, but from a breakdown of all authority. The appeal in State and Revolution to ‘smash the bourgeois state machine’ now seemed singularly out of date; that part of the revolutionary programme had succeeded beyond all expectations.[8]

The soviet state was faced with taking some drastic decisions: to quickly get the Red Army on its feet, to organise transport, to boost production, to guarantee food supplies to the hungry cities, to organise social life. All this had to be sorted out against the total sabotage by the entrepreneurs and managers that would lead to the widespread confiscation of industries, banks, shops, etc. It presented the soviet power with an additional challenge. A heated debate unfolded inside the party and the soviets. Everyone was in favour of militarily and economic resistance up until the proletarian revolution broke out in the other countries, principally Germany. The disagreement was about how to organise resistance: was it by strengthening the state machinery or by improving the organisation and capabilities of the working masses? Lenin led those who defended the first solution while some tendencies on the left of the Bolshevik Party defended the second.

In his pamphlet The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power, Lenin argues that “the primary task facing the revolution [...] was the task of... rebuilding a shattered economy, of imposing labour discipline and raising productivity, of ensuring strict accounting and control over production and distribution, eliminating corruption and waste and, perhaps above all, of struggling against the ubiquitous petty-bourgeois mentality [...] He did not hesitate to make use of what he himself termed bourgeois methods, including the use of bourgeois technical specialists [...] the recourse to piece work; the adoption of the ‘Taylor system’ [...] He therefore called for 'one-man management.’[9]

Why did Lenin favour this approach? The first reason was inexperience: soviet power was confronted in effect with huge and urgent tasks without being able to draw on any experience, and without this it was not possible to carry out any theoretical reflection on these matters. The second reason was the desperate and intolerable situation we have described. But we must also consider Lenin in turn to be a victim of the statist and bureaucratic logic, emerging bit by bit as its spokesman. This logic led him to put his trust in the old technicians, administrators and officials trained under capitalism and, moreover, in the unions who were responsible for disciplining workers, stifling independent initiatives and demonstrations by workers, imposing the capitalist division of labour and the narrow corporatist mentality that goes with it.

The oppositionists on the left denounced the idea that “The form of state control of enterprises must develop in the direction of bureaucratic centralisation, of rule by various commissars, of deprivation of independence from local Soviets and of rejection in practice of the type of ‘Commune-State’ ruled from below [...] The introduction of labour discipline in connection with the restoration of capitalist leadership in production cannot essentially increase the productivity of labour, but it will lower the class autonomy, activity and degree of organisation of the proletariat”.[10]

The Workers’ Opposition complained that: “given the disastrous state of our economy that still relies on the capitalist system (paid wages, different rates, labour categories, etc.), the elites in our party distrust the creative capacity of the workers, and are seeking salvation from the economic chaos with the heirs of the old capitalists, businessmen and technicians whose creative ability is corrupted in economic affairs by routine, habit and methods and management of the capitalist mode of production.”[11]

Far from withering away, the state power grew alarmingly: “A ‘white’ professor who reached Omsk in the autumn of 1919 from Moscow reported thatat the head of many of the centres and glavki sit former employers and responsible officials and managers of business. The unprepared visitor to the centres who is personally acquainted with the former commercial and industrial world would be surprised to see the former owners of big leather factories sitting in Glavkozh, big manufacturers in the Central textile organisations, etc.’[12] In March 1919, during a debate of the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin admitted: “We threw out the old bureaucrats, but they have come back, they call themselves ‘commonists’ when they can’t bear to say the word Communist, and they wear a red ribbon in their buttonholes and creep into warm places.[13]

The growth of the soviet bureaucracy finally overpowered the soviets. There were 114,259 employees in June 1918, 529,841 one year later, and 5.82 million in December 1920! “State interest” was relentlessly enforced over the revolutionary struggle for communism, “the general concerns of the state began to override the interests of the working class.[14]

The absorption of the Bolshevik Party into the state

The strengthening of the state led to the absorption of the Bolshevik Party. It had not a priori anticipated this conversion into a state party. According to figures from February 1918, the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks only had six administrative employees against 65 for the Council of Commissars, while the soviets of Petrograd and Moscow had more than 200. “The Bolshevik organisations were financially dependent on the help given them by the local Soviet institutions: generally speaking, such dependence was complete. It was even possible for prominent Bolsheviks, such as Preobrazhensky, to suggest that the Party should dissolve itself completely in the Soviet apparatus.” The anarchist Leonard Schapiro acknowledged that “the best of the Party cadres had been integrated in the apparatus, both central and local, of the soviets”. Many Bolsheviks felt that local committees of the Bolshevik party were nothing more than propaganda sections of the local Soviets[15]. The Bolsheviks even had doubts about their ability to exercise power at the head of the soviets. “In the aftermath of the October insurrection, when the Soviet government was being formed, Lenin had a momentary hesitation before accepting his post of chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars. His political intuition told him that this would put a brake on his capacity to act in the vanguard of the vanguard – to be on the left of the revolutionary party, as he had been so clearly between April and October 1917[16]. Lenin feared, not without reason, that if the party and its leading members were involved in the daily running of the Soviet government, they would find themselves trapped by the system and lose sight of the global goals of the proletarian movement that cannot be linked to the daily management of state affairs.[17]

The Bolsheviks didn’t want to monopolise power and shared the first Council of People’s Commissars with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Some of the sessions of this Council were even open to delegates from the Menshevik Internationalists and the anarchists.

The government only became definitively Bolshevik in July 1918, the date of the uprising of the Socialist Revolutionaries against the creation of poor peasants committees: “On July 6, two young Chekist members of the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, and major players in the conspiracy, A. Andreyev and G. Blumkin, appeared at the German Embassy and provided official documents attesting to their status and their mission. Admitted into the office of Ambassador, Count von Mirbach, they shot him and fled. In the aftermath, a detachment of Chekists commanded by a Left Socialist Revolutionary, Popov, would make a series of surprise arrests, including those of the leaders of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky and Latsis, the chairman of the Moscow Soviet, Smidovitch, and People’s Commissar for the Post, Podbielsky. He also seized the headquarters of the Cheka and the Central Post Office Building.”[18]

As a consequence of this, the party was then invaded by all sorts of opportunists and careerists, former tsarist officials or leading Menshevik converts. Nogin, an old Bolshevik, “spoke ofhorrifying facts about the drunkenness, debauchery, corruption, robbery and irresponsible behaviour of many party workers, so that one’s hair simply stands on end.’[19] In March 1918, before the Party Congress, Zinoviev told the story of the militant who welcomed a new member and told him to come back the next day to collect his membership card; to this he replied “No, comrade, I need it now to get an office job.

As Marcel Liebman noted, “If so many men who were communists in name only tried to enter the ranks of the party, it was because it was now the central power, the most influential institution in social and political life, one that united the new elite, appointed the managers and leaders and was the instrument and channel of upward social mobility and success” and he added that “the privileges of the middle and junior management raised protests in the party ranks[20], when all this is quite normal and commonplace in a bourgeois party.

The party then attempted to fight this influx by carrying out numerous purges. But this would prove to be ineffectual because the measures did not address the root of the problem as the merger of the party with the state was being strengthened inexorably. This danger was also contained in a similar way in the identification of the party with the Russian nation. The proletarian party is indeed international and its section in one or more countries where the proletariat is in control of an isolated bastion can in no way identify with the nation, but only and exclusively with the world revolution.

The transformation of Bolshevism into a party-state was eventually theorised by the argument that the party exercises power on behalf of the class, that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of the party,[21] which theoretically and politically disarmed it, completing its surrender into the arms of the state. In one of its resolutions, the 8th Party Congress (March 1919) agreed that the party must “win individual political sway in the soviets and effective control over all their activities.[22] The resolution was implemented in the following months with the formation of party cells in all the soviets to control them. Kamenev declared that “the Communist Party is the government of Russia. The country is ruled by the 600,000 party members.[23] The icing on the cake was provided by Zinoviev at the 2nd Congress of the Communist International (1920) when he declared that “every conscious worker must realise that the dictatorship of the working class can be realised only through the dictatorship of its vanguard, that is, through the Communist Party[24] and by Trotsky at the Tenth Party Congress (1921), who stated in a reply to the Workers’ Opposition:They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy!” Trotsky spoke of therevolutionary historical birthright of the Party”'. “'The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship ... regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class... The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers’ democracy…[25]

The proletariat had lost the Bolshevik Party as its vanguard. No longer was the state made to serve the proletariat; the state used the party as its battering ram against the proletariat. This is how the Platform of Fifteen, an opposition group that emerged within the Bolshevik Party in the late 1920s, denounced it: “The bureaucratisation of the party, the degeneration of its leading elements, the merger of the party apparatus with the bureaucratic apparatus of government, the loss of influence of the proletarian part of the party, the intervention of government in the internal struggles of the party - all this shows that the central committee has already exceeded the limitations of the policy of silencing the party and started to liquidate it - and is transforming it into an auxiliary arm of the state. Carrying out this policy of liquidation will mean the end of the proletarian dictatorship in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The party is the avant-garde and a vital weapon in the struggle of the working class. Without it, neither victory nor the retention of the proletarian dictatorship is possible.[26]

The necessity for the proletariat to organise autonomously from the transitional state

How could the proletariat in Russia have overturned the balance of forces, revitalised the soviets, held back the growth of the post-revolutionary state, opening the door to its real withering away and taking forward the world wide revolutionary movement towards communism?

This question could only have been solved by the development of the world revolution. “In Russia, the problem could only be posed.”[27] “…in Europe it will be immeasurably more difficult to start, whereas it was immeasurably more easy for us to start; but it will be more difficult for us to continue the revolution than it will be over there”.[28]

In the context of the struggle for the world revolution, there were two concrete tasks in Russia: saving the party for the proletariat by tearing it away from the talons of the state, and organising itself in workers’ councils capable of regenerating the soviet structure. Here we are only dealing with the latter point.

The proletariat has to organise itself independently from the transitional state and impose its own dictatorship over it. This may seem stupid to those who stick to facile formulae and syllogisms, which say that because the proletariat is the ruling class the state has to be its most faithful organ. In State and Revolution, going back over Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875, Lenin wrote:

In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois law.’ Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.

It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie![29]

The state in the period of transition[30] is a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”,[31] or, to put it more precisely, a state which conserves the deepest traits of a class society, a society of exploitation: in this phase, bourgeois right,[32] the law of value, the moral and spiritual influence of capitalism still exist. The transitional society still maintains many aspects of the old society, but it has gone through a profound change which is precisely what needs to be kept alive because it is the only thing that can lead to communism: the massive, conscious and organised activity of the great majority of the working class, its organisation into a politically dominant class, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The tragic experience of the Russian revolution shows that the organisation of the proletariat into the ruling class cannot take place through the transitional state (the soviet state)

The working class itself, as a class, considered as a unity and not as a diffuse social element, with unified class needs, with unified tasks and a consistent policy formulated in a clear manner, plays a less and less important political role in the Soviet republic.”[33]

The soviets made up the Commune-State, which Engels spoke about as the political association of the popular classes. This Commune-State plays an indispensable role in the repression of the bourgeoisie in the defensive war against imperialism and in maintaining a minimum of social cohesion, but cannot carry through the struggle for communism itself. Marx had already foreseen this in his draft of The Civil War in France:the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and therefore of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organised means of action. The Commune does not do away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive to the abolition of all classes and therefore of all class rule ... but it affords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and humane way.”[34] Furthermore, Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune in particular contains a good deal of criticism of the hesitations, confusions, and, in some cases, empty posturings of some of the Commune Council delegates, many of whom indeed embodied an obsolete petty bourgeois radicalism that was frequently outflanked by the more proletarian neighbourhood assemblies. At least one of the local revolutionary clubs declared the Commune to be dissolved because it was not revolutionary enough! [35]

the state is in our hands: but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted in the past year? No. But we refuse to admit that it did not operate in the way we wanted. How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand...[36]

To resolve this problem, the Bolshevik Party pushed through a series of measures. On the one hand the Soviet Constitution adopted in 1918 declared that “The All-Russian Congress of Soviets consists of representatives of local Soviets, the towns being represented by one deputy for every 25,000 inhabitants and the country areas by one deputy for every 125,000. This article formalises the dominance of the proletariat over the peasantry[37] while, at the same time, the programme of the Bolshevik Party, adopted in 1919, stated: “every member of a Soviet must, without fail, do a certain job of state administration; secondly, these jobs must be consistently changed so that they embrace all aspects of government, all its branches; and, thirdly, literally all the working population must be drawn into independent participation in state administration.[38]

These measures were inspired by the lessons of the Paris Commune. They were aimed at limiting the privileges and prerogatives of the state functionaries, but to be effective and efficient, only the proletariat organised autonomously in workers’ councils independent from the state[39] was in a position to carry this through.

Marxism is a living theory, which needs to deepen and rectify its conceptions on the basis of historical experience. Drawing the lessons on the Paris Commune that Marx and Engels bequeathed to them, the Bolsheviks understood that the Commune-State, which had to head towards extinction, was the expression of the soviets. But at the same time they erroneously identified it as a proletarian state,[40] believing that this process would come about by itself, from within the state.[41] The experience of the Russian revolution shows that it is impossible for the state to wither away by itself and this makes it necessary to distinguish the worker’ councils from the general Soviets, the first being the place where the proletariat organises itself and exerts its dictatorship over the transitional Commune-State represented by the general soviets.

After the seizure of power by the soviets, the proletariat will have to maintain and develop its own organisations which will act in an independent manner in the soviets: the red guards, the factory committees, the neighbourhood committees, the workers’ sections of the soviets, the general assemblies.  

The factory committees at the heart of working class organisation

We have already seen that the factory committees played a decisive role during the crisis of the soviets in July,[42] and how they prised them from the grip of the bourgeoisie, enabling them to play their role of organs of insurrection in October.[43] In May 1917, the Conference of Factory Committees in Jarkov (Ukraine) called on the soviets to “convert themselves into organs of revolution dedicated to consolidating its victories.[44] Between 7th and 12th October, a Conference of Factory Committees in Petrograd decided to create a Central Council of Factory Committees which took the name of the Workers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet. It immediately began coordinating all the base soviet organisations and intervened actively in the politics of the Soviet, radicalising it more and more. In his work The Soviet Trade Unions Deutscher recognised that the Factory Committee, the organ on the spot, rather than the trade union was the most potent and deadly instrument of upheaval.[45]

Along with other base organisations that emanated directly and organically from the working class, the factory committees expressed, much more naturally and authentically than the soviets, the thoughts, tendencies, and advances of the working class, maintaining a deep symbiosis with the class.

During the period of transition towards communism, the proletariat will in no way acquire the status of a ruling class at the economic level. This is why, in contrast to the bourgeoisie, it cannot delegate power to an institutionalised structure, to a state. Furthermore, despite its peculiarities, the Commune-State does not express the specific interests of the working class, determined by the need for the revolutionary transformation of the world, but the needs of all the non-exploiting classes. Finally, the ineluctably bureaucratic tendencies of the state mean that this organ will always be pushed towards becoming autonomous from the masses and towards imposing its rule on them. This is why the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot come from a state organ but from a force for permanent struggle, debate and mobilisation, from an organ which ensures the class autonomy of the proletariat, reflects the needs of the working masses and allows them to transform themselves through discussion and action.

We saw in the fourth article in this series how, after the seizure of power, the soviet base organisations and the workers’ organs of struggle progressively disappeared. This was a tragic episode which weakened the proletariat and accelerated a whole process of social decomposition.       

The Red Guard, which made a short-lived appearance in 1905, emerged in February at the initiative of the factory committees and under their control, succeeding in mobilising 100,000 workers. It remained active until the middle of 1918, but the civil war plunged it into a grave crisis. The enormously superior force of the imperialist armies highlighted the inability of the Red Guard to face up to them. Units in the south of Russia, under the command of Antonov Osveenko, put up a heroic resistance but were swept aside and defeated. Victims of the fear of centralisation, the units which tried to remain operational lacked the most basic equipment, such as bullets. It was above all an urban militia, with limited arms and training, without organisational experience, and could function mainly in the form of emergency units or as an auxiliary to an organised army, but it was incapable of waging a full scale war. The necessities of the moment made it imperative to set up a Red Army with the required rigid military structure.[46] The latter absorbed many units of the Red Guard which were dissolved as such. There were attempts to reconstitute the Red Guard up until 1919; certain soviets proposed that their units collaborate with the Red Army but the latter rejected these offers systematically when it didn’t dissolve the units by force.

The disappearance of the Red Guard restored to the soviet state one of the classic prerogatives of the state, the monopoly of arms, depriving the proletariat of one of its main means of defence since it no longer possessed its own military force.

The neighbourhood councils disappeared at the end of 1919. They had integrated workers from small enterprises and shops, the unemployed, the young, the retired, families who were part of the working class as a whole. They were also an essential means for disseminating proletarian thought and action among the marginal urban strata, such as the artisans, to the small peasants and so on.

The disappearance of the factory committees was a decisive blow. As we saw in the fourth article in this series, it took place rapidly and they had ceased to exist by the end of 1918. The trade unions played a decisive role in their destruction.

The conflict came out into the open at a tumultuous Pan-Russian Conference of Factory Committees on the eve of the October revolution. During the debates the idea was affirmed that ...“At the moment when the Factory Committees were formed, the trade unions actually did not yet exist. The Factory Committees filled the vacuum”. An anarchist delegate declared that “the trade unions wish to devour the Factory Committees. There is no popular discontent with the Factory Committees, but there is discontent with the trade unions. To the worker the trade union is a form of organisation imposed from without. The Factory Committee is closer to them”. One of the resolutions adopted by the conference stated that...“ workers’ control - within the limits assigned to it by the Conference - was only possible under the political and economic rule of the working class’. It warned against ‘isolated’ and ‘disorganised’ activities and pointed out that ‘the seizure of factories by the workers and their operation for personal profit was incompatible with the aims of the proletariat.’ [47]

The Bolsheviks continued to defend dogmatically the idea that the trade unions are the economic organs of the proletariat, and they took their side in the conflict between them and the factory committees. At the same conference, a Bolshevik delegate argued that the factory committees have to exercise their functions of control for the benefit of the trade unions and, what’s more, should be financially dependent on them”.[48]

On 3 November 1917, the Council of Peoples’ Commissars passed a decree on workers’ control, stipulating that the decisions of the factory committees could be “annulled by trade unions and congresses....”[49] This decision provoked animated protests by the factory committees and by members of the party. The decree was in the end modified: of the 21 delegates who formed the Council of Workers’ Control, 10 represented the trade unions and only 5 the factory committees! This imbalance not only put the latter in a position of weakness, but also imprisoned them in the logic of the management of production, making them all the more vulnerable to the trade unions.

Although theSoviet of Factory Committees remained active for several months, even trying to organise a general congress (see the fourth article in this series), the trade unions finally succeeded in dissolving the factory committees. The IInd Trade Union Congress, held between the 25th and 27th of January 1919, passed a resolution “demanding that ‘official status be granted to the administrative prerogatives of the unions’. It spoke of statisation’(ogosudarstvlenie) of the trade unions,as their function broadened and merged with the governmental machinery of industrial administration and control’.[50]

With the disappearance of the factory committees, “In the 'Soviet' Russia of 1920 the industrial workers weresubjected again to managerial authority, labour discipline wage incentives, scientific management - to the familiar forms of capitalist industrial organisation with the same bourgeois managers, qualified only by the State's holding the title to the property.’[51]The workers again found themselves completely atomised, lacking their own unifying organisations because the soviets were becoming assimilated with the classic electoralism of bourgeois democracy, no more than parliamentary chambers.

After the revolution, abundance does not yet exist and the working class continues to be subjected to the conditions of the realm of necessity, which includes exploitation for a whole period in which the world bourgeoisie has not yet been defeated. Even after this, as long as the integration of other social strata into associated labour has not been completed, the effort of producing the essential wealth of society will be borne mainly by the proletariat. The march towards communism will therefore contain a constant struggle to diminish exploitation to the point where it has disappeared[52]In order to maintain its collective political rule, the working class needs to have secured at least the basic material necessities of life and in particular to have the time and energy to engage in political life.[53]. Marx wrote that “by cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement”.[54]. If the proletariat, after seizing power, accepts a continuous augmentation of its exploitation, it will be incapable of carrying on the fight for communism.

This is what happened in revolutionary Russia. The exploitation of the working class increased to extreme limits the more the working class lost its autonomy and self-organisation. This process became irreversible when it was clear that the extension of the revolution had failed. The Workers’ Truth[55] group expressed the situation clearly: “the revolution has ended in a defeat for the working class. The bureaucracy and the NEPmen have become a new bourgeoisie which lives from the exploitation of the workers and profits from their disorganisation. With the trade unions in the hands of the bureaucracy, the workers are more disinherited than ever. After being converted into a leading party, into a party of leaders and organisers of the state organisation and economic organisation of a capitalist type, the Communist Party has irrevocably lost any links with and descent from the proletariat.

C. Mir 28.12.10

 

 


[1]. See for example: “The Period of Transition”, International Review n° 1, “The State and the dictatorship of the proletariat”, International Review n° 11. See also the articles of our series on communism: International Review n°s 77-78, 91, 95-96, 99, 127-130, 132, 134 and 135.

[2]. Bilan, n°. 18, organ of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, p.612. Bilan continued the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin on the question of the state and more particularly its role in the transition from capitalism to communism. Adopting Engels’ formulation, it defined the state as a “scourge which the proletariat inherits; in this regard, we will maintain an almost instinctive distrust of it.(Bilan n° 26 p.874).

[3]. Internationalisme, n° 10, organ of the Communist Left of France (GCF), 1945-1952. The Communist Left of France continued the work of Bilan and is the precursor of our organisation.

[4]. The Workers’ Opposition was a left tendency that emerged inside the Bolshevik Party in 1920-21. This article does not to set out to analyse the different left fractions that arose inside the Bolshevik Party in response to its degeneration. We refer the reader to the many articles we've already published on this question. These include “The Communist Left in Russia,” International Review n° s 8-9; “Manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party”, International Review n°s142, 143, 144 and 145. The quote, translated by us, is taken from the book Workers' Democracy or Party Dictatorship?, the chapter entitled “What is the Workers’ Opposition” on page 179 of the Spanish edition. It should be noted that if the Workers’ Opposition had the insight to see the problems the revolution faced, the solution it proposed could only make things worse. It thought that the unions should have even more power. Based on the correct idea that “the Soviet apparatus is made up from different social strata” (p.177 op. cit.), it concludes with the need for “the reins of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the field of economic construction [to] be given to organs which by their composition, are class organs, united by their vital links to production in a direct way, that is to say, the unions “(ibid.). This approach restricts the activity of the proletariat to the narrow domain of “economic construction” and at the same time gives organs that are bureaucratic and destructive of the capacities of the proletariat, the trade unions, the utopian mission of developing the autonomous activity of the masses.

[5]. See M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, Introduction. Available from: https://libcom.org/library/bolsheviks-workers-control-solidarity-introdu....

[6]. Cited by Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, London 1975, p.320.

[7]. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Ch. VIII, “The ascendancy of the party,” p.192 of 1973 Penguin edition.

[8] Ibid., note A, “Lenin's Theory of the State”,p.251.

[9]. See International Review 99, “Understanding the defeat of the Russian Revolution” (Part 1), p.17.

[10]. Ibid., quote from Ossinski, a member of one of the first left tendencies in the Party.

[11]. Workers' Democracy or Party Dictatorship?, p.181 of the Spanish edition, translated by us.

[12]. Brinton, op. cit., chapter on 1920. The Glavki were state organs for the management of the economy.

[13]. Lenin, March 1919, “Session of the Petrograd Soviet”, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p.32-3, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965. This quotation differs slightly from that in the French version of this article.

[14]. Workers' Democracy or Party Dictatorship?, p.213 of the Spanish edition, translated by us.

[15]. Quotes taken from Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, p 279.

[16]. International Review n° 99, op. cit.

[17]. This concern was echoed by the communist left, which “expressed, in 1919, the desire to draw a clearer distinction between state and party. It seemed to them that the one more than the other was focused on internationalism in line with their own concerns. The party must somehow play the role of the conscience of the government and the State(Marcel Liebman, op cit.). Bilan insisted on this danger of the party being absorbed by the state, of the working class losing its avant-garde and its main source of support, the soviets: “The confusion between these two notions of party and state is particularly damaging as there is no possibility of reconciling these two organs, when there is an irresolvable opposition in the nature, the function and the goals of the state and the party. The adjective ‘proletarian’ does not change the nature of the state which remains an organ of economic or political coercion, while the party is a body whose role is, par excellence, to achieve, not by coercion but political education, the emancipation of the workers” (Bilan n°.26, p.871).

[18]. Pierre Broué, Trotsky, p.255. The author relates the story of the anarchist author Leonard Schapiro.

[19]. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Ch. VIII, “The Ascendancy of the party,” Pelican Books, p.212.

[20]. Ibid.

[21]. This theory was rooted in the confusions that all the revolutionaries had about the party, its relationship with the class and the question of power, as we noted in an article in our series on communism, International Review No. 91 (p.16): “the revolutionaries of the day, despite their commitment to the soviet system of delegation which had made the old system of parliamentary representation obsolete, were still held back by parliamentary ideology to the extent that they saw the party which had a majority in the central soviets then formed the government and administered the state.” In reality, the old confusions were reinforced and pushed to the extreme by the theorisation of the mounting evidence of the transformation of the Bolshevik party into the Party-State.

[22]. Marcel Liebman, op. cit., p.280.

[23]. Ibid.

[24]. Ibid.

[25]. Quoted in Brinton's pamphlet, chapter on 1921. Trotsky was right in saying that the class can go through moments of confusion and hesitation and that the party, by contrast, armed with a rigorous theoretical and programmatic framework, is the bearer of the historic interests of the class and has to pass them down to it. But it can't do this by way of a dictatorship over the proletariat, which only weakens it, further increasing its hesitations.

[26]. The Platform of the Group of Fifteen was first published outside Russia by the branch of the Italian Left, which published the journal Reveil Communist in the late 1920s. It appeared in German and French under the title On the eve of Thermidor, revolution and counter-revolution in Soviet Russia - Platform of the Left Opposition in the Bolshevik party (Sapranov, Smirnov, Obhorin, Kalin, etc.) at the beginning of 1928. An English translation appears in the ICC’s book The Russian Communist Left.

[27]. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution.

[28]. Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee” to the VIIth Party Congress, 7 March 1918.

[29]. Chapter V, “The first phase of communist society.”

[30]. Like Marx, Lenin made improper use of the term “the lower stage of communism”, when in reality, once the bourgeois state has been destroyed, we are still living under a form of capitalism with a defeated bourgeoisie, and we think it is more precise to talk about a “period of transition from capitalism to communism”.

[31]. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky took up the same idea when he talked about the “dual” character of the state, “socialist” on one side but “bourgeois without a bourgeoisie” on the other. See our article from the series on communism in International Review n° 105.

[32]. As Marx said in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, there is nothing socialist about the principle of “equal work for equal wages”.

[33]. Alexandra Kollontai, in an intervention to the Xth Congress of the Party. 1921, translated from Workers’ Democracy or Party Dictatorship, p.171 of the Spanish edition. Anton Ciliga, in his book The Russian Enigma, went in a similar direction: “What separated the opposition from Trotskyism was not only in the way of judging the regime and of understanding the present problems; it was, before all, the way in which the part played in the revolution by the proletariat was being considered. To the Trotskyists it was the party, to the extreme left wing it was the working class which was the mover of the revolution. The struggle between Stalin and Trotsky concerned party politics and the directing personnel of the party; to the one as to the other the proletariat was but a passive object. The groups of the extreme left wing communists, on the other hand, were above all interested in the actual conditions of the working class and the part played by it, in what it actually was in Soviet society and what it should be in a society which sincerely set itself the task of building socialism” (Ciliga, p.271 of the 1979 edition).

[34]. Quoted in International Review n° 77: “1871, the first proletarian revolution.”

[35]. Ibid.

[36]. Lenin, “Political report of the Central Committee of the RCP(B)” , March 27th 1922. Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B). Collected Works, vol. 33, p.279. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965.

[37] Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1972 US edition, p.270.

[38]. Rough Draft of the Programme of the RCP, “The basic tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia”.

[39]. In his letter to the Republic of Workers’ Councils in Bavaria – which only lasted three weeks before being crushed by the troops of the social democratic government in May 1919 – Lenin seems to be oriented towards the independent organisation of workers’ councils: “The most urgent and most extensive implementation of these and similar measures, coupled with the initiative of workers’, farm labourers’ and - acting apart from them - small peasants’ councils, should strengthen your position.” “Message of greetings to the Bavarian Soviet Republic”, 27th April 1919, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p.325-6. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965.

[40]. Lenin did seem to have doubts about this, since on a number of occasions he called the state “a workers’ and peasants’ state with bureaucratic deformations”; and during the debate on the trade unions in 1921, he argued that the proletariat had to be organised in unions and have the right to strike to defend itself from “its” state: “Comrade Trotsky falls into error himself. He seems to say that in a workers’ state it is not the business of the trade unions to stand up for the material and spiritual interests of the working class. That is a mistake. Comrade Trotsky speaks of a “workers’ state”. May I say that this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about a workers’ state in 1917; but it is now a patent error to say: “Since this is a workers’ state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?” The whole point is that it is not quite a workers’ state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes. We have got down from general principles to practical discussion and decrees, and here we are being dragged back and prevented from tackling the business at hand. This will not do. For one thing, ours is not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state. And a lot depends on that. (Bukharin: “What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?”) Comrade Bukharin back there may well shout “What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?” I shall not stop to answer him. Anyone who has a mind to should recall the recent Congress of Soviets, and that will be answer enough.

But that is not all. Our Party Programme—a document which the author of theABC of Communism knows very well—shows that ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition. Well, is it right to say that in a state that has taken this shape in practice the trade unions have nothing to protect, or that we can do without them in protecting the material and spiritual interests of the massively organised proletariat? No, this reasoning is theoretically quite wrong. It takes us into the sphere of abstraction or an ideal we shall achieve in 15 or 20 years’ time, and I am not so sure that we shall have achieved it even by then. What we actually have before us is a reality of which we have a good deal of knowledge, provided, that is, we keep our heads, and do not let ourselves be carried away by intellectualist talk or abstract reasoning, or by what may appear to be “theory” but is in fact error and misapprehension of the peculiarities of transition. We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers’ organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state”. The trade unions, the present situation, and Trotsky’s mistakes”, 30 December 1920, Collected Works, Vol. 32, p.24-5. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965.

[41]. Lenin pushed for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (1922) which rapidly failed in its mission of control and was converted into a supplementary bureaucratic commission.

[42]. See International Review n° 141, “What are workers’ councils (II): the resurgence and crisis of workers’ councils in 1917.”

[43]. See International Review n° 143, “What are workers’ councils (III): The revolution of 1917 (July to October).”

[44]. Brinton, op. cit., chapter on 1917.

[45]. Cited by Brinton, ibid.

[46]. Without entering into a discussion about the need or not for a Red Army during this part of the period of transition, which we can call the world civil war (i.e. as long as the proletariat has not taken power on a world scale), one thing came out clearly during the Russian experience: the formation of the Red Army, its rapid bureaucratisation and affirmation as a state organ, the total absence of a proletarian counterweight within it; all this reflected a balance of forces with the bourgeoisie which was highly unfavourable to the proletariat on a world scale. As we remarked in an article from the series on communism in International Review n° 96, “the more the revolution spreads worldwide, the more it will be led directly by the workers' councils and their militias, the more the political aspects of the struggle will predominate over the military, the less there will be a need for a 'red army' to lead the struggle.

[47]. Cited by Brinton, chapter on 1917. Enthusiastic about the result of the Conference, Lenin declared that “we must shift the centre of gravity to the Factory Committees. The Factory Committees must become the organs of insurrection. We must change our slogan and instead of saying 'All Power to the Soviets' we must say 'All Power to the Factory Committees'” (ibid).

[48]. Ibid. We have not been able to find this quotation in the original English version of the pamphlet so have translated it from the Spanish version.

[49]. Ibid.

[50]. Ibid, chapter on 1919. The Russian experience shows conclusively the reactionary nature of the trade unions, their irreversible tendency to convert themselves into state structures and their radical antagonism to the new organisational forms which, since 1905, the proletariat had been developing in the context of the new conditions of decadent capitalism and faced with the necessity for revolution. 

[51]. Brinton, chapter on 1920, quoting from R V Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p.107.

[52]. “A policy of proletarian management, therefore, can only...have a socialist content if it follows a way which is diametrically opposed to capitalism - if it aims at a constant and progressive elevation of the living conditions of the masses, and not at holding them down or lowering them” (Bilan n° 28, “Problems of the period of transition”, cited in International Review n° 128).

[53]. cf International Review n° 95, “The programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

[54]. Marx, Value, Prices and Profits.

[55]. Formed in 1922, it was one of the last left fractions secreted by the Bolshevik Party in the struggle for its regeneration, its recuperation by the working class. See the ICC’s book The Russian Communist Left.

Historic events: 

History of the workers' movement: 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

Rubric: 

Russian Revolution

Decadence of Capitalism (ix): The Comintern and the virus of “Luxemburgism” in 1924

The previous article in this series showed how rapidly the hopes for an immediate revolutionary victory, kindled by the proletarian uprisings of 1917-19 had, a mere two years later, in 1921, given way to a more sober reflection among revolutionaries about the overall course of capitalism’s historical crisis. At the Third Congress of the Communist International, a key question for debate was this: the capitalist system has certainly entered an epoch of decline, but what happens if the proletariat does not immediately respond to the new period by overthrowing the system? And what is the task of communist organisations in a phase when the class struggle and the proletariat’s subjective understanding of its situation are in retreat, even when the objective historical conditions for revolution are still present?

This acceleration of history, which gave rise to different and often sharply conflicting responses from the revolutionary organisations, continued in the years that followed, as the degeneration of the revolution in Russia, its increasing isolation, opened the way to the triumph of an unprecedented form of counter-revolution. The year 1921 was a fateful turning point: faced with widespread proletarian discontent in Petrograd and Kronstadt, as well as a wave of peasant revolts, the Bolsheviks took the catastrophic step of using massive repression against the working class, while simultaneously banning fractions inside the party. The New Economic Policy, introduced immediately after the Kronstadt rebellion, conceded to some of its demands on the economic front, but not at all at the political level: there was to be no relaxation in the domination of the soviets by the party-state machinery. And yet a year later Lenin began to complain that the state was escaping the control of the proletarian party itself, dragging it in a direction it could not foresee. In the same year, at Rapallo, the “Soviet” state concluded a secret deal with German imperialism at a time when Germany was still in a state of social ferment: this was a clear sign that the Russian state was beginning to place its national interests above the needs of the international class struggle. In 1923, in Russia, there were more workers’ strikes and the formation of illegal left communist groupings like Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group, as well as a “legal” left opposition within the party, regrouping not only old dissidents like Ossinski but Trotsky himself.

Lenin died in January 1924 and in December of the same year Stalin tentatively raised the slogan of “socialism in one country”. By 1925/26, it had become official policy in the Russian party. The new line symbolised a decisive break with internationalism.

Bolshevisation versus “Luxemburgism”

Virtually all of the communists who came together to form the new International in 1919 were agreed that capitalism had proved to be a system in historic decline, even if they differed on the political implications of the new period and the means needed to develop the revolutionary struggle – for example, whether bourgeois parliaments should be used as a “tribune” for revolutionary propaganda, or should be boycotted in favour of action on the streets and in the workplace. Regarding the theoretical underpinnings of the new epoch, there had been little time for sustained debate. The only really coherent analysis of the “economics of decadence” had been provided by Rosa Luxemburg just before the outbreak of the world war. As we have seen,[1] her theory of capitalist breakdown provoked many criticisms from reformists and revolutionaries alike, but the criticisms were largely negative – there was little sign of an alternative framework for understanding the fundamental contradictions that had impelled capitalism to enter its epoch of decay. In any case, disagreements on this point were rightly not considered fundamental. The essential thing was to accept that the system had reached the stage where revolution had become both possible and necessary.

In 1924, however, within the Communist International, there was a revival of the controversy over Luxemburg’s economic analysis. Luxemburg’s views had always had a considerable influence in the German communist movement, both in the official KPD and the left communist KAPD. But now, given the growing pressure to more firmly tie the communist parties outside Russia to the needs of the Russian state, a process of “Bolshevisation” was launched throughout the Comintern, with the aim of chasing away unwanted divergences in theory and tactics. At a certain moment in the Bolshevisation campaign, the persistence of “Luxemburgism” in the German party was identified as being the fountainhead of a multitude of deviations – in particular, “errors” on the national and colonial question, and a spontaneist approach to the role of the party. At the most abstract “theoretical” level, this drive against Luxemburgism gave rise to Bukharin’s Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, written in 1924.

We last encountered Bukharin as a spokesman for the left of the Bolshevik party during the war – his almost prophetic analysis of state capitalism and his recognition of the need to return to Marx’s call for the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state placed him in the real vanguard of the international movement; he was also very close to Luxemburg in his rejection of the slogan of “national self-determination”, much to Lenin’s anger. In Russia in 1918 he had been a leading member of the Left Communist group which had opposed the Treaty of Brest Litovsk and, more significantly, opposed the early bureaucratisation of the Soviet state. However, once the controversy over the peace treaty had faded, Bukharin’s critical faculties were overtaken by his admiration for the methods of War Communism, which he began to theorise as a genuine form of the transition to communism.[2] The man who had criticised the leviathan state created by imperialism now saw no difficulty in the “proletarian state” becoming increasingly all-powerful during the transitional period. In the 1921 trade union debate, Bukharin sided with Trotsky in calling for the direct subordination of the trade unions to the apparatus of this state. However, with the introduction of the NEP, Bukharin shifted his position again. He repudiated the methods of extreme coercion favoured by War Communism, especially with regard to the peasantry, and now began to see the NEP, with its mixture of state ownership and individual property, and the reliance on market forces instead of direct state decree, as the “normal” model for the transition to communism. But this transitional phase – just as in the period when he had been enamoured of War Communism – was increasingly seen by Bukharin in national terms, in contrast with his views during the war, when he had stressed the globally inter-dependent nature of the world economy. In fact, Bukharin can in some ways be seen as the “originator” of the thesis of socialism in one country, which Stalin then took on and ultimately used to rid himself of Bukharin, first politically, then physically.[3]

Bukharin’s Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital was clearly intended as a theoretical justification for exposing the “weaknesses” of the KPD on the national, colonial and peasant questions – this is boldly asserted at the end of the work, although with no link in the argument between the attack on Luxemburg’s economics and their alleged political consequences. However, Bukharin’s all-out assault on Luxemburg on the theoretical question of capitalist accumulation has been taken up by some revolutionaries as though they are essentially independent from the dubious political aims of the document.

We think this is a mistake for a number of reasons. The political aim of Bukharin’s text cannot be separated either from its aggressive tone, or its theoretical content.

The tone of the text certainly indicates that its aim was to do a hatchet job on Luxemburg, to discredit her. As Rosdolsky points out: “The present-day reader may find Bukharin’s aggressive and often frivolous tone somewhat unpleasant, when one remembers that Rosa Luxemburg had fallen victim to fascist murderers only a few years previously. That his tone was dictated more by political than scientific interests provides some explanation. Bukharin saw his task as that of breaking the still very strong influence of ‘Luxemburgism’ within the German Communist Party (KPD) and any means seemed justified”.[4] You have to wade through pages of pages of sarcasms and patronising asides before, at the very end of the book, Bukharin grudgingly admits that Rosa has provided us with an excellent historical survey of the way that capitalism has dealt with the other social systems that constitute its milieu. There is no attempt whatever to begin the “polemic” by relating to the very real issues that Rosa Luxemburg was addressing in her work – the abandonment of the perspective of capitalism’s breakdown by the revisionists and the necessity to understand the tendency towards collapse inherent in the capitalist accumulation process. On the contrary, a number of Bukharin’s arguments give the impression that he is just striking out with whatever comes to hand, even if it means profoundly distorting Luxemburg’s thesis.

For example, what are we to make of the charge that Luxemburg provides us with a theory of imperialism which has it living harmoniously with the pre-capitalist world through a peaceful round of exchange of equivalents which, in Bukharin’s phrase means that “Both sides are quite content now. ‘The wolves have eaten, the sheep are unhurt’?[5] We have just mentioned that Bukharin himself admits elsewhere that a major strength of her book is the way it chronicles and denounces the way in which capitalism “integrates” the non-capitalist milieu – through plunder, exploitation, and destruction. This is the very opposite of the sheep and the wolves living in harmony. The sheep are either eaten or, through their own economic growth, they too become capitalist wolves and their competition further reduces the food supply...

Equally crude is the argument that, in Luxemburg’s definition of imperialism, only struggles for particular non-capitalist markets count as imperialist conflicts, and that “a fight for territories that have already become capitalist is not imperialism, which is utterly wrong”.[6] In reality Luxemburg’s argument that “Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains of the non-capitalist environment[7] is aimed at describing an entire era, a general context in which imperialist conflicts take place. The return of imperialist conflict to the heart of the system, the shift towards direct military rivalry between the developed capitalist powers, is already registered in the Accumulation and is developed at considerable length in The Junius Pamphlet.

Still on the subject of imperialism, we have Bukharin’s argument that, since there are still plenty of areas of non-capitalist production left in the world, capitalism would seem to have a bright future. “It is a fact that imperialism means catastrophe, that we have entered into the period of the collapse of capitalism, no less. But it is also a fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s population belongs to the ‘third persons’...it is not the industrial and agricultural workers who form the majority of today’s world population.... Even if Rosa Luxemburg’s theory were even approximately correct, the cause of revolution would be in a very poor position”.[8]

Paul Frölich (one of the “Luxemburgists” in the KPD who remained in the party after the exclusion of the elements who were to found the KAPD) answers this very well in his biography of Luxemburg, first published in 1939:

Various critics, and in particular Bukharin, believed that they were playing an effective trump card against Rosa Luxemburg when they pointed to the tremendous possibilities of capitalist expansion into non-capitalist areas. But the originator of the accumulation theory had already removed the sting from this argument by emphasising repeatedly that the death throes of capitalism would inevitably set in long before the inherent tendency to extend its markets had run into its objective limits. Expansionist possibilities are not a geographical conception: it is not the number of square miles which is decisive. Nor are they a demographical conception: it is not the statistical comparison of capitalist and non-capitalist populations which indicates the ripeness of the historical process. A socio-economic problem is involved, and a whole complex of contradictory interests, forces and phenomena has to be taken into account.[9] In sum, Bukharin has patently confused geography and demography with the real capacity of the remaining non-capitalist systems to generate exchange value and thus constitute an effective market for capitalist production.  

Capitalist contradictions

If we now look at Bukharin’s treatment of the central issue in Luxemburg’s theory, the problem raised by Marx’s reproduction schemas, we find again that Bukharin’s approach is not at all unconnected to his political outlook. In a two-part critique published in 1982 (International Review n° 29 and n° 30, “To go beyond capitalism: abolish the wages system”), it is quite rightly argued that Bukharin’s criticisms of Luxemburg reveal profound divergences regarding the very content of communism.

Central to Luxemburg’s theory is the argument that Marx’s schemas of expanded reproduction in Capital Volume 2, which assume for the sake of argument a society composed exclusively of capitalists and workers, should be taken precisely as abstract schemas and not as a demonstration of the real possibility of harmonious capitalist accumulation in a closed system. In real life, capitalism has been constantly driven to expand beyond the borders of its own social relations. For Luxemburg, following Marx’s argumentation in other areas of Capital, the problem of realisation is posed to capital as a whole even if for individual workers and capitalists other workers and other capitalists can perfectly well constitute a market for all their surplus value. Bukharin accepts of course that for expanded reproduction to take place, there will be a need for a constant source of additional demand. But he insists that this additional demand is provided by the workers; perhaps not the workers who absorb the variable capital advanced by the capitalists at the beginning of the accumulation cycle, but by additional workers: “The employment of additional workers produces an additional demand, which realises precisely that part of the surplus value which is to be accumulated, to be exact, that part which must of necessity convert itself into functioning, additional variable capital”.[10] To which our article replies: “Applying Bukharin’s analysis to reality comes down to this: what should capitalists do to avoid laying off workers when their businesses can no longer find any outlets? Simple! – take on ‘extra workers’! It only needed someone to think of it. The trouble is that a capitalist who followed this advice would go rapidly bankrupt.[11]

This argumentation is on a similar level to Otto Bauer’s response to Luxemburg, which she tears to pieces in her Anticritique: for Bauer, the simple growth in the population constitutes the new markets needed for accumulation. Capitalism would certainly be flourishing today if population growth solved the problem of realising surplus value. But, strangely enough, in the last few decades population growth has been a constant factor while the crisis of the system has also “grown” at dizzying rates. As Frölich pointed out, the problem of realising surplus value is not a question of demographics but of effective demand, demand backed by the ability to pay. And since workers’ demand can absorb no more than the original variable capital advanced by the capitalists, taking on new workers is revealed as a non-solution the moment you consider capitalism as a totality. 

There is however, another side to Bukharin’s argument, since he also argues that the capitalists themselves also constitute the additional market needed for further accumulation because they invest in the production of means of production. “The capitalists themselves buy the additional means of production, the additional workers, who receive money from the capitalists ... buy the additional means of consumption”.[12] This side of the argument is much more favoured by those who also consider, along with Bukharin, that Luxemburg had raised a problem that does not exist: producing and selling additional means of production solves the problem of accumulation. Luxemburg had already criticised the essentials of this argument in her critique of Tugan-Baranowski’s efforts to prove that capitalism faced no insuperable barriers in the accumulation process; she supported her argument by referring to Marx himself: “Besides, as we have seen (vol 2, part 3), continuous circulation takes place between constant capital and constant capital (even regardless of accelerated accumulation). It is at first independent of individual consumption because it never enters the latter. But this consumption definitely limits it nevertheless, since constant capital is never produced for its own sake, but solely because more of it is needed in spheres of production go into individual consumption.[13]For Luxemburg, a literal interpretation of the reproduction schemas such as Tugan-Baranowski’s would result “not in capital accumulation, but growing production of the means of production with no aim at all.[14]

Bukharin is aware that the production of producer goods is indeed not a solution to the problem, because he brings in the “extra workers” to buy up the increasing mass of commodities produced by the additional means of production. In fact he takes Tugan-Baranowski to task for not grasping that “the chain of production must always end with the production of means of consumption...which enter into the process of personal consumption”.[15] But he only puts forward this argument in order to accuse Luxemburg of mixing up Tugan-Baranowski with Marx. And in the end he answers Luxemburg, as have many others after him, by quoting Marx in a misleading manner which once again seems to imply that capitalism can be perfectly content in basing its expansion on an endless production of producer goods: “Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie.[16]These are certainly Marx’s words but Bukharin’s reference to them is misleading: Marx’s language here is polemical rather than exact: capital indeed bases itself on accumulation for its own sake, i.e. the accumulation of wealth in its historically dominant form of value; but it cannot achieve this merely by production for its own sake. This is because it only produces commodities and a commodity realises no profit for the capitalists if it is not sold. It does not produce for its own sake, merely to fill the warehouses or throw what it produces into the sea (even if these are often the unfortunate results of its inability to find a market for its goods). 

Bukharin’s state capitalist solutions

Bukharin’s biographer Stephen Cohen, who cited the above critical comments by Bukharin on Tugan- Baranowski, notes another basic contradiction in Bukharin’s approach.

At first glance, his inflexible approach to Tugan-Baranowski’s arguments seem curious. Bukharin himself, after all, had frequently emphasised the regulatory powers of state capitalist systems, later even theorising that under ‘pure’ state capitalism (without a free market) production could continue crisis free while consumption lagged behind[17]

Cohen has put his finger on a key element of Bukharin’s analysis. He is referring to the following passage in Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital:

Let us imagine three socio-economic formations: the collective-capitalist social order (state capitalism), in which the capitalist class is united in a unified trust and we are dealing with an organized, though at the same time, from the standpoint of the classes, antagonistic economy; then, the 'classical' capitalist society, which Marx analyses; and finally socialist society. Let us follow (1) the manner of the course of expanded reproduction; thus, the factors which make an ‘accumulation’ possible (we give the word ‘accumulation’ quotation marks, because the designation ‘accumulation’ by its very nature presupposes only capitalist relations); (2) how, where and when crises can arise.

1. State capitalism. Is an accumulation possible here? Of course. The constant capital grows, because the capitalists’ consumption grows. New branches of production, corresponding to new needs, are continually arising. Even though there are certain limits to it, the workers’ consumption increases. Notwithstanding this ‘under-consumption’ of the masses, no crisis can arise, since mutual demand of all branches of production, and likewise consumer demand, that of the capitalists as well as of the workers, are given from the start. Instead of an ‘anarchy of production’ – a plan that is rational from the standpoint of Capital. If there is a ‘miscalculation’ in means of production, the surplus is stored, and a corresponding correction will be made in the following period of production. If, on the other hand, there has been a ‘miscalculation’ in means of consumption for the workers, this excess is used as ‘fodder’ by distributing it amongst the workers, or the respective portion of the product will be destroyed. Even in the case of a miscalculation in the production of luxury articles, the ‘way out’ is clear. Thus, no crisis of over-production can occur here. The capitalist’s consumption constitutes the incentive for production and the plan of production. Hence, there is no particularly fast development of production (small number of capitalists)”.[18]

Froelich, like Cohen, also highlights this passage and comments:

“[Bukharin’s] solution turned out to be an indirect confirmation of her crucial thesis...” And this solution is “astonishing. We are presented here with a ‘capitalism’, which is not economic anarchy, but a planned economy in which there is no competition, but rather a general world trust, and in which capitalists do not have to bother about the realisation of all their surplus value....”.[19]

Our article is equally scathing about the idea of throwing away the surplus product:

Bukharin claims to solve the problem theoretically by eliminating it. The problem in capitalist crises of overproduction is the difficulty in selling what is produced. Bukharin tells us: all that needs to be done is ‘give it away free’! If capitalism were able to distribute its products for nothing, it would indeed never undergo any major crises – since its main contradiction would thus be solved. But such a capitalism can only exist in the mind of a Bukharin who has run out of arguments. The ‘free’ distribution of production, that is to say the organisation of society in such a way that men produce directly for themselves, is indeed the only way out for humanity. But this ‘solution’ is not an organised form of capitalism, but communism.[20]

When he turns to “classical” capitalist society in the ensuing paragraphs, Bukharin accepts that crises of overproduction can take place – but they are merely the result of temporary disproportions between the branches of production (a view previously expressed by the “classical” economists and criticised by Marx, as we showed in the article “The mortal contradictions of bourgeois society” in International Review n° 139,). Bukharin then devotes a few scant lines to socialism as such, and makes the obvious point that a society which produces only to satisfy human need would have no crises of overproduction. But what seems to interest Bukharin above all is this hyper-planned capitalism where the state irons out all problems of disproportion or miscalculation. In other words, the kind of society which, in the USSR of the middle twenties, he was already describing as socialism... Admittedly, Bukharin’s science fiction state capitalism has become a world trust, a global colossus with no pre-capitalist remnants surrounding it and no conflict between national capitals. But his vision of socialism in the Soviet Union was a similar nightmarish utopia, to all intents and purposes a self-contained trust with no internal competition and only a manageable peasantry partially and temporarily outside its economic jurisdiction.

Thus, as we said earlier, the article in International Review n° 29 correctly concludes that Bukharin’s attack on Rosa Luxemburg’s economic theory reveals two fundamentally opposed visions of socialism. For Luxemburg, the fundamental contradiction in capitalist accumulation derives from the contradiction between use value and exchange value, inherent in the commodity – and above all in the commodity labour power which has the unique characteristic of being able to engender an additional value which is the source of the capitalist’s profit, but also the source of his problem of finding sufficient markets to realise his profit. Consequently, this contradiction and all the convulsions that result from it can only be overcome by abolishing wage labour and commodity production – the essential prerequisites of the communist mode of production.

Bukharin on the other hand criticises Luxemburg for having things too easy and “singling out one contradiction”, when in fact there are many: the contradiction between branches of production, between industry and agriculture; the anarchy of the market and competition.[21] All of which is true, but Bukharin’s state capitalist solution shows that for him there is one fundamental problem with capitalism: its lack of planning. If only the state can take charge of production and distribution, then we can have crisis-free accumulation.

Whatever confusions the workers’ movement prior to the Russian revolution may have had about the transition to communism, its clearest elements had always argued that communism/socialism could only be created on a world scale because each country, each capitalist nation, is inevitably dominated by the world market; and the liberation of the productive forces set in motion by the proletarian revolution could only become effective when the tyranny of global capital had been overthrown in all its major centres. In contrast to this, the Stalinist vision of socialism in one country posits accumulation in a closed system – something which had been impossible for classical capitalism and was no more possible for a totally state regulated system, even if Russia’s vast size (and huge agricultural sector...) made an autarkic phase of development a temporary possibility. But if, as Luxemburg insisted, capitalism as a world order cannot operate in the confines of a closed system, this is still less the case the individual national capitals, and Stalinist autarky in the 1930s – founded on the frenzied development of a war economy – was essentially a preparation for its inevitable military-imperialist expansion, realised in the second imperialist holocaust and the conquests which followed it.

***

Between 1924 when Bukharin wrote his book, and 1929, year of the Great Crash, capitalism underwent a phase of relative stability and in some areas – above all the USA – of spectacular growth. But this was merely the lull before the storm of the greatest economic crisis capitalism had ever experienced. In the next article in this series we will look at some of the attempts made by revolutionaries to understand the origins and implications of this crisis, and above all its significance as an expression of the decline of the capitalist mode of production.

Gerrard, May 2011.

 

 


[3]. In his biography of Bukharin, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, London 1974, Stephen Cohen traces Bukharin’s initial version of the theory to as early as 1922. See pp.147-148

[4]. Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital, Pluto Press 1989 edition, vol. 2 p.458n). As we noted in a previous article (“Rosa Luxemburg and the limits to the expansion of capitalism”, International Review n°142), Rosdolsky has his own criticisms of Luxemburg, but he does not dismiss the problems she poses; with regard to Bukharin’s treatment of the reproduction schemas, he argues that while Luxemburg herself made mathematical errors, so did Bukharin; and more importantly, took Marx’s formulation of the problem of expanded reproduction for its actual solution: “Bukharin completely forgot that the extended reproduction of the total social capital must not only lead to the growth of c and v but also to that of α, i.e. to the growth of the individual consumption of the capitalists. Nevertheless, this elementary mistake remained unobserved for almost two decades, and Bukharin was generally regarded as the most authoritative defender of Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ against Rosa Luxemburg’s attacks ‘on those parts of Marx’s analysis, which the incomparable master has handed down to us the completed product of his genius’ (Imperialism,p.158 of the London 1972 edition). Nevertheless, Bukharin’s general formula for equilibrium is very useful although he too (like most critics of Rosa Luxemburg) mistook the mere formulation of the problem for its solution” (The Making of Marx’s Capital, p.450)

[5]. Imperialism and Accumulation of Capital, p.248, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1972.

[6]. Ibid, Chapter 4, p.253.

[7]. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter XXXI, “Protective Tariffs and Accumulation”, p. 446, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1968.

[8]. Bukharin, op.cit, p. 260.

[9]. Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg, p.162, Pluto Press 1972.

[10]. Bukharin op.cit. p. 166-167.

[11]. International Review n° 29.

[12]. Bukharin, op. cit. p.177.

[13]. Capital Vol III, chapter 18, p 304-5, cited by Luxemburg op. Cit., XXV, p.346.

[14]. Luxemburg, op. cit., p.335).

[15]. Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, cited by Cohen, op. cit, p.174.

[16]. Capital Vol. I, p.595.

[17]. Cohen, p.174.Cohen uses the term “at first sight” because he goes on to argue that what Bukharin actually had in mind here was less the old controversy with Tugan than the new controversy in the Russian party, between the “super- industrialisers” (initially Preobrazhinski and the left opposition, later Stalin) who tended to focus on the forced accumulation of the means of production in the state sector, and his own view which (ironically, considering his dismissal of Luxemburg’s estimation of the important of non-capitalist demand) continually stressed the need to base the expansion of state industry on the gradual development of the peasant market rather, as the super-industrialisers shockingly insisted, on a direct exploitation of the peasants and the spoliation of their wealth. 

[18]. Bukharin, op. cit., p.226

[19]. Froelich, op. cit., p.160.

[20]. International Review n° 29.

[21]. It is worth noting that Grossman also criticises Bukharin for talking vaguely about contradictions without locating the essential one that leads to the breakdown of the system. See Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, London 1992, p 48-9

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Decadence

The Communist Left in Russia: Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Part 4)

We publish here the fourth and final part of the Manifesto (the first three parts were published in the last three issues of the International Review). This addresses two particular issues: on the one hand, the organisation of workers in councils to take power and transform society; on the other, the nature of oppositional politics in the Bolshevik Party conducted by other groups formed in reaction to its degeneration.

The Manifesto makes a clear distinction between the proletariat organised in councils, and the other non-exploiting strata of society that it leads, “Where were the councils born? In the factories and in the plants. [...] The workers’ councils appeared in 1917 as guides of the revolution, not only in substance but also formally: soldiers, peasants, cossacks subordinate themselves to the organisational form of the proletariat”. Once the civil war against the white international reaction is won, it is still to the proletariat organised on its own foundations that the Manifesto assigns the role of transforming society. In this context, it attaches primary importance to the autonomous organisation of the working class which had been considerably weakened by years of civil war to the point that “We must talk not of the improvement of the soviets, but of their reconstitution. To organise councils in all nationalised plants and factories to solve an immense new task...

The Manifesto is very critical of the activity of other groups opposed to the policy of the Bolshevik Party, particularly the Workers’ Truth and another which can only be identified by the writings cited. The Manifesto denounces the false radicalism of the criticisms leveled by these groups (which it describes as “liberal”) against the Bolshevik Party, to the point where, it says, the latter could use such criticisms for its own purposes as a pretext for its policy of stifling freedom of speech for the proletariat.[1]

Finally, the article recalls the position of the Manifesto towards the Bolshevik Party, whose deficiencies threaten to transform it “into a minority of holders of power and economic resources in the country, which means to set itself up as a bureaucratic caste”: “to exert a decisive influence on the tactics of the RCP, conquering the sympathy of the proletarian masses, so as to compel the party to abandon the broad lines of its policy.”

The New Economic Policy and the management of industry

In fact the New Economic Policy has shared industry between, on one side, the state (trusts, unions, etc.) and, on the other, private capital and cooperatives. Our nationalised industry has taken on the character and appearance of private capitalist industry, in the sense that it operates on the basis of market needs.

Since the Ninth Congress of the RCP(B) the organisation of the management of the economy has been carried out without the direct participation of the working class, but with the help of purely bureaucratic appointments. The trusts are constituted following the same system adopted for the management of the economy and the merging of firms. The working class doesn’t know why such and such a director has been appointed, or on what grounds a factory belongs to this trust rather than another. Thanks to the policy of the leading group of the RCP, it takes no part in these decisions.

It goes without saying that the worker views with concern what is happening. He frequently wonders how he could have got here. He often remembers the time when the council of workers’ deputies appeared and developed in his factory. He asks the question: how can it be that our soviet, the soviet that we ourselves introduced and which neither Marx, nor Engels, nor Lenin, nor anyone else had thought of, how can it be that this soviet is dead? And worried thoughts haunt him... All workers will remember the way in which the councils of workers’ deputies were organised.

In 1905, when no-one in the country was even talking about workers’ councils and when, in books, it was only a question of parties, associations and leagues, the Russian working class created the soviets in the factories.

How were these councils organised? At the height of the revolutionary upsurge, each workshop of the factory elected a deputy to submit its demands to the administration and government. To coordinate the demands, these workshop deputies gathered together in councils and so into the council of deputies.

Where were the councils born? In the factories and in the plants. The workers of the plants and the factories, of any gender, religion, ethnicity or belief, unified themselves in an organisation, where they forged a common will. The council of workers’ deputies is therefore the organisation of the workers in all the enterprises of production.

It is in this way that the councils reappeared in 1917. They are described thus in the programme of the RCP(B): “The electoral district and the main core of the state is the unit of production (the plant, the factory) rather than the district”. Even after taking power, the councils retained the principle that their base is the place of production, and this was their hallmark with respect to any other form of state power, their advantage, because such a state organisation approximates the state apparatus of the proletarian masses.

The councils of workers’ deputies of all the plants and factories come together in general assemblies and form councils of workers’ deputies of the towns led by their executive committees (ECs). The congress of councils of provinces and regions forms the executive committees of provincial and regional councils. Finally, all the councils of factory deputies elect their representatives to the All-Russian Congress of Councils and form an All-Russian organisation of councils of workers’ deputies, their permanent organ being the All-Russian Executive Committee of Councils of Workers’ Deputies.

From the earliest days of the February Revolution, the needs of the civil war demanded the involvement in the revolutionary movement of armed force, by organising councils of soldiers’ deputies. The revolutionary needs of the moment dictated them to unite, which was done. Thus were formed the councils of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies.

Once the councils took power, they brought with them the peasantry represented by the councils of peasants’ deputies, and then the cossacks. Thus was organised the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (CEC), of the councils of workers’, peasants’, soldiers’ and cossacks’ deputies.

The workers’ councils appeared in 1917 as guides of the revolution, not only in substance but also formally: soldiers, peasants, Cossacks subordinated themselves to the organisational form of the proletariat.

During the seizure of power by the councils, it suddenly became clear that these councils, especially those of workers’ deputies, would be forced to occupy themselves almost entirely with a political struggle against the former slaveowners who had risen up, strongly supported by “the bourgeois factions of ambiguous socialist phraseology”. And until the end of 1920, the councils were occupied with the crushing of the resistance of the exploiters.

During this period, the councils lost their character linked to production and already, in 1920, the Ninth Congress of the RCP(B) decreed a single management of plants and factories. For Lenin, this decision was motivated by the fact that the only thing that had been done well was the Red Army with a single leadership.

And where now are the councils of workers’ deputies in the factories and plants? They no longer exist and are completely forgotten (even if we continue to talk about the power of the councils). No, there are no more and our councils today resemble many common houses or zemstvos[2] (with an inscription above the door: “It’s a lion, not a dog”).

Every worker knows that the councils of workers’ deputies organised a political struggle for the conquest of power. After taking power, they crushed the resistance of the exploiters. The civil war that the exploiters waged against the proletariat in power, with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, assumed a character so intense and bitter that it profoundly engaged the entire working class; this is why the workers were as removed from the problems of soviet power as the problems of production for which they had previously fought. They thought: we will manage production later. To reconquer production, it was first necessary to tear out the rebel exploiters. And they were right.

But in late 1920, the resistance of the exploiters was destroyed. The proletariat, covered in wounds, worn out, hungry and cold, would enjoy the fruits of its victories. It resumed production. And before it was the immense new task, namely the organisation of this production, of the country’s economy. It had to produce the maximum of material goods to show the advantage of this proletarian world.

The fate of all the conquests of the proletariat is closely related to the fact of seizing and organising production.

Production is the goal of society and that is why those who run production have governed and still govern society.”

If the proletariat fails to put itself at the head of production and put under its influence the entire petty-bourgeois mass of peasants, artisans and corporate intellectuals, everything will be lost again. The rivers of tears and blood, the piles of corpses, the untold suffering of the proletariat in the revolution will serve only to fertilise the ground on which capitalism restores itself, where a new world of exploitation will arise, of oppression of man by his fellow, if the proletariat does not recover production, does not impose itself on the petty bourgeois element personified by the peasant and the artisan, does not change the material basis of production

The councils of workers’ deputies who had forged the will of the proletariat in the struggle for power, triumphed on the civil war front, on the political front, but their triumph was weakened even to the point that we must talk not of the improvement of the soviets, but of their reconstitution.

We must reconstitute councils in all nationalised plants and factories to solve an immense new task, to create this world of happiness for which much blood was shed.

The proletariat is weakened. The basis of its strength (large industry) is in terrible shape, but the weaker the forces of the proletariat, the more it must have unity, cohesion and organisation. The council of workers’ deputies is a form of organisation that showed its miraculous power and not only overcame the enemies and adversaries of the proletariat in Russia, but also shook the domination of the oppressors in the whole world, the socialist revolution threatening the entire society of capitalist oppression.

These new soviets, if they take the commanding heights of production and the management of factories, will not only be capable of calling on the vast masses of proletarians and semi-proletarians to solve the problems posed to them, but will also directly employ in production the whole state apparatus, not in word, but in deed. When, following that, the proletariat will have organised, for the management of firms and industries, soviets as the basic cells of state power, it will not be able to stop there: it will go on to the organisation of trusts, unions and central directing organs, including the famous supreme soviets for the popular economy, and it will give a new content to the work of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. The soviets will assign as members of the All-Russian Central Committee of Soviets all those who fought on the fronts of the civil war, to the work on the economic front. Naturally all the bureaucrats, all the economists who consider themselves as the saviours of the proletariat (whom they fear above all speech and judgement), similarly the people who occupy the cushy jobs in the various organisms, will scream in protest. They will support what previously meant the ruin of production, the bankruptcy of the social revolution, because many of them know that they owe their posts not to their capacities, but to the protection of their acquaintances, to “who they know”, and in no way to the confidence of the proletariat, in whose name they govern. Of the rest, they have more fear of the proletariat than the specialists, the new leaders of enterprises, the new entrepreneurs and the Slastschows.

The All-Russian comedy with its red directors is orchestrated to push the proletariat to sanctify the bureaucratic management of the economy and praise the bureaucracy; it is a comedy as well because the strongly protected names of the directors of the trusts never appear in the press despite their ardent desire for publicity. All our attempts to unmask a provocateur who, not so long ago, received 80 roubles from the Tsarist police - the highest payment for this type of activity - and who is now found at the head of a rubber trust, have met with an insurmountable resistance. We are talking about the Tsarist provocateur Leschawa-Murat (the brother of the People’s Commissar for Domestic Commerce). This throws sufficient light on the character of the group which devised the campaign for the red directors.

The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets which is elected for a year and meets for periodic conferences constitutes the germ of the parliamentary rot. And it’s said: comrades, if you go, for example, to a meeting where comrades Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, talk for a couple of hours about the economic situation, what can one do except abstain or quickly approve the resolution proposed by the speaker? Given that the All-Russian Central Committee doesn’t deal with the economy, it listens to some exposés on the subject from time to time and then breaks up with each one going their own way. The same thing happened with the curious case of a project presented by the People’s Commissars being approved without any previous reading of it. Why read it before approving it? Certainly, one cannot be more educated than comrade Kurski (Commissar of Justice). The All-Russian Executive Committee has been transformed into a simple chamber for recording decisions. And its president? It is, with your permission, the supreme organ; but with regard to the tasks imposed on the proletariat, it is occupied with trifles. It seems to us, on the contrary, that the All-Russian Central Executive Committee should be more than any other linked to the masses, and this supreme legislative organ should decide on the most important questions of our economy.

Our Council of the Commissars of the People is, according to the opinion of its chief, comrade Lenin, a veritable bureaucratic apparatus. But he sees the roots of evil in the fact that the people who participate in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection are corrupt and he simply proposes to change the people occupying the leading posts; after that everything will be better. We have here in front of us the article of comrade Lenin appearing in Pravda, January 15, 1923: it is a good example of “political manoeuvring”. The best among leading comrades confront in reality this question as bureaucrats since they see the evil in the fact that it is Tsiouroupa (Rinz) and not Soltz (Kunz) who chairs the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. It reminds us of the spirit of a fable: “It is not by being obliging that you become musicians”. They are corrupted under the influence of the milieu; the milieu which has made them bureaucrats. Change the milieu and these people would work well.

The Council of People’s Commissars is organised in the image of a council of ministers and citizens of any bourgeois country and has all its faults. We have to stop to repair its dubious measures or to liquidate it, keeping only the Presidium of the CEC with its various departments, as we do in the provinces, districts and communes. And transform the CEC into a permanent organ with the standing committees that would deal with various issues. But so it does not become a bureaucratic institution, we must change the content of its work and this will be possible only when its base (“the main nucleus of state power”), the councils of workers’ deputies will be restored in all plants and factories, where the trusts, unions, directors of factories will be reorganised on the basis of a proletarian democracy, by the congress of councils, of districts up to the CEC. So we no longer need the chatter about the struggle against bureaucracy and the bickering. Because we know that bureaucrats are the worst critics of bureaucracy.

By reorganising the directing organs, by introducing all the elements really alien to bureaucracy (and this goes without saying), we will actually resolve the question that concerns us in terms of the New Economic Policy. So it will be the working class which leads the economy and the country and not a group of bureaucrats who threaten to turn into an oligarchy.

As for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (the Rabkrin),[3] it is better to liquidate it than try to improve its functioning by changing its officials. Unions (through their committees) will undertake a review of all production. We (the proletarian state) need not fear proletarian control and here there is no room for any real objection, if this is not the same fear that the proletariat inspires in the bureaucrats of all kinds.

So it must finally be understood that control must be independent of that which is submitted, and to get it, the unions have to play the role of our Rabkrin or former State Control.

Thus the local union nuclei in the plants and factories would be turned into organs of control.

The provincial committees brought together in councils of government trade unions would become organs of control in the provinces and the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions would have such a function at the centre.

The councils direct, the unions control, this is the essence of the relationship between these two organisations in the proletarian state.

In private enterprises (managed through a lease or concession), trade union committees play the role of state control, ensuring compliance with labour laws, payment of commitments made by the manager, the leaseholder , etc., to the proletarian state.

A few words on two groups

Two documents that we have before us, [one] signed by a clandestine group, The central group of the Workers’ Truth, the other bearing no signature, are a striking expression of our political mistakes.

Even the innocent literary entertainments that are still allowed a liberal part of the RCP (the so-called “Democratic Centralism”), simply cannot appear in our press. Such documents, devoid of theoretical and practical foundations, of the liquidator genre like the call of the “Workers’ Truth” group, would carry no weight among the workers if they were issued legally, but otherwise they may attract the sympathies not only of the proletariat, but also of communists.

The unsigned document, produced no doubt by the liberals of the RCP, rightly notes:

1)       The bureaucratism of the council and party apparatus.

2)       The degeneration of the party membership.

3)       The split between the elites and masses, the working class, the militants of the party’s base.

4)       The material differentiation between members of the party.

5)       The existence of nepotism.

How to fight all this? We must, you see:

1)       Reflect on theoretical problems in a strictly proletarian and communist framework.

2)       Ensure, within the same framework, an ideological unity and a class education of the healthy and advanced elements of the party.

3)       Struggle within the party for a principal condition of its internal reorganisation, the abolition of the dictatorship and the putting into practice of freedom of discussion.

4)       Fight within the party in favour of such conditions of development of the councils and the party, thereby facilitating the elimination of the petty bourgeois forces and influence and further consolidating the power and influence of a communist nucleus.

These are the main ideas of these liberals.

But, say then, who of the leading group of the party would object to these proposals? No one. Better yet, it has no equal for this kind of demagoguery.

The liberals have always served the leading party group precisely playing the role of “radical” opponents and thus fooling the working class and many communists who genuinely have good reasons for discontent. And their discontent is so great that to channel it, the bureaucrats of the party and councils need to invent an opposition. But they don’t tire themselves because the liberals help them each time with bombast of their own, by responding to specific questions with general phrases.

Who, among the current personnel of the Central Committee, will protest against the most radical point? “Fighting within the party in favour of such conditions of development of the councils and the party, thereby facilitating the elimination of the petty bourgeois forces and influence and further consolidating the power and influence of a communist nucleus”.

Not only do they not protest, but they make these statements with more vigour. Look at Lenin’s last article and you will see that he said “some very radical things” (from the liberals’ point of view): with the exception of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, our state apparatus is par excellence a relic of the past which has undergone no serious changes. Then he reaches out to the liberals, promises to bring them into the CC and the expanded Central Control Commission (CCC) - and they would like nothing better. And of course, when they enter the CC, universal peace will be established everywhere. In holding forth about free discussion in the party, they forget one little detail - the proletariat. For without freedom of speech given to the proletariat, no freedom in the party will be possible. It would be strange to have freedom of opinion in the party and at the same time deprive the class whose interests this party represents. Instead of proclaiming the need for the foundations of proletarian democracy according to the party programme, they talk about freedom for the most advanced communists. And there is no doubt that the most advanced are Sapronov, Maximovski and Co and if Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Lenin consider themselves the most advanced, then they agree on the fact that they are all “the best”, will increase the membership of the CC and CCC and everything will be fine.

Our liberals are incredibly...liberal, and they require no more than freedom of association. But to do what? What do they want to tell us, explain to us? Only what you have written in two small pages? So good! But if you pretend to be an oppressed innocent, a political refugee, then you need to dupe those who are to be duped.

The conclusion of these arguments is quite “radical”, even “revolutionary”: you see, the authors wish that the Twelfth Party Congress sort out one or two (what audacity!) functionaries who have contributed most to the degeneration of the party membership, to the development of bureaucracy while hiding their intentions behind fine phrases (Zinoviev, Stalin, Kamenev).

It’s stylish! When in the CC Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev give way to Maximovski, Sapronov, Obolensky, everything will be fine, really fine. We repeat that you have nothing to fear, fellow liberals, at the Twelfth Congress you will enter the CC and, which will be essential for you, neither Kamenev, Zinoviev nor Stalin will stop you. Good luck!

In their words, the “Workers’ Truth” group is composed of communists.

Like all the proletarians they address, we should believe them willingly, but the problem is that these are communists of a particular type. According to them, the positive significance of the October Russian revolution is that it has opened up to Russia magnificent prospects for a rapid transformation into an advanced capitalist country. As this group argues, it is without doubt a great conquest of the October Revolution.

What does that mean? It is neither more nor less than a call to retreat, to capitalism, abandoning the socialist slogans of the October revolution. Do not consolidate the positions of socialism, of the proletariat as ruling class, but weaken them, leaving the working class only the struggle for wages.

Accordingly, the group claims that classical capitalist relations are already restored. It therefore recommends that the working class rid itself of “communist illusions” and invites it to fight the “monopoly”of the right to vote by workers, which means that they must renounce it. But, gentlemen communists, would you allow us to ask for that?

But these gentlemen are not so foolish as to say openly that they are in favour of the bourgeoisie. What confidence would the proletarians then have in them? The workers would understand immediately that this is the same old refrain of the Mensheviks, the SRs and CDs[4], which is outside the group’s views. Yet it did not let its secret out. Because it claims to be committed to the fight against “administrative arbitrariness” but “with reservations”: “As far as possible in the absence of elected legislative bodies”. The fact that the Russian workers elect their councils and EC, this is not an election, just imagine, for a real election must be conducted with the participation of the bourgeoisie and the communists of The Workers’ Truth, and not that of workers. And all this is (tell me if it is not) “communist “ and “revolutionary”! Why, dear “communists”, do you stop halfway and not explain that this should be the general, equal, direct and secret right to vote, which is characteristic of normal capitalist relations? That it would be a real bourgeois democracy? Do you want to fish in troubled waters?

Gentlemen communists, do you hope to hide your reactionary and counter-revolutionary intentions by constantly repeating the word “revolution”? Over the last six years, the Russian working class has seen enough ultra-revolutionaries to understand your intention to deceive. The only thing that could make you succeed is the absence of a proletarian democracy, the silence imposed on the working class.

We leave aside other demagogic words of this group, noting only that the thinking of this “Workers’ Truth” is borrowed from A. Bogdanov.

The party

There is no doubt that even now, the RCP(B) is the only party that represents the interests of the proletariat and of the Russian working people at its side. There is no other. The programme and statutes of the party are the ultimate expression of communist thinking. From the moment when the RCP organised the proletariat for the insurrection and the seizure of power, from this time it became a party of government and was, during the harsh civil war, the only force capable of confronting the remains of the absolutist and agrarian regime, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. During these three years of struggle, the leading organs of the party assimilated the methods of work adapted to a terrible civil war but they now extend these to a whole new phase of the social revolution and in which the proletariat puts forward quite different demands.

From this fundamental contradiction flow all the deficiencies of the party and of the working of the soviets. These deficiencies are so serious that they threaten to cancel out all the good and useful work of the RCP. But even more, they risk destroying this party as a party of the avant-garde of the international proletarian army; they threaten - because of the present relationships with the NEP - to transform the party into a minority of holders of power and economic resources in the country, which conspires to set itself up as a bureaucratic caste.

Only the proletariat itself can repair these defects of its party. It might well be weak and its living conditions might be difficult, but it still has enough forces to repair its wrecked ship (its party) and finally reach the promised land.

Today, one can no longer maintain that it’s really necessary for the internal regime of the party to continue to apply methods valid at the time of civil war. That is why, in order to defend the aims of the party, it is necessary to strive - even if reluctantly - to utilise the methods which are not those of the party.

In the present situation, it is objectively indispensable to constitute a Communist Workers’ Group, which is not organisationally linked to the RCP, but which fully recognises its programme and the statutes. Such a group is about to develop notwithstanding the obstinate opposition of the dominant party, of the soviet bureaucracy and of the unions. The task of this group will be to exert a decisive influence on the tactics of the RCP, conquering the sympathy of the proletarian masses, so as to compel the party to abandon the broad lines of its policy.

Conclusion

1. The movement of the proletariat of all countries, especially those of advanced capitalism, has reached the phase of the struggle to abolish exploitation and oppression, the class struggle for socialism.

Capitalism threatens to plunge all humanity into barbarism. The working class must fulfill its historic mission and save mankind.

2. The history of class struggle shows explicitly that, in different historical situations, the same classes have preached either civil war or civil peace. The propaganda for civil war and civil peace by the same class was either revolutionary and humane, or counter-revolutionary and strictly selfish, defending the interests of a concrete class against the interests of society, the nation, humanity.

Only the proletariat is always revolutionary and humane, whether it advocates civil war or civil peace.

3. The Russian revolution provides striking examples of how different classes were transformed from partisans of civil war in those of civil peace and vice versa.

The history of class struggle in general and the last 20 years in Russia in particular teaches us that the current ruling classes who promote civil peace will advocate civil war, ruthless and bloody, when the proletariat takes power; we can say the same of “bourgeois fractions with an ambiguous socialist phraseology”, the parties of the 2nd International and those of the 2½ International.

In all countries of advanced capitalism, the proletarian party must, with all its strength and vigour, advocate the civil war against the bourgeoisie and their accomplices - and civil peace wherever the proletariat triumphs.

4. In the current conditions, the struggle for wages and a decrease in the working day through strikes, parliament, etc., has lost its former revolutionary scope and only weakens the proletariat, diverting it from its main task, reviving illusions about the possibility of improving its conditions within capitalist society. We must support the strikers, go to parliament, not to advocate a struggle for wages, but to organise the proletarian forces for a decisive and final battle against the world of oppression.

5. The discussion of the question of a “united front” in the military sense (as we discuss all aspects in Russia) and the singular conclusion there has been on it, has failed, so far, to seriously address this problem, because [in the current context] it is quite impossible to criticise anything.

The reference to the experience of the Russian revolution is only for the ignorant and is not confirmed in any way by this same experience as it remains set down in historical documents (resolutions of congresses, conferences, etc.).

The Marxist vision and dialectic of the problems of class struggle is replaced by a dogmatic vision.

The experience of a concrete epoch with goals and tasks is automatically transported to another that has particular features of its own, which leads inevitably to the imposition, on communist parties around the world, of an opportunist tactic of the “united front”. The tactic of a “united front” with the Second International and the 2½ International completely contradicts the experience of the Russian revolution and the programme of the RCP(B). It is a tactic of agreement with the open enemies of the working class.

We must form a united front with all the revolutionary organisations of the working class who are ready (today, not one day or another) to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat, against the bourgeoisie and its fractions.

6. The theses of the CC of the Communist International are a classic disguise for opportunist tactics in revolutionary phrases.

7. Neither the theses nor the discussions in the congresses of the Communist International have tackled the question of the united front in countries that have completed the socialist revolution and in which the working class exercises its dictatorship. This is due to the role that the Russian Communist Party took in the International and in the internal politics of Russia. The particularity of the question of the “united front” in such countries is that it is resolved in different ways during different phases of the revolutionary process: in the period of the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters and their accomplices, a certain solution is valid, another is needed on the contrary when the exploiters are already defeated and the proletariat has made progress in building the socialist order, yet with the help of the NEP and with weapons in hand.

8. The national question. Many arbitrary appointments, neglect of local experience, the imposition of tutors and exiles (“planned permutations”), all the behaviour of the leading group of the RCP(B) towards the national parties adhering to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, has aggravated in the masses of the many small ethnic groups, chauvinistic tendencies that penetrate the communist parties.

To get rid of these trends once and for all, we must implement the principles of proletarian democracy in the organisation of the national communist parties, each headed by its CC, adhering to the IIIrd Communist International, as well as the RCP(B) and forming an autonomous section of it. To resolve common tasks, the communist parties of the countries of the USSR must convene their periodic congress which elects a standing Executive Committee of the Communist Parties of the USSR.

9. The NEP is a direct consequence of the state of the productive forces of our country. It should be used to maintain the positions of the proletariat conquered in October.

Even in the case of a revolution in one of the advanced capitalist countries, the NEP would be a phase of socialist revolution that it is impossible to pass over. If the revolution had broken out in one of the countries of advanced capitalism, this would have had an influence on the duration and development of the NEP.

But in all countries of advanced capitalism, the need for a New Economic Policy at some stage of the proletarian revolution will depend on the degree of influence of the petty-bourgeois mode of production comapred to that of socialised industry.

10. The extinction of the N.E.P. in Russia is linked to the rapid mechanisation of the country, the victory of tractors over wooden ploughs. On these bases of development of the productive forces is instituted a new reciprocal relationship between cities and countryside. To rely on imports of foreign machinery for the needs of the agricultural economy is not right. This is politically and economically harmful insofar as it links our agricultural economy to foreign capital and weakens Russian industry.

The production of the necessary machines in Russia is possible, that will strengthen industry and bring the city and the countryside closer together in an organic way, will remove the material and ideological gap between them and will soon form the conditions that will allow us to give up the NEP.

11. The New Economic Policy contains terrible threats for the proletariat. Apart from the fact that, through it, the socialist revolution undergoes a test of its economy, besides the fact that we must demonstrate in practice the advantages of socialist forms of economic life in relation to capitalist forms - besides all this, we must stick to socialist positions without becoming an oligarchic caste that would seize all the economic and political power and be afraid of the working class more than anything else.

To prevent the New Economic Policy from turning into the “New Exploitation of the Proletariat”, the proletariat must participate directly in the resolution of the enormous tasks facing it at this time, on the basis of the principles of proletarian democracy; which will give the working class the possibility of protecting its October conquests from all dangers, wherever they come from, and of radically altering the internal regime of the party and its relations with it.

12. The implementation of the principle of proletarian democracy must correspond to the fundamental tasks of the moment.

After the resolution of political-military tasks (seizure of power and suppression of the exploiters’ resistance), the proletariat is led to solve the most difficult and important economic question: the transformation of the old capitalist relations into new socialist relations. Only after the completion of such a task can the proletariat consider itself victorious; if not everything will still have been in vain, and the blood and the dead will serve only to fertilise the land on which will continue to rise the edifice of exploitation and oppression of bourgeois rule.

In order to accomplish this task it is absolutely necessary that the proletariat really participates in the management of the economy: “Whoever finds themselves at the summit of production equally finds themselves at the summit of ‘society’ and of the ‘state’”.

It is thus necessary:

  • that in all the factories and firms councils of workers’ delegates are constituted;
  • that the congresses of the councils elect the leaders of the trusts, the unions and the central authorities;
  • that the All-Russian Executive is transformed into an organ which manages agriculture and industry. The tasks which are imposed on the proletariat must be confronted with a view to turning proletarian democracy into reality. This must be expressed in an organ which works in an assiduous fashion and institutes within itself permanent sections and commissions ready to confront all problems. But the Council of Commissars of the People which apes some bourgeois ministry must be abolished and its work confided to the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviets.

It is necessary moreover that the influence of the proletariat is reinforced on other levels. The unions, which must be real proletarian class organs, must be constituted as organs of control having the right and the means for worker and peasant inspection. Factory and firm committees must perform a control function in factories and firms. Leading sections of the unions which are united in the central leading union must control the reins, with the union leaders joining up in an All-Russian central union - these must be the organs of control at the centre.

But today the unions are performing a function which doesn’t belong in a proletarian state, which is an obstacle to their influence and contrasts with the sense of their position within the international movement.

He who is afraid of such a role for the unions shows his fear of the proletariat and loses all links with it. 

13. Upon the terrain of the profound dissatisfaction of the working class, various groups are forming which propose to organise the proletariat. Two currents: the liberal platform of Democratic Centralism and that of “Workers’ Truth” show, on the one hand a lack of political clarity, on the other, an effort to connect with the working class. The working class is looking for a form of expression for its dissatisfaction. 

Both groups, which very probably have honest proletarian elements belonging to them, judging the present situation unsatisfactory, are leading towards erroneous conclusions (of a Menshevik type).

14. There persists in the party a regime which is harmful to the relationship of the party with the proletarian class and which, for the moment, doesn’t allow the raising of questions that are, in any way, embarrassing for the leading group of the RCP(B). From this comes the necessity to constitute the Workers’ Group of the RCP(B) on the basis of the programme and statutes of the RCP, so as to exercise a decisive pressure of the leading group of the party itself.

We are calling on all authentic proletarian elements (including those of “Democratic Centralism” and “Workers’ Truth”, of the “Workers’ Opposition”) and those who find themselves outside as well as inside the party, to unite on the basis of the Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the RCP(B).

The more quickly that the necessity to self-organise is recognised, the less will be the difficulties that we have to surmount.

Forward, comrades!

The emancipation of the workers is the work of the workers themselves!

 

Moscow, February 1923.

The central provisional organisation bureau of the Workers’ Group of the RCP(B)

 


[1]. For more on the groups criticised by the Manifesto, especially the Workers’ Truth and Democratic Centralism, see the ICC’s book, The Russian Communist Left.

[2]. Zemstvos: provincial assemblies of imperial Russia,representative, prior to their abolition by the soviet authorities, of the local nobility, wealthy artisans and merchants (source Wikipedia) [ICC note]

 

[3]. Rabkrin: the organisation that was in principle responsible for the correct operation of the state and for fightingits bureaucratisation, but became in turn a caricature of bureaucracy

[4]. SR: Socialist Revolutionaries. CD: Constitutional Democrats. [ICC note]

 

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History of the Communist Left

International Review no.146 - 3rd Quarter 2011

Protests in Spain: A movement that heralds the future

The “15M” Movement in Spain – it takes its name from the date it was created, May 15th – is highly important because of its unique characteristics. This article will recount the significant episodes and at each point draw lessons and perspectives for the future.

Providing an account of what actually happened is necessary for an understanding of the unfolding dynamic of the international class struggle towards mass working class mobilisations that will help the class regain confidence and provide it with the means of posing an alternative to this moribund society.[1]

Capitalism’s bleak future is what lies behind the 15M Movement

The word “crisis” has a dramatic connotation for millions of people who are consumed by a tide of poverty produced by worsening living conditions, going from permanent unemployment and insecure employment where planning from one day to the next is difficult, to even worse situations that can mean hunger and destitution.[2]

But what is most distressing is the absence of any future. This was denounced by the Assembly of the Imprisoned in Madrid[3] in a statement which, as we shall see, was the spark that lit the fuse to the movement: “We find ourselves looking ahead and see little hope on the horizon and no future that could allow us to live a quiet life and enjoy doing the things we want and like to do.[4] When the OECD tells us that it will take 15 years for Spain to return to the level of employment it had in 2007 – almost a whole generation deprived of work! – when similar figures can be extrapolated for the United States or Great Britain, we can see to what extent this society has fallen into a vortex of endless poverty, unemployment and barbarism.

The movement was at first directed against the bipartite political system predominant in Spain (the two parties, the Popular Party, PP, on the right and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE, on the left, receive 86% of the votes).[5] This factor played a role, specifically in connection with the lack of any future, since in a country where the right plays on its deserved reputation of being authoritarian, arrogant and anti-working class, broad sectors of the population were concerned at how, with government attacks being carried out by its false friends – the PSOE –, its declared enemies – the PP –threatening to move back into power for a longer term, with no electoral alternative, this would amount to a general blockage of society.

This general feeling was reinforced by the unions’ involvement that began with them calling a “general strike” on September 29th, which had a demobilising affect, but ended with the signing of a social pact with the government in January 2011, which agreed to the brutal reform of pensions and closed the door to any possibility of mass mobilisations being called under the unions’ leadership.

To these factors was added a deep sense of outrage. One of the consequences of the crisis, as it was put in the assembly in Valencia, is that “the people who own a lot are fewer, but they own much more than they did, while those who own a little are numerically many more, but they own much less.” The capitalists and their political representatives have become more and more arrogant, greedy and corrupt. They have no hesitation accumulating great wealth, while poverty and desolation grow all around them. This provides stark evidence for the existence of social classes and clearly demonstrates that we are not all “equal citizens”.

Faced with this situation, some groups emerged towards the end of 2010, affirming the need to unite in the streets, to act independently of the political parties and trade unions, to organise assemblies... The old mole conjured up by Marx was giving rise to a subterranean maturation within society which would burst out into the open in the month of May! The mobilisation of “Youth with no Future” in the month of April brought together 5,000 young people in Madrid. Moreover, the success of the demonstrations of young people in Portugal – “Geração à Rasca” (a generation adrift) – which assembled more than 200,000 young people, and the very popular example of Tahrir Square in Egypt, gave an impetus to the movement.

The assemblies: a vision of the future

On May 15th, a coalition of more than 100 organisations – baptised Democracia Ya Real (DRY)[6] – called some demonstrations in major provincial towns “against the politicians”, calling for “real democracy”.

Small groups of young people (unemployed, temporary workers and students), in disagreement with the organisers who wanted the movement to act as a valve for social discontent, tried to set up camps in the main squares in Madrid, in Granada and other cities in an attempt to continue the movement. DRY disowned them and let police squads unleash a brutal repression, perpetrated particularly in the police stations. However, those who were victims organised themselves into an Assembly of the Imprisoned in Madrid and quickly produced a statement clearly denouncing the degrading treatment dished out by the police. It made a big impression and encouraged many young people to join the camps.

On Tuesday, May 17th, while DRY was trying to confine the camps to a symbolic protest role, the huge mass of people that flowed into them imposed the holding of mass meetings. On the Wednesday and Thursday, these large assemblies spread to over 73 cities. They expressed their worthwhile reflections and made some sound proposals dealing with all aspects of social, economic, political and cultural life. Nothing human was alien to this immense improvised main square!

A protester in Madrid said: “The assemblies are the best thing there is, everyone can speak, people understand each other, you can think out loud, thousands of strangers can come to an agreement. Isn’t that wonderful?” The assemblies were a different world, in contrast to the sombre atmosphere of the polling booths and far removed from involvement in electoral campaigns: “Brotherly embraces, cries of delight and of enthusiasm, songs of freedom, merry laughter, humour and joy were seen and heard in the crowd of many thousands of persons which surged through the town from morning till evening. The mood was exalted: one could almost believe that a new and better life was beginning on the earth. A most solemn and at the same time an idyllic, moving spectacle.[7] Thousands of people were discussing passionately and listening attentively to each other in an atmosphere that was deeply respectful and surprisingly orderly. They shared the same outrage and concerns for the future but, more importantly, the desire to understand its causes; and out of this arose the effort to debate and to analyse a range of questions, the hundreds of meetings and the bookstalls... An effort with seemingly no concrete results, but which “blew everyone’s mind” and sowed the seeds of consciousness in the fields of the future.

Subjectively, the class struggle rests on two pillars: consciousness on the one hand and trust and solidarity on the other. Regarding the latter, the assemblies also contained the promise of the future: human ties, feelings of empathy flowing through the squares, widespread solidarity and unity; these were at least as important as making decisions or agreeing to demands. The furious politicians and press demanded, with the immediatism and utilitarianism characteristic of bourgeois ideology, that the movement condense its demands into a “protocol”, which DRY should try to convert into a “Ten Commandments” containing all the ridiculous and tame democratic measures like open lists, popular legislative initiatives and reform of the electoral law.

The fierce resistance of the movement to these hasty measures shows how it points the way forward for the class struggle. In Madrid, people were shouting: “We’re not going slowly, we just have a long way to go”. In an open letter to the assemblies, a group from Madrid said: “The challenge is to synthesise what we want the demonstrations to achieve. We are convinced that it is not insubstantial, as the self-interested politicians would have it or all those who want nothing to change, or rather want to change some details so that everything remains the same. It’s not by suddenly presenting a ‘Grenelle of demands’ that we will succeed in synthesising the reasons we are fighting; it’s not by creating a shopping list of demands that our revolt will express itself and strengthen itself.[8]

The effort to understand the causes of a dramatic situation and an uncertain future, and to find the way to struggle accordingly, is what constitutes the basis of the assemblies. This gives them their deliberative character that disorientates those looking for the struggle to be focused around precise demands. The work of reflecting on ethical, cultural, artistic and literary themes (there were interventions in the form of songs and poems), created a false sense of a petty-bourgeois movement of the “indignants”. We have to separate the wheat from the chaff. The latter is certainly present in the democratic and populist shell that has often enveloped these concerns. But the above things are wheat, because the revolutionary transformation of the world depends on and provides a stimulus for massive cultural and ethical change; “by changing the world and changing our lives we transform ourselves”is the revolutionary motto that Marx and Engels formulated in The German Ideology more than a century and a half ago: “...Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration that can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary therefore not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.[9]

The mass assemblies were a first attempt to respond to a general problem in society that we highlighted more than 20 years ago: the social decomposition of capitalism. In the “Theses on decomposition” that we wrote at that time,[10] we pointed to the tendency for the decomposition of the ideology and the superstructures of capitalist society and, coupled with it, the increasing dislocation of the social relations both of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The working class is not exempt from this because, among other things, it lives alongside the petty bourgeoisie. We give a warning in this text about the effects of this process: “1) solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look after number one’; 2) the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of relationships which form the basis for all social life; 3) the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society; 4) consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch.

However, what the massive assemblies in Spain show – as did those that appeared during the student movement in France in 2006[11] – is that the sectors most vulnerable to the effects of decomposition – the young and the unemployed, especially because of their lack of work experience – have been present at the forefront of the assemblies and in the effort to develop consciousness on the one hand and solidarity and empathy on the other.

For all these reasons, the mass assemblies provide a first indication of what lies ahead. This may not seem very much to those waiting for the proletariat to appear like a bolt from the blue and show that it is clearly and unequivocally the revolutionary class of society. However, from a historical point of view, and taking into account the enormous difficulties that lie in its path, this is a good start, since it has begun a rigorous preparation of the subjective terrain.

Paradoxically, these characteristics have also been the Achilles heel of the “15M” movement in the first stage of its development. Not having set out with any specific objective, fatigue, a difficulty in coping with the first set of problems posed, and an absence of conditions favourable to workplace struggles, plunged the movement into a sort of vacuum that could not be sustained for very long, and which the DRY has tried to fill with its own so-called “simple” and “feasible” objectives for “democratic reform” that are utopian and reactionary.

The traps that the movement has had to face

For almost two decades, the world proletariat has been in the wilderness and not participated in any large-scale struggles, and in particular has suffered a loss of confidence in itself and a loss of its own class identity.[12] Even if this atmosphere has progressively changed since 2003, with the appearance of significant struggles in many countries and a new generation of revolutionary minorities, the stereotypical image of the working class as “unresponsive” and “inactive” continues to predominate.

The large numbers of people suddenly appearing on the social stage are hindered by the weight of the past, and by the increasing problem that the movement contains social strata in the process of proletarianisation that are more vulnerable to democratic ideology. In addition, due to the fact that the movement did not emerge from a struggle against a specific measure, it has produced a paradox, something not uncommon in history,[13] as the two major classes of society – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie –appear to have avoided open combat, giving the impression of a peaceful movement enjoying “everyone’s support.”[14]

But in reality, the confrontation between the classes was present in the early days. Didn’t the PSOE government retaliate immediately with brutal repression against a handful of young people? Wasn’t it the swift and passionate response of the Assembly of the Imprisoned in Madrid which unleashed the movement? Wasn’t it this denunciation that opened the eyes of many young people who subsequently chanted “they call it democracy, but it isn’t!”, an ambiguous slogan that was converted by a minority into “they call it a dictatorship and it is one!”?

For those who think the class struggle is a succession of “strong emotions”, the “dispassionate” approach adopted within the assemblies led them to believe that this was nothing more than an exercise in a “harmless constitutional legality”, and perhaps many participants even believed that their movement was limited to that.

However, the mass assemblies in the public squares, with the slogan “Seize the Square”, expressed a challenge to the democratic rule of order. What determines the social relations and legitimises the laws is that the exploited majority “minds its own business” and, if it wants to, “participates” in civic matters by using the voting system, and protests through the unions which atomise and individualise it even more. Uniting, building solidarity, discussing collectively, starting to act as an independent social force constitutes an overwhelming violence against bourgeois order.

The bourgeoisie has done its utmost to bring an end the assemblies. By all appearances, with its usual sickening hypocrisy, it had only praise and sympathy for the Indignants, but the facts – which are what really matter – betrayed this apparent complacency.

As the day of the election – Sunday, May 22nd – approached, the Central Electoral Commission decided to ban assemblies across the country on Saturday 21st, designated as a “day of reflection”. From the early hours of Saturday morning, a huge deployment of police surrounded the Puerta del Sol camp, but in turn it was encircled by a huge crowd which obliged the Interior Minister himself to order a withdrawal. More than 20,000 people then occupied the square in a mood of euphoria. We see here another episode of class confrontation, even if the explicit violence was restricted to only a few outbursts.

DRY proposed maintaining the camps while keeping silent to respect the “day of reflection”, so not holding the assemblies. But no one listened, and the assemblies on Saturday 21st, formally illegal, had the highest levels of support. In the assembly in Barcelona, signs, slogans repeated in chorus and placards sarcastically proclaimed in response to the Electoral Assembly: “We are reflecting!

On Sunday 22nd, election day, instead of another attempt to end the assemblies, DRY proclaimed that “we’ve achieved our goals” and that the movement must be ended. The response was unanimous: “We are not here for the elections”. On Monday 23rd and Tuesday 24th, both in the number of participants and in the richness of the debates, the assemblies reached their peak. Interventions, slogans, placards proliferated demonstrating a deep reflection: “Where is the Left? It’s behind the Right”, “The polls ca not hold back our dreams”, “600 euros per month, that’s some violence”, “If you don’t let us dream, we will prevent you from sleeping!, “No work, no home, no fear”, “They deceived our grandparents, they deceived our children, they will not deceive our grandchildren”. They also show an awareness of the perspectives: “We are the future, capitalism is the past”, “All power to the assemblies”, “There is no evolution without revolution”, “The future starts now”, “Do you still believe this is a utopia?”...

From this high point, the assemblies went into decline. Partly because of fatigue, but also from the constant bombardment from DRY about adopting its “Democratic Decalogue”. The points in the Decalogue are far from neutral, they directly attack the assemblies. The most “radical” demand, the “popular legislative initiative”,[15] in addition to entailing endless parliamentary procedures that would discourage the most ardent supporter, would above all replace open and widespread debate where everyone feels part of a collective body with some individual acts, ordinary citizenship, and protest confined to “my own four walls”.[16]

This sabotage from the inside was combined with repressive attacks from the outside; thereby demonstrating how hypocritical the bourgeoisie is when it claims that the assemblies constitute “a constitutional right of assembly.” On Friday 27th, the Catalan government – in coordination with the central government – launched an attack: the “mossos de esquadra” (regional police forces) invaded Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona and savagely cracked down, inflicting many injuries and making numerous arrests. The Barcelona Assembly – until then the most oriented towards class positions – fell into the trap of classical democratic demands: petitions to demand the resignation of the Interior Minister, opposition to the “disproportionate”[17] use of violence, calling for “democratic control of the police”. This volte-face was all the more obvious as it gave way to nationalist poison and included in its demands “the right to self-determination”.

The scenes of repression increased in the week of June 5th to 12th: Valencia, Saint-Jacques de Compostela, Salamanca ... The most brutal blow however was delivered on the 14th and 15th in Barcelona. The Catalan parliament was discussing a law known as Omnibus, which included brutal social cuts, especially in the education and health sectors (including 15,000 lay-offs in the latter). DRY, outside of any dynamic of discussion in the workers’ assemblies, called for a “peaceful demonstration” which was to surround the Parliament to “prevent the deputies passing an unjust law.” This typical, purely symbolic action, instead of waging a struggle against the law and the institutions that are behind it, appealed to the “conscience” of the deputies. For the demonstrators thus trapped, only a false choice remained: either the democratic terrain and the impotent and passive whining of the majority, or its counterpart, the “radical” violence of a minority.

The insults and jostling of a few deputies provided the opportunity for a hysterical campaign that criminalised those engaged in violence (lumping them together with those who defend class positions) and called for “defence of the democratic institutions that are at risk”. We have come full circle. DRY sports its pacifism and asks demonstrators to exercise violence against the “violent” elements,[18] and goes even further in asking openly for the “violent” elements to be delivered to the police and for the demonstrators to applaud the latter for its “good and loyal service!”

The June 19th demonstrations and the extension to the working class

From the beginning, the movement had two cores: a wide democratic core, fuelled by confusion and doubt, which was socially heterogeneous with a tendency to avoid direct confrontation. But it also had a proletarian core, expressed by the assemblies[19] and a constant tendency to “go to the working class.”

In the Barcelona assembly, workers from telecommunications, health, fire services as well as university students mobilised actively against the social attacks. They created a commission to spread the general strike, and the animated debates in this commission led to the organisation of a network of “the Indignants” of Barcelona which convened an assembly for Saturday June 11th for those workplaces involved in struggles, to be followed up with a meeting on Saturday July 3rd. On Friday June 3rd workers and unemployed demonstrated in Plaza Catalunya behind a banner with the words “Down with the union bureaucracy! General strike!” In Valencia, the assembly supported a demonstration by public transport workers and also a neighbourhood demonstration against cuts in education. In Zaragoza, public transport workers enthusiastically participated in the assembly.[20] The assemblies decided to form neighbourhood assemblies.[21]

The demonstration of June 19th saw a new surge from the proletarian core. The demonstration had been called by the assemblies of Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga against the social cuts. DRY tried to undermine it by proposing solely democratic slogans. That provoked a spontaneous reaction in Madrid to go and demonstrate at the Congress against the cuts to social spending, which saw more than 5000 people attend. Moreover a co-ordination of neighbourhood assemblies in the south of Madrid, born out of the fiasco of the September 29th strike (with a very similar orientation to that of the inter-professional general assemblies created in France in the heat of the events of autumn 2010) launched an appeal: “Let’s go to the Congress that cuts social spending without consulting us, the people and workers from the neighbourhoods of Madrid, and say: enough! [...] This initiative represents the view of a working class grass-roots assembly against those who take decisions behind workers' backs without their approval. The struggle will be long, so we encourage you to organise in neighbourhood assemblies, and at your places of work or study.

The June 19th demonstrations were very successful, the reception was massive in more than 60 cities, but their content was even more important. It was a response to the brutal campaign against “the violent ones”. Expressing a maturation born out of the many discussions in the most active milieus,[22] the slogan heard the most, for example in Bilbao, is “Violence is not being able to make ends meet each month!” and in Valladolid: “Violence is also unemployment and evictions”.

However, it was the demonstration in Madrid in particular that provided a new focus coming from June 19th on perspectives for the future. It was convened by an organisation coming from the working class and its most active minorities.[23] The theme of this gathering was “March and unite against the crisis and against capital.” It declared: “No to wage cuts and pension cuts; against unemployment: workers' struggles; no to price rises, increase our wages, increase the taxes on those who earn the most, protect our public services, no to privatisation of health and education ... Long live working class unity.[24]

A collective in Alicante adopted the same Manifesto. In Valencia, the Autonomous and Anti-capitalist bloc composed of various groups very active in the assemblies distributed a manifesto that read: “We want an answer to unemployment. The unemployed, those in temporary employment, along with those working in the black economy have come together in the assemblies to collectively agree to demands and to press for their implementation. We want the withdrawal of the Law on Labour Reform, which authorises the reduction of redundancy payments to 20 days. We want the withdrawal of the Law on Pensions Reform since behind this is a life of privation and poverty and we do not want to sink any further into poverty and uncertainty. We demand an end to evictions. The need for people to be housed is more important than the blind laws of commerce and the profit motive. We say NO to the cuts in health and education, NO to the redundancies being prepared by the regional governments and in the town halls following the recent elections.”[25]

The Madrid march was organised in several columns that started from seven different suburbs or neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city; these separate columns attracted crowds of people as they moved along. These mass mobilisations are part of the working class tradition as in the 1972-1976 strikes of in Spain (and also the tradition of 1968 in France) where, starting from a big concentration of workers or from a factory that acts as a “beacon”, as happened at Standard in Madrid at that time,increasing numbers of workers, residents, unemployed and young people come out and join them, and this whole mass converges on the town centre. Evidence of this tradition was present in the struggles at Vigo in 2006 and 2009.[26]

In Madrid, the Manifesto read out to the assembled crowd called for the holding of “Assemblies that will prepare a general strike” and was greeted with widespread cries of “Long live the working class”.

The need for a reflective enthusiasm

The demonstrations of June 19th gave rise to a sense of excitement; according to a demonstrator in Madrid: “The atmosphere was that of a real festival. All kinds of people and all ages: young people around 20 years old, the retired, families with children, and all kinds of other people too, walked together... and at the same time people came out onto their balconies to applaud us. I came home exhausted, but with a broad smile on my face. Not only had I the feeling of having been fighting for a just cause, but in addition, I had a really fantastic time.” Another said: “It's really important seeing all these people gathered in one place, talking politics and fighting for their rights. Don't you have the feeling that we're taking back the streets?

After the initial explosions typical of assemblies seeking a way forward, the movement began to look at how to develop the struggle, began to see that solidarity, unity and building collective strength could be achieved.[27]The idea began to spread around that “We can stand up to Capital and the State”, and that the key to this strength would be the working class renewing its struggle.In the assemblies in the neighbourhoods of Madrid, one topic of debate has been that of calling a general strike in October to “oppose the cuts in social spending.” There was an outcry from the CCOO and UGT unions saying that such a call would be “illegal” and they alone had the authority to do it, to which many sectors answered loud and clear by saying: “only the mass assemblies can take this decision.

But we shouldn't let ourselves get carried away, because the process through which the working class revives its struggle will not be easy. There is a heavy burden of illusions and confusions about democracy, the ideology of “citizenship” and “reforms”, reinforced by the pressure of DRY, the politicians and the media who exploit doubts and immediatism (wanting to see “quick and tangible results”). There is also a lot of fear because there are so many unanswered questions. It is particularly important today to see how difficult it is for workers to mobilise in the workplace because there is a big risk of losing their jobs and finding themselves with no income, which for many would cross the line between a poor quality but bearable life and a life in extreme poverty.

In democratic and union terms, the struggle is a sum of individual decisions. Aren't you discontented? Don't you feel downtrodden? Yes, you are! So why aren't you rebelling? It would be so simple if it was a case of the worker choosing between being “brave” or “cowardly”, alone with his conscience, as in a polling station! The class struggle does not follow this kind of idealistic and phoney schema. It is the result of a collective strength and consciousness that comes not only from the discontent that has resulted in an untenable situation, but also from the perception that it is possible to fight together and that a sufficient degree of solidarity and determination exists to carry it through.

Such a situation is the product of a subterranean process that depends on three elements: organisation in open assemblies that provides an understanding of the forces available and the steps to take to increase them; consciousness in deciding what we want and how to get it; combativity faced with the sabotage of the trade unions and all the organs of mystification.

This process is under way, but it remains unclear when and how it will succeed. A comparison can possibly help us. During the great mass strike in May 68,[28] there was a demonstration on May 13th in Paris in support of the students that was brutally repressed. The sense of power that it brought out was expressed the next day in the outbreak of a series of spontaneous strikes, like that at Renault in Cleon and then Paris. This did not happen after the big demonstrations on June 19th in Spain. Why is that?

In May 1968 the bourgeoisie was politically unprepared to confront the working class and the repression only threw oil on the fire; now it can rely in many countries on a super- sophisticated apparatus of unions and parties, and can use ideological campaigns specifically based around democracy, and which also provide for a very effective political use of selective repression. Today, the upsurge of struggle requires a much greater effort of consciousness and solidarity than was the case in the past.

In May 1968, the crisis was only just beginning; today it has clearly plunged capitalism into an impasse. The situation is so daunting that it makes going out on strike difficult even for as “simple” a reason as a wage increase. In such a serious situation strikes will break out from a feeling that “enough is enough”, but the conclusion must then follow that “the proletariat has only its chains to lose and a world to win.

This movement has no frontiers

If the road seems longer and more painful than in May 1968, the foundations being laid are much more solid. One of these, which is critical, is the recognition of being part of an international movement. After a “trial period” with some massive movements (the student movement in France in 2006 and the revolt of the youth in Greece in 2008[29]), we have now seen a succession of movements on a broader scale over the last nine months that has opened up the possibility of paralysing the barbaric hand of capitalism: France in the autumn of 2010, Britain in November and December 2010, Egypt, Tunisia, Spain and Greece in 2011.

The consciousness that the “15M” movement is part of this international chain has begun to develop in embryo. The slogan “This movement has no frontiers” was taken up by a demonstration in Valencia. Various camps have organised demonstrations “for a European Revolution”; on June 15th there were demonstrations in support of the struggle in Greece, and they were repeated the 29th. On the 19th, there were a small number of internationalist slogans: one sign saying “A happy world union” and another in English: “World Revolution”.

For years, what is called “economic globalisation” served as a pretext for the left wing of the bourgeoisie to arouse nationalist sentiments, favouring “national sovereignty” over “stateless markets.” It proposed nothing less than workers being more nationalistic than the bourgeoisie! With the development of the crisis, but also thanks to the popularity of the Internet and social networking, young workers began to turn these campaigns back against their promoters. The idea gained ground that “faced with economic globalisation, it was necessary to respond with the international globalisation of the struggles”, that faced with worldwide poverty the only possible response is a worldwide struggle.

The “15M” has had repercussions internationally. The mobilisations in Greece over two weeks followed the same “model” of mass assemblies in the main squares; they were consciously inspired by the events in Spain.[30]

According Kaosenlared on June 19th, “this is the fourth consecutive Sunday that thousands of people of all ages have demonstrated in Syntagma Square in front of the Greek Parliament, in response to the call of the pan-European movement of the 'Indignants', to protest against the austerity measures.”

In France, Belgium, Mexico and Portugal regular assemblies on a smaller scale have expressed solidarity with the 'Indignants' and tried to stimulate discussion. In Portugal, “About 300 people, the majority of them young, marched on Sunday afternoon in central Lisbon in response to the call of Real Democracia Ya, inspired by the Spanish 'Indignants'. The Portuguese demonstrators marched calmly behind a banner which read: ‘Spain, Greece, Ireland, Portugal: our struggle is international.’[31]

The role of active minorities in preparing new struggles

The world debt crisis is demonstrating that capitalism has no way out. In Spain as in other countries, frontal attacks are raining down and there is no respite in sight, just further blows against our living conditions. The working class has to respond and this means taking off from the impetus given by the May assemblies and the demonstrations of 19th June.

To prepare this response, the working class gives rise to active minorities, comrades who seek to understand what’s going on, become politicised, animate debates, actions, meetings, assemblies, trying to convince those who still have doubts, bringing arguments to those who are looking for answers. As we saw at the beginning, these minorities contributed to the emergence of the 15M movement.

With its modest forces, the ICC has participated in the movement and tried to put forward orientations:   “In any trial of strength between the classes, there are rapid, important fluctuations, and you have to know how to orientate yourself, to use your prin­ciples and analyses as a guide without getting swept away. You have to know how to join the flow of a movement, how to make the ‘general goals’ more concrete, how to respond to the real preocc­upations of a struggle, how to be able to support and stimulate its positive tendencies.”[32] We have written numerous articles trying to understand the phases that the movement has gone through while making concrete and realisable proposals: the emergence of assemblies and their vitality, the offensive against them by DRY, the trap of repression, the turning point of the 19 June demonstrations.[33]

Since one of the necessities of the movement is debate, we opened a heading on our web page in Spanish ‘Debates del 15M’ where comrades with different analyses and positions could express themselves.

Working with other collectives and active minorities was one of our priorities. We took part in common initiatives with the Circulo Obrero de Debate in Barcelona, the Red de Solidaridad de Alicante and various assemblyist collectives in Valencia.

In the assemblies, our militants intervened on concrete points: defence of the assemblies, the need to orient the struggle towards the working class, the need for mass assemblies in workplaces and education centres, the rejection of democratic demands and the need to frame demands within the struggle against social attacks, the impossibility of reforming or democratising capitalism, the only realistic possibility being its destruction.[34] As far as possible, we also participated actively in the neighbourhood assemblies.

Following the 15M, the minority favourable to a class orientation has got bigger and become more dynamic and influential. It needs now to keep itself together, to co-ordinate itself at a national and international level. Towards the working class as a whole, it needs to put forward positions which express its deepest needs and aspirations: against the democratic lie, showing what lies behind the slogan “All power to the assemblies!”; against the demands for democratic reform, showing the need to fight against the attacks on living conditions; against illusory “reforms” of capitalism, affirming the need for a tenacious, persevering struggle which has the perspective of destroying capitalism.

The important thing is that debate and struggle develops within this milieu. A debate around the many questions posed over the last few months: reform or revolution? Democracy or assemblies? Citizens’ movement or class movement? Democratic demands or demands against the social attacks? General strike or mass strike? Trade unions or assemblies? A struggle to push forward self-organisation and the independent struggle but above all to unmask and overcome the many traps that will certainly be put in our path.

C Mir July 2011

 


[2]. An official of Caritas, a church NGO in Spain that is concerned with poverty, reported that “we are now talking about 8 million people in the process of exclusion and 10 million under the poverty line.” That’s 18 million people, or one third of the population of Spain! This is obviously not a Spanish particularity; the standard of living of the Greeks has fallen 8% in one year.

[3]. See further on in the text for more detail.

[4].Translated from our Spanish website.

[5]. Two slogans were very popular: “PSOE-PP, it’s the same shit!” and “With roses or with seagulls, they take us for pancakes!”, based on the fact that the rose is the symbol of the PSOE and the gull that of the PP.

[6]. To read about the movement and its methods, see our article “The citizens’ movement, ‘Democracia Real Ya!’ A dictatorship against the mass assemblies,” https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2011/special-report-15M-spain/...

[7]. This quotation of Rosa Luxemburg is from The Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions (Chapter 3, p.28, Merlin Press). It refers to the great strike in southern Russia in 1903 and fits like a glove the exalted atmosphere of the assemblies a century later.

[8]. Translated from our Spanish website. The phrase “Grenelle of demands” refers to the “Accords de Grenelle” (location of the French Ministry of Education) between the French government, workers and students at the end of the May ‘68 movement.

[9]. See The German Ideology, Part One, “Feuerbach - Opposition of the materialist and idealist,” D, “Proletarians and Communism”.

[10]. See International Review n°s 62, 107 “Decomposition, the final phase of the decadence of capitalism

[11]. “Theses on the 2006 spring students’ movement in France” in International Review n°125,

[12]. In our opinion, the root cause of these problems lies in the events of 1989 that swept away the state regimes falsely identified as “socialist” and allowed the bourgeoisie to develop a crushing campaign on the “end of communism”, “the end of the class struggle”, “the failure of communism”, etc., which brutally affected several generations of workers. See International Review n° 60, “Collapse of stalinism: new difficulties for the proletariat

[13]. Remember how, between February and June 1848 in France, this type of “celebration of all social classes” also took place, which ended with the June days when the armed Paris proletariat clashed with the Provisional Government. During the Russian Revolution of 1917 this same atmosphere of general union under the aegis of the “revolutionary democracy” also reigned between February and April.

[14]. The exception to this is the extreme right who, driven by uncontrollable hatred of the working class, expresses out loud what other sections of the bourgeoisie only utter in private.

[15]. The possibility for citizens to collect a certain number of signatures to propose and pass laws and reforms in Parliament.

[16]. Democracy is based on the passivity and the atomisation of the vast majority reduced to a sum of individuals so vulnerable and defenceless that they think their “self” can be sovereign. By contrast, the assemblies are based on the opposite view: people are strong because they are supported by their “wealth of social relations” (Marx) by being integral to and part of a vast collective body.

[17]. As if punishment could be “proportionate”!

[18]. DRY asked the demonstrators to surround and publicly criticise the conduct of any element who was “violent” or “suspected of being violent” (sic).

[19]. Their origins go far back to the district meetings during Paris Commune, but become clearer with the revolutionary movement in Russia in 1905 and since then, they have appeared in every great movement of the class in different guises and designations: Russia 1917, Germany 1918, Hungary 1919 and 1956, Poland in 1980... in Vigo in Spain in 1972, there was a general assembly in the town, followed by one in Pamplona in 1973 and in Vitoria in 1976 and again in Vigo in 2006. We have written many articles on the origins of these workers' assemblies. See in particular the series “What are workers' councils?” starting in International Review n°140

[20]. In Cadiz, the general assembly held a debate on “Insecurity” which drew strong support. In Caceres a lack of information on the movement in Greece was criticised and in Almera a meeting was held to discuss “the state of the workers' movement”.

[21]. These are actually double-edged swords: they contain positive aspects, such as extending the broader debate into the deeper layers of the working population and the possibility – as was the case – of giving an impetus to fighting unemployment and insecurity in the assemblies, breaking with the atomisation and the shame that plagues many unemployed workers, breaking with the situation of total vulnerability and insecurity in which the workers in small firms find themselves. The downside is that they are also used to disperse the movement, to draw it away from its broader concerns, to lead it off into a concern for “citizenship” fostered by the fact that the neighbourhood – an entity where workers mix with the petty bourgeoisie and with bosses, etc., - lends itself more to such things.

[22]. See, for example, “an anti-violence protocol”

[23]. In the Coordination of the assemblies of the neighbourhoods and southern suburbs of Madrid, we find what are essentially workers' assemblies from different sectors, even if some small radical unions are also involved. See https://asambleaautonomazonasur.blogspot.com/

[24]. The privatisation of public services and savings banks is a response of capitalism to the worsening crisis and, more specifically, expresses the fact that the State, with its great burden of debt, is forced to cut its spending, even if it means harming unjustifiably the way essential services are provided. However, it is important to understand that the alternative to privatisation is not to fight for the services to be retained under state ownership. Firstly, because “privatised” services often continue to be controlled organically by the institutions of the state which outsource the work to the private companies. And second, because the state and state ownership are not at all “social” or concerned with “citizens' well-being”. The state is an organ exclusively serving the ruling class and state ownership is based on wage exploitation. This is an issue that has begun to be raised in some workers' circles, notably in an assembly in Valencia against unemployment and job insecurity.

[27]. This does not mean we underestimate the obstacles that capitalism by its intrinsic nature, based on deadly competition and everyone mistrusting everyone else, puts in the way of the unification process. It can only be achieved after a period of huge and complicated effort based on the united and massive struggle of the working class, a class which produces collectively and by way of associated labour the essential wealth of society and which, as such, contains within it the reconstruction of the social being of humanity.

[30]. There has been complete censorship of the events in Greece and the mass movements unfolding there, which prevents us from including this in our analysis.

[31]. Taken from Kaosenlared : kaosenlared.net

[33]. see the various articles marking each of these moments in our press

[34]. This wasn’t something specific to the ICC: a rather popular slogan was “to be realistic, be anti-capitalist!”. One banner proclaimed “The system is inhuman, be anti-system!”

Geographical: 

Recent and ongoing: 

On the 140th anniversary of the Paris Commune

With the dramatic events of the Paris Commune between March and June 1871 we have the first example in history of the working class taking political power into its own hands. The Commune meant the dismantling of the old bourgeois state and the formation of a power directly controlled from below: the delegates of the Commune, elected by popular assemblies in the neighbourhoods of Paris, were subject to immediate recall and were paid no more than the average worker’s wage. The Commune called for its example to be taken up throughout France, demolished the Vendôme Column as a symbol of French national chauvinism, and proclaimed that its red flag was the flag of the Universal Republic. Naturally, this crime against the natural order had to be mercilessly punished. The liberal British newspaper, The Manchester Guardian, published at the time a very critical report on the bloody revenge of the French ruling class:

 “Civil government is temporarily suspended in Paris. The city is divided into four military districts, under General’s LADMIRAULT, CISSKY, DOUAY, and VINOY. ‘All powers of the civil authorities for the maintenance of order are transferred to the military’. Summary executions continue, and military deserters, incendiaries, and members of the Commune are shot without mercy. The marquis DE GALIFLET has given some slight dissatisfaction by shooting, it is said, a number of innocent persons near the Arc de Triomphe. It will be remembered that the Marquis (who was with BAZAINE in Mexico) ordered upwards of 80 men, selected from a large convoy of prisoners, to be shot near the Arch. It is now said that some of these men were innocent. The Marquis would probably, if he were appealed to, express a polite regret that such an untoward circumstance should have occurred; and what more could a true ‘friend of order’ require?[1]

In a mere eight days, 30,000 Communards were massacred. And those who played their part in this Calgary were not merely the Galiflets and their French superiors. The Prussian junkers, whose war with France had sparked off the uprising in Paris, patched up their differences with the French bourgeoisie to enable the latter to crush the Commune: the first clear evidence that, no matter how savage the national rivalries that pit different ruling classes against each other, they will stand shoulder to shoulder when they face a threat from the proletariat.   

The Commune was utterly defeated, but it has been a source of inestimable political lessons for the workers’ movement. Marx and Engels revised their view of the proletarian revolution as a result of it, concluding that the working class could not take control of the old bourgeois state but had to destroy it and replace it with a new form of political power. The Bolsheviks and Spartacists of the Russian and German revolutions in 1917-19 took inspiration from it and saw the workers’ councils or soviets which emerged from those revolutions as a continuation and a development of the principles of the Commune. The communist left of the 1930s and 40s, in trying to understand the reasons for the defeat of the revolution in Russia, went back to the experience of the Commune to see what light it shed on the problem of the state in the period of transition between capitalism and communism. In line with this tradition, our Current has also published a certain number of articles on the Commune. The first volume of our series Communism is not just a nice idea but a material necessity, which looks at the evolution of the communist programme in the 19th century workers’ movement, devotes a chapter to the Commune, examining how the experience of Paris 1871 has clarified the attitude that the working class must adopt towards both the bourgeois state and the post-revolutionary ‘semi-state’; towards the other non-exploiting classes in society; towards the political, social and economic measures needed to advance in the direction of a society without classes and without a state. This article can be found here, as well as in the book containing the whole of the first series, which can be bought directly from the ICC or on Amazon. We are also re-publishing in our territorial press an article originally written for the 120th anniversary of the Commune in 1991. This article denounces the latter-day efforts of the bourgeoisie to recuperate the memory of the Commune and hide its internationalist and revolutionary essence by presenting it as a chapter in the patriotic struggle for democratic freedoms.

 


[1]. Manchester, Thursday June 1 1871:Summary of Foreign News.

 

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History of the workers' movement

Contribution to a history of the workers' movement in Africa (part 2): 1914-28

1914 - 1928: the first real confrontations between the two classes

Between 1855 and 1914, the proletariat that emerged in the colony of French West Africa (FWA) underwent its class struggle apprenticeship by trying to come together and organise with the aim of defending itself against its capitalist exploiters. Despite its extreme numerical weakness, it demonstrated its will to struggle and a consciousness of its strength as an exploited class. We can also note that, on the eve of World War One, the development of the productive forces in the colony was sufficient to give rise to a frontal collision between the bourgeoisie and working class.

General strike and uprising, Dakar 1914

At the beginning of 1914, the discontent and anxiety of the population, which had been building up since the preceding year, didn’t immediately express itself in the form of a strike or demonstration. But by May the anger exploded and the working class unleashed an insurrectionary general strike.

This strike was first of all a response to the crass provocations of the colonial power towards the population of Dakar during the legislative elections of May, when big business[1] and the Mayor threatened to cut credits, water and electricity to all those who wanted to vote for the local candidate (a certain Blaise Diagne, of whom more below). At the same time an epidemic of plague broke out in the town and, under the pretext of preventing its spread to the residential quarters (of Europeans), Mayor Masson of Dakar (a colonist) quite simply ordered the burning down of all the dwellings (of the local population) suspected being infected.

This fanned the flames, resulting in a general strike and a riot against the criminal procedures of the colonial authorities. In order to respond, a group of youths called the “Young Senegalese” called for an economic boycott and filled the streets, putting up posters throughout Dakar with the slogan: “Let’s starve those that starve us”, taking up the slogan of the candidate and future black deputy.

Barely concealing its own disquiet, big business launched a violent campaign through the newspaper L’AOF (in its pocket) against the strikers: “Here our stevedores, carters and other workers are deprived of their wages... How are they going to eat? ...your strikes which have affected the life of the port will only make the problem much more cruel to the unfortunate than it will to those well off: they will paralyse the development of Dakar by discouraging those that want to come here from doing so.[2]

But it didn’t work and the strike couldn’t be prevented. On the contrary, it spread, affecting all sectors, notably the port and the railway, the lungs of the colony’s economy, as well as trade and services, both private and public. The following is related in the secret memoirs of the Governor of the colony, William Ponty: “The strike (added the Governor General), by the abstention fomented from below, was perfectly organised and a complete success. It was...the first event of its kind that I had seen so unanimous in these regions.[3]

The strike lasted 5 days (between the 20th and 25th of May) and the workers ended up by forcing the colonial authorities to put out the fire that they themselves had lit. In fact the strike was exemplary! The struggle marked a major turning point in the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the working class of FWA. It was the first time that a strike spread beyond occupational categories and brought together workers with the population of Dakar and the region in the same combat against the dominant power.

This was clearly a struggle that abruptly changed the balance of forces in favour of the oppressed, compelling the Governor (with the approval of Paris) to cede to the claims of the striking population, expressed in these terms: “The cessation of the incineration of dwellings, the restitution of bodies, reconstruction of the buildings and dwellings destroyed using solid materials, the complete removal from the entire town of all the dwellings built in sub-standard wood or straw and their replacement by buildings in cement for low-priced habitation.[4]

However, this same Governor said nothing about the number of victims burnt inside their dwellings or cut down under a hail of bullets from the forces of order. At best, the local authorities of the colony only raised the question of “the restitution of the bodies” and said not a word about the killings and their extent.

But, despite the censorship of the words and actions of the working class at that time, one can imagine that the workers who saw their homes burnt down and those of their families, did not remain inert and put up a fierce fight. Clearly, although few in number, the working class was without doubt a decisive element in the confrontations that made the forces of colonial capital give ground. But above all the strike had a very political character:

Certainly it was an economic strike, but it was also political, a strike of protest, a strike of sanction, a strike of reprisals, decided upon and put into effect by all the population of Cape Verde... The strike thus had a very clear political character and the reaction of the authorities was something quite different... The administration was both surprised and disarmed. Surprised because it had never had to face up to a manifestation of this nature, disarmed because there was no presence at all of a classical union organisation with offices, rules, but a general movement taken in hand by the whole population and whose leadership was invisible.[5]

In accord with the author above, one must conclude that it was indeed an eminently political strike expressing a high degree of proletarian consciousness. An even more remarkable phenomenon given the unfavourable context for the class struggle: one dominated from the outside by the sound of marching boots and, from the inside, by struggles for power and the settling of accounts within the bourgeoisie through the legislative elections, whose main issue, for the first time, was the election of a deputy from the black continent. This was a mortal trap that the working class turned against the dominant class by unleashing, along with the rest of the oppressed population, a victorious strike.

1917-1918: strike movements seriously concern the bourgeoisie

As we know, the period 1914 to 1916 was marked, in the world in general and Africa in particular, by a feeling of terror and dejection following the outbreak of the first global butchery. Certainly, just before the conflagration, we saw a formidable class combat in Dakar in 1914; similarly there was a tough strike in Guinea in 1916.[6] But on the whole a general state of impotence dominated the working class even though its living conditions deteriorated on every level. In fact, it wasn’t until 1917 (by chance?) that we saw new expressions of struggle in the colony:

The accumulated effects of galloping inflation, the screwing down of wages, all types of worries, at the same time as they threw light on the tight links of dependence between the colony and the Metropole and the increasing integration of Senegal into the capitalist world system, all provoked a rupture of social equilibrium in which the consciousness of the workers and their will to struggle was clearly affirmed. From 1917, political relations were signalling that in a situation of crisis, stagnation of business, crushing taxation, the growing pauperisation of the masses, more and more workers were incapable of making ends meet and were demanding increases in wages.[7]

Strikes broke out between December 1917 and February 1918 against the misery and degradation of the conditions of life of the working class, and this despite the installation of a state of siege throughout the colony, accompanied by an implacable censorship. Nevertheless, even with little detail on the strikes and their outcomes at this time, we can see here, through some confidential notes, the existence of real class confrontations. Thus, in regard to the strike movement of coal miners working for the Italian company Le Senegal, one can read this in a note sent from the Governor William Ponty to his minister: “…Satisfaction having been given to them immediately, work was resumed the following day...” Or again: “A small strike of two days occurred during the quarter on the sites of the firms Bouquereau and Leblanc. Most of the strikers have been replaced by Portuguese.[8]

But without knowing what the reaction of the workers replaced by the “blacklegs” was, the Governor General indicated that: “The workers of all occupations are due to strike on the 1st of January”. Further, he informed his minister that the builders, spread out over a dozen worksites, struck on February 20th claiming an increase in wages of 6 to 8 francs per day, and that “satisfaction [of the claim] put an end to the strike.

As we can clearly see, between 1917 and 1918, workers’ militancy was such that confrontations between the bourgeoisie and proletariat often ended up with victories for the latter, as is attested in quotes from diverse secret reports or observations from the colonial authorities. Similarly, workers’ struggles of this time couldn’t be separated from the historic context of the revolution in Russia in particular and in Europe in general:

The concentration of wage-earners in the ports, on the railways, created the conditions for the first manifestations of the workers’ movement... Finally, the suffering of the war – the war effort, the hardships suffered by the combatants – created the need for a respite and hope for a change. The echoes of the October revolution in Russia had reached Africa; there were Senegalese troops stationed in Romania who refused to march against the Soviets: there were black marines in the naval units who mutinied in the Mediterranean; some of those who took part in the mutinies of 1917 experienced the revolutionary strides of the years at the end of the war and of the period immediately after the war in France.[9]

So the Russian revolution of 1917 did have echoes in Africa, particularly amongst the youth, a great part of who were enlisted and sent to Europe by French imperialism as cannon fodder for the war of 1914-18. In this context, we can understand the well-founded concerns of the French bourgeoisie at that time; they were to become even more worried as the wave of struggle continued.

1919: a year of struggles and attempts to build up workers’ organisations

1919, a year of intense workers’ struggles, was also the year of the emergence of many associations of an occupational character, despite the fact that the colonial authority continued to ban any union organisation or any coalition of more than twenty workers within FWA. However, there were many workers who took the initiative to create occupational associations (“friendly societies”) that had the potential for taking up the defence of their interests. But as the prohibition was particularly aimed at native workers, it fell to their European comrades – as it happened the rail workers – to take the initiative of creating the first “occupational friendly society” in 1918; in fact the rail workers had already been the origin of the first (public) attempt in this area in 1907.

These occupational friendly societies were the first union organisations recognised in the colony: “Little by little, coming out of the narrow framework of the company, the coalition of the workers was growing, going first of all through a Union at the level of a town like Saint-Louis or Dakar, then a regroupment at the level of the colony, of all those whose occupational obligations subjected them to the same servitude. We find examples of them among teachers, postal workers, women typists, trade employees. [...] Through these means, the nascent union movement strengthened its class position. It enlarged the field of its framework and action and it disposed of a powerful striking force, which showed itself to be particularly effective faced with the boss. Thus, the spirit of solidarity between workers little by little gained flesh. Convincing indications even show that the most advanced elements were engaged in becoming conscious of the limits of corporatism and laid the basis of an inter-occupational union of workers from the same sector, covering a wider geographical space.[10]

In fact, in this context we learn later, in a police report taken from the archives, of the existence of a federation of associations of colonial state workers of FWA.

But, becoming aware of the size of the danger from the appearance of federated workers’ groups, the Governor ordered an enquiry into the activities of the emerging unions. Subsequently, he instructed his Secretary General to break the organisations and their responsible leaders in the following terms: “1) see if it’s possible to get rid of all the natives reported; 2) look into the conditions under which they were taken on; 3) don’t let the joint note go into circulation and keep it in your drawer; I’ll personally put my memo with it.[11]

What vocabulary, and what a cynic is this Monsieur le Governor! With total logic he carried out his dirty “mission” through massive dismissals and by hunting down any worker who might to belong to one union organisation or another. Clearly the attitude of the Governor was that of a state police chief in his most criminal works and, in this sense, he also carried out the segregation between European and “native” workers, as this archive document shows:

That the metropolitan civil laws extend to citizens living in the colonies is understandable, since they are members of an evolved society or else natives who have been habituated for a long time to our customs and our civic life; but to extend these to races still in a state bordering on barbarity, who are almost completely foreign to our civilisation, is often an impossibility, if not a regrettable error.[12]

We have here a Governor who is contemptuously about to carry out his policy of apartheid. In fact, not content with deciding to “liquidate” the indigenous workers, he goes one better in justifying his actions through overtly racist theories.

Despite this anti-proletarian political criminality, the working class of this time (European and African) refused to capitulate and pursued the best possible struggle for the defence of its class interests.

Railworkers’ strike in April 1919

1919 was a year of strong social agitation. Several sectors came into struggle around diverse demands, whether wages or concerning the right to set up organisations for the defence of workers’ interests. But it was the rail workers who were the first to strike this year, between April 13th and 15th, first of all sending a warning to their employer: “April 8th 1919, or hardly seven months after the end of hostilities, a movement of demands broke out in the rail services of Dakar-Saint-Louis (DSL) on the initiative of European and local workers in the form of an anonymous telegram drawn up and addressed to the Inspector General of Public Works:rail workers of Dakar-Saint Louis, are unanimously agreed in presenting the following demands: raising of pay for European and indigenous personnel, regular increases and maintenance allowances, improved sick pay and allowances ... we will stop all work for one hundred and twenty hours, from this day, 12th April if there’s no favourable response on all points: signed, Rail workers of Dakar-Saint Louis.’[13]

This is the particularly strong and combative tone with which rail workers announced their intention to strike if their demands weren’t met by the employers. Similarly, we should note the unitary character of the strike. For the first time, in a conscious fashion, European and African workers decided to draw up their list of demands together. Here we are dealing with a gesture of the internationalism which only the working class is the bearer of. This is the giant step taken by the rail workers – knowingly striving to overcome the ethnic barriers that the class enemy regularly sets up in order to divide the proletariat and lead it to defeat.

Reaction of the authorities faced with the rail workers’ demands

On receiving the telegram from the workers, the Governor General summoned the members of his administration and army chiefs to decide at once on the total requisitioning of personnel and administration of the Dakar-Saint Louis line, placing it under military authority. The decree of the Governor even states: “Troops will first of all use their rifle butts. An attack by small weapons will be met with the use of bayonets [...] It will be indispensable for troops to shoot in order to assure the security of personnel of the administration is not put in danger...” And the French authorities concluded that the laws and rules governing the army became immediately applicable.

However, neither this terrible decision for a decidedly repressive response, nor the arrogant uproar accompanying its implementation, succeeded in preventing the strike from taking place: “At 18h 30, Lachere (civil chief of the network) cabled the boss of the Federation that, odd number trains not leaving today; trains four and six have left, the second stopped at Rusfique...’ and urgently insisted on advisability of giving in to the demand of the workers. Rail traffic was almost completely paralysed. It was the same thing at Dakar, Saint Louis, Rusfique. The entire network was on strike, Europeans and Africans... ; arrests were made here and there, attempts to oppose the workers on racial grounds came to nothing. Otherwise, some personnel went to the stations without working, others purely and simply defected. In the morning of April 15th, there was a total strike in Rusfique. No European or African worker was present. Consequently the order was given to close the station. The centre of the strike was found here. Never has Senegal known a movement of such breadth. For the first time a strike has been undertaken by Europeans and Africans and has succeeded so vividly, and at the level of the territory. Members of the ruling elite were going mad. Giraud, President of the Chamber of Commerce, has made contact with the rail workers and tried to conciliate. Maison Maurel and Prom warned its management in Bordeaux. Maison Vielles sent its Marseille headquarters this alarmist telegram: ‘Situation untenable, act!’ Giraud went on the offensive, going directly to the President of the Syndicate for the Defence of Senegalese Interests (i.e. the bosses) in Bordeaux, criticising the nonchalance of the authorities.[14]

Panic gripped the leadership of the colonial administration faced with the flames of the workers’ struggle. Following pressure from the economic leadership of the colony, both on the bosses in France and on central government, the authorities in Paris had to give the green light to negotiations with the strikers. Following this, the Governor General convened a meeting with representatives of the latter (on the second day of the strike) with proposals favouring the demands of the strikers. And when the Governor expressed his wish to meet railway worker delegates made up solely of Europeans, the workers replied by refusing to agree to the plan without the presence of African workers on the same equitable footing as their white comrades. In fact, the workers on strike distrusted their interlocutors and not without reason, because after giving satisfaction to the rail workers on the main points of their demands, the authorities continued their manoeuvres and hesitations regarding some demands of the native workers. But that only increased the combativity of the railway workers, who quickly decided to go back on strike, giving rise to new pressures from the representatives of the French bourgeoisie in Dakar on the central government in Paris. This is what’s shown in the following telegrams:

“It is urgent that satisfaction is given immediately to the personnel of DSL and the decision is notified without delay otherwise we risk a new strike” (the representative of big business);

“I ask you straightaway... to give approval to arbitration by the Governor General transmitted in my cable of the 16th... very urgent before May 1st, if (as seems probable) we are going to have a new work stoppage on this date” (Director of the Railways);

“Despite my counsels, the strike will resume if the company doesn’t give satisfaction” (the Governor General).[15]

Visibly, there was general panic among the colonial authorities at all levels. In brief, in the end, the French government gave its approval to the arbitration of its Governor by validating the agreement negotiated with the strikers. Work restarted on April 16th. Once again, the working class pulled off a great victory over the forces of capital thanks notably to its class unity and above all to the development of its class consciousness.

But in addition to the satisfaction of the demands of the rail workers, this movement had positive consequences for other workers; in fact the 8-hour day was extended throughout the colony following the strike. What’s more, faced with the bosses’ resistance in accepting it and faced with the dynamic of struggle created by the rail workers, workers from other branches also went into struggle to make themselves heard.

The postal strike

After this, in order to obtain increases in wages and better conditions of work, workers of the PTT (postal service) of Saint-Louis went on strike May 1st 1919. It lasted for 12 hours and ended up with the postal services almost paralysed. Faced with the breadth of the movement, the colonial authority requisitioned the army to provide a specialised force for ensuring the continuity of public services. But this military body was far from being able to effectively play the role of blackleg. The administrative authority thus had to agree to negotiate with the postal strike committee, which was offered a wage increase of 100%. In fact: “The duplicity of the colonial authorities soon restarted the strike movement which took off with renewed vigour, braced without doubt by the enticing perspectives that it had glimpsed for a moment. It lasted up to May 12th and ended in total success.[16]

Once again, here was a victory gained by the PTT workers thanks to their militant stance. Decidedly, the workers showed themselves more and more conscious of their strength and their class affiliation.

In fact all public services were more and more affected by the movement. Numerous occupational categories were able to benefit from the fall-out of the struggle unleashed by the workers of the PTT: after they had obtained substantial wage increases, it was the turn of workers in the public sector, farm workers, teachers, health workers, etc. But the success of the movement didn’t stop there: again the representatives of capital refused to surrender.

Threat of a new railworkers strike and the political manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie

Following the movement of the postal workers and six months after the victorious end of their movement, the indigenous rail workers decided to strike without their European comrades by addressing the authorities with new demands: “In this letter, we ask for an improvement of pay and modifications of the rules regarding indigenous personnel... We take the liberty of saying to you that we can no longer lead the life of the galley and we hope that you will avoid it by taking measures of which you alone will be responsible... and we would like, just like the fixed personnel (formed almost exclusively of Europeans), to be recompensed. Act on our regard as you would act on their regard and everything will be for the best.[17]

The indigenous workers wanted to benefit from the material advantages that some workers had acquired following the strike of PTT workers. But above all they wanted to be treated the same as the European workers, the key being the threat of a new strike.

The initiative of the indigenous workers of the DSL had, quite naturally, aroused the lively interest of the bosses. Given that the 13th to 15th April movement had been a crowning success because of the unity of the action, it was necessary to do everything to ensure that this new trench opening up between European and African workers would be reinforced. The best way to weaken the movement of workers would be to let them exhaust themselves in fratricidal rivalries, which would undermine any future coalition.

The network’s administration thus worked to accentuate the disparities in order to increase the frustration of the indigenous workers’ milieu in the hope of rendering definitive the rupture that was opening up.”[18]

Consequently the colonial authorities moved cynically into action, deciding not to adjust the income of the natives in relation to those of the Europeans, but, on the contrary to noisily increase the earnings of the latter while holding back on the demands of the local rail workers. The evident aim was to deepen the gap between the two groups, setting one against the other to neutralise both.

But fortunately, sensing the trap being laid by the colonial authorities, the indigenous rail workers avoided a strike in these conditions, deciding to wait for better days. We can also note that while they gave the impression of having forgotten the importance of the class unity they had previously shown in allying with their European comrades, the indigenous rail workers were still able to decide to widen their movement to other categories of workers (public and private services, European as well as African). In any case, they were able to recognise the uneven character of class unity, to see that class consciousness develops slowly in ups and downs. Let’s also remember that the colonial power institutionalised racial and ethnic divisions from the first contacts between Europeans and Africans. This did not mean there would be no other attempts at unity between African and European workers.

The revolt of Senegalese sailors at Santos (Brazil) in 1920: strike and repression

We learn from the recollections of a French consul of the existence of a struggle undertaken by some sailors on the Vapeur Provence (enlisted in Marseille) at Santos around May 1920. This was an example of workers’ solidarity followed by fierce police repression. Here’s how this diplomat relates the event: “Undisciplined acts occurred on board the Vapeur Provence... I went to Santos and, after enquiries, I punished the main guilty parties... 4 days in prison and I led them to the town’s prison in the interest of the security of the navy... All the Senegalese stokers showing solidarity with their comrades took a threatening attitude despite my formal defence... And the Senegalese tried to release their comrades, following the police agents and making threats and insults, and the local authority finally had to proceed with their arrest.[19]

In fact, these were worker-sailors (stokers, greasers, seamen) some of whom were registered in Dakar, others at Marseille, employed by big business to ensure the transport of goods between the three continents. The problem is that the diplomat’s notes say nothing about the cause of the revolt. It seems however that this movement had links with another that happened in 1919 when Senegalese sailors, following a struggle, were disembarked and replaced by some Europeans (according to police sources). Following that, after the strike, many of the Senegalese union members decided to quit the CGT, which had approved this decision, and join the CGTU (the latter being a split from the former).

In any case, this event seems to have seriously concerned the colonial authorities as is shown in the following account:

The consul, fulminating more than ever, vehemently demanded that when they arrived at Dakar, the guilty were handed over to the competent tribunal, and showed his surprise and indignation in these terms: ‘The attitude of these individuals is such that it constitutes a real danger for the ships on which they will sail in the future and for the general security of the general staff and crew. They are animated by the worst spirit, have lost, or never had, the least respect for discipline and believe they have the right to give orders to the commandant’.

They discovered, without a doubt and for the first time, the state of spirit of the Senegalese after the First World War and were evidently scandalised by the mood of contestation and their determination not to accept without reacting what they considered as an attempt on their rights and liberties. The working class was developing politically and on the trade union level.”[20]

This was a magnificent class combat by the maritime workers who, despite an unfavourable balance of forces, were able to show the enemy their determination, achieving self-respect by showing solidarity in the struggle.

1920: the re-launch of the rail workers’ action ends in victory

We’ve already seen that, following the victorious movement of workers of the PTT (in 1919), the indigenous rail workers wanted to rush into this breach by going on strike, before finally deciding to cancel their action due to the lack of favourable conditions.

Six months after this episode, they decided to re-launch their protest action in earnest. The movement of the rail workers was first of all motivated by the general degradation of living conditions due to the disastrous conditions of the Great War, which accentuated the discontent of the workers and of the population in general. The cost of living in the main towns underwent dizzying increases. Thus, the price of a kilo of millet, which in December 1919 was 0.75F, tripled in the space of four months. And a kilo of meat went from 5F to 7F, chicken 6F to 10F, etc.

A note from the Inspector General of Public Works of April 13th, in which he asked his superiors not to apply the law on the 8-hour day in the colony, was the last straw. It immediately revived the latent discontent smouldering among the rail workers since their protest movement of December 1919. The workers on the railway went into action on June 1st 1920: “It was the first strike movement undertaken at the ethnic level by the workers on the railways, which explains the rapidity and unanimity with which the business community received the event and decided to remedy it... From the first of June, they called on the States General of Colonial Trade in Senegal, addressing their concerns to the Federation Chief, and inviting him not to stand by during the deterioration in the social climate.[21]

The indigenous rail workers thus decided to launch a new showdown with the colonial authorities in order to achieve the same demands. But this time the African rail workers seemed to have drawn the lessons of the aborted action by enlarging the social base of the movement with several delegates representing each trade, fully entrusting them to negotiate collectively with the political and economic authorities. As a matter of fact, from the second day of the strike, unease grew among the main colonial authorities. Thus alerted by the Dakar economic decision-makers, the Minister of the Colonies sent a cable to the Governor in the following terms: “It has been pointed out to me that following the strike 35,000 tonnes of uncovered grain awaiting delivery is held up in different stations of Dakar-Saint Louis”. From here, pressure mounted on the Director of the Rail Network, pushing him to respond to the demands of the wage earners. And this “station master” responded to his superiors in the following way: “We fear that if a new increase in wages, so high and so little justified, was granted, it could have a general impact on the demands of all personnel and encourage them to present us with new demands.

Straightaway, the network’s management tried hard to break the strike by playing black against white (which had previously succeeded). Thus, on the third day of the movement, it managed to get together a train of goods and passengers, thanks to the co-operation of a European engine driver and stokers from the navy under escort from the forces of order. But when the management tried to play this card again, it couldn’t find any worker ready to play its game because this time, following strong pressure exerted on them by the indigenous strikers, the European rail workers decided to remain “neutral”. Afterwards, we find in a report of the Deputy Governor of Senegal:[22]The workers of Dakar-Saint Louis have declared that if they have no satisfaction at the end of the month, they will leave Dakar to work on farming in the lougans[23] in the colony’s interior.

At this point (the sixth day of the strike), the Governor of Senegal convened a meeting of all his social partners to notify them of a series of measures, elaborated by his own services, to meet the strikers’ demands; at the end of the day, the strikers got what they were asking for. Clearly the workers gained a new victory thanks to their combativity and a better organisation of the strike, and it is this that enabled them to impose a balance of force over the representatives of the bourgeoisie: “What appears certain however is that the workers’ mentality, grew stronger through these tests and more refined about the stakes involved, with more widespread forms of struggle and attempts at union co-ordination in a sort of broad class front faced with combative bosses.[24]

But even more significant in this development of a class front was June 1st 1920, the day the rail workers started their strike: “the tugboat crews stopped work a few hours later, despite the promise they had given, noted the Deputy Governor, to await the outcome of the talks that Martin, Chief of the Maritime Inspection Service, had been responsible for leading. We have here the first deliberate attempt to co-ordinate strike movements simultaneously unleashed by... rail workers and port workers, that is, personnel of the two sectors that constituted the lungs of the colony whose concerted paralysis blocked all economic and commercial activity, in and out... The situation appeared even more worrying (for the Administration), since the bakers of Dakar had also threatened to strike on the same day, and would certainly have done so if immediate increases in their wages had not been granted.[25]

Similarly, at the same time, other strike movements broke out at the Han/Thiaroye yards and yards on the Dakar-Rufisque route. Police sources reporting this event say nothing about the origin of the simultaneous explosion of these different movements. However, by putting together several pieces of information from this same colonial police source, we can conclude that the extension of this struggle movement was not unconnected with the Governor’s attempt to break the maritime transport strike Without saying so openly, the colonial state representative first of all called in the navy with some European civilian teams to provide transport services between Dakar and Goree[26] and this seems to have provoked solidarity action by workers in other sectors: “Did this intervention of the state on the side of the bosses arouse the solidarity of other occupational branches? Without being able to decisively confirm it we can note that the strike broke out almost simultaneously with the attempts to break the movement of the crews in public works.[27]

In fact, we know that after five days the movement was crumbling under the double impact of state repression and rumours of the bosses’ decision to replace the strikers with blacklegs.

The workers, feeling that the length of their action and the intervention of the military could change the balance of forces and jeopardise the successful conclusion of their action, had, on the seventh day of their strike softened their initial demands by formulating their platform based on the following... The Administration and the bosses were united in rejecting these new proposals, forcing the strikers to continue their movement in desperation or else end it on the local authorities’ conditions. They opted for the latter solution.”[28]

Clearly, the strikers had to return to work effectively on their old salary plus the “ration”, with the balance of forces squarely in the bourgeoisie’s favour and recognising the dangers of pursuing their movement in isolation. We can say here that the working class suffered a defeat but the fact of having retreated in good order meant that it wasn’t so profound, nor did it wipe out the workers’ understanding of the more numerous and important victories that it had gained.

To sum up, the period from 1914 to 1920 was strongly marked by intense class confrontations between the colonial bourgeoisie and the working class emerging in the colony of French West Africa; and this in a revolutionary context at the world level. French capital was fully conscious of this because it felt the full force of the proletarian struggle.

The activities of the world communist movement, during the same period, underwent an uninterrupted development, marked notably by the entry onto the scene of the first expression of African marxism;[29] breaking with the utopian approach that his brothers had adopted towards colonial problems, he developed the first native explanation of this question we know, the first serious and profound critique of colonialism as a system of exploitation and domination.[30]

Among the workers who were at the front of the strike movements in Senegal in the period from 1914 to 1920, some were close to the former “young infantrymen” demobilised or survivors from the First World War. For example, the same sources tell us of the existence at that time of a handful of Senegalese unionists, one of whom, a certain Louis Ndiaye (a young sailor of 13) was a militant of the CGT from 1905 and the representative of this organisation in the colonies between 1914 and 1930. In this respect, like many other “young infantrymen”, he was mobilised in 1914-18 into the navy where he managed to survive. Both he and another young Senegalese, Lamine Senghor, who was close to the PCF in the 1920s, were clearly influenced by the ideas of the Communist International. In this sense, and along with other figures of the 1920s, we can consider that they played a major and dynamic role in the process of politicisation and the development of class-consciousness in the ranks of the workers of the first colony of French West Africa.

Lassou (to be continued).

 

 


[1]. This term designates trade other than local at the time, essentially the import/export business controlled by a few families.

[2]. Quoted in Iba Der Thiam, Histoire du mouvement syndical africain 1790-1929, Editions L’Harmattan, 1991.

[3]. Ibid.

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. Ibid.

[6]. See Afrique noire, l’Ere colonial 1900-1945, Jean Suret-Canale, Editions Sociales, Paris 1961.

[7]. Thiam, op.cit.

[8]. Ibid.

[9]. Suret-Canale, op. cit.

[10]. Ibid. It’s worth recalling here what we said at the time of the publication of the first part of this article in International Review n° 145: “…if we largely recognise the seriousness of the researchers who provide these reference sources, we do not necessarily share some of their interpretations of historic events. It’s the same for certain ideas, for example when they talk about ‘union consciousness’ instead of ‘class consciousness’ (of workers), or again ‘union movement’ (instead of workers’ movement). Otherwise, up to another order, we have confidence in their scientific rigour as long as their theses don’t come up against historical facts and don’t prevent other interpretations.” In a more general way we want to underline again that during a period of the life of capitalism, the unions effectively constituted real organs of struggle of the working class in defence of its immediate interests within capitalism. They were then integrated into the capitalist state and with that lost any possibility of being used by the working class in its combat against exploitation. [NB. Part of the section quoted above was omitted from the version of the article published in the English language edition of International Review n° 145.]

[11]. Quoted ibid.

[12]. Ibid.

[13]. Ibid.

[14]. Ibid.

[15]. Ibid.

[16]. Ibid.

[17]. Ibid.

[18]. Ibid.

[19]. Ibid.

[20]. Ibid.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. The Governor of Senegal was subordinate to the Governor General of FWA.

[23]. Cultivation areas created by burning down forests.

[24]. Thiam, op. cit.

[25]. Ibid.

[26]. A Senegalese island situated in the Bay of Dakar.

[27]. Thiam, op. cit.

[28]. Ibid.

[29]. This reference is to Lamine Senghor, see below.

[30]. Thiam, op.cit.

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History of the workers' movement

19th ICC Congress: Resolution on the international situation

1. The resolution adopted by the previous ICC Congress pointed out right away how reality had categorically refuted the optimistic predictions of the leaders of the capitalist class at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century, particularly after the fall of the “Evil Empire”, the imperialist bloc which called itself “socialist”. It cited the now famous declaration of George Bush Senior in March 1991 announcing the birth of a “New World Order” based on respect for “international law”, underlining how surreal this declaration now seemed when confronted with the growing chaos engulfing capitalist society. Twenty years after this prophetic speech, and especially since the beginning of the last decade, the world has never been such a picture of chaos. In the space of a few weeks we have seen a new war in Libya, joining the list of bloody conflicts which have affected the planet in this period, new massacres in the Ivory Coast, and the tragedy which has hit one of the most powerful and modern countries in the world, Japan. The earthquake which ravaged part of the country underlined once again that these are not natural catastrophes but the catastrophic consequences of natural phenomena. It showed that society already has the means to construct buildings that resist earthquakes and which would make it possible to avoid tragedies like the one in Haiti last year. It also showed how even an advanced state like Japan is incapable of planning ahead: the earthquake in itself left few victims but the ensuing tsunami killed nearly 30,000 people in a few minutes. And by provoking a new Chernobyl it brought to light not only the lack of preparedness of the ruling class, but also its role as a sorcerer’s apprentice, unable to master the forces which it has set in motion. It was not the Tepco company running the Fukushima nuclear power station that was the first or the only one responsible for this disaster. It was the capitalist system as a whole, a system based on the frenzied hunt for profit by competing national units and not on the satisfaction of the needs of humanity, which fundamentally bears responsibility for the present and future catastrophes suffered by humanity. In the final analysis, the Japanese Chernobyl is a new illustration of the ultimate bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, a system whose survival constitutes a threat to humanity's very survival.

2. The crisis which world capitalism is currently going through is the most direct and obvious expression of the historic bankruptcy of this mode of production. Two years ago the bourgeoisie in all countries was seized by an almighty panic faced with the gravity of the economic situation. The OECD didn’t hesitate to say that “The world economy is in the midst of its deepest and most synchronised recession in our lifetimes.[1] When we know how cautiously this venerable institution usually expresses itself, we can get an idea of how scared the ruling class has been when faced with the potential collapse of its international financial system, the brutal fall in world trade (more than 13% in 2009), the depth of the recession in the main economies, the wave of bankruptcies hitting or threatening emblematic industrial enterprises like General Motors or Chrysler. This fear on the bourgeoisie's part led it to convene a number of G20 summits such as the one in March 2009, which decided to double the reserves of the International Monetary Fund and agreed that states should make massive investments of liquidities into the economy in order to save the banking system from perdition and get production going again. The spectre of the Great Depression of the 1930s was haunting them and led the OECD to try to shoo away such demons by writing that “While some have dubbed this severe global downturn a ‘great recession’, it will remain far from turning into a repeat of the 1930s Great Depression thanks to the quality and intensity of government policies that are currently being undertaken.[2] But as the resolution of the 18th Congress said “it is typical of the ruling class in its speeches of today to forget the speeches it made yesterday”. The OECD’s World Economic Outlook Interim Report of spring 2011 expressed a real relief at the restoration of the banking system and the economic recovery. The ruling class cannot act in any other way. It is incapable of giving a lucid, global and historic view of the difficulties encountered by capital, since such a view would lead it to discover the definitive impasse faced by its system. It is reduced to commenting on a day-to-day basis on the fluctuations of the immediate situation and thus to trying to find reasons for consoling itself. In doing so it is led to underestimate the significance of the major phenomenon of the last two years: the crisis of sovereign debt in a certain number of European states. This is so even if the media sometimes adopt an alarmist tone about it. In fact, the potential bankruptcy of a growing number of states constitutes a new stage in capitalism's plunge into insurmountable crisis. It highlights the limits of the policies through which the bourgeoisie has managed to hold back the evolution of the capitalist crisis for several decades.

3. The capitalist system has now been facing the current crisis for 40 years. May ‘68 in France, and all the proletarian struggles that followed it internationally, only took on such a breadth because they were fuelled by the world-wide deterioration of the living conditions of the working class, resulting form the first effects of the capitalist crisis, notably an increase in unemployment. This crisis went through a brutal acceleration in 1973-75 with the first big international recession of the post war period. Since then new recessions, each time deeper and more extensive, have hit the world economy, culminating in the one in 2008-9 which has revived the spectre of the 1930s. The measures adopted by the G20 of March 2009 to avoid a new Great Depression are significant expressions of the policy that the ruling class has been carrying out for several decades. They boil down to the injection of a considerable mass of credit into the economy. Such measures are not new. In fact for over 35 years they have been at the heart of the policies carried out by the ruling class aimed at escaping the major contradiction of the capitalist mode of production: its inability to find solvent markets that can absorb its production. The recession of 1973-5 was surmounted through the massive credits handed out to the third world countries, but since the beginning of the 1980s, with the debt crisis in these countries, the bourgeoisie of the most developed countries has had to give up this lung for its economy. It was then the states of the most advanced counties, and in the first place the USA, which came forward as the “locomotives” of the world economy. The neo-liberal “Reaganomics” of the beginning of the 1980s, which permitted a significant recovery of the US economy, was based on an unprecedented development of budget deficits, even though Ronald Reagan also declared that “the state is not the solution, it is the problem”. At the same time the considerable trade deficit of the USA enabled the commodities produced by other countries to find outlets there. During the 1990s the Asiatic “tigers” and “dragons” (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, etc) for a while accompanied the USA in its role as “locomotives”; their spectacular rates of growth became an important destination for the commodities of the most industrialised countries. But this “success story” was built at the price of a considerable indebtedness, which pushed these countries into major convulsions in 1997 along with the “new” and “democratic” Russia which found itself in default of payment, cruelly disappointing those who had banked on the “end of communism” to re-launch the world economy on a lasting basis. At the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century there was a new acceleration of debt, particularly through the runaway development of housing mortgages in a number of countries, notably the USA. The latter thus accentuated its role as the locomotive of the world economy, but at the price of a colossal growth in debt, especially within the US population, based on all sorts of financial products aimed at reducing the risk of being in default of payment. In reality, this proliferation of dubious loans in no way prevented them from acting as a Sword of Damocles hanging over the American and world economy. On the contrary they could only accumulate the toxic debts in the capital of the banks, which was at the root of their collapse in 2007 and of the brutal world recession of 2008-9.

4. Thus as the resolution adopted at the last congress put it “it is not the financial crisis which is at the origin of the current recession. On the contrary, the financial crisis merely illustrates the fact that the flight into debt, which made it possible to overcome overproduction, could not carry on indefinitely. Sooner or later, the ‘real economy’ would take its revenge In other words, what was at the basis of the contradictions of capitalism, overproduction, the incapacity of the markets to absorb the totality of the commodities produced, had come back onto the scene”. And the same resolution after the G20 summit of 2009 wrote that “The only ‘solution’ the bourgeoisie can come up with is... a new flight into debt. The G20 could not invent a solution to the crisis for the good reason that there is no solution”.

The crisis of sovereign debt that is spreading today, the fact that states are incapable of honouring their debts, is a spectacular illustration of this reality. The potential bankruptcy of the banking system and the onset of the recession have obliged all states to inject considerable sums into their economies, even though their revenues were in free fall because of the downturn in production. As a result of this, public deficit in most countries went through a considerable increase. For the most exposed ones such as Ireland, Greece or Portugal this meant a situation of potential bankruptcy, an inability to pay their public employees and to reimburse their debts. From then on the banks refused to grant them new loans, except at the most exorbitant rates, because they could not be at all sure they were going to be repaid. The “rescue plans” which they benefited from thanks to the European Bank and the IMF constitute new debts that were simply piled up on top of preceding ones. This is no longer a vicious circle; it is an infernal spiral. The only “effectiveness” of these plans consists of an unprecedented attack against the workers, against the public employees whose wages and jobs have been drastically reduced, but also against the whole of the working class through overt cuts in education, health and retirement pensions, and major tax increases. But all these anti-working class attacks, by massively amputating purchasing power, can only contribute further to a new recession.

5. The crisis of sovereign debts in the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) is only a small part of the earthquake threatening the world economy. It is not because they have been rated AAA in the index of confidence by the rating agencies (the same agencies which up until the eve of the debacle of the banks in 2008 gave the same banks the maximum rating) that the big industrial powers are holding out much better. In April the Standard and Poor Agency gave a negative opinion about the perspective of a Quantitative Easing no 3, i.e. a 3rd recovery plan by the US Federal State, aimed at supporting the economy. In other words the world's first power runs the risk of seeing a withdrawal in “official” confidence in its capacity to reimburse its debts; there is also a growing concern that any repayments will come in the shape of a strongly devalued dollar. In fact this confidence is already beginning to wear thin with the decision of China and Japan last autumn to buy massive quantities of gold and raw materials instead of American Treasury Bonds, which led the Federal Bank to buy between 70 and 90 percent of them. This lack of confidence is perfectly justified when we note the incredible level of debt of the American economy: in January 2010 public debt (Federal State, States, municipalities) already represented nearly 100 percent of GNP, and this only constituted a part of the country's total debt, which also includes the debts of households and non-financial enterprises. This amounts to 300 per cent of GNP. And the situation was no better in the other big countries, where on the same day total debts represented 280 percent of GNP for Germany, 320 percent for France, 470 percent for the UK and Japan. And in the last country, the public debt alone reached 200 percent of GNP. And since then in all countries the situation has only got worse with all the various recovery plans.

Thus the bankruptcy of the PIIGS is just the tip of the iceberg of the bankruptcy of world economy, which for decades has owed its survival to a desperate headlong flight into debt. States which have their own currency, such as the UK, Japan and obviously the US, have been able to hide this bankruptcy by printing money (unlike the countries of the Euro zone like Greece, Portugal or Ireland, which don’t have this possibility). But this permanent cheating by states, which have become real counterfeiters, with the US state at the head of the gang, cannot go on indefinitely, any more than the trickery in the financial system, as demonstrated by the financial crisis in 2008, which almost led to the explosion of the whole financial apparatus. One of the visible signs of this is the current acceleration of inflation on a world scale. By tipping over from the banking sphere to the level of states, the debt crisis marks the entry of the capitalist mode of production into a new phase of its acute crisis, which will considerably aggravate the violence, and extent of its convulsions. There is no light at the end of the tunnel of capitalism. This system can only lead society into an ever-increasing barbarism.

6. Imperialist war constitutes the major expression of the barbarism into which decadent capitalism is dragging human society. The tragic history of the 20th century is the most obvious expression of this: faced with the historic impasse of its mode of production, faced with the exacerbation of trade rivalries between states, the ruling class is forced to rush towards military policies and conflicts. For the majority of historians, including those who do not claim to be marxists, it is clear that the Second World War was born out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Similarly the aggravation of imperialist tensions at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, between the two blocs of the day, America and Russia (invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR in 1979, crusade against the “Evil Empire” by the Reagan administration) flowed to a large extent from the return of the open crisis of the capitalist economy at the end of the 1960s. However, history has shown that this link between the aggravation of imperialist conflicts and the economic crisis of capitalism is not direct or immediate. The intensification of the Cold War ended up with the victory of the Western bloc through the implosion of the rival bloc, which in turn resulted in the break-up of the Western bloc. While it escaped from the threat of a new generalised war which could have led to the disappearance of the human species, the world has not been spared an explosion of military tensions and confrontations. The end of the rival blocs meant the end of the discipline that they were able to impose in their respective territories. Since then the planetary imperialist arena has been dominated by the efforts of the world's leading power to maintain its world leadership, above all over its former allies. The first Gulf war in 1991 already had this objective, but the history of the 1990s, particularly the war in Yugoslavia, has shown the failure of this ambition. The war against terrorism declared by the USA after the September 11 2001 attacks was a new attempt to reaffirm their leadership, but the fact that they simply got bogged down in Afghanistan and in Iraq underlined once again their inability to re-establish this leadership.

7. These failures of the USA have not discouraged Washington from pursuing the offensive policy that it has been carrying out since the beginning of the 1990s and which has made it the main factor of instability on the world scene. As the resolution from the last congress put it: “Faced with this situation, Obama and his administration will not be able to avoid continuing the warlike policies of their predecessors.... if Obama has envisaged a US withdrawal from Iraq, it is in order to reinforce its involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. This was illustrated recently with the execution of Bin Laden by an American commando raid on Pakistan territory. This “heroic” operation obviously had an electoral element as we are now a year and a half away from the US elections. In particular it was aimed at countering the criticism of the Republicans, who have reproached Obama with being soft in affirming US hegemony on the military level; these criticisms had been stepped up during the intervention in Libya where the leadership of the operation was left to the Franco-British tandem. It also meant that after using Bin Laden in the role of Bad Guy for nearly ten years it was time to get rid of him in order not to appear completely impotent. In doing so the USA proved that it is the only power with the military, technological and logistical means to carry out this kind of operation, precisely at the time when France and Britain are having difficulty in carrying out their anti-Gaddafi operation. It notified the world that the US would not hesitate to violate the national “sovereignty” of an “ally”, that it intends to fix the rules of the game wherever it judges it necessary. Finally it succeeded in obliging the governments of the world to salute the value of this exploit, often with considerable reluctance.

8. Having said this, the striking coup carried out by Obama in Pakistan will in no way make it possible to stabilise the situation in the region. In Pakistan itself this slap in the face to its national pride runs the risk of sharpening old conflicts between various sectors of the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus. Similarly, the death of Bin Laden will not allow the US and other countries engaged in Afghanistan to regain control of the country and back up the authority of the Karzai government, which is completely undermined by corruption and tribalism. More generally it will in no way make it possible to hold back the tendencies towards every man for himself and the growing challenge to the authority of the world's first power, which have continued to express themselves as we have seen recently with the constitution of a series of surprising temporary alliances: rapprochement between Turkey and Iran, alliance between Iran, Brazil and Venezuela (strategic and anti-US), between India and Israel (military and aimed at breaking out of isolation), between China and Saudi Arabia (military and strategic). In particular it will not be able to discourage China from pushing forward the imperialist ambitions which its recent status as a big industrial power enables it to have. It is clear that this country, despite its demographic and economic importance, does not have, and is unlikely to have, the military or technological means to constitute itself as the new head of a bloc. However, it does have the means to further perturb American ambitions, whether in Africa, Iran, North Korea or Burma, and to throw a further stone into the pond of instability which characterises imperialist relations. The “New World Order” predicted 20 years ago by George Bush Senior, which he dreamed about being under the guidance of the US, can only more and more present itself as a world chaos, which the convulsions of the capitalist economy can only aggravate more and more.

9. Faced with this chaos affecting bourgeois society at all levels - economic, military, and also environmental, as we saw recently in Japan – only the proletariat can bring a solution, its solution: the communist revolution. The insoluble crisis of the capitalist economy, the growing convulsions it is going through, constitute the objective conditions for it. On the one hand by obliging the working class to develop its struggles against the growing attacks imposed by the exploiting class; on the other hand by enabling it to understand that these struggles take on all their significance as moments of preparation for its decisive confrontation with a capitalist mode of production condemned by history.

However, as the resolution from the last international congress put it: “The road towards revolutionary struggles and the overthrow of capitalism is a long one... For consciousness of the possibility of the communist revolution to gain a significant echo within the working class, the latter has to gain confidence in its own strength, and this takes place through the development of massive struggles.”In a much more immediate sense, the resolution made it clear that “the main form this attack is taking today, that of massive lay-offs, does not initially favour the emergence of such movements... It is in a second period, when it is less vulnerable to the bourgeoisie's blackmail, that workers will tend to turn to the idea that a united and solid struggle can push back the attacks of the ruling class, especially when the latter tries to make the whole working class pay for the huge budget deficits accumulating today with all the plans for saving the banks and stimulating the economy. This is when we are more likely to see the development of broad struggles by the workers”.

10. The two years since the last congress have amply confirmed this prediction. This period has not seen wide-scale struggles against the massive lay-offs and rising unemployment being inflicted on the working class in the most developed countries. At the same time, significant struggles have begun to take place against the “necessary cuts in public spending”". This response is still very timid, notably where these austerity plans have taken the most violent forms, in countries like Greece or Spain for example, even though the working class there had recently shown evidence of a rather important level of militancy. In a way it seems that the very brutality of the attacks provoke a feeling of powerlessness in the workers' ranks, all the more because they are being carried out by “left” governments. Paradoxically, it is where the attacks seem the least violent, in France for example, where workers' combativity has been expressed in the most massive way, with the movement against the pension reforms in the autumn of 2010.

11. At the same time, the most massive movements we have seen in the recent period have not taken place in the most industrialised countries but in countries on the peripheries of capitalism, notably in a number of countries in the Arab world, particularly Tunisia and Egypt where, in the end, after trying to meet the movements with ferocious repression, the bourgeoisie was forced to get rid of the local dictators. These movements were not classic workers' struggles like the ones these countries had seen in the recent past (for example the struggles in Gafsa in Tunisia in 2008 or the massive strikes in the textile industry in Egypt in the summer of 2007, which encountered the solidarity of a number of other sectors). They often took the form of social revolts in which all different sectors of society were involved: workers from public and private sectors, the unemployed, but also small shopkeepers, artisans, the liberal professions, educated young people etc. This is why the proletariat only rarely appeared directly in a distinct way (for example in the strikes in Egypt towards the end of the revolt there); still less did it assume the role of a leading force. However, at the origin of these movements, reflected in many of the demands that were raised, we find fundamentally the same causes as those at the origin of the workers' struggles in other countries: the considerable aggravation of the crisis, the growing misery it provokes within the entire non-exploiting population. And while the proletariat did not in general appear directly as a class in these movements, its imprint was still there in countries where the working class has a significant weight, especially through the deep solidarity expressed in the revolts, their ability to avoid being drawn into acts of blind and desperate violence despite the terrible repression they had to face. In the end, if the bourgeoisie in Tunisia and Egypt finally resolved, on the good advice of the American bourgeoisie, to get rid of the old dictators, it was to a large extent because of the presence of the working class in these movements. One of the proofs of this was the outcome of the movement in Libya: not the overthrow of the old dictator Gaddafi but military confrontation between bourgeois cliques in which the exploited were enrolled as cannon fodder. In this country, a large part of the working class was made up of immigrant workers (Egyptian, Tunisian, Chinese, Sub-Saharan, Bangladeshi) whose main reaction was to flee the repression which was unleashed in a ferocious manner in the first few days.

12. The military outcome of the movement in Libya, with the entry of NATO forces into the conflict, enables the bourgeoisie to promote campaigns of mystification aimed at the workers of the advanced countries, whose spontaneous reaction was to feel solidarity with the demonstrators of Tunis and Cairo and to salute their courage and determination. In particular, the massive presence of the educated youth, who face a future of unemployment and poverty, echoed the recent movements of educated youth in a number of western European countries in the recent period: the movement against the CPE in France in the spring of 2006, revolts and strikes in Greece at the end of 2008, demonstrations and strikes by high school and university students in the UK at the end of 2010, the student movements in the USA and Italy in 2008 and 2010, etc. The bourgeois campaigns aimed at distorting the significance of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt were obviously facilitated by the illusions which weighed heavily on the working class in these countries: nationalist, democratic and trade unionist illusions in particular, as had been the case in 1980-81 with the struggle of the Polish proletariat.

13. 30 years ago this movement enabled the ICC to put forward its critical analysis of the theory of the “weak link” developed in particular by Lenin at the time of the revolution in Russia. At this point the ICC had argued, on the basis of the positions elaborated by Marx and Engels, that it was from the central countries of capitalism, above all the old industrial countries of Europe, that the signal for the world proletarian revolution would be sent out, owing to the concentrated nature of the proletariat in these countries, and even more because of its historic experience, which will provide it with the best weapons to finally spring the most sophisticated ideological traps laid by the bourgeoisie for a very long time. Thus, one of the most fundamental steps to be taken by the world working class in the future is not only the development of massive struggles in the central countries of western Europe but also its capacity to break out of the democratic and trade union traps, above all by taking charge of its own struggles. These movements will constitute a beacon for the world working class, including the class in the main capitalist power, the USA, whose dive into growing poverty, already hitting tens of millions of workers, is going to turn the “American Dream” into a real nightmare.

14. The movement of autumn 2010 against the pension reforms in France, a country whose proletariat, since May 1968, constitutes a kind of reference point for many workers of other European countries, put into relief the fact that the working class is still far from attaining the capacity to overcome the grip of the unions and take control of its struggles, a reality expressed all the more clearly during the massive “mobilisation” organised by the British trade unions in March 2011 against the austerity plans of the Cameron government. However, the fact that within this movement against the pension reforms in France, despite the overall grip of the Intersyndicale, a number of “interprofessional assemblies” were formed in different towns, expressing the will to react against this grip, to take direct control of struggles through assemblies open to all, to overcome professional divisions, is an indication that the working class is beginning to take the road towards this essential step.

Similarly, the fact that during the recent period we have seen numerous struggles in the countries of the periphery shows that the conditions are beginning to come together for the future decisive struggles in the central countries to give the signal for the world-wide extension of class movements. 

The crisis is going to hit the world working class with increasing cruelty. But whatever the traps laid by the bourgeoisie, whatever the proletariat's hesitations faced with the immensity of the task before it, the class will be obliged to struggle in an increasingly massive and conscious manner. It's the task of revolutionaries to play a full part in these coming combats, so that the proletariat can accomplish the mission conferred on it by history: the overthrow of capitalism with all its barbarity, the edification of a communist society, the passage of humanity from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

ICC, Spring 2011.

 


[1]. OECD, World Economic Outlook Interim Report, March 2009). English language version, p.5.

[2]. Ibid, p. 7.

Life of the ICC: 

Rubric: 

19th ICC Congress

19th ICC Congress: Preparing for class confrontations

The ICC held its 19th Congress last May. In general a congress is the most important moment in the life of revolutionary organisations, and since the latter are an integral part of the working class, they have a responsibility to draw out the main lessons of their congresses and make them accessible to a wider audience within the class. This is the aim of the present article. We should point out right away that the Congress put into practice this concern to open out beyond the confines of the organisation since, as well as delegations from ICC sections, the Congress was attended not only by sympathisers of the organisation or members of discussion circles in which our militants participate, but also delegations from other groups which the ICC is in contact and discussion with: two groups from Korea and Opop from Brazil.[1] Other groups had been invited and accepted the invitation but were unable to come because of the increasingly severe barriers the European bourgeoisie has set up with regard to non-European countries.

Following the statutes of our organisation:

the Congress is the sovereign organ of the ICC. As such it has the tasks

-         of elaborating the general analyses and orientations of the organisation, particularly with regard to the international situation;

-          of examining and drawing a balance sheet of the activities of the organisation since the preceding congress

-         of defining the perspectives for future work.”

On the basis of these elements we can draw out the lessons of the 19th Congress.

The international situation

The first point that needs to be dealt with is our analyses and discussions of the international situation. If an organisation is unable to elaborate a clear understanding of the international situation, it will not be able to intervene appropriately within it. History has taught us how catastrophic an erroneous evaluation of the international situation can be for revolutionary organisations. We can cite the most dramatic cases, such as the underestimation of the danger of war by the majority of the Second International on the very eve of the first world imperialist slaughter, even though, in the period leading up to the war, under the impetus of the left within the International, its congresses had correctly warned of the danger and called on the proletariat to mobilise against it.

Another example is the analysis put forward by Trotsky during the 1930s, when he saw the workers’ strikes in France in 1936 or the civil war in Spain as the premises for a new international revolutionary wave. This analysis led him to found the 4th International in 1938. Faced with the “conservative policies of the Communist and Socialist parties”, the new organisation was supposed to put itself at the head of “the masses of millions of men who were ceaselessly advancing along the road to revolution.” This error greatly contributed to the sections of the 4th International going over to the bourgeois camp during the Second World War: seeking at any cost to “be with the masses”, they were engulfed in the politics of the “Resistance” carried out by the Socialist and Communist parties, i.e. in support for the Allied imperialist bloc.  

More recently, we saw how certain groups coming from the communist left missed out on the generalised strike in May 1968 in France and the whole international wave of struggles that followed, seeing it as no more than a “student movement”. We can equally see the cruel fate of other groups who thought that May 68 was already the revolution and fell into despair and disappeared from the scene when it didn’t quite fulfil their hopes.

Today it is of the greatest importance for revolutionaries to develop an accurate analysis of what’s at stake in the international situation, above all because in the recent period the stakes have been getting higher than ever.

In this issue of the International Review, we are publishing the resolution adopted by the Congress and it is therefore not necessary to go over all its points here. We only want to underline the most important aspects.

The first aspect, the most fundamental one, is the decisive step taken by the crisis of capitalism with the sovereign debt crisis of certain European states such as Greece:

 “In fact, the potential bankruptcy of a growing number of states constitutes a new stage in capitalism's plunge into insurmountable crisis. It highlights the limits of the policies through which the bourgeoisie has managed to hold back the evolution of the capitalist crisis for several decades... The measures adopted by the G20 of March 2009 to avoid a new Great Depression are significant expressions of the policy which the ruling class has been carrying out for several decades. They boil down to the injection of a considerable mass of credit into the economy. Such measures are not new. In fact for over 35 years they have been at the heart of the policies carried out by the ruling class aimed at escaping the major contradiction of the capitalist mode of production: its inability to find solvent markets that can absorb its production..... . The potential bankruptcy of the banking system and the onset of the recession have obliged all states to inject considerable sums into their economies, even though their revenues were in free fall because of the downturn in production. As a result of this, public deficit in most countries went through a considerable increase. For the most exposed ones such as Ireland, Greece or Portugal this meant a situation of potential bankruptcy, an inability to pay their public employees and to reimburse their debts. From then on the banks refused to grant them new loans, except at the most exorbitant rates, because they could not be at all sure they were going to be repaid. The 'rescue plans' which they benefited from thanks to the European Bank and the IMF constitute new debts which were simply piled up on top of preceding ones. This is no longer a vicious circle; it is an infernal spiral..... The crisis of sovereign debts in the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) is only a small part of the earthquake threatening the world economy. It is not because they have been rated AAA in the index of confidence by the rating agencies... that the big industrial powers are holding out much better....the world's first power runs the risk of seeing a withdrawal in 'official' confidence in its capacity to reimburse its debts; there is also a growing concern that any repayments will come in the shape of a strongly devalued dollar... And since then in all countries the situation has only got worse with all the various recovery plans. Thus the bankruptcy of the PIIGS is just the tip of the iceberg of the bankruptcy of world economy, which for decades has owed its survival to a desperate headlong flight into debt... By tipping over from the banking sphere to the level of states, the debt crisis marks the entry of the capitalist mode of production into a new phase of its acute crisis that will considerably aggravate the violence and extent of its convulsions. There is no light at the end of the tunnel of capitalism. This system can only lead society into an ever increasing barbarism.”

The period that followed the Congress has confirmed this analysis. On the one hand, the sovereign debt crisis of the European countries, which now clearly threatens not only the PIIGS but the entire Euro Zone, has increasingly dominated current events. And the so-called “success” of the 22nd July European summit on Greece won’t change much. All the previous summits were supposed to have come up with long-lasting solutions to Greece’s problems and we can see how effective they were!

And at the same time, with Obama’s difficulties in getting his budget policies accepted, the media “discovered” that the USA is also burdened with a colossal sovereign debt, whose level (130% of GNP) is up there with that of the PIIGS. This confirmation of the analyses that came out of the Congress doesn’t derive from any particular merit of our organisation. The only “merit” it can claim is being faithful to the classic analyses of the workers’ movement which, since the development of marxist theory, has always argued that the capitalist mode of production, like the ones that came before it, cannot in the long run overcome its economic contradictions. And it was in this framework of marxist analysis that the discussions at the Congress took place. Different points of view were put forward, notably on the ultimate causes of the contradictions of capitalism (which to a large extent correspond to our debate on the “Thirty Glorious Years”[2]), or on whether or not the world economy is likely to sink into hyperinflation because of the frenzied resort to printing banknotes, especially in the USA. But there was a real homogeneity in underlining the gravity of the current situation, as expressed in the resolution which was unanimously adopted.

The Congress also looked at the evolution of imperialist conflicts, as can be seen from the resolution. At this level, the two years since our last Congress have not brought any fundamentally new elements, but rather a confirmation of the fact that, despite all its military efforts, the world’s leading power has shown itself incapable of re-establishing the “leadership” it had during the Cold War, and that its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan have not succeeded in establishing a “Pax Americana” across the world, on the contrary: “The ‘New World Order’ predicted 20 years ago by George Bush Senior, which  he dreamed about being under the guidance of the US, can only more and more present itself as a world chaos, which the convulsions of the capitalist economy can only aggravate more and more” (point 8 of the resolution).

It was important for the Congress to pay particular attention to the current evolution of the class struggle since, aside from the particular importance this question always has for revolutionaries, the proletariat today is facing unprecedented attacks on its living conditions. These attacks have been especially brutal in the countries under the whip of the European Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as is the case with Greece. But they are raining down in all countries, with the explosion of unemployment and above all the necessity for all governments to reduce their budget deficits.

The resolution adopted by the previous congress argued that “the main form this attack is taking today, that of massive lay-offs, does not initially favour the emergence of such movements (i.e massive struggles).... It is in a second period, when it is less vulnerable to the bourgeoisie's blackmail, that workers will tend to turn to the idea that a united and solid struggle can push back the attacks of the ruling class, especially when the latter tries to make the whole working class pay for the huge budget deficits accumulating today with all the plans for saving the banks and stimulating the economy. This is when we are more likely to see the development of broad struggles by the workers.”

The 19th Congress observed that “The two years since the last congress have amply confirmed this prediction. This period has not seen wide-scale struggles against the massive lay-offs and rising unemployment being inflicted on the working class in the most developed countries.” However the Congress did note that “significant struggles have begun to take place against the ‘necessary cuts in public spending’. This response is still very timid, notably where these austerity plans have taken the most violent forms, in countries like Greece or Spain for example, even though the working class there had recently shown evidence of a rather important level of militancy. In a way it seems that the very brutality of the attacks provoke a feeling of powerlessness in the workers' ranks, all the more because they are being carried out by 'left' governments.” Since then, the working class in these countries has given proof that it is not just lying down. This is especially the case in Spain where the movement of the “indignant” has for several months acted a sort of beacon for other countries in Europe and other continents. 

This movement began at the very moment the Congress was being held and so it was obviously not possible to discuss it at that point. However, the Congress was led to examine the social movements which had been hitting the Arab countries from the beginning of the year. There was not a total homogeneity in the discussions on this subject, not least because they are something we have not seen before, but the whole Congress did rally to the analysis contained in the resolution:

...the most massive movements we have seen in the recent period have not taken place in the most industrialised countries but in countries on the peripheries of capitalism, notably in a number of countries in the Arab world, particularly Tunisia and Egypt where, in the end, after trying to meet the movements with ferocious repression, the bourgeoisie was forced to get rid of the local dictators. These movements were not classic workers' struggles like the ones these countries had seen in the recent past (for example the struggles in Gafsa in Tunisia in 2008 or the massive strikes in the textile industry in Egypt in the summer of 2007, which encountered the solidarity of a number of other sectors). They often took the form of social revolts in which all different sectors of society were involved: workers from public and private sectors, the unemployed, but also small shopkeepers, artisans, the liberal professions, educated young people etc. This is why the proletariat only rarely appeared directly in a distinct way (for example in the strikes in Egypt towards the end of the revolt there); still less did it assume the role of a leading force. However, at the origin of these movements, reflected in many of the demands that were raised, we find fundamentally the same causes as those at the origin of the workers' struggles in other countries: the considerable aggravation of the crisis, the growing misery it provokes within the entire non-exploiting population. And while the proletariat did not in general appear directly as a class in these movements, its imprint was still there in countries where the working class has a significant weight, especially through the deep solidarity expressed in the revolts, their ability to avoid being drawn into acts of blind and desperate violence despite the terrible repression they had to face. In the end, if the bourgeoisie in Tunisia and Egypt finally resolved, on the good advice of the American bourgeoisie, to get rid of the old dictators, it was to a large extent because of the presence of the working class in these movements.”

This upsurge of the working class in the countries on the periphery of capitalism led the Congress to go back to the analysis elaborated by our organisation in the wake of the mass strikes in Poland in 1980:

At this point the ICC had argued, on the basis of the positions elaborated by Marx and Engels, that it was from the central countries of capitalism, above all the old industrial countries of Europe, that the signal for the world proletarian revolution would be sent out, owing to the concentrated nature of the proletariat in these countries, and even more because of its historic experience, which will provide it with the best weapons to finally spring the most sophisticated ideological traps laid by the bourgeoisie for a very long time. Thus, one of the most fundamental steps to be taken by the world working class in the future is not only the development of massive struggles in the central countries of western Europe but also its capacity to break out of the democratic and trade union traps, above all by taking charge of its own struggles. These movements will constitute a beacon for the world working class, including the class in the main capitalist power, the USA, whose dive into growing poverty, already hitting tens of millions of workers, is going to turn the 'American Dream' into a real nightmare.

This analysis is starting to be verified by the recent movement of the “indignant” in Spain. Whereas the demonstrators in Tunis or Cairo waved the national flag as the emblem of their struggle, national flags have been more or less absent in the movements in the big European cities (notably in Spain). Of course the “indignant” movement is still heavily impregnated with democratic illusions but it has the merit of highlighting the fact that every state, even the most democratic and left wing, is the ferocious enemy of the exploited.  

The intervention of the ICC in the development of the class struggle

As we saw above, the capacity of revolutionary organisations to analyse correctly the historic situation in which they find themselves, as well as knowing how to question analyses which have been found wanting in the reality of the facts, precondition the form and content of their intervention within the working class; in other words, their ability to live up to the responsibilities which the class engendered them to carry out.

The 19th Congress of the ICC, on the basis of an examination of the economic crisis, of the terrible attacks which have been imposed on the working class, and of the first responses of the class to these attacks, concluded that we are entering into a period of class conflicts much more intense and massive than in the period between 2003 and now. At this level, even more than with the evolution of the crisis which will play a big part in determining these movements, it is difficult to make any short term predictions. It would be illusory to try and fix where and when the next major class combats will break out. What is important to do, however, is to draw out the general tendency and to be extremely vigilant towards the evolution of the situation in order to be able to react rapidly and appropriately when this is required, both in taking up positions and intervening directly in the struggles. 

The 19th Congress felt that the balance sheet of the ICC’s intervention since the previous congress was definitely a positive one. Whenever it was necessary, and sometimes very rapidly, statements of position were published in numerous languages on our website and in our territorial paper press. Within the limits of our very weak forces, the press was widely distributed in the demonstrations which accompanied the social movements of the recent period, in particular during the movement against the reform of pensions in France in autumn 2010 or the mobilisations of educated youth against attacks that were aimed especially at students coming from the working class (such as the major increase in tuition fees in the UK at the end of 2010). Parallel to this, the ICC held public meetings in a lot of countries and on several continents, dealing with the emerging social movements. At the same time, whenever possible, militants of the ICC spoke up in assemblies, struggle committees, discussion circles and internet forums to support the positions and analyses of the organisation and participate in the international debate generated by these movements.

This balance sheet is in no way a public relations exercise aimed at consoling our militants or bluffing those who read this article. It can be verified, and challenged, by all those who follow the activities of organisation since by definition we are talking about public activities.

Similarly, the Congress drew a positive balance sheet of our work towards elements and groups who defend communist positions or who are heading in that direction.

The perspective of a significant development of workers’ struggles carries with it the potential for the emergence of revolutionary minorities. Even before the world proletariat began to engage in massive struggles, this could already be discerned in outline (and was already noted in the resolution adopted at the 17th Congress[3]), to a large extent because, since 2003, the working class had begun to recover from the retreat that followed the collapse of the “socialist” bloc in 1989 and the huge campaigns about the “death of communism” and the “end of the class struggle”. Since then, even if in a hesitant way, this tendency has been confirmed, leading to the establishment of contacts with elements and groups in a significant number of countries. “This phenomenon of the development of contacts involves both countries where the ICC doesn’t have a section and those where it is already present. However, the influx of contacts has been much less palpable in countries where the ICC already exists. We can say that its open obvious expressions are still reserved to a minority of ICC sections” (from the presentation to the Congress of the report on contacts).

Very often, the new contacts have appeared in countries where there is no section of the organisation, or not yet. We could see this for example at the “Pan-American” conference held in November 2010, which as well as Opop and other comrades from Brazil, was attended by comrades from Peru, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador.[4] Because of the development of this milieu of contacts, “our intervention towards it has been through a major acceleration, demanding a militant and financial investment greater than the ICC has ever made in this area of its activity, making it possible to hold the richest and most numerous encounters and discussions in our history” (Report on contacts).

This report “stresses the novelty of the situation regarding contacts, in particular our collaboration with anarchists. On certain occasions we succeeded in making common cause in the struggle with elements and groups who are in the same camp as us, the camp of internationalism” (presentation of the contacts report). This cooperation with elements and groups who identify with anarchism has stimulated a number of rich discussions within our organisation, enabling us to get a better grasp of the various facets of this current and in particular to get a clearer understanding of its heterogeneous nature, since it ranges from pure leftists ready to support all sorts of bourgeois movements or ideologies, such as nationalism, to clearly proletarian elements whose internationalism is beyond reproach.

Another novelty is our cooperation, in Paris, with elements who identify with Trotskyism...these elements were very active during the mobilisation against pension reform, aiming to facilitate the workers taking charge of their own struggles, outside the union framework, while at the same time encouraging the development of discussion within the class, just as the ICC tried to do. We therefore had every reason to associate ourselves with this effort. If their attitude is in contradiction with the classic practices of Trotskyism, so much the better” (presentation of the report).

Thus, the Congress was also able to draw a positive balance sheet of our organisation’s work towards elements defending revolutionary positions or moving towards them. This is a very important part of our intervention within the working class, part of the process that will lead to the constitution of a revolutionary party, which is indispensable to the victory of the communist revolution.[5]  

Organisational questions

Any discussion on the activities of a revolutionary organisation has to consider the assessment of its functioning. And in this area the Congress, on the basis of different report, noted the biggest weaknesses of the organisation. In our press or even in public meetings, we have already dealt publicly with the organisational difficulties the ICC has encountered in the past. This has nothing to do with exhibitionism but is a classic practice of the workers’ movement. The Congress examined these difficulties at some length, in particular the often degraded state of the organisational tissue and of collective work, which can weigh heavily on some sections. We don’t think that the ICC is today going through a crisis like the ones in 1981, 1993 or 2001. In 1981 we saw a significant part of the organisation abandon the political and organisational principles on which it had been founded, leading to some very serious convulsions and in particular the loss of half our section in Britain. In 1993 and 2001, the ICC had to face problems with clans within the organisation, resulting in a rejection of loyalty to the organisation and the departure of numbers of militants (in particular members of the Paris section in 1995 and of the central organ in 2001[6]). Among the causes of these last two crises, the ICC identified the consequences of the collapse of the “socialist” bloc which provoked a very profound retreat in the consciousness of the world proletariat; more generally, we looked at the impact of the social decomposition affecting capitalist society. The causes of the present difficulties are partly of the same order but they are not leading to the phenomena of a loss of conviction or disloyalty. All the militants of the sections where these problems have arisen are fully convinced of the validity of the ICC’s fight, and continue to show their loyalty and dedication towards the organisation. When the ICC had to face up to the most sombre period suffered by the working class since the end of the counter-revolution whose end was marked by the movement of May 1968 – a period of general retreat in militancy and consciousness which began at the start of the 1990s – these militants “stayed at their post”. Very often, these are comrades who have known each other and militated together for more than 30 years. There are thus many solid links of friendship and confidence between them. But the minor faults, the small weaknesses, the character differences which everyone has to accept in others have often led to the development of tensions or a growing difficulty to work together over a period of many years in small sections which have not been refreshed by the “new blood” of new militants, precisely because of the retreat experienced by the working class. Today this “new blood” is beginning to arrive in certain sections of the ICC, but it is clear that the new members can only be properly integrated if the organisational tissue of the ICC improves. The Congress discussed these issues with a lot of frankness, and this led some of the invited groups to speak up about their own organisational difficulties. However, there could be no miracle solution to the problems, which had already been noted at the previous congress. The activities resolution which it adopted reminds us of the approach already adopted by the organisation and calls on all the militants and sections to take this up in a more systematic way:

    “Since 2001 the ICC has embarked on an ambitious theoretical project that was designed, amongst other things, to explain and develop what communist militancy (and thus the party spirit) is. It has been a creative effort to understand at the deepest level:

-         the roots of proletarian solidarity and confidence;

-         morality and the ethical dimension of marxism;

-         democracy and democratism and its hostility to communist militancy;

-         psychology and anthropology and its connection to the communist project;

-         centralism and collective work;

-         the culture of proletarian debate;

-         marxism and science.

In short the ICC has been engaged in an effort to restore a wider understanding of the human dimension of the communist goal and the communist organisation, to rediscover the breadth of vision of militancy that was almost lost during the counter-revolution and therefore arm itself against the reappearance of circles, clans and parasitism that thrive in an atmosphere of ignorance or denial of these wider questions of organisation and militancy” (point 10).

 “The realisation of the unitary principle of organisation – collective work - demands the development of all the human qualities connected to the theoretical effort to comprehend communist militancy in a positive way that we referred to in point 10. This means the growth of mutual respect and support, cooperative reflexes, a warm spirit of understanding and sympathy for others, sociability, and generosity” (point 15).

The discussion on “marxism and science”

One of the points stressed in the discussions and in the resolution adopted by the Congress is the need to go deeper into the theoretical aspects of the questions we face. This is why, as at the preceding congress, this one devoted an item on its agenda to a theoretical question, “marxism and science”. This discussion will, as have other theoretical issues discussed in our organisation, lead to the publication of various documents. We are not going to report here the elements raised in the discussion, which followed on from numerous discussions which had been held in the sections. What we want to say here is that the delegations to the Congress were very pleased with this debate, and that this owed a great deal to the contributions of a scientist, Chris Knight,[7] who we had invited to take part in our Congress.

This was not the first time that the ICC had invited a scientist to its congress. Two years ago, Jean-Louis Dessalles came to present his reflections on the origin of language, which gave rise to some very lively discussions.[8] We want to thank Chris Knight for accepting our invitation and we salute the quality of interventions , which were both very lively and accessible for non-specialists, which includes the majority of ICC militants. Chris Knight intervened on three occasions.[9] He spoke during the general debate and all the participants were impressed not only by the quality of his arguments but also his remarkable discipline, not only strictly respecting the time given and the framework of the debate (a discipline that is often not so well respected by members of the ICC). He then presented, in a very imaginative manner, a summary of his theory of the origins of human civilisation and language, talking about the first of the “revolutions” experienced by humanity, in which women acted as the driving force (an idea taken from Engels). This revolution was followed by several others, each time allowing society to progress. He sees the communist revolution as the culminating point in this series of revolutions and considers that, as with the previous ones, humanity has the means to succeed in making it.

Chris Knight’s third intervention was a very sympathetic greeting to the Congress.

At the end of the Congress, the delegations felt that the discussion on marxism and science, and the participation of Chris Knight within it, had been one of the most interesting and satisfactory parts of the Congress, a moment which will encourage all the sections to pursue and develop an interest in theoretical questions. 

Before concluding this article, we want to say that the participants at the 19th Congress of the ICC (delegations, groups and comrades invited), which was held almost to the day 140 years after the bloody week that put an end to the Paris Commune, honoured the memory of the fighters of this first revolutionary attempt by the proletariat.[10]

We are not drawing a triumphalist balance sheet of the 19th Congress of the ICC, not least because it had to recognise the organisational difficulties we are facing, difficulties the ICC will have to overcome if it is to continue being present at the rendezvous which history is giving to revolutionary organisations. A long and difficult struggle awaits our organisation. But this perspective should not discourage us. After all, the struggle of the working class as a whole is also long and difficult, full of pitfalls and defeats. This is a perspective that should inspire militants to carry on the struggle; a fundamental characteristic of every communist militant is to be a fighter.

ICC 31.7.2011 

 


[1]. Opop had already been present at the two previous congresses of the ICC. See the articles on the 17th and 18th congresses in International Reviews n°s 130 and 138. 

[2]. See International Review n°s 133, 135,136,138 and 141.

[3]. “Today, as in 1968, the recovery of class combats is accompanied by a deep reflection, and the appearance of new elements who are turning towards the positions of the communist left is just the tip of the iceberg.”

[4]. See "5ª Conferencia Panamericana de la Corriente Comunista Internacional - Un paso importante hacia la unidad de la clase obrera". https://es.internationalism.org/RM120-panamericana

[5]. The Congress discussed and took up a criticism contained in the report on contacts concerning the following formulation in the resolution on the international situation from the 16th ICC Congress: “The ICC is already the skeleton of the future party”. As the report said, “it is not possible at this juncture to define what form the organisational participation of the ICC in the future party will take because this will depend on the general situation and the configuration of the milieu, but also on the development of our own organisation”. This said, the ICC has the responsibility of keeping alive and enriching its inheritance from the communist left in order to allow present and future generations of revolutionaries, and thus the future party, to draw the maximum benefit from it. In other words, it has the responsibility of acting as a bridge between the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the future revolutionary wave. 

[6]. The elements who rejected loyalty towards the organisation often fell into an approach which we define as “parasitic”: while continuing to claim that they were defending the real positions of the organisation, they devoted most of their efforts towards denigrating the organisation and trying to discredit it. We have dedicated a document to the phenomenon of political parasitism (“Theses on Parasitism” in International Review n° 94). It should be noted that some comrades in the ICC, while recognising that such behaviour exists and the necessity to firmly defend the organisation against it, don’t agree with this concept of parasitism, a disagreement that was expressed at the Congress

[7]. Chris Knight is a British university teacher who up until 2009 taught anthropology at the University of East London. He is the author of the book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, which we have reviewed on our website in English, and which is based in a very faithful manner on Darwin’s theory of evolution and the works of Marx and above all Engels (especially in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State). He says he is “100% marxist” in the domain of anthropology. He is also a political militant who animates the Radical Anthropology Group and other groupings whose main mode of intervention is the organisation of street theatre that denounces and ridicules capitalist institutions. He was sacked from the University for having organised an event linked to the demonstrations against the G20 in London in March 2009. He was accused of “calling for murder” for having hanged an effigy of a banker and carrying a placard saying “Eat the bankers!”. We don’t agree with some of Chris Knight’s political positions or forms of action, but from having discussed with him for some time now, we are convinced of his total sincerity, his real dedication to the cause of the emancipation of the proletariat and his fierce conviction that science and a knowledge of science are fundamental weapons of that cause. In this sense we want to express our warmest solidarity with him against the repressive measures he has been subjected to (sacking and arrest).

[8]. See our article on the 18th Congress in International Review n°138.

[9]. We will publish extracts from these interventions on our website.

[10]. The participants at the 19th Congress of the ICC dedicate this Congress to the memory of the fighters of the Commune who fell, exactly 140 years ago, at the hands of a bourgeoisie which was determined to make them pay dearly for their “assault on the heavens”.

In May 1917, for the first time in history, the proletariat made the ruling class tremble. It was the bourgeoisie’s fear of the gravedigger of capitalism that explains the fury and barbarity of the repression meted out to the Commune insurgents.

The experience of the Paris Commune has provided fundamental lessons to the ensuing generations of the working class. Lessons which enabled them to carry out the Russian evolution in 1917.    

The fighters of the Paris Commune, fallen under the bullets of Capital, will not have given their blood for nothing if, in its future combats, the working class is able to be inspired by the example of the Commune and to overturn capitalism.

Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them” (Karl Marx, The Civil War in France)

Life of the ICC: 

Rubric: 

19th ICC Congress

Decadence of Capitalism (x): For revolutionaries, the Great Depression confirms the obsolescence of capitalism

There was no real recovery of world capitalism after the devastation of the First World War. Most of the economies of Europe stagnated, never really solving the problems posed by the disruption of war and revolution, by outdated plant and massive unemployment. The plight of the once powerful British economy was typified by the situation in 1926 when it resorted to direct wage cuts in a vain attempt to restore its competitive edge on the world market, provoking the 10-day General Strike in solidarity with the miners whose wages and conditions were the central target of the attack. The only real boom was in the USA, which benefited both from the sorrows of its former rivals and the accelerated development of mass production symbolised by the Detroit assembly lines churning out the Model T Ford. America’s coronation as the world’s leading economic power also made it possible to pull German capital from the floor thanks to the injection of massive loans. But all the din of the “Roaring Twenties” in the US and in pockets elsewhere could not hide the fact that this recovery was not founded on any substantial extension of the world market, in marked contrast to the massive growth in the last decades of the 19th century. The boom, already largely fuelled by speculation and bad debts, was laying the ground for the shattering crisis of overproduction which broke out in 1929, rapidly engulfed the world economy and buried it in the deepest depression it had ever known (see first article in the series, in International Review n° 132).

This was not a return to the “boom and bust” cycle of the 19th century, but an entirely new disease: the first major economic crisis of a new era in the life of capitalism. It was a confirmation of what the vast majority of revolutionaries had concluded in response to the war of 1914: the bourgeois mode of production had become obsolete, a system in decay. The Great Depression of the 1930s was interpreted by nearly all the political expressions of the working class as a further confirmation of this diagnosis, not least because as the years passed it became increasingly evident that there would be no spontaneous recovery and that the crisis was pushing the system closer and closer to a second imperialist carve-up.

But this new crisis did not give rise to a new wave of revolutionary struggles, even if there were important class movements in a number of countries. The working class had suffered a historic defeat following the strangling of revolutionary attempts in Germany, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere, and the agonising death of the revolution in Russia. With the triumph of Stalinism in the Communist parties, the surviving revolutionary currents had shrunk to small minorities struggling to clarify the reasons for this defeat and unable to exert any major influence within the working class. Nevertheless, understanding the historical trajectory of capitalism’s crisis was a crucial element in guiding these groups through this gloomy period. 

Responses from the proletarian political movement: Trotskyism and anarchism

The left opposition current around Trotsky, regrouping itself into a new Fourth International, published its programme in 1938, with the title The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the 4th International. In continuity with the Third International, it affirmed that capitalism was in irremediable decay. “The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind’s productive forces stagnate…All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet ‘ripened’ for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten.” This is not the place for a detailed critique of the “transitional programme” as it has come to be known. Despite its marxist starting point, it presents a view of the relationship between objective and subjective conditions which veer off into both vulgar materialism and idealism: on the one hand, it tends to present the decadence of the system as an absolute halt to the development of the productive forces; on the other, the reaching of this objective dead-end means that only the correct leadership is required to transform the crisis into revolution. The opening words of the document state that “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”. Hence the voluntarist attempt to form a new International in a period of counter-revolution. Indeed for Trotsky, the defeat of the proletariat is precisely why the proclamation of the new International is required: “Sceptics ask: But has the moment for the creation of the Fourth International yet arrived? It is impossible, they say, to create an International ‘artificially’; it can arise only out of great events, etc etc….The Fourth International has already arisen out of great events: the greatest defeats of the proletariat in history”. In all these calculations, the actual level of class consciousness in the proletariat, its capacity to affirm itself as an independent force, is more or less placed in the margins. This approach is not unrelated to the semi-reformist and state capitalist content of many of the “transitional demands” contained in the programme, since they are viewed less as real solutions to the constriction of the productive forces than as a sophisticated means of enticing the proletariat from the pen of its present, corrupt leadership and shepherding it towards the correct one. The transitional programme is thus built on a complete disjuncture between the analysis of capitalist decay and its programmatic consequences.  

Anarchists have often disagreed with marxists about the latter’s insistence on basing the prospects of revolution on the objective conditions attained by capitalist development. In the 19th century, capitalism’s epoch of ascent, anarchists like Bakunin tended to argue that the uprising of the masses was possible at any moment, accusing the marxists of postponing the revolutionary struggle to some distant future. Consequently, in the period that followed the First World War there was little attempt by the anarchist currents to draw out the consequences of capitalism’s entrance into its decadent phase, since for many of them nothing much had changed. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of the economic crisis in the 1930s also convinced some of its best elements that capitalism had indeed reached its epoch of decline. The exiled Russian anarchist Maximoff, in My Social Credo, published in 1933, asserts that “this process of decline dates from the time just after the First World War, and it has assumed the form of increasingly acute and growing economic crises, which during recent years, have sprung up simultaneously in the countries of the victors and the vanquished. At the time of writing (1933-1934) the crisis has attacked nearly every country in a veritable world crisis of the capitalist system. Its prolonged nature and its universal scope can in no way be accounted for by the theory of periodical political crises”. He goes on to show how capitalism’s efforts to pull itself out of the crisis through protectionist measures, wage cuts and state planning are only deepening the contradictions of the system: “capitalism, which has given birth to a new social scourge, is unable to get rid of its own evil offspring without killing itself in the process. The logical development of this trend must unavoidably bring about the following dilemma: either a complete disintegration of society, or the abolition of capitalism and the creation of a new, more progressive social system. There can be no other alternative. The modern form of social organisation has run its course and is proving, in our times, an obstacle to human advance, as well as a source of social decay. This outworn system is therefore due to be relegated to the museum of social evolutionary relics”. Maximoff, it is true, sounds very much like a marxist in this text, as he does when he argues that capitalism’s inability to extend itself will prevent the crisis from resolving itself in the old way: “In the past, capitalism would have saved itself from deadly crisis by seizing colonial markets and those of the agrarian nations. Nowadays, most of the colonies are themselves competing in the world market with the metropolitan countries, while the agrarian lands are proceeding in the direction of intensive industrialisation”. Similar clarity on the characteristics of the new period can be found in the writings of the British group, the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation, although here the influence of the marxists of the German/Dutch communist left was much more direct.[1]

The Italian/Belgian communist left

This was no accident: it was the communist left which was the most rigorous in analysing the historic significance of the economic depression as an expression of the decadence of capitalism and in seeking to locate the roots of the crisis in the marxist theory of accumulation. The Italian and Belgian Fractions of the Communist Left, in particular, consistently founded all of their programmatic positions on the recognition that the crisis of capitalism was historic and not merely cyclical: for example the rejection of national struggles, and of democratic demands, which clearly distinguished this current from the Trotskyists, was based not on any abstract sectarianism but on an insistence that the changed conditions of world capitalism had rendered these aspects of the proletariat’s programme obsolete. This same search for coherence prompted the comrades of the Italian and Belgian left to plunge into a profound study of the inner dynamics of the capitalist crisis. Inspired also by the recent translation into French of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital, this study gave rise to the articles penned by Mitchell, “Crises and cycles of capitalism in agony”, published in Bilan n°s 10 and 11 in 1934 (republished in International Reviews n°s102 and 103).        

Mitchell’s articles go back to Marx to examine the nature of value and the commodity, the process of exploitation of labour, and the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system that reside in the production of surplus vale itself. For Mitchell, there was a clear continuity between Marx and Rosa Luxemburg in recognising the inability of the entirety of the surplus value to be realised by the combined consumption of workers and capitalists. Regarding Marx’s schemas of reproduction, which are at the heart of the controversy sparked by Luxemburg’s book, Mitchell has this to say:

it seems to us that if Marx, in his schemas of enlarged reproduction, hypothesised an entirely capitalist society where the only opposition was between capitalists and proletarians, this was precisely in order to demonstrate the absurdity of a capitalist society one day achieving an equilibrium and harmonious with the needs of humanity. This would mean that the surplus value available for accumulation, thanks to the expansion of production, could be realised directly, on the one hand by the purchases of new means of production, on the other by the demand of the extra workers (and where would they be found?) and that the capitalists would have been transformed from wolves into peaceful progressives.

Had Marx been able to continue the development of his schemas, he would have ended with this opposing conclusion: that a capitalist market which can no longer be extended by the incorporation of non-capitalist milieus – which is impossible historically – would mean an end to the process of accumulation and the end of capitalism itself. Consequently, to present these schemas (as some ‘marxists’ have done) as the image of capitalist production able to continue without imbalance, without overproduction, without crises, is consciously to falsify marxism”.[2]

But Mitchell’s text does not remain at the abstract level. It takes us through the main phases of the ascent and decline of the whole capitalist system, from the cyclical crises of the 19th century, in which he attempts to show the interaction between the problem of realisation and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, the development of imperialism and monopoly, and the end of the cycle of national wars after the 1870s. While highlighting the growing role of finance capital, he criticises Bukharin’s tendency to see imperialism as a product of finance capital rather than a response of capital to its inner contradictions. He analyses the hunt for colonies and the growing competition between the major imperialist powers as the immediate factors behind the First World War, which marks the entry of the system into its crisis of senility. He then identifies some of the main features of capitalism’s mode of life in this new era: the increasing recourse to debt and fictitious capital, the massive interference of the state in economic life, typified by fascism but expressing a more general tendency, the growing divorce between money and real value symbolised by the abandoning of the gold standard. Capitalism’s short-lived recovery after the first world war is explained with reference to a number of factors: the destruction of hypertrophied capital, the demand generated by the need to reconstruct shattered economies, the unique position of the USA as the new powerhouse of the world economy – but above all to the ‘”fictitious prosperity” created by credit: this post-war growth was not based on a real expansion of the global market and was therefore very different from the recoveries of the 19th century. By the same token, the world crisis that broke out in 1929 was not like the cyclical crises of the 19th century: not simply in scale but because of its irresolvable nature, which guaranteed that there would be no automatic or spontaneous shift from bust to boom. Capitalism would henceforward survive by increasingly flouting its own laws: “If we consider the determining factors of capitalism’s general crisis, we can understand why the world crisis cannot be absorbed by the ‘natural’ action of capitalism’s economic laws, and why on the contrary these laws have been emptied out by the combined power of finance capital and the capitalist state, which have compressed all manifestations of particular capitalist interests”.[3] Thus, if the manipulations of the state permitted an increase in production, this was devoted largely to the military sector and preparations for a new war. “wherever it turns, however it tries to escape the grip of the crisis, capitalism is pushed irresistibly towards its destiny of war. Where and how the war the war will break out is impossible to determine today. What is important to say and to state clearly is that it will explode over the division of Asia and that it will be world wide”.[4]

 Without going further into the strengths, and some of the weaker points, of Mitchell’s analysis,[5] this text is a remarkable one by any standards, one of the communist left’s first attempts to provide a coherent, unified and historical analysis of the process of capitalism’s rise and descent.       

The German/Dutch communist left

In the tradition of the German-Dutch left, which had been severely decimated by counter-revolutionary repression in Germany itself, the “Luxemburgist” analysis was still adhered to by a number of groups. But there was also a major trend in another direction, in particular within the Dutch left and the US group around Paul Mattick. In 1929 Henryk Grossman published a major work on the theory of crisis: The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System. The Groep van Internationale Communisten (GIC) in Holland declared it to be “remarkable”[6], while in 1934 Paul Mattick published a summary (and development) of Grossman’s ideas in “The Permanent Crisis – Henryk Grossman’s Interpretation of Marx’s Theory of Capitalist Accumulation” in International Council Correspondence, Volume 1, n° 2. This text explicitly acknowledged Grossman’s contribution while developing his thesis on certain points. Despite Grossman’s status as a sympathiser of the KPD and other Stalinist parties, and despite his assessment of Mattick as a “sectarian” politically speaking,[7] he and Mattick maintained a correspondence for some time, largely around the issues posed by Grossman’s book.  

Grossman’s book was therefore published in advance of the outbreak of the world crisis, but it certainly inspired a number of revolutionaries to apply his thesis to the concrete reality of the Great Depression. At the heart of Grossman’s book was his insistence that the theory of capitalist breakdown is absolutely central to Marx’s Capital, even if Marx was not able to draw it to a conclusion. The revisers of marxism - Bernstein, Kautsky, Tugan Baranowski, Otto Bauer and others – had all rejected the notion of capitalist collapse and this was entirely consistent with their reformist politics. For Grossman, it was axiomatic that socialism would come about not simply because capitalism was an immoral system but because the historical evolution of capitalism itself would plunge it into insurmountable contradictions, turning into a fetter on the further growth of the productive forces: “At a certain point in its historical development capitalism fails to encourage the expansion of the productive forces any further. From this point on, the downfall of capitalism becomes economically inevitable. To provide an exact description of this process and to grasp its causes through a scientific analysis of capitalism was the real task Marx posed for himself in Capital.[8] On the other hand, “if there is no economic reason why capitalism must necessarily fail, then socialism can replace capitalism on purely extra-economic – political or psychological or moral – grounds. But in that case we abandon the materialist basis of a scientific argument for the necessity of socialism, the deduction of this necessity from the economic movement”.[9]

Thus far Grossman agreed with Luxemburg who had led the way in reaffirming the centrality of the notion of collapse, and on this point he sided with her against the revisionists. However, Grossman considered that Luxemburg’s theory of crisis was deeply flawed, based on a misunderstanding of the method Marx had tried to develop in his use of the reproduction schema: “instead of testing Marx’s reproduction scheme within the framework of his total system and especially of his theory of accumulation, instead of asking what role it plays methodologically in the structure of his theory, instead of analysing the schema of accumulation down to its ultimate conclusion, Luxemburg was unconsciously influenced by them (the revisionist epigones). She came around to believing that Marx’s schemes really do allow for unlimited accumulation”.[10] As a result, he argued, she shifted the problem from the primary sphere of the production of surplus value to the secondary sphere of circulation. Grossman re-examined the scheme of reproduction that Otto Bauer had adapted from Marx in his critique of The Accumulation of Capital.[11] Bauer’s aim here had been to disprove Luxemburg’s contention that capitalism would be faced with an irresolvable problem in the realisation of surplus value once it had eliminated all “external” markets; for Bauer, the demographic growth of the proletariat would be sufficient to absorb all the surplus value needed to maintain accumulation. It should be emphasised (because this accusation has been made, particularly by Pannekoek, whose critique of Grossman we shall come back to) that Grossman did not make the mistake of regarding Bauer’s schema as a real description of capitalist accumulation:

I shall show that Bauer’s scheme reflects and can reflect only the value side of the reproduction process. In this sense it cannot describe the real process of accumulation in terms of value and use value. Secondly, Bauer’s mistake lies in his supposing that the scheme is somehow an illustration of the actual processes in capitalism, and in forgetting the simplifications that go together with it. But these shortcomings do not reduce the value of Bauer’s scheme”.[12] Grossman’s intention in following up Bauer’s schema to their “mathematical” conclusion was to show that even without a problem of realisation, capitalism would inevitably run up against insuperable barriers. Taking into account the rising organic composition of capital and the resulting tendency for the rate of profit to fall, the global enlargement of capital would culminate in a point where the absolute mass of profit would be insufficient to fund further accumulation, and the system would be faced with collapse. In Grossman’s hypothetical treatment of Bauer’s schema, this point is reached after 35 years: from this point on, “any further accumulation of capital under the conditions postulated would be quite meaningless. The capitalist would be wasting effort over the management of a productive system whose fruits are entirely absorbed by the share of workers. If this state persisted it would mean a destruction of the capitalist mechanism, its economic end. For the class of entrepreneurs, accumulation would not only be meaningless, it would be objectively impossible because the over-accumulated capital would lie idle, would not be able to function, would fail to yield any profits”.[13]

This led some of Grossman’s critics to argue that he thought he could predict with absolute certainty the point when capitalism would become impossible. However, this was never his aim. Grossman was simply trying to re-appropriate Marx’s theory of collapse by explaining why Marx considered the tendency towards the fall in the rate of profit to be the central contradiction in the accumulation process. “This fall in the rate of profit at the stage of over-accumulation is different from the fall at earlier stages of the accumulation of capital. A falling rate of profit is a permanent symptom of the progress of accumulation through all of its stages, but at the initial stages of accumulation it goes together with an expanding mass of profits and expanded capitalist consumption. Beyond certain limits however the falling rate of profit is accompanied by a fall in the surplus value earmarked for capitalist consumption and soon afterwards of the portion of surplus value destined for accumulation. ’The fall in the rate of profit would then be accompanied by an absolute decrease in the mass of profit’ Marx, Capital Vol. 3,chap XV, p 252.[14]

For Grossman the crisis came about not, as Rosa Luxemburg argued, because capitalism was faced with “too much” surplus value, but because it would end up with too little value extracted from the exploitation of the workers to make further investment in accumulation profitable for the capitalists. Overproduction crises did occur but they were fundamentally a result of the over-accumulation of constant capital: “The ensuing overproduction of commodities is a consequence of imperfect valorisation due to over-accumulation. The crisis is not caused by disproportionality between expansion of production and lack of purchasing power – that is, by a shortage of consumers. The crisis intervenes because no use is made of the purchasing power that exists. This is because it does not pay to expand production any further since the scale of production makes no difference to the amount of surplus value now obtainable. So on the one hand purchasing power remains idle. On the other, the elements of production lie unsold.”[15]

Grossman’s book is very much a return to Marx and he does not hesitate to criticise “eminent” marxists like Lenin and Bukharin for failing to analyse capitalism’s crises or its imperialist drives as expressions of its inner contradictions, for focusing instead on outward manifestations (in Lenin’s case, for example, the existence of monopolies as a “cause” of imperialism). In the Introduction to his book, Grossman explains the methodological premise underlying this criticism: “I have tried to show how the empirically ascertainable tendencies of the world economy which are regarded as defining characteristics of the latest stage of capitalism (monopolistic organisations, export of capital, the struggle to divide up the sources of raw materials, etc) are only secondary surface appearances that stem from the essence of capital accumulation as their primary basis. Through this inner connection it is possible to use a single principle, the Marxian law of value, to explain clearly all the appearances of capitalism without recourse to any ad hoc theories, and to throw light on its latest stage – imperialism. I do not labour the point that this is the only form in which the tremendous consistency of Marx’s economic system can be clearly drawn out”.

Continuing in the same vein, Grossman then defends himself in advance from the charge of “pure economism”:

Because I deliberately confine myself to describing only the economic presuppositions of the breakdown of capitalism in this study, let me dispel any suspicion of ‘pure economism’ from the start. It is unnecessary to waste paper over the connection between economics and politics; that there is a connection is obvious. However, whilst Marxists have written extensively on the political revolution, they have neglected to deal theoretically with the economic aspect of the question and have failed to appreciate the true content of Marx's theory of breakdown. My sole concern here is to fill in this gap in the Marxist tradition”.[16]

This should be kept in mind when Grossman is charged with portraying the final crisis of the system as a simple inability of the economic machine to function any longer. However, leaving aside the impression created by many of his abstract formulations about capitalist collapse, there is a more fundamental problem about Grossman’s attempt to “throw light on (capitalism’s) latest stage – imperialism”. Unlike Mitchell, for example, he does not explicitly argue that his work is aimed at clarifying the conclusions reached by the Third International, i.e. that the First World War had ushered in the epoch of capitalist decline, the epoch of “wars and revolutions”. In some passages, for example in taking Bukharin to task for seeing (world) war as proof that the epoch of breakdown has arrived, he tends to downplay the significance of world war as an unmistakeable sign of the senility of the capitalist mode of production. It’s true that he accepts that it “might very well be the case” that the epoch of breakdown has arrived, and that his main objection to Bukharin’s argument is the suggestion that war is the “cause” of the decline and not its symptom; but Grossman also argues that “far from being a threat to capitalism, wars are a means of prolonging the existence of the capitalist system as whole. The facts show precisely that after every war capitalism has entered on a period of new upsurge.[17]This represents a serious underestimation of the menace that capitalist war holds for the survival of humanity and does strengthen the idea that for Grossman the “final crisis” will be a purely economic one. Furthermore, although Grossman’s book contains a number of efforts to concretise his economic analysis – showing the inevitable increase in inter-imperialist competition brought about by the tendency towards breakdown – his emphasis on the inevitability of a future “final crisis” that would compel the working class to overthrow the system leaves it unclear whether the historical epoch of proletarian revolution has already arrived.

Mattick and the epoch of permanent crisis

In this sense, Matticks’ text is more explicit than Grossman’s book in locating the crisis of capitalism in the general context of historical materialism and thus against the background of the rise and fall of different modes of production. Thus the starting point in the document is the affirmation that “Capitalism as an economic system had the historical mission of developing the productive forces of society to a much greater extent than was possible under any previous system. The motive force in the development of the productive forces in capitalism is the race for profit. But for that very reason this process of development can continue only as long as it is profitable. From this point of view capital becomes a barrier to the continuous development of the productive forces as soon as that development comes into conflict with the necessity for profit”. For Mattick there is no doubt that the epoch of capitalist decline has arrived and that we are now in a phase of “permanent crisis” as the title argues – even though there can be temporary booms brought about capitalist counter-measures, such as the increase in absolute exploitation, this is a “boom in the death crisis, a gain that does not indicate development but decay”. Again, perhaps more plainly than Grossman, Mattick does not argue for an “automatic” collapse once the rate of profit has declined beyond a certain level: he shows capitalism’s reaction to its historic impasse by increasing the exploitation of the working class, to wring out the last drops of surplus value needed for accumulation, and by marching towards world war to appropriate cheaper raw materials, conquer markets and annex new sources of labour power; at the same time wars, like the economic crisis itself, are seen as “gigantic devaluations of constant capital by violent destruction of value as well as of use value forming its material base. These twin drives towards increased exploitation and world war will in Mattick’s view provoke a reaction from the working class that will open up the perspective of proletarian revolution. Already the Great Depression is “the greatest crisis in capitalist history” but “whether it will be the last for capitalism, as well as for the workers, depends on the action of the latter”.

Mattick’s work is thus clearly in continuity with prior attempts by the Communist International and the communist left to understand the decadence of the system. And while Grossman had already looked into the limits of the counter-tendencies to the fall in the rate of profit, Mattick again made these more concrete by looking at the actual unfolding of the world capitalist crisis in the period opened up by the 1929 crash.

In our view, despite Mattick’s concretisations of Grossman’s theory, there remains an area of abstraction in this general approach. We are baffled by Grossman’s view that there is “no trace in Marx” of a problem of insufficient market outlets.[18] It is certainly not the case that the problem of realisation or “circulation” lies outside the accumulation process but is an indispensable part of it. By the same token, Grossman’s seems to dismiss the problem of overproduction as a mere by-product of the fall in the rate of profit, ignoring those passages in Marx which clearly root it in the fundamental relationship between wage labour and capital.[19] And while Luxemburg, developing on these elements, provides a coherent framework for understanding why the very triumph of capitalism as a global system should propel it into its era of decline, it is harder to grasp at what point the rising organic composition of capital reaches a level where the counter-tendencies are used up and decline sets in. Indeed, in explaining foreign trade as one of these counter-tendencies, Mattick himself sounds a little Luxemburgist when he argues that the conversion of the colonies into capitalist countries removes this vital option: “Foreign trade as a counter-tendency eliminates itself by turning capital-importing countries into capital exporting countries, by forcing their industrial development through a hot house growth. As the force of the counter-tendencies is stopped, the tendency of capitalist collapse is left in control. Then we have the permanent crisis, or the death-crisis of capitalism. The only means left for the continued existence of capitalism is then the permanent, absolute and general pauperisation of the proletariat”. In our opinion this is an indication that the problem of realisation – the necessity for the permanent extension of the global market to offset the inner contradictions of capital - cannot be removed from the equation so easily.[20]

However, the aim of this chapter is not to delve again into the arguments for or against Luxemburg’s theory, but to show that the “alternative” explanation for the crisis contained in the Grossman-Mattick theory is also entirely framed in an understanding of the decline of capitalism. This however is not the case for the principal criticism of the Grossman-Mattick thesis made within the communist left in the 1930s – Pannekoek’s “The theory of capitalist collapse”, first published in. Ratekorredspondenz in June 1934.[21]

Pannekoek’s critique of the “theory of collapse”

In the 1930s Pannekoek was working very closely with the Groep van Internationale Communisten, and his text wasno doubt written in response to the growing popularity of Grossman’s theories inside the council communist current: it mentions the fact that the theory had already been integrated into the manifesto of Mattick’s United Workers Party. The opening paragraphs of the text hint at what may have been a perfectly justified concern – to avoid the mistakes made by a number of German communists at the time of the revolutionary wave, when the idea of a “death crisis” was taken to imply that capitalism had already exhausted all options and only needed the slightest push to topple it utterly, a standpoint that was often mixed up with voluntarist and adventurist actions. However, as we have argued elsewhere,[22] the essential flaw in the argument of those who put forward the notion of the death crisis in the post-war period was not the notion of capitalist collapse – which is better understood as a process that may last for many decades than as a sudden crash apparently coming from nowhere - but the conflation of two distinct phenomena: the historic decline of capitalism as a mode of production and the conjunctural economic crisis – however profound – that the system may pass through at a given moment. In polemicising against the idea of capitalist collapse as something immediate and expressed purely on the economic level, Pannekoek fell into the trap of repudiating the notion of capitalist decline altogether - a view consistent with other positions he adhered to at the time, such as the possibility of capitalist revolutions in the colonial regions and the “bourgeois role of Bolshevism” in Russia.

Pannekoek begins by criticising Rosa Luxemburg’ theory of collapse. He repeats familiar criticisms of her theories – that they were based on a non-problem and that the mathematics of Marx’s reproduction schemas shows that there is no fundamental problem of realisation for capitalism. However, the main target of Pannekoek’s text was Grossman’s theory.

Pannekoek takes Grossman to task on two main levels: the lack of congruence between Marx’s crisis theory and Grossman’s; and the tendency to see the crisis as an automatic factor in the advent of socialism which will require little in the way of self-conscious action by the working class. A number of Pannekoek’s detailed criticisms of the use of Bauer’s tables suffer from a flawed starting point – i.e. that he accuses Grossman of taking Bauer’s tables literally. We have shown this to be false. More serious is his accusation that Grossman misunderstands and even consciously “rewrites” Marx on the relation between the fall in the rate of profit and the rise in the mass of profit. Pannekoek insists that since an increase in the mass of profit always accompanied the fall in the rate, Marx never envisioned a situation where there would be an absolute dearth of surplus value: “Marx speaks of over-accumulation precipitating a crisis, of there being too much accumulated surplus value which is not invested and which depresses profits. But Grossman’s collapse comes about through there being too little accumulated surplus value.

These criticisms are difficult to follow: there is no contradiction between talking about overaccumulation and a dearth of surplus value: if “overaccumulation” is another way of saying that there is an excess of constant capital, this will necessarily mean that the commodities produced will contain less surplus value and thus less potential profit for the capitalists. It’s true that Marx considered that a fall in the rate of profit would be compensated by a rise in the mass of profit: this depends in particular on the possibility of selling an ever greater amount of commodities and thus takes us back to the problem of the realisation of surplus value, but we don’t intend to examine this further here.

However, the main issue here is the basic notion of capitalist collapse and not the specific theoretical explanations for it. The idea of a purely economic collapse - even if it is far from clear that Grossman and Mattick actually adhered to such a view -  would indeed reflect a very mechanical approach to historical materialism, one in which human action plays little or no role; and for Pannekoek, Marx always saw the end of capitalism as being brought about by the conscious action of the working class. This question was central to Pannekoek’s critique of theories of collapse, because he felt that all such theories tended to underestimate the necessity for the working class to arm itself in struggle, to develop the consciousness and organisation needed for the immense task of overthrowing capitalism, which would certainly not fall like a ripe fruit into its hands. Pannekoek accepts that Grossman did consider that the advent of the “final crisis” would provoke the class struggle, but he says that the saw this struggle in purely economist terms.  Whereas, for Pannekoek, “Socialism comes not because capitalism collapses economically and men, workers and others, are forced by necessity to create a new organisation, but because capitalism, as it lives and grows, becomes more and more unbearable for the workers and repeatedly pushes them to struggle until the will and strength to overthrow the domination of capitalism and establish a new organisation grows in them, and then capitalism collapses. The working class is not pushed to act because the unbearableness of capitalism is demonstrated to them from the outside, but because they feel it generated within them.

Actually, a passage from Grossman already anticipates many of Pannekoek’s criticisms: “The idea of breakdown, necessary on objective grounds, definitely does not contradict the class struggle. Rather, the breakdown, despite its objectively given necessity, can be influenced by the living forces of the struggling classes to a large extent and leaves a certain scope for active class intervention...Only now is it possible to understand why, at a high level of capital accumulation, every serious rise in wages encounters greater and greater difficulties, why every major economic struggle necessarily becomes a question of the existence of capitalism, a question of political power.... The struggle of the working class over everyday demands is thus bound up with its struggle over the final goal. The final goal for which the working class fights is not an ideal brought into the workers’ movement ‘from outside’ by speculative means, whose realisation, independent of the struggles of the present, is reserved for the distant future. It is, on the contrary, as the law of capitalism’s breakdown presented here shows. A result of immediate everyday struggles and its realisation can be accelerated by these struggles.[23]

But for Pannekoek, Grossman was a “bourgeois economist who has never had practical experience of the struggle of the proletariat and who is consequently not in a position to understand the essence of Marxism”. And although Grossman admittedly criticised aspects of the “old workers” movement (social democracy and “party communism”), he really had nothing in common with what the council communists called the “new workers’ movement”, which was genuinely independent from the old. Pannekoek thus insists that if for Grossman there is a political dimension to the class struggle, this essentially comes from the action of a “Bolshevik” type party. Grossman remained an advocate of the planned economy, and the transition from the more traditional and anarchic form of capital to the state-run variety could happily dispense with any intervention by a self-organised proletariat; all it required was the firm hand of a “revolutionary vanguard” at the moment of final crisis.

It is not altogether accurate to accuse Grossman of being nothing but a bourgeois economist with no practical experience of the workers’ struggle: prior to the war he had been deeply involved in the Jewish workers’ movement in Poland, and although in the wake of the revolutionary wave he remained a sympathiser of the Stalinist parties (and was in later years, shortly before his death, employed by the university of Leipzig in Stalinist East Germany) he always retained an independence of mind, so that his theories cannot be dismissed as a mere apologia for Stalinism. As we have seen, he did not hesitate to criticise Lenin; he maintained a correspondence with Mattick; and for a brief period in the early 30s he had been attracted to the Trotskyist opposition. It is certainly true that he did not spend the best part of his life, as Rosa, Mattick or Pannekoek had done, as a revolutionary communist but it is reductionist to see the whole of Grossman’s theory as a direct reflection of his politics.[24]

Pannekoek sums up the argument in “Theories of capitalist collapse” as follows:“The workers’ movement has not to expect a final catastrophe, but many catastrophes, political — like wars, and economic — like the crises which repeatedly break out, sometimes regularly, sometimes irregularly, but which on the whole, with the growing size of capitalism, become more and more devastating. So the illusions and tendencies to tranquillity of the proletariat will repeatedly collapse, and sharp and deep class struggles will break out. It appears to be a contradiction that the present crisis, deeper and more devastating than any previous one, has not shown signs of the awakening of the proletarian revolution. But the removal of old illusions is its first great task: on the other hand, the illusion of making capitalism bearable by means of reforms obtained through Social Democratic parliamentary politics and trade union action and, on the other, the illusion that capitalism can be overthrown in assault under the leadership of a revolution-bringing Communist Party. The working class itself, as a whole, must conduct the struggle, but, while the bourgeoisie is already building up its power more and more solidly, the working class has yet to make itself familiar with the new forms of struggle. Severe struggles are bound to take place. And should the present crisis abate, new crises and new struggles will arise. In these struggles the working class will develop its strength to struggle, will discover its aims, will train itself, will make itself independent and learn to take into its hands its own destiny, viz., social production itself. In this process the destruction of capitalism is achieved. The self-emancipation of the proletariat is the collapse of capitalism.

There is much in this view that is correct, above all the necessity for the class as a whole to develop its autonomy from all the capitalist forces that pose as its saviours. Pannekoek does not however explain why the crises should become more and more devastating – he merely offers capitalism’s size as a factor.[25] But he also fails to ask the question: how many devastating catastrophes can capitalism go through before it actually destroys itself and the possibility of a new society? In other words, what’s missing here is the sense of that capitalism is a system limited historically by its own contradictions and that it was already confronting humanity with the choice between socialism and barbarism. Pannekoek was perfectly correct in his insistence that economic collapse would by no means lead automatically to socialism. But he tended to forget that a declining system that was not overthrown by the revolutionary working class could and would destroy itself and all possibilities for socialism. The very opening lines of the Communist Manifesto hold open the possibility that if the oppressed class is not able to carry through its transformation of society, the advancing contradictions of the mode of production can end up simply in the mutual ruin of the contending classes. In this sense, capitalism is indeed condemned to deteriorate to the point of its “final crisis”, and there is no guarantee that communism lies on the further shore of this debacle. This realisation, however, does not diminish the importance of the working class acting decisively to bring about its own solution to capitalism’s collapse. On the contrary, it makes the conscious struggle of the proletariat, and the activity of revolutionary minorities within it, all the more urgent and indispensable.  

Gerrard, 28/6/11.

 

 


[1]. For example: the APCF paper Advance, in May 1936, published an article by Willie McDougall, entitled “Capitalism must go”, explaining the economic crisis in terms of overproduction, the article concludes that:
 “[Capitalism's] historic mission - the superseding of feudalism - has been accomplished.  It has raised the level of production to heights undreamed of by its own pioneers, but its peak point has been reached and decline set in.  
Whenever a system becomes a fetter to the expansion or proper functioning of the forces of production, a revolution is immanent and it is doomed to make way for a successor.  Just as feudalism had to give way to the more productive system of capitalism, so must the latter be swept from the path of progress to make way for socialism.

[2]. Bilan n° 10.

[3]. Bilan n° 11.

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. In particular the paragraphs dealing with the destruction of capital and labour in war. See the introduction to the debate on the factors behind the “Thirty Glorious Years” in IR n° 133 and footnote 2 to the second part of the Mitchell article in IR n° 103.

[6]. PIC, Persdinst van de Groep van Internationale Communisten no.1, January 1930 “Een marwaardog boek”, cited in the ICC’s The Dutch and German Communist Left, 2001, p 271

[7]. Rick Kuhn, Henryck Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism, Chicago 2007, p 184

[8]. The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system, 1992 abridged English edition, Pluto Press, p36.

[9]. Ibid. p56.

[10]. Ibid. p125.

[11]. Bauer, “The accumulation of capital”, Die Neue Zeit, 1913. An English translation was published in History of Political Economy, n°18:1, 1986.

[12]. Grossman, op. cit., p.69.

[13]. Ibid. p76.

[14]. Ibid. p.76-77.

[15]. Ibid. p.132.

[16]. Ibid. p.32-33.

[17]. Ibid. pp. 49-50.

[18]. Grossman, op. cit. P. 128n.

[19]. See a previous article in this series, “The mortal contradictions of bourgeois society”, in International Review n°139

[20]. In a later work, Economic Crises and Crisis Theory (1974), Mattick returns to this problem, and recognises that Marx did effectively see the problem of overproduction as being not merely a consequence of the falling rate of profit, but a contradiction in its own right, deriving in particular from the restricted “consuming power” of the working class. In fact his intellectual honesty leads him to pose an uncomfortable question: “Here we find ourselves facing the question raised earlier, whether Marx had two crisis theories, one deriving crisis from the theory of value as the falling rate of profit, and the other deriving it from the insufficient consumption of the workers”(from chapter 3, “The Epigones”. The answer he puts forward, in fact, is that Marx’s “underconsumptionist” formulations must be imputed to “either an error of judgement or unclear writing” (chapter 2. “Marx’s Crisis Theory”).

[21]. English translation by Adam Buick in Capital and Class, Spring 1977 https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1934/collapse.htm

[22]. “The Age of Catastrophes” in International Review n° 143

[23]. Kuhn, op. cit., p. 135-6, quoting from the full German edition of The law of accumulation, 601-3

[24]. This is a somewhat similar error to the one Pannekoek made when he argued in Lenin as Philosopher that the bourgeois influences on Lenin’s philosophical writings demonstrated the bourgeois class nature of Bolshevism and the October revolution

[25]. See our book on the German/Dutch left, p 273, where a similar point is made about the position of the GIC as a whole: “in rejecting the somewhat fatalistic conceptions of Grossman and Mattick, the GIC abandoned the entire heritage of the German left’s crisis theory. The crisis of 1929 was seen, not as a generalised crisis expressing the decline of the capitalist system, but as a cyclical crisis. In a pamphlet published in 1933, the GIC asserted that the Great Crisis was ‘chronic’ rather than permanent, even since 1914. Capitalism was like the legendary phoenix, endlessly reborn from its ashes. After each ‘regeneration’ by the crisis, capitalism reappeared ‘greater and more powerful than ever’ But this ‘regeneration’ wasn’t eternal, since ‘ the flames threaten the whole of social life with an increasingly violent death’ Finally, only the proletariat could give the capitalist phoenix the ‘death blow’, and transform a cycle of crisis into a final crisis. This theory was thus contradictory, since, on the one hand, it was a vision of cyclical crises as in the 19th century, with capitalism constantly expanding, in permanent ascendancy; on the other hand, it described a cycle of increasingly lethal destructions and reconstructions” The pamphlet in question was De beweging van het kapitalitisch bedrifsleven.

 

Historic events: 

Deepen: 

Political currents and reference: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

Rubric: 

Decadence of Capitalism

International Review no.147 - 4th Quarter 2011

The world economic catastrophe is unavoidable

In quick succession over the last few months we have seen a number of important events bearing witness to the gravity of the world economic situation: Greece’s inability to deal with its debts; similar threats to Italy and Spain; warnings to France of its extreme vulnerability in the event of a cessation of payment by Greece or Italy; the paralysis of the US House of Representatives over the issue of raising the debt-ceiling; the USA’s loss of its “Triple A” status – the guarantee of its ability to repay its debts; more and more persistent rumours about the danger of certain banks collapsing, with denials to the contrary fooling nobody given that the same banks have often already imposed massive job-cuts; the first confirmation of the rumours with the failure of the Franco-Belgian bank Dexia. Each time, the leaders of this world have been running after events, but each time the holes they seem to have filled in seem to open up again a few weeks or even days later. Their inability to hold back the escalation of the crisis is less the result of their incompetence and their short-term view than of the current dynamic of capitalism towards catastrophes which cannot be avoided: the bankruptcy of financial establishments, the bankruptcy of entire states, a plunge into deep global recession. 

Dramatic consequences for the working class

The austerity measures pushed through in 2010 were implacable, placing a growing part of the working class – and of the rest of the population – in a situation where their most basic needs can no longer be met. To enumerate all the austerity measures which have been introduced in the euro zone, or which are about to be introduced, would make a very long list. It is however necessary to mention a certain number of those that are becoming widespread and which are a significant indication of the lot of millions of the exploited. In Greece, while taxes on consumer goods were increased, the retirement age was raised to 67 and public sector wages were brutally reduced. In September 2011 it was decided that 30,000 public sector workers should be put on technical unemployment with a 40% reduction in wages, while pensions over €1,200 were cut by 20%; the same measure was applied to incomes over €5,000 a year.[1] In nearly all countries taxes have been raised and thousands of public sector jobs axed. This has created many problems in the operation of public services, including the most vital ones: thus, in a city like Barcelona, operating theatres, emergency services and hospital beds have been greatly reduced;[2] in Madrid, 5,000 uncontracted teachers lost their jobs[3] and this was made up for by the contracted teachers having to take on an extra two hours teaching a week.

The unemployment figures are more and more alarming: 7.9% in Britain at the end of August; 10% in the euro zone (20% in Spain) at the end of September[4] and 9.1% in the US over the same period. Throughout the summer, redundancy plans and job-cuts came one after the other: 6,500 at Cisco, 6,000 at Lockhead Martin, 10,000 at HSBC, 3,000 at the Bank of America: the list goes on. The earnings of the exploited have been falling: according to official figures, real wages were going down at an annual rate of 10% by the beginning of 2011, by over 4% in Spain, and to a lesser extent in Italy and Portugal. In the US, 45.7 million people, a 12% increase in a year,[5] only survive thanks to the weekly $30 food stamps handed out by the state.

And despite all this, the worst is yet to come.

All this demonstrates the necessity to overthrow the capitalist system before it leads humanity to ruin. The protest movements against the attacks which have been taking place in a whole number of countries since the spring of 2011, whatever their insufficiencies and weaknesses, nevertheless represent the first steps of a broader proletarian response to the crisis of capitalism (see the article “From indignation to the preparation of class battles” in this issue of the Review).

Since 2008, the bourgeoisie has not been able to block the tendency towards recession

At the beginning of 2010, it was possible to have the illusion that states had succeeded in sheltering capitalism from the continuation of the recession that began in 2008 and early 2009, taking the form of a dizzying fall in production. All the big central banks of the world had injected massive amounts of money into the economy. This was when Ben Bernanke, the director of the FED and architect of major recovery plans was nicknamed “Helicopter Ben” since he seemed to be inundating the US with dollars from a helicopter. Between 2009 and 2010, according to official figures, which we know are always overestimated, the growth rate in the US went from -2.6% to +2.9%, and from -4.1% to +1.7% in the euro zone. In the “emerging” countries, the rates of growth, which had fallen, seemed in 2010 to return to their levels before the financial crisis: 10.4% in China, 9% in India. All states and their media began singing about the recovery, when in reality production in all the developed countries never succeeded in going back to 2007 levels. In other words, rather than a recovery, it would be more accurate to talk about a pause in a downward movement of production. And this pause only lasted a few quarters:

·                     In the developed countries, rates of growth began to fall again in mid-2010. Predicted growth in the US in 2011 is 0.8%. Ben Bernanke has announced that the American recovery is more or less “marking time”. At the same time, growth in the main European countries (Germany, France, Britain) is near to zero and while the governments of southern Europe (Spain, 0.6% in 2011 after -0.1% in 2010;[6] Italy 0.7% in 2011)[7] have been repeating non-stop that their countries “are not in recession”, in reality, given the austerity plans that they are and will be going through, the perspective opening in front of them is not very different from what Greece is currently experiencing: in 2011, production there has fallen by over 5%.

·                     In the “emerging” countries the situation is far from brilliant. While they saw important growth rates in 2010, 2011 is looking much gloomier. The IMF has predicted that their growth rate for 2011 will be 8.4%,[8] but certain indices show that activity in China is about to slow down.[9] Growth in Brazil is predicted to go from 7.5% in 2020 to 3.7% in 2011.[10] Finally, capital is starting to flee Russia.[11] In brief, contrary to what we have been sold by the economists and numerous politicians for years, the emerging countries are not going to act as locomotives pulling world growth. On the contrary, they are going to be the first victims of the situation in the developed countries and will see a fall in their exports, which up till now have been the main factor behind their growth.

The IMF has just revised its predictions which had assumed a 4% growth in the world economy in 2010 and 2011: having previously noted that growth had “considerably weakened”, they have now said that we “cannot exclude” a recession in 2012.[12] In other words, the bourgeoisie is becoming aware of the degree to which economic activity is contracting. In the light of all this, the following question is posed: why have the central banks not carried on showering the world in money as they did at the end of 2008 and in 2009, thus considerably increasing the monetary mass (it was multiplied by 3 in the US and 2 in the euro zone)? The reason is that pouring “funny money” into the economy doesn’t resolve the contradictions of capitalism. It results not so much in a recovery of production, but a recovery of inflation. The latter stands at nearly 3% in the euro zone, a bit more in the US, 4.5% in the UK and between 6 and 9% in the emerging countries.

The production of paper or electronic money allows new loans to be agreed... thereby increasing global debt. The scenario is not new. This is how the world’s big economic actors have become mired in debts to the point where they can no longer pay them back. In other words, they are now insolvent, and this includes none other than the European states, America, and the entire banking system.  

The cancer of public debt

The euro zone

The states of Europe are finding it increasingly difficult to honour the interest on their debts.

The reason that the euro zone has been the first to see certain states in default of payment is that, unlike the US, Britain and Japan, they don’t control the printing of their own money and so don’t have the opportunity to pay towards their debts in fictional money. Printing euros is the responsibility of the European Central Bank (ECB) which is basically controlled by the big European states and in particular Germany. And, as everyone knows, multiplying the mass of currency by two or three times at a time when production is stagnating only leads to inflation. It’s in order to avoid this that the ECB has become more and more reluctant to finance states that need it; otherwise it risks being in default of payment itself.

This is one of the central reasons why the countries of the euro zone have for the last year and a half been living under the threat of Greece defaulting on its payments. In fact, the problem facing the euro zone has no solution since its failure to finance Greece’s debt will result in a cessation of payment by Greece and its exit from the euro zone. Greece’s creditors, which include other European states and major European banks, would then find it very hard to honour their commitments and would themselves face bankruptcy. The very existence of the euro zone is being put into question, even though its existence is essential for the exporting countries in the north of the zone, especially Germany.

For the last year and a half the issue of defaulting on payments has been focussed mainly on Greece. But countries like Spain and Italy are going to find themselves in a similar situation since they have never found a fiscal recipe for amortising part of their debt (see graph[13]). A glance at the breadth of Italy’s debt, which is very likely to default in the near future, shows that the euro zone would not be able to support these countries to ensure that they could honour their commitments. Already investors believe less and less in their capacity to repay, which is why they are only prepared to lend them money at very high rates of interest. The situation facing Spain is also very close to the one that Greece is now in.   

The positions adopted by governments and other euro zone institutions, especially the German government, express their inability to deal with the situation created by the threat of certain countries going bust. The major part of the bourgeoisie of the euro zone is aware of the fact that the problem is not knowing whether or not Greece is in default: the announcement that the banks are going to take part in salvaging 21% of Greece’s debts is already a recognition of this situation, which was confirmed at the Merkel-Sarkozy summit on 9 October which admitted that Greece would default on repaying 60% of its debt. From this point the problem posed to the bourgeoisie is to find a way of making sure that this default will lead to the minimum of convulsions in the euro zone. This is a particularly delicate exercise that has provoked hesitation and divisions within it. Thus, the political parties in Germany are very divided over the issue of how, if they are going to aid Greece financially, they will then be able to help the other states that are rapidly heading towards the same position of default as Greece. As an illustration, it is remarkable that the plan drawn up on 21st July by the authorities of the euro zone to “save” Greece, which envisages a strengthening of the capacity of the European Financial Stability Facility from 220 to 440 billion euros (with the obvious corollary of an increased contribution from the different states), was contested for weeks by an important section of the ruling parties in Germany. After a turn-around in the situation, it was finally voted for by a large majority in the Bundestag on 29th September. Similarly, up till the beginning of August, the German government were opposed to the ECB buying up the titles of Italy and Spain’s sovereign debt. Given the degradation of these countries’ economic situation, the German state finally agreed that from August 7th the ECB could buy up such obligations.[14] So much so that between August 7th and 22nd the ECB bought up 22 billion euros of these two countries’ sovereign debt![15] In fact, these contradictions, these coming and goings, show that a bourgeoisie as internationally important as the German bourgeoisie doesn’t know what policies to carry out. In general, Europe, pushed by Germany, has opted for austerity. But this doesn’t rule out a minimal financing of states and banks via the European Financial Stability Facility (which thus presupposes increasing the financial resources available to this organism) or authorising the ECB to create enough money to come to the aid of a state which can no longer pay its debts and so avoid an immediate default.

Certainly this is not just a problem for the German bourgeoisie but for the entire ruling class, because the whole bourgeoisie has been getting into debt since the 1960s to avoid overproduction, to the point where it is now very difficult not only to pay back the debts but even to pay back the interest on those debts. Hence the economies it is now trying to make via draconian austerity polices, draining incomes everywhere, and at the same time causing a reduction in demand, aggravating overproduction and accelerating the slide into depression.  

The USA

The USA was faced with the same kind of problem in the summer of 2011.

The debt ceiling, which in 2008 was fixed at $14,294bn, was reached by May 2011. It had to be raised in order for the US, like the countries in the euro zone, to be able to keep up the payments, including internal ones: the functioning of the state was at stake. Even if the unbelievable stupidity and backwardness of the Tea Party was an element aggravating the crisis, they were not at the root of the problem facing the President and Congress. The real problem was the necessity to choose between two alternatives:

·         either carry on with the policy of increasing Federal state debt, as the Democrats argued, which basically meant asking the FED to print money, with the risk of an uncontrolled fall in the value of the dollar;

·         or push through a drastic austerity programme, as the Republicans demanded, through the reduction over the next ten years of public expenditure by something between $4,000bn and $8000bn. By way of comparison, the Gross Domestic Product of the US in 2010 was $14,624bn, which gives an idea of the scale of the budget cuts, and thus the slashing of public sector jobs, implied by this plan.   

To sum up, the alternative posed this summer to the US was the following: either take the risk of opening the door to galloping inflation, or carry through an austerity programme which could only strongly restrict demand and provoke a fall or even a disappearance of profits: in the long run, a chain reaction of closures and a dramatic fall in production. From the standpoint of the national interest, both the Democrats and the Republicans are putting forward legitimate answers. Pulled hither and thither by the contradictions assailing the national economy, the US authorities have been reduced to contradictory and incoherent half measures. Congress will still be faced with the need both to make massive economic cuts and to get the economy moving.

The outcome of the conflict between Democrats and Republicans shows that, contrary to Europe, the USA has opted more for the aggravation of debt because the Federal debt ceiling was raised by 2100 billion up till 2013, with a corresponding reduction in budgetary expenses of around 2500 billion in the next ten years.  

But, as for Europe, this decision shows that the American state does not know what policies to adopt in the face of the debt crisis.

The lowering of America’s credit rating by the rating agency Standard and Poor, and the reactions that followed, are an illustration of the fact that the bourgeoisie knows quite well that it has reached a dead-end and that it can’t see a way out of it. Unlike many other decisions taken by the ratings agencies since the beginning of the sub-prime crisis, Standard and Poor’s decision this summer looked coherent: the agency is showing that there is no recipe to compensate for the increase in debt agreed by Congress and that, as a result, the USA’s capacity to reimburse its debts has lost credibility. In other words, for this institution, the compromise, which avoided a grave political crisis in the US by aggravating the country’s debt, is going to deepen the insolvency of the US state itself. The loss of confidence in the dollar by the world’s financiers, which will be an inevitable result of Standard and Poor’s judgement, will lead to a fall in its value. At the same time, while the vote on increasing the Federal debt ceiling made it possible to avoid a paralysis in the Federal administration, the different states and municipalities are already faced with exactly that problem. Since July 4, the State of Minnesota has been in default and it had to ask 22,000 state employees to stay at home.[16] A number of US cities, such as Central Falls and Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, are in the same situation, while it looks like the State of California and others will soon be in the same boat

Faced with the deepening of the crisis since 2007, the economic policies of both the US and the euro zone have meant the state taking charge of debts that were originally contracted in the private sector. These new debts can’t fail to increase the overall public debt, which has itself been growing ceaselessly for decades. States are facing a deadline on debt that they can never pay back. In the US as in the euro zone, this will mean massive lay-offs in the public sector, endless wage-cuts and ever-rising taxes.  

The threat of a grave banking crisis

In 2008-9, after the collapse of certain banks such as Bear Stearns and Northern Rock and the utter downfall of Lehman Brothers, states ran to the aid of many other banks, pumping in capital to avoid the same fate. What is the state of health of the banks today? It is once again very bad. First of all, a whole series of irrecoverable loans have not been removed from their balances. In addition, many banks themselves hold part of the debts of states that are now struggling to make their repayments. The problem for the banks is that the value of the debts they have taken on has now considerably diminished.

The recent declaration by the IMF, based on a recognition of the current difficulties of the European Banks and stipulating that they must increase their own funds by 200 billion euros, has provoked a number of sharp reactions and declarations from these institutions, claiming that everything was fine with them. And this at a moment when everything was showing the contrary:

American banks no longer want to refinance in dollars the American affiliates of the European banks and have been repatriating fund which they had previously placed in Europe;

European banks are lending less and less to each other because they are less and less sure of being repaid. They prefer to put their liquidities in the ECB, despite very high bank rates; a consequence of this growing lack of confidence is that the rate of interest on inter-bank loans has been climbing continually, even if it has not yet reached the levels of the end of 2008.[17]

The high point was reached a few weeks after the banks proclaimed their wonderful state of health, when we saw the collapse and liquidation of the Franco-Belgian bank Dexia, without any other bank being willing to come to the rescue.

We can add that the American banks are poorly placed to keep the machine going on behalf of their European consorts: because of the difficulties they are facing, the Bank of America has just cut 10% of its workforce and Goldman Sachs, the bank which has become the symbol of global speculation, has just laid off 1,000 people. And they too prefer depositing their liquidities in the FED rather than loaning to other American banks.

The health of the banks is essential for capitalism because it can’t function without a banking system that supplies it with currency. But the tendency we are seeing today is towards another “Credit Crunch”, i.e. a situation where the banks no longer want to loan as soon as there is the least risk of not being repaid. What this means in the long run is a blockage in the circulation of capital, which amounts to the blockage of the economy. From this perspective we can better understand why the problem of shoring up the banks’ own funds has become the first item on the agenda of the various international summit meetings that have taken place, even ahead of the situation in Greece, which has certainly not been resolved. At root, the problem of the banks reveals the extreme gravity of the economic situation and illustrates the inextricable difficulties facing capitalism.  

When the US lost its triple A status, the headline of the French economic daily Les Echos of 8th August read: “America downgraded, the world enters the unknown”. When the main economic media of the French bourgeoisie expresses its disorientation like this, when it shows its anxiety about the future, it merely expresses the disorientation of the entire bourgeoisie. Since 1945, western capitalism (and world capitalism after the collapse of the USSR) has been based on the fact that the strength of American capital was the final guarantor of the dollars that ensured the circulation of commodities and thus of capital around the world. But now the immense accumulation of debts contracted by the American bourgeoisie to deal with the return of the open crisis of capitalism since the end of the 1960s has ended up becoming a factor aggravating and accelerating the crisis. All those holding parts of the American debt, starting with the American state itself, are holding an asset which is worth less and less. The currency on which the debt is based can now only weaken the American state.

The base of the pyramid on which the world has been built since 1945 is breaking up. In 2007, when the financial crisis broke, the financial system was saved by the central banks, i.e. by the states. Now the states themselves are on the verge of bankruptcy and it is out of the question that the banks can come along and save them. Whichever way the capitalists turn, there’s nothing that can make a real recovery possible. Even a very feeble rate of growth would require the development of fresh debts in order to create the demand needed to absorb commodities; but even the interest on the debts already taken out is no longer repayable and this is dragging banks and states towards bankruptcy.  

As we have seen, decisions that once seemed irrevocable are being put into question in the space of a few days and certainties about the health of the economy are being disproved just as quickly. In this context, states are more and more obliged to navigate from one day to the next. It is probable, but not certain because the bourgeoisie is so disoriented by a situation it has never been in before, that to deal with immediate issues it will continue to sustain capital, whether financial, commercial or industrial, with newly-printed money, even if this gives a new impetus to the inflation that is already on the march and is going to become more and more uncontrollable. This will not stop the continuation of lay-offs, wage-cuts and tax increases; but inflation will more and more make the poverty of the great majority of the exploited even worse. The very day that Les Echoes wrote “America downgraded, the world enters the unknown”, another French economic daily, La Tribune led with “left behind”, describing the planet’s big decision-makers whose photos appeared on the front page. Yes indeed: those who once promised us marvels and mountains, and then tried to console us when it became obvious that the marvel was actually a nightmare, now admit that they have been left behind. And they have been left behind because their system, capitalism is definitively obsolete and is in the process of pulling the vast majority of the world’s population into the most terrible poverty.

Vitaz 10/10/11.

    

 


[1]. lefigaro.fr, 9.22.11, “La colère gronde de plus en plus en Grèce”.

[2]. news.fr.msn.com; “Espagne, les enseignants manifestent à Madrid contre les coupes budgetaires”.

[3]. rfi.fr, 21.9.11, “Manifestations d’enseignants et lycéens en Espagne”.

[4]. Statistique Eurostat.

[5]. Le Monde, 7-8.8.11.

[6]. finance-economie.com, 10.10 11, “Chiffres clés Espagne”.

[7]. globalix.fr “La dynamique de la dette italienne”.

[8]. IMF, World Economic Outlook Update, July 2010.

[9]. Le Figaro, 3.10.11.

[10]. Les Echos, 9.8.11.

[11]. lecourrierderussie.com, 10.12.11: “Putin, la crise existe”.

[12]. lefigaro.fr, 5.10.11: “FMI, recession mondiale pas exclue”.

[13]. Adapted from Le Monde 5.8.11.

[14]. Les Echos, August 2011.

[15]. Les Echos, 16 August 2011.

[16]. rfi.fr, 2.7.11,”Faillite: le gouvernment de Minnesota cesse activities”

[17]. gecodia.fr “Le stress interbancaire en Europe approche du pic post Lehman”

Rubric: 

Economic Crisis

The Indignados in Spain, Greece and Israel

From indignation to the preparation of class struggles

In the editorial of International Review n° 146 we gave an account of the struggles that had developed in Spain.[1]Since then, the contagion of its example has spread to Greece and Israel.[2]

In this article, we want to draw the lessons of these movements and look at what perspectives they hold faced with the bankruptcy of capitalism and the ferocious attacks against the proletariat and the vast majority of the world population.

In order to understand these movements we have to categorically reject the immediatist and empiricist method that dominates society today. This method analyses each event in itself, outside of any historical context and isolated in the country where it appears. This photographic method is a reflection of the ideological degeneration of the capitalist class, because All that the latter can offer is a day-by-day resistance, with no hope of success, to the irrevocable collapse of the capitalist mode of production.[3]

A photograph can show us a person with a big happy smile, but this can hide the fact that a few seconds before or after they were grimacing with anxiety. We cannot understand social movements in this way. We can only see them in the light of the past in which they have matured and the future to which they are pointing; it is necessary to place them in their international context and not in the narrow national confines where they appear, and, above all, we have to understand them in their dynamic; not by what they are at any given moment but by what they can become due to the tendencies, forces and perspectives they contain and which will sooner or later come to the surface.

Will the proletariat be able to respond to the crisis of capitalism?

At the beginning of the 21st century we published a series of two articles entitled “Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism”,[4] in which we recalled that the communist revolution is not inevitable and that its realisation depends on the union of two factors, the objective and subjective. The objective condition is supplied by the decadence of capitalism[5] and by “the open crisis of bourgeois society, clearly proving that capitalist relations of production must be replaced by others.”[6]The subjective factor is related to the collective and conscious action of the proletariat.

The articles acknowledge that the proletariat has previously missed its appointments with history. During the first – the First World War – its attempt to respond with an international revolutionary wave in 1917-23 was defeated; in the second – the Great Depression of 1929 – it was absent as an autonomous class; in the third – the Second World War – it was not only absent but also believed that democracy and the welfare state, those myths used by the victors, were actually victories. Subsequently, with the return of the crisis at the end of the 1960s, it “did not fail to respond but it was confronted by a series of obstacles that it has had to face and which have blocked its progress towards the proletarian revolution.[7] These obstacles led to a significant new phenomenon – the collapse of the so-called “communist” regimes in 1989 – in which not only was the proletariat not an active factor, but it was the victim of a formidable anti-communist campaign that made it retreat, not only at the level of its consciousness but also its combativity.

What we might call the “the fifth rendezvous with history” opened up from 2007. The crisis is more openly showing the almost definitive failure of the policies that capitalism has put in place to try to respond to the emergence of its insoluble economic crisis. The summer of 2011 made clear that the enormous sums injected cannot stop the haemorrhage and that capitalism is sliding towards a Great Depression far more serious than that of 1929.[8]

But initially, and despite the blows that have rained down on it, the proletariat has appeared equally absent. We foresaw such a situation at our 18th International Congress (2009): “In a historic situation where the proletariat has not suffered from a historic defeat as it had in the 1930s, massive lay-offs, which have already started, could provoke very hard combats, even explosions of violence. But these would probably, in an initial moment, be desperate and relatively isolated struggles, even if they may win real sympathy from other sectors of the working class. This is why, in the coming period, the fact that we do not see a widescale response from the working class to the attacks should not lead us to consider that it has given up the struggle for the defence of its interests. It is in a second period, when it is less vulnerable to the bourgeoisie's blackmail, that workers will tend to turn to the idea that a united and solid struggle can push back the attacks of the ruling class, especially when the latter tries to make the whole working class pay for the huge budget deficits accumulating today with all the plans for saving the banks and stimulating the economy. This is when we are more likely to see the development of broad struggles by the workers.[9]

The current movements in Spain, Israel and Greece show that the proletariat is beginning to take up this “fifth appointment with history”, to prepare itself to be present, to give itself the means to win.[10]

In the series cited above, we said that the two pillars on which capitalism – at least in the central countries – has relied on to keep the proletariat under its control, are democracy and the so-called “welfare state”. What the three movements show is that these pillars are beginning to be questioned, albeit in a still confused way, and this questioning is being fuelled by the catastrophic evolution of the crisis.

The questioning of democracy

Anger against politicians and against democracy in general has been shown in all three movements, which have also displayed outrage at the fact that the rich and their political personnel are becoming increasing richer and more corrupt while the vast majority of the population are treated as commodities to service the scandalous profits of the exploiting minority, commodities to be thrown in the trash when the “markets are not going well”; the brutal austerity programmes have also been denounced, programmes no one talked about in the election campaigns but which have become the main occupation of those elected.

It is clear that these feelings and attitudes are not new: ranting about politicians for example has been common currency during the last thirty years. It is equally clear that these feelings can be diverted into dead ends, which is what the forces of the bourgeoisie have been insistently trying to do in the three movements: “towards a participative democracy”, towards a “democratic renewal”, etc.

But what is new and of significant importance is that, despite the intentions of those spreading these ideas, democracy, the bourgeois state and its apparatus of domination are the subject of debate in countless assemblies. You cannot compare individuals who ruminate on their disgust, in an atomized, passive and resigned way, with the same individuals who express this collectively in assemblies. Beyond the errors, confusions and dead ends which inevitably find expression and which must be combated with great patience and energy, what is most important is that these problems are being posed publicly; clear evidence of a politicisation of the masses, and also that this democracy, which has rendered capitalism such good service throughout the last century, is now being put into question.

The end of the so-called “welfare state

After the Second World War, capitalism installed the so-called “welfare state”.[11] This has been one of the principal pillars of capitalist rule in the last 70 years. It created the illusion that capitalism could overcome its most brutal aspects: the welfare state would guarantee security against unemployment, for retirement, provide free health care, education, social housing, etc.

This “social state”, the complement to political democracy, has already suffered significant amputations over the last 25 years and is now heading for its disappearance pure and simple. In Greece, Spain and Israel (where it is above all the shortage of housing that has polarised the young), discontent over the removal of minimum social benefits has been at the centre of the movements. There have certainly been attempts by the bourgeoisie to divert this towards “reforms” of the constitution, the passing of laws that “guarantee” these benefits, etc. But the wave of growing discontent will help to challenge these dykes which are meant to control the workers.

The movement of the Indignants, the culmination of eight years of struggle

The cancer of scepticism dominates ideology today and infects the proletariat and its own revolutionary minorities. As stated above, the proletariat has missed all of the appointments that history has given it during the course of a century of capitalist decadence, and this has resulted in an agonising doubt in its own ranks about its identity and its capacities as a class, to the point where even in displays of militancy some reject the term “working class”.[12] This scepticism is made even stronger because it is fed by the decomposition of capitalism;[13] despair, the lack of concrete plans for the future foster disbelief and distrust of any perspective of collective action.

The movements in Spain, Greece and Israel – despite all the weaknesses they contain – have begun to provide an effective remedy against the cancer of scepticism, as much by their very existence and what they mean for the continuity of struggles and the conscious efforts made by the world proletariat since 2003.[14] They are not a storm that suddenly burst out of a clear blue sky but the result of a slow accumulation over the last eight years of small clouds, drizzle and timid lightning that has grown until it acquires a new quality.

Since 2003 the proletariat has begun to recover from the long reflux in its consciousness and combativity that it suffered after the events of 1989. This process follows a slow, contradictory and very tortuous rhythm, expressed by:

  • a series of struggles isolated in different countries in the centre as well as on the periphery, characterised by protests “pregnant with possibilities”; searching for solidarity, attempts at self-organisation, the presence of new generations, reflection about the future;
  • a development of internationalist minorities looking for revolutionary coherence, posing many questions, seeking contact with each other, discussing, drawing up perspectives...

In 2006 two movements broke out – the student movement against the Contract of Primary Employment in France and the massive workers’ strike at Vigo in Spain[15] – which, despite their distance, difference in conditions and age, showed similar features: general assemblies, extension to other workers, massive demonstrations... They were like a first warning shot that, apparently, had no follow up.[16]

A year later an embryonic mass strike exploded in Egypt starting in a large textile factory. At the beginning of 2008 many struggles broke out, isolated from each other but simultaneously in many countries, from the periphery to the centre of capitalism. Other movements also stood out, such as the proliferation of hunger revolts in 33 countries during the first quarter of 2008. In Egypt, these were supported and in part taken over by the proletariat. At the end of 2008 the revolt of young workers in Greece exploded, supported by a section of the proletariat. We also saw the seeds of an internationalist reaction at Lindsey (Great Britain) and an explosive generalized strike in southern China (in June).

After the initial retreat of the proletariat faced with the first impact of the crisis – as we pointed out above – much more determined struggles began to take place, and in 2010 France was rocked by massive protest movements against pension reform, with the appearance of inter-professional assemblies; British youth rebelled in December against the sharp rise in student fees. 2011 saw major social revolts in Egypt and Tunisia. The proletariat seemed to gain momentum for a new leap forward: the movement of the “Indignant” in Spain, then in Greece and Israel.

Does this movement belong to the working class?

These three movements cannot be understood outside the context that we have just analysed. They are like a puzzle that brings together all the pieces provided throughout the past eight years. But scepticism is very strong and many have asked: can we talk about movements of the working class if it is not present as such, and if they are not reinforced by strikes or assemblies in the workplace?

The so-called “Indignant” movement is a very valuable concept for the working class[17] but this is not revealed immediately because it does not identify itself directly with its class nature. Two factors give it the appearance of being essentially a social revolt:

The loss of class identity

The working class has gone through a long period of reflux which has inflicted significant damage on its self-confidence and the consciousness of its own identity: “With the collapse of the eastern bloc and the so-called ‘socialist' regimes, the deafening campaigns about the ‘end of communism', and even the ‘end of the class struggle' dealt a severe blow to the consciousness and combativity of the working class; the proletariat suffered a profound retreat on these two levels, a retreat which lasted for over ten years.. At the same time, it [the bourgeoisie] managed to create a strong feeling of powerlessness within the working class because it was unable to wage any massive struggles.[18] This partly explains why the participation of the proletariat as a class has not been dominant even though it was present through the participation of individual workers (employed, unemployed, students, retired...) who attempted to clarify, to get involved according to their instincts, but who lacked the strength, cohesion and clarity there would be if the class participated collectively as a class.

It follows from this loss of identity that the programme, theory, traditions, methods of the proletariat, are not recognised as their own by the immense majority of workers. The language, forms of action, even the symbols which appear in the Indignants movement derive from other sources. This is a dangerous weakness that must be patiently combated to bring about a critical re-appropriation of the theoretical heritage, experience, traditions, that the workers’ movement has accumulated over the past two centuries.

The presence of non-proletarian social strata

Among the Indignants there is a strong presence of non-proletarian social strata, especially a middle layer that is in the throes of proletarianisation. As for Israel, our article underlined that: “Another tack is to label this as a ‘middle class’ movement. It’s true that, as with all the other movements, we are looking at a broad social revolt which can express the dissatisfaction of many different layers in society, from small businessmen to workers at the point of production, all of whom are affected by the world economic crisis, the growing gap between rich and poor, and, in a country like Israel, the aggravation of living conditions by the insatiable demands of the war economy. But ‘middle class’ has become a lazy, catch-all term meaning anyone with an education or a job, and in Israel as in North Africa, Spain or Greece, growing numbers of educated young people are being pushed into the ranks of the proletariat, working in low paid and unskilled jobs where they can find work at all.[19]

If the movement appears vague and poorly defined, this cannot put into question its class character, especially if we view things in their dynamic, in the perspective of the future, as the comrades of the TPTG do concerning the movement in Greece: “What the whole political spectrum finds disquieting in this assembly movement is that the mounting proletarian (and petit-bourgeois) anger and indignation is not expressed anymore through the mediation channels of the political parties and the unions. Thus, it is not so much controllable and it is potentially dangerous for the political and unionist representation system in general.[20]

The presence of the proletariat is visible neither as a force leading the movement, nor through a mobilisation in the workplace. It lies in the dynamic of searching, clarification, preparation of the social terrain, of recognition of the battle that is being prepared. That is where its importance is found, despite the fact that this is only an extremely fragile small step forward.

In relation to Greece, the comrades of the TPTG say that “One thing is certain: this volatile, contradictory movement attracts the attention from all sides of the political spectrum and constitutes an expression of the crisis of class relations and politics in general. No other struggle has expressed itself in a more ambivalent and explosive way in the last decades,[21] and on Israel, a journalist noted, in his own language, that “it was never oppression that held the social order in Israel together, as far as the Jewish society was concerned. It was indoctrination - a dominant ideology, to use a term preferred by critical theorists. And it was this cultural order that was dented in this round of protests. For the first time, a major part of the Jewish middle class - it’s too early to estimate how large is this group - recognized their problem not with other Israelis, or with the Arabs, or with a certain politician, but with the entire social order, with the entire system. In this sense, it’s a unique event in Israel’s history.[22]

The characteristics of future struggles

With this vision we can understand the features of these struggles as the characteristics that future struggles will assume with a critical spirit and develop at higher levels:

  • the entry into struggle of new generations of the proletariat, with, however, an important difference with the 1968 movements: while the young then gave zero consideration to their “defeated and embourgeoisified” elders, today we see a struggle that unites the different generations of the working class;
  • mass direct action: the struggle has won the street, the squares have been occupied. The exploited have found in these a place where they are able to live, discuss and act together;
  • the beginnings of politicisation: beyond the false answers that are and will be given, it is important that the great masses are beginning to be directly and actively involved in the great questions of society; this is the beginning of their politicisation as a class;
  • the assemblies: they are linked to the proletarian tradition of the workers’ councils of 1905 and 1917, which spread to Germany and other countries during the world revolutionary wave of 1917-23. They reappeared in 1956 in Hungary and in 1980 in Poland. They are the weapon of unity, of the development of solidarity, of the capacity of the proletarian masses to understand and make decisions. The slogan “All power to the assemblies!”, very popular in Spain, expresses the birth of a deep reflection on the key questions of the state, dual power, etc.;
  • the culture of debate:the clarity that inspires the determination and heroism of the proletarian masses cannot be decreed, nor is it the fruit of indoctrination by a minority possessed of “the truth”: it is the combined product of experience, of struggle and especially of discussion. The culture of debate has been present in these three movements: everything was up for discussion, nothing that was political, social, economic, human, escaped the critique of these immense improvised ‘town squares’. As we say in the introduction to the article by the comrades in Greece, this has an enormous importance: “a determined effort to contribute towards the emergence of what the comrades of the TPTG call a ‘proletarian public sphere’ which will make it possible for growing numbers of our class not only to work out how to resist capitalism’s attacks on our lives, but to develop the theories and actions that lead to a new way of life altogether”;[23]
  • the way to confront the question of violence: “The proletarian movement has been confronted from the beginning with the extreme violence of the exploiting class, with repression when it tries to defend its interests, with imperialist war but also with the daily violence of exploitation. Unlike exploiting classes, the class that is the bearer of communism is not the bearer of violence; and even though it has to make use of it, it does not do so by identifying with it. In particular, the violence it has to use in the overthrow of capitalism, which it will have to use with great determination, is necessarily a conscious and organised violence and must always be preceded by a whole process of growth in consciousness and organisation through the various struggles against exploitation.[24] As in the students’ movement in 2006, the bourgeoisie has tried on numerous occasions to lead the Indignants movement (especially in Spain) into the trap of violent confrontations with the police in conditions of dispersion and weakness, in order to discredit the movement and facilitate its isolation. These traps have been avoided and an active debate on the question of violence has begun to emerge.[25]

Weaknesses and confusions of the struggle

The last thing we want to do is glorify these movements. Nothing is more alien to the Marxist method than to make a certain struggle, however important and rich in lessons it is, into a definitive, finished and monolithic model that must be followed to the letter. We are perfectly aware of the weaknesses and problems of these movements.

The presence of a “democratic wing

This strives for the realisation of a “real democracy”. It is represented by various currents, including some of the right as in Greece. It is clear that the media and politicians support this wing in order to try and get the whole movement to identify with it.

Revolutionaries must vigorously struggle against all the mystifications, false measures and false arguments of this trend. But why is there still such a strong tendency to be seduced by the siren songs of democracy after so many years of lies, traps and deceptions? We can point to three reasons. The first is the weight of non-proletarian social layers who are very open to such democratic and inter-classist mystifications. The second is the strength of confusions and democratic illusions still very present in the working class itself, especially among young people who have not yet been able to develop a political experience. Finally, the third is the weight of what we call the social and ideological decomposition of capitalism, that encourages the tendency to seek refuge in an entity that is “above classes and class conflicts” – that is to say the state, which will allegedly bring some order, justice and mediation.

But there is a deeper cause, to which it is necessary to draw attention. In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx states that “proletarian revolutions constantly retreat faced with the enormity of their own aims”. Today, events underscore the bankruptcy of capitalism, the need to destroy it and to build a new society. For a proletariat that doubts its own capacities, that has not yet recovered its identity, this creates and will continue to create for some time the tendency to cling to false hopes, to false measures for “reforms” and “democratisation”, even while doubting them. All this undoubtedly gives the bourgeoisie a margin of manoeuvre that allows it to sow division and demoralisation and, consequently, to make it even more difficult for the proletariat to recover its self-confidence and class identity.

The poison of apoliticism

This is an old weakness which has weighed on the proletariat since 1968 and has its origin in the huge disappointment and profound scepticism provoked by the Stalinist and social democratic counter-revolution, which caused a tendency to believe that all political opposition, including that which claims to be proletarian, is nothing but a vile lie, containing within it the worm of treachery and oppression. This has widely benefited the forces of the bourgeoisie which, hiding their real identity and under the fiction of intervening “as free citizens”, work within the movement to take control of the assemblies and sabotage them from within. The comrades of the TPTG show this clearly: “In the beginning there was a communal spirit in the first efforts at self-organizing the occupation of the square and officially political parties were not tolerated. However, the leftists and especially those coming from SYRIZA (Coalition of Radical Left) got quickly involved in the Syntagma assembly and took over important positions in the groups that were formed in order to run the occupation of Syntagma square, and, more specifically, in the group for “secretarial support” and the one responsible for “communication”. These two groups are the most important ones because they organize the agenda of the assemblies as well as the flow of the discussion. It must be noted that these people do not openly declare their political allegiance and appear as ‘individuals’.”[26]

The danger of nationalism

This is very present in Greece and Israel. As the comrades of the TPTG denounced, “Nationalism (mostly in a populist form) is dominant, favoured both by the various extreme right wing cliques as well as by left parties and leftists. Even for a lot of proletarians or petty-bourgeois hit by the crisis who are not affiliated with political parties, national identity appears as a last imaginary refuge when everything else is rapidly crumbling. Behind the slogans against the ‘foreign, sell out government’ or for the ‘Salvation of the country’, ‘National sovereignty’ and a ‘New Constitution” lies a deep feeling of fear and alienation to which the ‘national community’ appears as a magical unifying solution.[27]

This reflection by the comrades is as accurate as it is profound. The loss of identity and confidence of the proletariat in its own strength, the slow process through which the struggle in the rest of the world is going, encourages the tendency to “cling on to the national community”, as a utopian refuge faced with a hostile world full of uncertainties.

So for example, the consequences of the cuts in health and education, the real problems created by the weakening of these services, are used to confine the struggles behind nationalist barriers by demanding a “good education” (because it will make us more competitive on the world market), and a “health service for all citizens”.

The fear and difficulty of taking up class confrontations

The frightening threat of unemployment, massive casualisation, the growing fragmentation of employees – divided, in the same workplaces, into an inextricable web of subcontractors and an incredible variety of different terms of employment – have a powerfully intimidating effect and make it more difficult for workers to come together for the struggle. This situation cannot be overcome either through voluntarist calls for mobilization or by admonishing the workers for their alleged “cowardice” or “servility”.

Thus, the step towards the mass mobilization of the unemployed, casual workers, places of work and study, is made much more difficult that it might seem at first sight, causing in turn a hesitation, a doubt and a tendency to cling to “assemblies” which every day are becoming more minoritarian “and whose “unity” favours only the forces of the bourgeoisie who work within them. This gives the bourgeoisie a margin of manoeuvre to prepare its dirty tricks intended to sabotage the general assemblies. And this is precisely what the comrades of the TPTG denounced: The manipulation of the main assembly in Syntagma square (there are several others in various neighbourhoods of Athens and cities in Greece) by “incognito” members of left parties and organizations is evident and really obstructive in a class direction of the movement. However, due to the deep legitimization crisis of the political system of representation in general they, too, have to hide their political identity and keep a balance between a general, abstract talk about “self-determination”, “direct democracy”, “collective action”, “anti-racism”, “social change” etc on the one hand and extreme nationalism, thug-like behaviour of some extreme-right wing individuals participating in groups in the square on the other hand, and all this in a not so successful way.[28]

Looking to the future with confidence

While it is clear that for humanity to survive, capitalism must die”,[29] the proletariat is still very far from having the capacity to execute this sentence. The movement of the Indignants has laid the foundation stone.

In the series mentioned above, we said: “one of the reasons why the revolutionaries where unable to be successful in previous revolutions was that they underestimated the forces of the ruling class, especially its political intelligence.”[30] This capacity of the bourgeoisie to use its political intelligence against the struggles is today stronger than ever! So for example, the Indignants movements in three countries were completely blacked out, except when they were given the veneer of “democratic regeneration”. Likewise, the British bourgeoisie was able to take advantage of the discontent to channel it into a nihilistic revolt that served as a pretext to strengthen repression and intimidate any response from the class.[31]The movements of the Indignant have laid a first stone, in the sense that they have taken the first steps for the proletariat to recover its self-confidence and its class identity, but this is still a long way off because it requires the development of mass struggles on a directly proletarian terrain, which will show that, faced with the bankruptcy of capitalism, the working class is capable of offering a revolutionary alternative to the non-exploiting social layers.

We do not know how this goal will be achieved and we must remain vigilant to the capabilities and initiatives of the masses, like that of 15th May in Spain. What we do know is that the international extension of the struggle will be a key factor in this direction.

The three movements have planted the seed of an internationalist consciousness: when the movement of the Indignants arose in Spain, it said its inspiration was Tahrir Square in Egypt;[32] it sought an international extension of the struggle, although this would be done in the utmost confusion. For their part, the movements in Israel and Greece explicitly stated they were following the example of the Indignants of Spain. Protesters in Israel displayed placards saying, "Mubarak, Assad, Netanyahu: all the same!", which shows not only an awareness of who the enemy is but also at least an embryonic understanding that their struggle is waged with the exploited of these countries and not against them in the framework of national defence.[33] “In Jaffa, dozens of Arab and Jewish protesters carried signs in Hebrew and Arabic reading ‘Arabs and Jews want affordable housing,’ and ‘Jaffa doesn’t want bids for the rich only.’ […] there have been ongoing protests of both Jews and Arabs against evictions of the latter from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. In Tel Aviv, contacts were made with residents of refugee camps in the occupied territories, who visited the tent cities and engaged in discussions with the protesters.[34] The movements in Egypt and Tunisia, like that in Israel, change the face of the situation in a part of the world that is probably the main focus of imperialist confrontations on the planet. As our article says, “The present international wave of revolts against capitalist austerity is opening the door to another solution altogether: the solidarity of all the exploited across religious or national divisions; class struggle in all countries with the ultimate goal of a world wide revolution which will be the negation of national borders and states. A year or two ago such a perspective would have seemed completely utopian to most. Today, increasing numbers are seeing global revolution as a realistic alternative to the collapsing order of global capital.[35]

The three movements have contributed to the crystallization of a proletarian wing: in both Greece and Spain but also in Israel,[36] a "proletarian wing" is emerging, in search of self-organization, uncompromising struggle for class positions and a fight for the destruction of capitalism. The problems but equally the potentialities and the perspectives of this large minority cannot be addressed in the context of this article. What is certain is that this is a vital weapon that the proletariat has given life to in order to prepare its future battles.

C. Mir, 23-9-2011.

 


[1]. See en.internationalism.org/ir/146/editorial-protests-in-spain. Given that this article analysed this experience in depth we will not repeat what we said here.

[3]. “Communist revolution or the destruction of humanity”, Manifesto of the 9th ICC Congress, 1991.

[4]. International Review n°s. 103 and 104.

[5]. For discussion of this crucial concept of the decadence of capitalism, see amongst others https://en.internationalism.org/ir/146/great-depression.

[6]. “Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism”, International Review n° 103.

[7]. International Review n°104, op. cit.

[10]. “Since it has no economic basis within capitalism, its only real strength apart from its numbers and organisation, is its ability to become clearly aware of its nature, of its struggle’s ends and means” (International Review n° 103, op. cit.)

[11]. “Nationalisations, and a certain number of “social measures” (such as the state’s taking charge of the health system), were all completely capitalist measures. […] The capitalists had every interest in the good health of the workforce […] But these capitalist measures were presented as ‘workers’ victories’” (International Review n° 104, op. cit.).

 

[12]. We cannot deal here with why the working class is the revolutionary class of society and why its struggle represents the future for all other non-exploiting strata, a burning question as we have seen in the movement of the Indignants. The reader can find more material on this question in two articles published in International Review n°s. 73 and 74, “Who can change the world?: the proletariat is still the revolutionary class”.

[13]. See the “Theses on Decomposition”, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition.

[14]. See the articles that analysed this development of the class struggle in the International Review.

[16]. The bourgeoisie is careful to hide these events: the nihilist riots in November 2005 in France are much better known, including in the politicised milieu, than the conscious movement of students five months later.

[17]. Indignation is neither resignation nor hate. Faced with the insupportable dynamic of capitalism, resignation expresses passivity, a tendency to reject it without seeing how to confront it. Hate, on the other hand, expresses an active sentiment since rejection is turned into a struggle, but it is a blind struggle, without the perspective or reflection to elaborate an alternative, it is purely destructive, a collection of individual responses but without generating anything collective. Indignation expresses the active transformation of rejection with the effort to struggle consciously, seeking the development of a collective and constructive alternative.

[18] See “Resolution on the international situation”, International Review n° 130.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. “Israel protests...”, op. cit.

[23]. “Preliminary notes...”, op. cit.

[25]. See ¿Qué hay detrás de la campaña contra los violentos por los incidentes de Barcelona?, https://es.internationalism.org/node/3130.

[26]. “Preliminary notes…”, op. cit.

[27]. Ibid.

[28]. Ibid.

[29]. Slogan of the Third International.

[30]. International Review n° 104, op. cit.

[32]. The "Plaza de Cataluña" was renamed “Tahrir Square” by the assembly, which not only showed an internationalist commitment but was also a slap in the face for Catalan nationalism, which considers this place as its crown jewel.

[33]. See “Israel protests…”, op. cit.: “A demonstrator interviewed on the RT news network was asked whether the protests had been inspired by events in Arab countries. He replied, “There is a lot of influence of what happened in Tahrir Square… There’s a lot of influence of course. That’s when people understand that they have the power, that they can organise by themselves, they don’t need any more the government to tell them what to do, they can start telling the government what they want”.

[34]. Ibid.

[35]. Ibid.

[36]. In this movement, “Some have openly warned of the danger that the government could provoke military clashes or even a new war to restore ‘national unity’ and split the protest movement” (ibid.), which at least implicitly reveals a distancing from the Israeli state of national unity in the service of the war economy and of war.

 

 

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Contribution to a history of the workers' movement in Africa (part 3): The 1920s & 30s

1923: “The Bordeaux Agreement” or “class collaboration” pact

It was in this year that that “the Bordeaux Agreement” was signed; a “treaty of friendship” between the colonial economic interests[1] and Blaise Diagne, the first African deputy to sit in the French National Assembly. Having drawn lessons from the magnificent insurrectionary strike in Dakar in May 1914 and its repercussions in subsequent years,[2] the French bourgeoisie had to reorganise its political apparatus to deal with the inexorable rise of the young proletariat in its African colony. It was in this context that it decided to use Blaise Diagne, making him “mediator/peacemaker” in conflicts between the classes, in fact a counter-revolutionary role. Indeed, the day after his election as deputy and having been a major witness to the insurrectionary movement against the colonial power, in which he himself had been involved at the beginning, Diagne was now faced with three options to play a historic role in future events: 1) to profit from the political weakening of the colonial bourgeoisie in the aftermath of the general strike, in which it suffered a defeat, by triggering a “national liberation struggle”; 2) to fight for the communist program by raising the banner of proletarian struggle inside the colony, profiting in particular from the success of the strike; 3) to bolster his own personal political interests by allying himself with the French bourgeoisie which  at this time was holding out its hand to him.

Diagne eventually chose the last course, namely an alliance with the colonial power. In reality, the “Bordeaux Agreement” showed that the French bourgeoisie was not only afraid of working class militancy in its African colony, but was equally concerned by the international revolutionary situation.

“...Given the turn of events, the colonial government set about winning the black deputy’s support so that his powers of persuasion and his foolhardy courage could be used to serve the colonial power and its commercial interests. This way it would be able to pull the rug from under the feet of the African elite whose minds were running way with them when, at the time, the October Revolution (1917), the Pan-black movements and the threat of world communism were having a dangerously seductive affect in the colonies on the thinking of the colonised.

“[...] Such was the real meaning of the agreement signed in Bordeaux on June 12th, 1923. It marked the end of the combative and headstrong Diagnism and opened up a new era of collaboration between the colonisers and colonised, and left the deputy stripped of all his charisma that up to this point was his major political asset. A great impetus had been lost.[3]

The first black member of the African colony remains faithful to French capital until his death

To better understand the meaning of this agreement between the colonial bourgeoisie and the young deputy, let’s retrace the path of the latter. Blaise Diagne was noticed very early on by the representatives of French capital, who saw him playing a future role in their political strategy and steered him in this direction. Indeed, Diagne had a strong influence on urban youth through the Young Senegalese Party that supported his campaign. With the support of youth, especially educated and intellectual youth, he entered the electoral arena in April 1914 and secured the single post of deputy with responsibility for the whole of French West Africa (FWA). Let’s recall that we were on the eve of massive imperialist slaughter and it was in these circumstances that the famous general strike broke out in May 1914 when, after mobilising the youth of Dakar with the prospect of mounting a formidable revolt, Diagne tried unsuccessfully to stop it, not wanting to jeopardise his interests as a young petit-bourgeois deputy.

In fact, once elected, he was responsible for ensuring the interests of big business on the one hand and enforcing the “laws of the Republic” on the other. Even before the Bordeaux Agreement was signed, Diagne had distinguished himself by successfully recruiting 72,000 “Senegalese Sharpshooters” for the global butchery of 1914-1918. It was for this reason that, in January 1918, he was appointed Commissioner of the Republic by the then French prime minister Georges Clemenceau. Given the reluctance of young people and their parents to be enrolled, he toured the African villages of FWA to persuade reluctant individuals and, by the use of propaganda and intimidation, managed to recruit tens of thousands of African young men to be sent off to their deaths.

He was also a strong advocate of that abominable “forced labour” in the French colonies, as indicated by his speech at the fourteenth session of the International Labour Office in Geneva[4].

All in all, the first black member of the African colony was never a real supporter of the workers’ cause; on the contrary, ultimately he was just a counter-revolutionary opportunist. Furthermore the working class would soon come to realise it: “...as if the Bordeaux Agreement had convinced the workers that the working class was now able to lead the march itself in the fight against economic injustice and for social and political equality, the trade union struggles were given, like a pendulum swing, an exceptional boost.”[5] Clearly, Diagne could not long keep the trust of the working class, and he remained faithful to his colonial sponsors until his death in 1934.

1925: a year of heightened militancy and solidarity faced with police repression

The year of 1925 was shaken by three great social conflicts all of which had important consequences and all of which were indeed on the railways. First there was a strike of indigenous and European railwaymen in Dakar - Saint-Louis, from January 23rd to 27th, for economic demands; next, shortly afterwards, there was the threat of a general strike in Thies-Kayes, planned around specific demands including trade union rights; and finally, there was the workers' revolt in Bambara, on the railway construction site at Ginguinéo, a revolt where soldiers were called in to suppress it and refused to do so.”[6]

And yet the time was not particularly favourable for entering into struggle because to discourage working class militancy the colonial authorities had adopted a series of extremely repressive measures.

During 1925, on the recommendations of the Governors General, particularly the one of FWA, some draconian measures were imposed by the Department for the Colonies specifically making revolutionary propaganda illegal.

In Senegal, new instructions from the Federation (the two French colonies, FWA, FEA) had led to increased surveillance across the whole territory. And in each of the colonies of the group, a special service was established in conjunction with the General Security Service, to centralise in Dakar, and examine, all the evidence from the listening posts.

“[...] A new emigration regime with new arrangements for identifying natives was drawn up in the Ministry in December 1925. Every foreigner and every suspect had a file thereafter; the foreign press was under strict control, and it was commonplace for newspapers to be shut down [...] The mail was systematically violated, shipments of papersopened and often destroyed.”[7]

Once again, the colonial power trembled at the announcement of a new outbreak of working class struggle, hence its decision to establish a police state to take tight control of civil life and contain any social unrest arising in the colony, but also, and above all, to avoid contact between the workers in struggle in the colonies and their class brothers around the world; hence the draconian measures against “revolutionary propaganda”. And yet, in this context, important workers' struggles could violently erupt, despite all the repressive arsenal wielded by the colonial state.

A highly political railway strike

On January 24th 1925, European and African railway workers came out on strike together, establishing a strike committee and raising the following demands: “The employees of the Dakar - Saint-Louis railway unanimously agreed to halt the traffic on January 24th. They only took this action after much consideration and after feeling genuinely aggrieved. They had had no wage increase since 1921, despite the steady increase in the cost of living in the colony. Most of the Europeans were getting less than 1,000 francs in their monthly salary and a native got a daily wage of 5 francs. They were after higher wages to be able to live decent lives.”[8]

Indeed, the very next day, all employees in the various sectors of the railway left their machines, their workshops and offices, paralysing the railway for a short time. But this movement was above all highly political in nature in that it came right in the middle of a legislative campaign, forcing the parties and their candidates to take a clear position on the demands of the strikers. As a result, from that moment, the various politicians and commercial lobbies called on the colonial administration to get them back to work immediately by meeting the employees’ demands. And right away, on the second day of the strike, the railway workers’ demands were met in full. In fact, the members of the jubilant strike committee delayed their response until after consulting the rank and file. Similarly, the strikers insisted on having the order to return to work from their delegates in writing and sent by special train to all the stations.

The workers had once again won an important victory in the struggle, showing great maturity and determination, along with adaptability and realism. [...] This success is all the more significant from the fact that all workers of the network, European and native, who had been at loggerheads over issues of colour and had problems working together, had wisely set aside their differences as soon as the threat of the draconian labour laws was on the horizon. [...] The governor himself could not help but notice the maturity and the unity and the timing of the strike’s organisation. The preparation, he wrote, had been very cleverly carried out. The mayor of Dakar himself, experienced and loved by the indigenous people, had not been notified of their participation. The timing of the deal was chosen so that commerce, to safeguard its own interests, supported the claims. The reasons given, with some justification, put the campaign in big trouble. In short, he concluded, everything came together for it to have its maximum effect and to give it the support of public opinion.[9]

This is a vivid illustration of the high level of militancy and class-consciousness shown by the working class of the French colony, where European and African workers collectively took charge of organising their victorious struggle. Here we have a brilliant lesson in class solidarity consolidating gains from all previous experiences of confrontation with the bourgeoisie. And this makes even clearer the international character of the workers’ struggles at that time, despite the continual efforts of the bourgeoisie to “divide and rule”.

In February 1925, the strike of the telegraph office workers forces the authorities to back down after 24 hours

The movement of railwaymen had hardly finished when the telegraph office workers (‘câblistes’) went on strike, also raising many demands including a big wage increase and an improvement to their status. This movement came to an end after 24 hours for a good reason: “With the collaboration of the local and metropolitan powers, thanks to the successful intervention from members of the elected bodies, complete order returned within 24 hours, because satisfaction was given in a partial settlement to the câblistes, as conceded in the granting of an standby allowance to all staff.”[10]

So, buoyed by this success, the telegraph workers (European and indigenous together) put the rest of their demands on the table, threatening to go out on strike immediately. They took advantage of the strategic position they occupied as highly skilled technicians in the administrative and economic machinery who were clearly able to shut down communication networks across the territory. For their part, faced with the demands of the telegraph employees threatening a new strike, the bourgeoisie’s representatives decided to retaliate with a campaign of intimidation and accusation against the strikers: “How is it that the few functionaries who are agitating for an increase in pay can’t see they are digging their own grave?[11]

In fact, political power and big business piled a great deal of pressure on the strikers, going as far as accusing them of trying to “deliberately destroy the economy” while also trying to undermine the their unity. With the pressure intensifying, the workers decided to resume work on the basis of demands met at the end of the previous strike.

This episode was also one of the high points in the struggle when the unity between the European and African workers was fully achieved.

Rebellion in the Thies-Kayes railway yards, December 11th 1925

A rebellion broke out on this line when a group of about a hundred workers decided to cross swords with their boss, a captain of the colonial army. A cynical and authoritarian figure, he was accustomed to being obeyed without question and inflicted physical harm on workers he deemed “lazy”.

According to the investigation that had been carried out by the Administrator Aujas, commander of the Kaolack area, it appeared that a rebellion had broken out on December 11th because of “ill treatment” inflicted on these workers. The area commander added that, without admitting these statements entirely, captain Heurtematte acknowledged that he sometimes happened to hit a lazy and uncooperative labourer with a whip. [The incident] escalated after the captain had tied three Bambaras [an ethnic term], whom he took to be the main culprits, to stakes with ropes.[12]

And things went wrong for the captain when he began to whip the three workers because their comrades in the yard decided to put an end to their torturer for good. He was only saved in the nick of time by the arrival on site of soldiers called to his aid. “The soldiers in question were French subjects from eastern Senegal and from Thies; having arrived there and heard what had happened, they unanimously refused the order to fire on the black workers. The poor captain said he had issued it as he feared for his life, assailed on all sides by a ferocious and menacing crowd.”[13]

This is quite remarkable because until now we were quite used to seeing the “sharpshooters” as submissive individuals, obediently accepting roles as “blacklegs” or outright “liquidators” of strikers. This gesture of fraternisation reminds us of other historical episodes where conscripts refused to use force against strikes or revolutions. The most famous example is of course the episode in the Russian Revolution where a large number of soldiers refused to fire on their revolutionary brothers, disobeying the orders from above despite the high risks involved.

The attitude of the “sharpshooters” against their captain was all the more heart-warming since the conditions of the time were dominated by a strong tendency towards the militarisation of social and economic life in the colony. Moreover, the affair took a highly political turn because the civil and military administration found itself very embarrassed by having to choose between punishing the soldiers’ insubordination and risk strengthening their solidarity with the workers, or playing the incident down. Eventually the Colonial authority chose the latter.

But the affair strongly hit the headlines and threatened to create complications in interracial relations that were already a concern in a service like the railways, so the federal authorities, and local too, finally agreed on the need to smooth over the incident and to play it down, having already come to realise the disastrous consequences of the policy favouring racial collaboration introduced by Diagne in signing the Bordeaux Agreement which was already costing them dear.”[14]

Indeed, like its predecessors, this phase of struggle clearly exposed the limitations of the “Bordeaux Agreement” by which the deputy Blaise Diagne thought he had secured “collaboration” between the exploiters and exploited. But unfortunately for the colonial bourgeoisie, class-consciousness had been there.

The militant sailors’ strike in 1926

Like the previous year, 1926 was marked by an episode of struggle that was both very militant and very rich in terms of combativeness and class solidarity. This was all the more remarkable as the movement was launched in the same conditions of repression of social struggles, which in the previous year had seen a number of shipyards and other sectors continuously occupied by the forces of the police and gendarmerie in the name of “safeguarding” the economy.

While the attacks on the railways continued inexorably[15] and the agitation spread to the sectors more attached to order and discipline of the ex-servicemen, the workers of the African Freight Co. of Saint-Louis launched a strike action, which would hold the record for the longest duration of all the social movements studied in this locality.

It all started on September 29th when a telegram from the Lieutenant Governor informed the Head of the Maritime Federation that sailors of the African Freight Company in St. Louis had gone on strike for improved wages. In a real spirit of almost spontaneous solidarity, their colleagues in the Maison Peyrissac employed on the Steamship Cadenelle, then anchored in Saint- Louis, although not directly involved in the demands being pursued, also stopped work on October 1st.[16]

Driven by frighteningly high rises in living costs, many sectors put forward wage demands with the threat of going on strike, and a large number of companies had agreed to give their employees wage increases. This was not the case for workers of the Freight Company, however, and this led them to take action with the support of their comrades on the steamship. Despite this, the bosses remained unmoved and refused any negotiations with the strikers until the fifth day of the strike, letting the action continue in the hope that it would quickly exhaust itself.

But the movement retained the cohesion and solidarity of the first few days and on October 6th the management of the Freight Co., beset on all sides by commercial interests and secretly encouraged by the Administration to be more flexible, saw the danger in the situation and gave in suddenly. It made the following offer to the crews: ‘a monthly increase of 50 francs (regardless of category) and food for sustenance (around 41 francs per month)’. [...] But the workers involved, wanting to show active solidarity with their colleagues at Maison Peyrissac, asked for and won the same benefits to be given to them. The management at this company gave in. On October 6th, the strike ended. The movement had lasted eight full days, during which time the unity of workers stayed solid throughout. This had been an event of great importance.”[17]

Once again we are witnessing a formidable movement, providing clear insights into the vitality of the struggles of this time. In other words, the unfolding of the struggle provided the opportunity for a real expression of “active solidarity” (as Thiam says) between workers from different companies. What better example of solidarity than one crew demanding and obtaining the same benefits it had won through its strike for its comrades of another company in “gratitude” for the support received from them!

What to say too about the combativeness and cohesion that the workers of the freight company showed with their solid show of force against the might of capital!

The long and bitter strike of seamen from Saint-Louis in July-August 1928

The announcement of this strike was of great concern to the colonial authorities because it seemed to echo the demands of seamen in France who were preparing to enter the struggle at the same time as their African comrades.

At the Congress of the International Federation of Trade Unions (in the pay of Stalin) held in Paris in August 1927, an appeal was made in defence of the proletariat of the colonies, as related:

An English delegate to the Congress of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU)) in Paris, seizing the occasion... had particularly insisted on the existence in the colonies of millions of men subjected to unbridled exploitation, proletarians in the fullest sense, who now needed to become organised and engaged in trade union type actions, pressing for their demands in particular by using the weapon of protests and strikes. Echoing this, Koyaté (an African syndicalist) said himself that ‘the right to organise has the power to resist in French Black Africa through mass strikes, in illegality’”.[18]

In France unrest had been growing since June 1928 among seamen who were demanding a wage increase and were thus expected to strike on July 14th. But on the set date, it was the native seamen of the shipping companies in Saint-Louis who went on strike en masse, with the same demands as their comrades back in the home country. The reaction of the colonial authorities was to cry “international conspiracy” and point, among others, to two native union leaders as the “ring leaders” of the movement. And to deal with it, the Administration of the colony made a common front with the employers by combining political manoeuvres and repressive measures to break the strike.

“...Then the hard bargaining began. While the sailors were prepared to see their wage claim reduced by up to 25 francs, the bosses said it was impossible to award them more than 100 francs per month. As the workers (seeking 250 francs more), considered the offer inadequate, the strike continued unabated. “[19]

The strikers of the St. Louis region found immediate support from other seamen:

“(State Archives) The head of the maritime Register tells us, in effect, that in the afternoon of the 19th, the ‘Cayor’ tugboat came from Dakar and arrived with the barge ‘Forez’. The boat had hardly anchored when the crew made common cause with the strikers with the exception of an old boatswain and another sailor. But he tells us that the next morning on July 20th, the strikers stormed aboard the ‘Cayor’ and forcibly dragged the two sailors who remained at their posts ashore. A brief demonstration outside the town hall was dispersed by police.”[20]

The strike lasted more than a month before being broken militarily by the colonial Governor who used force to remove the native crews and replaced them with troops. Exhausted by the long weeks of struggle, deprived of the necessary financial resources to support their families, in short to avoid starving, the sailors had to return to work; hence the smug satisfaction of the local representative of the colonial power who offered his own account of events: “[At the end of the strike] the seamen asked to go back onto the ships of the African Freight Co. They returned to their old conditions, and the strike resulted in the sailors losing one month's salary, whereas, if they had listened to the proposals of the Head of the Maritime Register they would have benefited with an increase in their pay from 50 to 100 francs a month.[21]

This retreat of the strikers, realistic in the circumstances, was regarded by the bourgeoisie as a “victory” that announced the crisis of 1929, whose effects began to be felt locally. From then on, the colonial power was not slow to profit from its “victory” over the striking seamen and from the opportunity to strengthen its repressive forces.

Confronted with this situation, the colonial Governor, aware of the political tensions already brewing from the declarations of Ameth Sow Télémaquem[22] talking about the coming revolution in Senegal, about the succession of social movements and the deteriorating financial situation and popular discontent, adopted two measures to maintain order.

Firstly he had accelerated the process, begun in 1927, aimed at placing control of the Senegal security services in Dakar from where, he said, the surveillance of the colony would be increased. [...] The second measure was to more quickly put in place training for the gendarmerie responsible for policing Thies-Niger.”[23]

This meant: the presence of police assigned to escort duty on trains to “accompany” train crews with “intervention brigades” on all lines, measures aimed at individuals or groups who would be arrested and imprisoned if they defied police orders, while anyone stirring up “social unrest” (strikes and demonstrations) would be severely punished. Let us note that all these means of repression, increasing the militarisation of labour, were targeted principally at the two sectors that were the lungs of the colonial economy, namely the waterways and railways.

But despite all this military control, the working class did not cease to pose a threat to the colonial authorities.

Yet when social unrest continued on sections of the railway in Thies, where strike action was threatened after the non-payment of back pay they were due, with the submission of claims for wage increases and a denunciation of the negligence of an administration that was completely disinterested in their fate, the Governor took these threats very seriously, working to establish, in 1929, a new private police force, this time composed of former military, mostly officers who, under the direction of the Commissioner of the special police, would ensure a permanent peace in the depot at Thies.”[24]

So in this period of acute social tensions related to the terrible world economic crisis, the colonial regime had no alternative but to rely more than ever on its armed forces to put an end to working class combativeness.

The Great Depression and the militarisation of labour weaken workers’ combativeness

As we saw previously, the colonial power did not wait for the arrival of the 1929 crisis to militarise the world of work, because it began to resort to the army in 1925 faced with the pugnacity of the working class. But this situation, with both the deepening global economic crisis and the militarisation of labour, must have weighed heavily on the working class of the colony because, between 1930 and 1935, there were few struggles. In fact the only important class movement that we know of was that of the workers in the port of Kaolack:

A short and violent strike in Kaolack on May 1st 1930: between 1500 and 2000 workers from peanut farms and from the port stopped work while loading the boats. They asked for the doubling of their wages of 7.50 francs. The police intervened and a striker was slightly injured. Work resumed at 1400 hours: the workers had won a wage of 10 francs a day. [25]

This short yet vigorous strike brought to a close the series of dazzling struggles since 1914. In other words, 15 years of class confrontations after which the proletariat of the colony of French West Africa was able to stand up to its enemy and to build its identity as an autonomous class.

For its part, in the same period, the bourgeoisie showed its real nature as a bloodthirsty class by using every means at its disposal, including the most ferocious, to attempt to put an end to working class combativeness. But in the end it still had to regularly back down faced with the onslaughts of the working class, often giving in completely to the strikers’ demands.

1936/1938: important workers' struggles under the Popular Front government

In the wake of the arrival of the Popular Front government of Leon Blum, there was a fresh explosion of working class combativeness with the outbreak of numerous strikes. Hence, there were no fewer than 42 “wildcat strikes” in Senegal between 1936 and 1938, including that of September 1938, which we will deal with below. This fact is especially significant as the unions had just been legalised, given “new rights”, by the Popular Front government, and therefore benefited from its legitimacy.

These struggles were often victorious. For example the one in 1937 when seamen of European origin on a French ship stopping over in the Ivory Coast, having become concerned by the miserable living conditions of the indigenous sailors (the Kroumen), encouraged the latter to demand better working conditions. But the native workers were evicted using military force by the colonial administrator, which straight away led to the French crew going out on strike in support of their African comrades to force the authorities to meet the demands of the strikers in full.

Here yet again is an act of workers’ solidarity that can be added to the many episodes cited above where unity and solidarity between Europeans and Africans was the source of many of the victorious struggles, despite their “racial differences”.

1938: the railway strike arouses the hatred of the whole bourgeoisie against the workers

Another highly significant movement in terms of class confrontation was the strike of the railworkers in 1938, carried out by workers on short-term contracts whose demands had been “neglected” by the unions. In the case of the day labourers or auxiliaries, the more numerous and impoverished of railwaymen, they were paid daily, worked Sundays and public holidays, covered sick days, and worked a 54 hour week without any of the entitlements of the tenured staff, all of this with no guaranteed work on the next day.

It was these railwaymen who carried out the famous strike of 1938.

The strike movement had moreover broken out spontaneously and outside the unions. On September 27th, the auxiliary railworkers (not the tenured staff) of Dakar-Niger went on strike in Thies and Dakar to protest against the arbitrary removal of one of their comrades.

The next day, in the depot at Thies, the strikers organised a blockade to prevent the ‘blacklegs’ coming to work. The Dakar-Niger police tried to intervene, but were quickly overwhelmed, and the management of the railway appealed to the administrator who sent in the troops: the strikers defended themselves throwing stones, the army returned fire. There were six dead and thirty wounded. The next day (29th) there was a general strike across the network. On Thursday, 30th, an agreement was signed between the workers' delegates and the whole government on the following basis:

1) No sanctions, 2) No interference with the right of association, 3) Compensation for the victims' families, 4) An investigation into the demands.

On October 1st, the union gave the order to return to work.[26]

Here we see again a dramatic and heroic struggle waged by the railwaymen, outside the union’s instructions, which made the colonial power back down, and this despite its resort to a blood-letting, using the army, as indicated by the number of deaths and injuries, not to mention the dozens of workers thrown in jail. To better gauge the barbaric nature of the repression, here is the testimony of a workman painter, one of the survivors of this carnage:

When we learned of the assignment to Gossas of Cheikh Diack, a violent unease spread among the workers’ circles, especially the auxiliaries for whom he was the spokesman. We decided to oppose it by striking the next day when our boss was back at his post. I woke up that day, a Tuesday - I will always remember - I heard gunshots. I lived near the city Ballabey. A few moments later I saw my brother Domingo rush off to the Depot. I rushed after him, aware of the danger he faced. Soon I saw him crossing the railway line and then falling down a few yards further on. When I got near him, I thought he must have been struck by an illness because there was no obvious injury; when I raised him up, he was groaning. Blood flowed from a wound near his left shoulder. He died moments later in my arms. Drunk with rage, I rushed at the soldier in front of me. He fired at me. I advanced not realising I was hurt. I think it was the anger brewing inside me that gave me the strength to reach out and snatch his gun, his belt, his cap, then I knocked him out before falling unconscious.[27]

This story illustrates the ferocity of the Senegalese sharpshooters towards the 'native' workers, ignoring the example shown by their colleagues who refused to fire on workers during the rebellion at the workshop at Thies in 1925. The striking workers showed a tremendous fighting spirit and admirable courage in defending their own interests and their dignity as members of the exploited class.

It’s important to point out here that before going out on strike, the workers were harassed by all the forces of the bourgeoisie, parties and various leaders, employers and trade unions. All of these representatives of capitalist order hurled insults at and intimidated the workers who dared to go on strike without the “blessing” of anyone but themselves, and indeed wild and hysterical Muslim religious leaders were unleashed on the strikers, at the request of the Governor, as recalled by Nicole Bernard-Duquenet:

He (the governor) also appealed to religious leaders and community elders; Nourou Seydou Tall, who had often acted as an emissary of the Governor-General, spoke in Thies (before the striking workers), Cheikh Amadou Moustapha Mbacke went round the network explaining that a good Muslim should not go on strike because it is a form of rebellion.[28]

For once we can quite agree with this cynical cleric and say that a strike really is an act of rebellion not only against exploitation and oppression, but also against religious obscurantism.

As for the unions, which didn’t lead the struggle of the railwaymen, they still had to join the “bandwagon” so as not lose complete control of the movement. And here their state of mind is described by the strikers’ delegate: “We asked for an increase of 1.50 francs per day for the most recent starters with up to 5 years service, 2.50 francs for those with 5 to 10 years, and 3.50 francs over 10 years, along with a travel allowance for the conductors, escorts, mechanics etc. [...] Incredible as it may seem, such claims were favourably received by the management of the network, but by contrast were undermined by the Union of Indigenous Workers of Dakar-Niger, which represented the more senior staff. Indeed, it couldn’t resign itself to seeing us win this first round. Its leaders were eager to have exclusive rights to the negotiations with the authorities of the network. The union situation at the time led to rivalries, obscure internecine struggles and competition for loyalty to the employers, which largely explains this position. As a result I was transferred to Dakar. Those in high places were naïve to believe that this action could stifle the protest movement that had arisen amongst the ‘lowest paid’”.[29]

Again we see a clear demonstration of the betrayal of the workers' interests and the role played by the unions as “social peacemakers” on behalf of capital and the bourgeois state. Nicole Bernard-Duquenet sums it up:

It is therefore almost certain that the secretaries of the unions have done everything to stop the threat of a strike that could cause trouble for the authorities.

But in addition to the military and police forces, trade unions, employers and religious organisations, it was above all the press (of both right and left) that preyed like a hungry vulture on the strikers:

The ‘Courrier colonial’ (employers’ paper): ‘In the home country we have long condemned the disastrous consequences of strikes, constantly provoked by the slogans of agitators, mostly foreigners or in the pay of foreigners, so that the colonial governments rush to combat energetically every vague impulse to transform our colonies into spheres of strike activity’;

’L’Action francaise’ (right wing paper):’Thus, while those marxists responsible for the rioting are clearly left alone, the Minister of Colonies is considering using sanctions against the Senegalese soldiers (and not against the strikers). And all this to please the socialists and save their creature, Governor General De Coppet, who is acting in a scandalous manner.’[30]

Here we have an insight into the attitude of the media vultures of the right. Yet the approach of the left wing press was hardly less scathing:

Newspapers supporting the Popular Front are very bitter. The FWA blames the strike on agents provocateurs, a ‘pointless strike’ [...] The ‘Periscope Africain’ speaks of a strike ‘bordering on rebellion’ where no striker was a member of the indigenous union. The Bulletin of the Federation of civil servants condemns the use of bullets to disperse the strikers, interprets the strike as a riot, and says the auxiliaries are neither in the CGT or communists. They are not even union supporters. ‘It’s all the Fascists’ fault.’

Le Populaire (SFIO) blames the incidents on a ‘local right-wing party violently opposed to the CGT and to fascist intrigues of certain unionists (a reference to the strikers' spokesman)’.”[31]

And to characterize all these vile anti-working class reactions, let’s listen to the conclusions of the historian Iba Der Thiam when he says this:

As we see it, the events that occurred in Thies were seen on the left and on the right, as the extension of French internal politics, that is to say, a struggle between democrats and fascists in the absence of any concrete and plausible social motivation.

It is this erroneous assessment, which would explain in large measure why the railway strike in Thies has never been adequately taken up by French unions, even the most advanced.

“[...] The recriminations of FWA and Periscope Africain, against the strikers, are similar in many respects to the articles of Le Populaire and L’Humanite “.[32]

In other words, the press of the right and left has a similar attitude to the strike movement of the railwaymen. We see it all in that last paragraph; we see there the unanimity of the forces of the bourgeoisie, national and colonial, against the working class in its struggle against poverty and for dignity. These heinous reactions of the left press against striking workers confirm more than anything the final enrolling of the “Communist Party” into the ranks French capital, knowing that this was already the case with the “Socialist Party” since 1914. In addition, we should recall that this anti-working class conduct was taking place in the context of the military preparations of the Second World War, during which the French left played a key role in enlisting the proletariat in the French homeland as in the African colonies.

Lassou (to be continued), November 2011.

 


[1]. This refers to the big businesses dominated by Bordeaux merchants like Maurel & Prom, Peyrissac, Chavanel, Vezia, Deves, etc., a group with the monopoly of credit from the sole Bank of West Africa.

[2]. A general strike and a riot over five days spread throughout the Dakar region, totally paralysing economic and political life and forcing the colonial bourgeoisie to give in to strikers' demands (see International Review n° 146).

[3]. Iba Der Thiam, History of the African Trade Union Movement 1790-1929, Editions L'Harmattan, 1991.

[4]. See Black Africa, the Colonial Era 1900-1945, Jean Suret-Canale, Editions Sociales, Paris 1961.

[5]. Thiam, ibid. It’s worth recalling here what we said at the time of the publication of the first part of this article in International Review n° 145: “…if we largely recognise the seriousness of the researchers who provide these reference sources, we do not necessarily share some of their interpretations of historic events. It’s the same for certain ideas, for example when they talk about ‘union consciousness’ instead of ‘class consciousness’ (of workers), or again ‘union movement’ (instead of workers’ movement). Otherwise, up to another order, we have confidence in their scientific rigour as long as their theses don’t come up against historical facts and don’t prevent other interpretations.” [NB. Part of the section quoted above was omitted from the version of the article published in the English language edition of International Review n° 145.]

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Ibid.

[8]. Ibid.

[9]. Ibid.

[10]. Ibid.

[11]. Ibid.

[12].  Ibid.

[13].  Ibid.

[14].  Ibid.

[15]. The information we have does not give any indication who perpetrated these attacks.

[16]. Thiam, ibid.

[17]. Ibid.

[18]. Ibid.

[19]. Ibid.

[20]. Ibid.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. African trade union member of the IFTU social democratic tendency.

[23]. Thiam, ibid.

[24]. Thiam, ibid.

[25]. Nicole Bernard-Duquenet, Le Sénégal et le Front populaire, L’Harmattan, 1985

 

[26]. Jean Suret-Canale, op. cit. 

[27]. Antoine Mendy, quoted by the publication Senegal d’Aujourdhui, n° 6, March 1964.

 

[28]. Nicole Bernard-Duquenet, op. cit.

[29]. Cheikh Diack, cited by the same newspaper, Senegal d’Aujourdhui

[30]. Nicole Bernard-Duquenet, op. cit.

[31]. Nicole Bernard-Duquenet, op. cit.

[32]. Iba Der Thiam, The railway strike of Senegal in September 1938, Masters Thesis, Dakar 1972.

 

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History of the workers' movement

Revolutionary syndicalism in Germany (III)

In the two previous articles[1] we showed that from the 1890s a proletarian opposition developed within the German unions. At the beginning it was against reducing the workers’ struggle to purely economic questions as the general confederations of the unions were doing. It then went on to oppose illusions in parliament and the SPD’s increasing confidence in the state. But it was only from 1908, following the break with the SPD, that the Free Union of German Unions, the FVDG, developed clearly towards revolutionary syndicalism. The outbreak of the 1st World War in 1914 presented the revolutionary syndicalists in Germany with the acid test: support the nationalist politics of the dominant class or else defend proletarian internationalism. Together with the internationalist minorities around Liebnecht and Luxemburg, the revolutionary syndicalists of the FVDG in Germany formed a current – too often forgotten unfortunately – which held fast against the war hysteria.

The test of the hour: the “union sacrée” or internationalism

Hand in hand with Social Democracy, which publicly voted for war credits on 4th August 1914, the leadership of the big social democratic unions also bowed down before the war plans of the dominant class. At the conference of the directive committees of the social democratic unions on 2nd August 1914, where it was decided to suspend all strikes and all struggles for demands so as not to compromise the war mobilisation, Rudolf Wissell gave voice to the chauvinist convulsions which had pervaded the social democratic unions: “If Germany is defeated in the present struggle, which none of us wants, then all union struggles after the end of the war will be destined to failure and futility. If Germany triumphs a positive conjuncture will be inaugurated and the means of the organisation will not have to weigh so heavily in the balance.[2]The appalling logic of the unions lay in making a direct connection between the lot of the working class and the outcome of the war; if “their country” and their dominant class profited from the war, then this would also benefit the workers, because they could depend on domestic policy to make concessions to the working class. Consequently, every effort had to be made to ensure Germany military victory.

The inability of the social democratic unions to take up an internationalist position against the war is not surprising. Once the defence of working class interests is entrapped in the national framework, once bourgeois parliamentarism is embraced as a panacea rather than the international conflict between the working class and capitalism being the political orientation, this must inevitably lead into the capitalist camp.

In fact the dominant class in Germany was only able to go to war thanks to the public conversion of the SPD and its unions! The social democratic unions did not just passively follow. No, they developed a real war policy, a chauvinist propaganda and were a crucial factor in ensuring intensive war production. “Socialist reformism” was turned into “social imperialism” as Trotsky put it in 1914.

Of those workers who tried to swim against the tide immediately after the declaration of war in Germany, a number of them were influenced by revolutionary syndicalism. The strike on the steam-ship “Vaterland”[3] just before the beginning of the war, in May-June 1914, is an example of the confrontation between the combative fractions of the working class and the main social democratic union, which defended the “Union Sacrée”. The largest ship in the world at the time was the proud emblem of German imperialism. Part of the crew, of whom many were workers of the revolutionary industrial union federation, went on strike during its maiden voyage from Hamburg to New York. The Social Democratic Federation of the German Transport Workers’ Union was bitterly opposed to this strike: “Consequently, all those who took part in the assemblies of the revolutionary syndicalists have committed a crime against the sailors. […] We reject wild cat strikes on principle. […] And with the gravity of the present situation, which requires the mobilisation of the whole work force, the revolutionary unionists are trying to divide the workers and, in doing so claim to follow the slogan of Marx that the emancipation of the workers can only be the task of the workers themselves.[4]The calls for unity in the workers’ movement on the part of the social democratic unions were no more than empty phrases aimed at ensuring their control over working class movements and pushing them into “a union to support the war” in August 1914.

It would be quite unfair to reproach the revolutionary syndicalists in Germany for having abandoned the class struggle in the weeks preceding the declaration of war. On the contrary, for a short time they acted as a rallying point for the combative workers: “Workers went there and heard the term revolutionary syndicalism for the first time and here they expected to realise their desire for revolution.[5] However, all the organisations of the working class, including the revolutionary syndicalist current, had another task to accomplish. As well as continuing the class struggle, it was indispensable to expose the imperialist nature of the war that was taking place.

What was the attitude of the revolutionary syndicalist FVDG to the war? On 1st August 1914, in their main publication, Die Einigkeit; they adopted a clear position against the coming war, not as naïve pacifists but as workers seeking solidarity from those in other countries: “Who wants war? Not the working people, but a military camarilla of good-for-nothings in every European state which is greedy for martial victory. We workers don’t want war! We loath it, it destroys culture, it rapes humanity and greatly increases the number crippled by the current economic war. We workers want peace! We don’t make distinctions between Austrians, Serbs, Russians, Italians, French etc. Brothers in toil, that’s our name! We hold out our hands to the workers of all countries in order to prevent a terrible crime which will give rise to torrents of tears from the eyes of mothers and children. Barbarians and those who are against all civilisation may well see war as a sublime and holy thing – men who are sensitive at heart, socialists, guided by a conception of the world formed by justice, humanity and love of man, detest war! Therefore, workers and comrades everywhere, raise your voices in protest against this crime against humanity that is being planned! It will rob the poor of what they have as well as costing them their life-blood, but it will bring profit to the rich, glory and honour to the defenders of militarism. Down with the war!

On 6th August 1914 German troops attacked Belgium. Franz Jung, a sympathiser of the revolutionary syndicalist FVDG, latter a member of the KAPD, paints a vivid picture of his experience at the time in a Berlin that was drunk with war hysteria: “At least a crowd descended on the few dozen demonstrating for peace, whom I had joined. As far as I can recall, this demonstration had been organised by the revolutionary syndicalists around Kater and Rocker. A banner mounted on two poles was displayed, a red flag was raised and the demonstration ‘Down with the war!’ started off. We didn’t get very far.”[6]

Let’s hear the words of another revolutionary of the period, the internationalist anarchist, Emma Goldman: “In Germany Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Oerter, Fritz Kater and many other comrades stayed in contact. We were obviously no more than a handful in comparison with the thousands intoxicated by the war. Even so we managed to distribute a manifesto of our International Bureau throughout the world and we denounced the war for what it really was with all our might.[7] Oerter and Kater were the most important experienced members of the FVDG. The FVDG maintained its position against the war throughout the conflict. This was undoubtedly the greatest strength of the FVDG – but strangely enough, it is the chapter in its history which is the least documented.

As soon as the war started, the FVDG was banned. Many of its members – in 1914 it still had about 6,000 – were placed in detention or forcibly sent to the front. In the Review Der Pionier, another of its publications, the FVDG wrote in the editorial of 5th August 1914, “The International Proletariat and the coming world war” that “everyone knows that the war between Serbia and Austria is just a visible expression of chronic war fever…” The FVDG described how the governments of Serbia, Austria and Germany had managed to win over the working class to its “war hysteria” and it denounced the SPD and its lie about a so-called “defensive war”: “Germany will never be the aggressor, this is the idea that these government gentlemen are already putting into our heads, and this is why the German Social Democrats, as their press and their spokesmen have already shown to be their perspective, will find themselves to a man squarely in the ranks of the German army.” Issue n° 32 of Die Einigkeit, 8th August 1914, was the last to be distributed to militants.

Internationalist anti-militarism

In the introduction to this series of articles on revolutionary syndicalism, we distinguished between anti-militarism and internationalism. “Internationalism is based on the understanding that, although capitalism is a world system, it remains nonetheless incapable of going beyond the national framework and an increasingly frenzied competition between nations. As such, it engenders a movement that aims at the international overthrow of capitalist society by a working class that is also united internationally. […] Anti-militarism, by contrast, is not necessarily internationalist, since it tends to take as its main enemy not capitalism as such, but only an aspect of capitalism.[8] In which camp was the FVDG ?

In the FVDG’s press in this period, there is little elaborated or developed political analysis on the causes of the war or the relations between the various imperialist powers. This gap is a consequence of the syndicalist vision of the FVDG. It saw itself, particularly at this time, as an organisation for struggle at an economic level, although in fact it was more like a co-ordination of groups defending syndicalist ideas than a union as such. The bitter confrontations with the SPD that ended in 1908 with its exclusion, had produced within the ranks of the FVDG a decided aversion to “politics” and, consequently, the loss of what had been learnt from past struggles against the ideology expounded by the big social democratic unions, that there is a separation between the economic and the political. Although the FVDG’s understanding of the dynamic of imperialism was not really as clear as it needed to be, the organisation was nevertheless obliged by the war to adopt a decidedly political position.

The history of revolutionary syndicalism in Germany shows, through the example of the FVDG, that theoretical analyses of imperialism alone are not enough to adopt a genuinely internationalist position. A healthy proletarian instinct, a profound feeling of solidarity with the international working class are just as essential – and it was just this that formed the backbone of the FVDG in 1914.

On the whole the FVDG described itself as “anti-militarist”; we hardly find the term internationalism. But to do full justice to the revolutionary syndicalists of the FVDG, it is absolutely necessary to take account of the real nature of its oppositional work against the war. The FVDG’s point of view on the war was not at all bound by national frontiers, nor was it imbued with the illusions spread about by pacifism on the possibility of a peaceful capitalism. Unlike the majority of pacifists who, immediately after the declaration of war, found themselves in the ranks of those defending the nation against foreign militarism – the one that was supposed to be the more barbaric – on 8th August 1914 the FVDG clearly warned the working class against any co-operation with the national bourgeoisie: “So the workers must not put their faith credulously in humanity as it is at the moment, that of the capitalists and the bosses. The present war hysteria must not cloud awareness of the class antagonisms existing between Capital and Labour.[9]

For the comrades of the FVDG it was not a matter of opposing just one aspect of capitalism, militarism, but of integrating the struggle against the war into the general struggle of the working class to go beyond capitalism internationally, as Karl Liebnecht had put it in his 1906 pamphlet Militarism and Anti-militarism. In his article of 1915, Anti-militarism!, he rightly criticised the heroic and apparently radical expressions of anti-militarism, such as desertion, which leave the army even more in the hands of the militarists by eliminating the best anti-militarists. For this reason “any method that functions in an exclusively individual way or is realised individually is to be rejected on principle”. Within the international revolutionary syndicalist movement, there were very different views on the anti-militarist struggle. Domela Nieuwenhuis, historically a representative of the idea of the general strike, described the means to achieve it as a curious mixture of reforms and individual objection in the 1901 pamphlet Militarism. This was not at all the case for the FVDG, which shared Liebnecht’s conviction that only the class struggle of all the workers collectively – and not individual action – could stop the war.

The production of the FVDG’s press was the responsibility of the secretariat (Geschäftskommission) in Berlin, that was composed of 5 comrades around Fritz Kater and it expressed strongly the individual political positions of these comrades because of the weak organisational cohesion of the FVDG. Even so, the internationalism of the FVDG was not restricted to a minority of the organisation, as was the case with the revolutionary syndicalist CGT in France. It did not experience splits within its ranks on the question of the war. It was rather repression against the organisation and the fact that its members were forcibly sent to the front which meant that only a minority was able to sustain a permanent activity. Revolutionary syndicalist groups remained active mainly in Berlin and in about 18 other places. After Die Einigkeit was banned in August 1914, contact was maintained by means of the Mitteilungsblatt and then, once this too was banned in June 1915, through the publication Rundschreiben, which was also made illegal in May 1917. The heavy repression against the internationalist revolutionary syndicalists in Germany meant that from the beginning of the war their publications were more in the nature of internal bulletins than public reviews: “The directive committees, or those entrusted with the task, must immediately produce only the number of issues needed for their existing members and must distribute the bulletin only to them.[10]

The comrades of the FVDG also had the courage to oppose the mobilisation for participation in the war carried out by the majority of the revolutionary syndicalist CGT in France: “All this excitement to war on the part of international socialists, unionists and anti-militarists doesn’t serve one jot to shake us from our principles[11] they wrote, referring to the capitulation of the majority of the CGT. The question of war had become the touch stone in the international revolutionary syndicalist movement. To confront their big sister, the revolutionary syndicalist CGT, they had to have a very solid loyalty to the working class because the CGT and its theories had been an important reference point over the years in the FVDG’s evolution towards revolutionary syndicalism. During the war the comrades of the FVDG supported the internationalist minority, around Pierre Monatte, who left the CGT.

Why did the FVDG remain internationalist?

All the unions in Germany succumbed to nationalist war fever in 1914. Why was the FVDG an exception? We cannot give a reply to this question by simply attributing it to their “luck” in having – as they did – a secretariat (Geschäftskommission) that was firm and internationalist. Likewise, we cannot explain the capitulation of the social democratic unions on the question of war by their misfortune in having treacherous leaders.

The FVDG did not remain solidly internationalist simply because of its clear evolution towards revolutionary syndicalism from 1908 onwards. The example of the French CGT shows that revolutionary syndicalism of the period was not in itself a guarantee of internationalism. On the whole we can say that a declaration of faith in marxism, anarchism or revolutionary syndicalism does not in itself guarantee internationalism in deed.

The FVDG refused the patriotic lie of the dominant class, including social democracy, of a purely “defensive war” (a trap into which Kropotkin tragically fell). It denounced in its press the logic according to which each nation presented itself as the one “under attack”; Germany from shady Russian Tsarism, France from Prussian militarism, etc.[12] This clarity could only develop on the basis of understanding that it was now impossible to distinguish, within capitalism, more modern nations from more backward ones and that capitalism as a whole had became destructive for humanity. In the period of the first world war the internationalist position was characterised above all by the political denunciation of the “defensive war”. It is no accident that, in Autumn 1914, Trotsky dedicated an entire pamphlet to this question.[13]

The FVDG also reasoned in accordance with human principles: “Socialism places human principles above national principles.” “It is difficult to find oneself on the side of a humanity that is drowning in affliction, but if we want to be socialists, that is our place.”[14] The question of solidarity and the human relation to other workers throughout the world is a basis of internationalism. The internationalism of the FVDG, expressed in 1914 in a proletarian way against the war, was a sign of the strength of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany in relation to the decisive question of war.

The principal roots of the FVDG’s internationalism are to be found above all in its long history of opposition to the reformism that pervaded the SPD and the social democratic unions. Its aversion to the SPD’s universal panacea of parliamentarism played an essential role because it prevented it from becoming ideologically integrated into the capitalist state, unlike the social democratic unions.

In the years leading up to the outbreak of the world war, contrasts between three tendencies within the FVDG appeared: one expressed its identity as a union, another the resistance to “politics” (of the SPD) and a third the reality of the FVDG as a collection of propaganda groups (a reality which, as we have already explained, blocked its capacity to produce clear analyses of imperialism). This confrontation produced only weaknesses. Confronted with the openly chauvinist policies of the SPD and the other unions, the old reflex to resist the depoliticisation of the workers’ struggles, quite strong until the debate on the mass strike in 1904, was revived.

Although, as we wrote in our previous article, the resistance of the FVDG to reformism bore with it strange weaknesses, such as an aversion towards “politics”, what was determinant in 1914 was its attitude to the war. The internationalist contribution of the FVDG was at that time much more important, for the working class, than its weaknesses.

Its healthy reaction against turning all its attention to Germany, in spite of the difficult conditions, was decisive in its capacity to maintain a firm internationalist position. The FVDG sought contact not only with Monatte’s internationalist minority in the CGT, but also with other revolutionary syndicalists in Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Holland (National Arbeids Secretariaat) and Italy (Unione Sindacale Italiana) who were trying to oppose the war.

Insufficient contact with the other internationalists in Germany

How strongly could the international voice of the FVDG make itself heard within the working class during the war? It fought energetically against the perfidious organs that had joined the “Union Sacrée”. As its internal publication Rundschreiben attests, it accepted the consequences of its position by refusing to participate in the war committees:[15]Certainly not! Such a function is not for our members or functionaries […] no-one can ask that of them.”[16] But in the years 1914-1917, it addressed itself almost exclusively to its own members. On the basis of a realistic assessment of their impotence at the time and the impossibility of being a real obstacle to the war, but above all, justifiably afraid that the organisation would be destroyed, Fritz Kater, in the name of the secretariat (Geschäftskommission) addressed the comrades of the FVDG on 15th August 1914 in the Mitteilungsblatt: “Our views of militarism and the war, as we have defended them and spread them for decades and which we will guarantee until the end of our lives, are not admissible in a period of feverish enthusiasm for the war. We are condemned to silence. It was to be expected and so we are by no means surprised that we have been outlawed. We must resign ourselves to remaining silent, as must all other union comrades.

Kater expresses on the one hand the hope of maintaining an activity as it was before the war (which was however impossible because of the repression!) and on the other hand the minimal aim to save the organisation: “The secretariat (Geschäftskommission) is of the opinion that it would not be acting in accordance with its duty if it stopped all its other activities now that the publications have been banned. This must not be the case. […] It will maintain the links between the different organisations and will do all that is necessary to prevent their decomposition.

The FVDG in fact survived the war but not because it had a particularly effective survival strategy or because it made insistent appeals not to leave the organisation. It was obviously its internationalism that served as an anchor for its members throughout the war.

When, in September 1915 the international declaration against the war – the Zimmerwald Manifesto – received considerable echo, the FVDG welcomed it and expressed solidarity. It did so above all because it was close to the internationalist minority of the CGT that was present at Zimmerwald. But the FVDG was suspicious of many of the groups at the Zimmerwald conference on the grounds that they were still too much tied to the parliamentary tradition. In truth, the suspicion was not unjustified; six of those present, including Lenin, said: “The manifesto accepted by the conference does not completely satisfy us. […] The manifesto does not contain any clear idea on how to combat the war.[17] Unlike Lenin, the FVDG was not sufficiently clear either on how to oppose the war. Its suspicions were rather the expression of a lack of openness towards other internationalists, as shown by their relationship to those in Germany.

Why was there not even any co-operation in Germany between the international opposition of Spartakusbund and the revolutionary syndicalists of the FVDG? For a long time there had been a wide gap between them that could not be closed. About ten years earlier in the debate on the mass strike, Karl Liebnecht had attributed to the FVDG as a whole the individualist weaknesses of one of its temporary spokesmen, Rafael Friedeberg. As far as we know, the revolutionaries around Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebnecht did not seek contact with the FVDG either during the early years of the war, certainly because they underestimated the internationalist capability of the revolutionary syndicalists.

The FVDG’s attitude to Liebnecht, the figure who symbolised the movement against the war in Germany, was anything but constant, which prevented it from coming closer politically. On the one hand, it never forgave Liebnecht for approving the war credits in August 1914, a vote that he made without conviction and exclusively on the basis of a wrong conception of fraction discipline, which he himself subsequently criticised. Even so, in its press the FVDG always defended him when he was the victim of repression. The FVDG did not believe that the revolutionary opposition within the SPD was capable of freeing itself from parliamentarism, a step that it had itself managed only by splitting from the SPD in 1908. There was deep distrust. It was only at the end of 1918, when the revolutionary movement had spread throughout the whole of Germany that the FVDG called upon its members to join the Spartakusbund temporarily, as a second affiliation.

In retrospect neither the FVDG nor the Spartakists tried to establish contact with one another on the basis of their internationalist position during the war. In fact the bourgeoisie recognised the fact that the FVDG and the Spartakists shared an internationalist position rather better than did the two organisations themselves: the SPD-controlled press often tried to denigrate the Spartakists as being close to the “Kater tendency”.[18]

If there is a lesson for today and for the future to be learnt from the history of the FVDG during the first world war, it is this: it is essential to make contact with other internationalists, even if there are differences on other political questions. This has nothing to do with the “united front” (which is based on a weakness at the level of principles and is even prepared to co-operate with organisations in the bourgeois camp) as it appeared in the history of the workers’ movement in the 1920s-30s. On the contrary, it is the recognition that internationalism is the most important proletarian position and that it is held in common.

 Mario 5/8/2011.

 


[1]. See “The birth of revolutionary syndicalism in the German workers’ movement” in International Review n° 137 and “The Free Association of German Trade Unions: on the road to revolutionary syndicalism” in International Review n° 141

[2]. H.J.Bieber: Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution, 1918, vol.1, p.88 (our translation).

[3]. “Fatherland” in German.

[4]. See Folkert Mohrhof, Der syndikalistische Streik auf dem Ozean-Dampfer „Vaterland“ 1914, 2008 (our translation).

[5]. Die Einigheit, main publication of the FVDG, 27th June 1914, article by Karl Roche, “Ein Gewerkschaftsfuhrer als Gehilfe des Staatsanwalts“, (our translation).

[6]. Franz Jung, Der Weg nach unten, Nautilus, p.89 (our translation).

[7]. Emma Goldman, Living my Life, p. 656 (our translation). In February 1915, Emma Goldman and other internationalist anarchists, such as Berkman and Malatesta, made a public statement against the approval of the war on the part of the main representative of anarchism, Kropotkin, and others. In the Mitteilungsblatt of 20th February 1915, the FVDG welcomed this defence of internationalism against Kropotkin on the part of the revolutionary anarchists.

[8]. “What is revolutionary syndicalism?” International Review 118, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/118_syndicalism_i.html.

[9]. Die Einigkeit, no 32, 8 August 1914.

[10]. Mitteilungsblatt, 15 August 1914.

[11]. Mitteilungsblatt, 10 October 1914. Quoted by Wayne Thorpe in Keeping the faith: The German Syndicalists in the First World War. This work, together with the original documents of the FVDG, is the only (and very precious) source on German revolutionary syndicalism during the First World War.

[12]. See, among others, Mitteilungsblatt, November 1914 and Rundschreiben, August 1916.

[13]. The War and the International.

[14]. Mitteilungsblatt, 21st November 1914.

[15]. These war committees (Kriegsausschusse) were founded after February 1915, initially in the Berlin metal industry, between representatives of the bosses’ association and the big unions. The aim was to halt the growing tendency for workers to change workplace in search of a higher salary as the social bloodletting through the massacres had produced a dearth in the workforce. This “uncontrolled” movement was, according to the government and the unions, damaging to war production. The creation of these committees was based on a previous attempt made in August 1914 by the social democratic leader Theodor Leipart, aimed at setting up Kriegsarbeitgemeinschaften (war collectives with the employers) which, under the hypocritical pretence of acting in the interests of the working class to “combat unemployment” and regulate the work process, were in fact simply intended to make war production more efficient.

[16]. Quotes by W. Thorpe, Keeping the faith: The German Syndicalists in the First World War.

[17]. Declaration of Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek, Nerman, Hoglund, Berzin at the Zimmerwald conference, quoted by J. Humbert-Droz The Origins of the Communist International p.144.

[18]. Vorwarts, 9th January 1917.

Historic events: 

Deepen: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

Rubric: 

History of the workers' movement

The post-war boom did not reverse the decline of capitalism

The last few articles in this series have demonstrated the high level of agreement among Marxists (and even some anarchists) regarding the historical stage capitalism had reached by the middle of the 20th century. The devastating imperialist war of 1914-18, the international revolutionary wave that came in its wake, and the unprecedented world economic depression which marked the 1930s were all seen as irrefutable evidence that the bourgeois mode of production had entered its epoch of decline, the epoch of the world proletarian revolution. The experience of the second imperialist bloodbath did not call this diagnosis into question; on the contrary, it was seen as providing even more decisive proof that the system had outlived itself. Victor Serge had already described the 1930s as “midnight in the century”, a decade which had seen the victory of the counter-revolution on all fronts at the very moment that the objective conditions for the overthrow of the system had never been more plainly developed. But the events of 1939-45 showed that the night could grow darker still. 

As we wrote in the first article in this series: “Picasso's painting of Guernica is rightly celebrated as a ground-breaking depiction of the horrors of modern war. The indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population of this Spanish town by German planes supporting Franco's armies still had the power to shock because it was a relatively new phenomenon. Aerial bombing of civilian targets during the First World War had been minimal and largely ineffective. The vast majority of those killed during that war were soldiers on the battlefronts. The second world war showed that capitalism in decline was increasing in its capacity for barbarism because this time the majority of those killed were civilians: ‘The total estimated human loss of life caused by World War II, irrespective of political alignment, was roughly 72 million people. The civilian toll was around 47 million, including about 20 million due to war related famine and disease. The military toll was about 25 million, including about 5 million prisoners of war.’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties) The most terrifying and concentrated expression of this horror was the industrialised murder of millions of Jews and other minorities by the Nazi regime, shot in batch after batch in the ghettos and forests of eastern Europe, starved and worked to death as slave labourers, gassed in hundreds of thousands at Auschwitz, Belsen or Treblinka. But the civilian death tolls from the bombing of the cities by both sides were proof that this Holocaust, this systematic murder of the innocent, was a generalised feature of this war. Indeed at this level the democracies certainly outdid the fascist powers, as the ‘carpet bombing’ and ‘firebombing’ of German and Japanese cities made the German Blitz seem amateurish in comparison. The symbolic culminating point in this new method of mass slaughter was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in terms of civilian deaths, the ‘conventional’ bombing of cities like Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden were even more deadly.”[1]  

In contrast to the First World War, which had to a large extent been ended by the outbreak of revolutionary struggles in Russia and Germany, the proletariat did not throw off the shackles of defeat at the end of the second. Not only had it been crushed physically, in particular by the steam-hammer of Stalinism and fascism; it had also been mobilised ideologically behind the banners of the bourgeoisie, above all through the fraud of anti-fascism and the defence of democracy. There were outbreaks of class struggle and revolt at the end of the war, particularly with the strikes in northern Italy which had a clearly internationalist spirit. But the ruling class had been well-prepared for such outbreaks and dealt with them with utter ruthlessness, above all in Italy where the allied forces master-minded by Churchill allowed the Nazi forces to put down the workers’ revolt while still bombing the strike-hit northern cities; meanwhile the Stalinists did their best to recruit militant workers into the patriotic resistance. The terror bombing of German cities eliminated any possibility that the military defeat of Germany would see a repeat of the revolutionary struggles of 1918.[2]  

In short, the hope that had animated those small revolutionary groups which had survived the shipwreck of the 20s and 30s – that a new war would give rise to a new upsurge in the revolution – was quickly dashed.

The state of the proletarian political movement after World War Two

In these conditions, the small revolutionary movement that had maintained internationalist positions during the war, despite a short period of revival following the collapse of the fascist regimes in Europe, faced the most difficult conditions as it set about the task of analysing the new phase of capitalism’s life in the aftermath of six years of carnage and destruction. The majority of Trotskyists had signed their death warrant as a proletarian current during the war by supporting the allied camp in defence of “democracy” against fascism; this betrayal was confirmed by the open support for Russian imperialism and its annexation of eastern Europe after the war. There were still a number of groups that had broken from Trotskyism and maintained an internationalist stance against the war, such as the Austrian RKD, the group around Munis and the Union Communiste Internationaliste in Greece, animated by Aghis Stinas and Cornelius Castoriadis/Paul Cardan, who went on to form the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. The subsequent evolution of these tendencies reflects the extreme difficulties of the period. The RKD, in its readiness to go to the root of Trotskyism’s demise, began by rejecting Bolshevism and ended up abandoning marxism altogether; Munis evolved towards left communist positions and remained all his life convinced that capitalist civilisation was profoundly decadent, applying this with particular clarity to key issues such as the trade union and the national question. But he was seemingly unable to grasp how this decadence was connected to the economic impasse of the system: in the 1970s his organisation, the Ferment Ouvrière Révolutionnaire, walked out of the conferences of the communist left on the grounds that the other participating groups all agreed that there was an open economic crisis of the system, a position he rejected. As we shall see later on in this article, Socialisme ou Barbarie was seduced by the boom that opened up in the 1950s and also began to question the foundations of marxist theory. Consequently none of the former Trotskyist groups seem to have made any lasting contribution to a marxist comprehension of the historic conditions now facing world capitalism.        

The evolution of the Dutch communist left after the war was also indicative of the general trajectory of the movement. There was a brief political and organisational revival with the formation of the Spartacusbond in Holland. As we show in our book The Dutch and German Communist Left, this group momentarily returned to the clarity of the old KAPD, not only in recognising the decline of the system but also in abandoning the “councilist” fear of the party. This development was facilitated by an open attitude to other revolutionary currents, in particular the Gauche Communiste de France. This was a short-lived development however. The majority of the Dutch left, especially the group around Cajo Brendel, soon drifted back towards anarchist conceptions of organisation and towards a workerist approach which saw little need to locate workers’ struggles in their general historical context

Debates in the Italian communist left

The revolutionary current which had been clearest about the trajectory capitalism was following in the 1930s – the Italian Communist Left – was by no means spared the turmoil affecting the revolutionary movement at the end of the war. The outbreak of a significant proletarian revolt in Northern Italy in 1943 was initially seen by most of its adherents as signifying a change in the historic course – the stirrings of the expected communist revolution. The comrades of the French Fraction of the International Communist Left, which had been formed during the war in Vichy France, initially shared this outlook, but quickly recognised that the bourgeoisie, profiting from the whole experience of 1917, was well-prepared for such outbreaks and had used all the weapons in its armoury to crush them mercilessly. By contrast, the majority of the comrades who had remained in Italy, joined by members of the Italian Fraction who had returned to Italy from exile, had already proclaimed the Internationalist Communist Party (henceforward PCInt, to distinguish it from subsequent “International Communist Parties”). The new organisation was clearly internationalist in its opposition to both imperialist camps, but it had been hurriedly cobbled together from a number of different, and in many ways politically disparate, elements; and this was to give rise to numerous difficulties in the next few years. The majority of the comrades of the French Fraction opposed the dissolution of the Italian Fraction and the entry of its members into the new party, and were soon warning it against adopting positions which marked a clear regression from the views of the Italian Fraction in exile. On central issues such as the party’s relationship with unions, its willingness to stand in elections, and its internal organisational practice, the French Fraction saw clear evidence of a slide towards opportunism.[3] The result of these criticisms was that the French Fraction was expelled from the International Communist Left and constituted itself as the Gauche Communiste de France.

One of the component parts of the PCInt was the “Fraction of Socialists and Communists” in Naples around Amadeo Bordiga; and a central element in the decision to proclaim the party was the prospect of forming the party with Bordiga, who had played an outstanding role in the formation of the CP of Italy in the early 1920s and in the subsequent fight against the degeneration of the Communist International. Bordiga was the last to openly criticise Stalin in the sessions of the CI, denouncing him to his face as the gravedigger of the revolution. But from the beginning of the 1930s and the first years of the war Bordiga had retired from political life, despite many pleas by his comrades to resume activity. Consequently the political gains made by the Italian Fraction in exile – on the fraction/party relationship, the lessons of the Russian revolution, the course of capitalism’s decline and its impact on questions such as the union and national questions – largely passed him by, and he tended to remain stuck on the positions of the 1920s. Indeed, in his determination to oppose all forms of opportunism and revisionism, encapsulated in the constant “new turns” of the official Communist Parties, Bordiga began to develop the theory of the “historical invariance of marxism”: in this view, the communist programme was distinguished by its essentially unchanging nature, implying that the dramatic changes which came about in the positions of CI or the communist left in their break from social democracy were no more than a “restoration” of the original programme incarnated in the Manifesto of 1848.[4] This approach logically implied that there had not been any epochal change in capitalism in the 20th century, and Bordiga’s main argument against the notion of capitalist decadence is contained in his polemic against what he called “the theory of the descending curve”:

 “The theory of the descending curve compares historical development to a sinusoid: every regime, the bourgeois regime for example, begins with a rising phase, reaches a maximum, begins to decline towards a minimum; after this another regime begins its ascent. This is the vision of gradualist reformism: no convulsions, no leap, no jump. The marxist vision can (in the interests of clarity and conciseness) be represented as a number of branches of curves, all ascending until they reach the top (in geometry: the singular point or cusp), after which there comes a sudden and violent fall and, at the bottom, a new social regime arises; we have another historic ascending branch... The current affirmation that capitalism is in its descending branch can only lead to two errors: one fatalist the other gradualist.[5]

Elsewhere Bordiga wrote:  “For Marx, capitalism grows without stopping, beyond all limits.[6] Capitalism was a series of cycles in which each moment of crisis, following a period of “unlimited” expansion, was deeper than the previous one and posed the necessity for a sudden and complete rupture with the old system.

We have responded to these arguments ourselves in International Review n°s 48 and 55,[7] rejecting Bordiga’s charge that the notion of capitalist decline leads to a gradualist and fatalist vision, and explaining why new societies don’t spring into existence overnight without human beings going through a long experience of the old system’s incompatibility with their needs. But there was already opposition to Bordiga’s theory within the PCInt. Not all the work of the Fraction had been lost within the forces that had formed the PCInt. Faced with the reality of the post war period – marked mainly by increasing isolation of revolutionaries from the class, inevitably transforming an organisation that could initially mistake itself for a party into a small communist group – two main tendencies emerged, preparing the ground for the split of 1952. The current around Onorato Damen, ancestor of the present-day Internationalist Communist Tendency, retained the notion of capitalist decadence – it was they who were principally targeted in Bordiga’s “descending curve” polemic – and this enabled them to maintain the clarity of the Fraction on key questions such as the definition of Russia as a form of state capitalism, agreement with Rosa Luxemburg on the national question, and a grasp of the capitalist nature of the trade unions (the latter position being defended with particular clarity by Stefanini who had been one of the first in the Fraction in exile to understand the integration of the unions into the state).

The summer 2011 issue of Revolutionary Perspectives, the journal of the Communist Workers’ Organisation (the ICT’s affiliate in the UK), republishes Damen’s introduction to correspondence between himself and Bordiga around the time of the split. Damen, referring to Lenin’s conception of capitalism as moribund, and Rosa Luxemburg’s view of imperialism as a process hastening the collapse of capitalism, rejects Bordiga’s polemic against the theory of the descending curve: “It is true that imperialism hugely increases and provides the means for prolonging the life of capital but at the same time it constitutes the surest means for cutting it short. This schema of the ever-ascending curve not only does not show this but in a certain sense denies it.

Furthermore, as Damen points out, the vision of a capitalism which is in some sense perpetually ascendant permits Bordiga to indulge in ambiguities on the nature and role of the USSR:

Faced with the alternative of remaining what we have always been, or bending to an attitude of platonic and intellectualist aversion to American capitalism, and benevolent neutrality towards Russian capitalism merely because it is not yet capitalistically mature, we don’t hesitate to restate the classical position which internationalist communists take on all the protagonists in the second imperialist conflict, which is not to hope for a victory of one or other of the adversaries, but to seek a revolutionary solution to the capitalist crisis.”

We might add that this idea that the less developed parts of the world economy could contain a “youthful” and thus progressive form of capitalism led the Bordigist current into an even more explicit dilution of internationalist principles, with its support for the movement of the “coloured peoples” in the former colonies.    

It is a mark of the post-war retreat of the Italian left back to the confines of Italy that much of the debate between the two tendencies in the PCInt long remained inaccessible to the non-Italian speaking world. But it seems to us that while Damen’s current was in general far clearer on the fundamental class positions, neither side had a monopoly on clarity. Bordiga, Maffi and others were correct in their intuition that the period opening up, still characterised by the triumph of the counter-revolution, inevitably meant that theoretical tasks would take priority over wide-scale agitational work. The Damen tendency, by contrast, was even less able to recognise that a real class party, able to develop an effective presence within the working class, was simply not on the agenda in that period. In this sense, the Damen tendency completely lost sight of the crucial insights of the Italian Fraction on the precise question of the fraction as a bridge between the old degenerating party and the new party made possible by the revival of the class struggle. In fact, without any real elaboration, Damen makes an unjustified link between Bordiga’s schema of the ever-ascending curve – which was certainly false – and the latter’s “theory of the uselessness of creating a party in a counter-revolutionary period”, which in our opinion was essentially valid. Against this, Damen offers us the idea that “the birth of the party does not depend, and on this we agree, ‘on the genius or value of a leader or a vanguard’, but it is the historic existence of the proletariat as a class which poses, not merely episodically in time and space, the need for the existence of its party.” We might equally argue that the proletariat has a permanent “need” for the communist revolution: it is certainly true at one level, but it does not get us anywhere near understanding whether the balance of class forces makes the revolution something tangible, something within reach, or a perspective for a much more distant future. Furthermore, if we connect this general problem to the specificities of the epoch of capitalist decline, Damen’s logic appears even more suspect: the actual conditions of the working class in the decadent period, in particular the swallowing of its permanent mass organisations in the maws of state capitalism, have quite clearly made it more, not less difficult, for the class party to maintain itself outside of phases of intense proletarian upsurge.

The contribution of the Gauche Communiste de France

The GCF, though formally excluded from the Italian branch of the communist left, was much more faithful to the old Italian Fraction’s conception of the role of the revolutionary minority in a period of defeat and counter-revolution. It was also the group which made the most important advances in understanding the characteristics of the period of decadence. They were not content merely to repeat what had been understood in the 1930s but aimed to arrive at a deeper synthesis: their debates with the Dutch left enabled them to overcome some of the Italian left’s errors on the role of the party in the revolution and sharpened their understanding of the capitalist nature of the trade unions. And their reflections on the organisation of capitalism in the period of decadence enabled them to develop a clearer insight into the profound changes in the role of war and in the organisation of economic and social life that marked the period. These advances were summarised with particular clarity in two key texts: the report on the international situation from the July 1945 conference of the GCF, and “The evolution of capitalism and the new perspective” published in Internationalisme no. 46 in 1952[8].

The 1945 report focused on the way in which the function of capitalist war had changed from the ascendant to the decadent period. Imperialist war was the most concentrated expression of the system’s decline:

 “Under capitalism, there is no fundamental opposition between war and peace, but there is a difference between the ascendant and decadent phases of capitalist society and, consequently, a difference in the function of war (and in the relationship between war and peace) in the two respective phases. While in the first phase war had the function of enlarging the market with a view towards a greater production of consumer goods, in the second phase production is focused essent­ially on the production of the means of destruction, i.e. with a view towards war. The decadence of capitalist society is strikingly ex­pressed in the fact that whereas in the ascendant period wars led to economic development, in the decadent period economic activity is geared essentially towards war.

This doesn’t mean war has become the goal of capitalist production, which remains the prod­uction of surplus value, but it does mean that war, taking on a permanent character, has become decadent capitalism’s way of life...

In response to those who argued that the destructiveness of war was merely a continuation of the classic cycle of capitalist accumulation, and thus an entirely “rational” phenomenon, the GCF stressed the profoundly irrational character of imperialist war – not only from the point of view of humanity, but even of capital itself:  

The object of war production is not the solution of an economic problem. Its origins are the re­sult of the state's need, on the one hand, to defend itself against the dispossessed classes and maintain their exploitation by force, and on the other to maintain its economic position and better it at the expense of other imperialist states, again by force. The permanent crisis makes the solution of inter-imperialist differ­ences by armed struggle inevitable. War and the threat of war are latent or overt aspects of the situation of permanent war in society. Modern war is essentially a war of materials. With a view to war, a monstrous mobilization of a country's entire economic and technical re­sources is necessary. War production becomes at the same time the axis of industrial production and society's main economic arena.

But does the mass of products represent an increase in social wealth? To this we must reply categorically, no. All the values created by war production are doomed to disappear from the productive process to be destroyed without reappearing in the next cycle. After each cycle of production, society chalks up, not a growth in its social heritage, but a decline, an impov­erishment of the totality.

Thus the GCF saw imperialist war as an expression of a senile capitalism’s tendency to destroy itself. The same could be said for the mode of organisation that becomes dominant in the new era: state capitalism.

In “The evolution of capitalism and the new perspective”, the GCF analysed the role of the state in the survival of the system in the period of decadence; here again capitalism’s agonising collapse is indicated by the continuous flouting or deformation of its own laws:

Unable to open up new markets, each country closes itself off and tries to live on its own. The universalisation of the capitalist economy, which had been achieved through the world market, is breaking down. Instead we have autarky. Each country tries to go it alone: it creates unprofit­able sectors of production to compensate for the break-up of the market. This palliative further aggravates the dislocation of the world market.

Before 1914, profitability, via the mediation of the market, was the standard, the measure, the stimulant of capitalist production. In the present period this law of profitability is being violated. The law is no longer applied at the level of the enterprise, but at the global level of the state. The distribution of value is carried out according to a plan of accounts at national level, no longer through the direct pressure of the world market. Either the state subsidizes the deficit part of the economy or the state itself takes over the entire economy.

This does not mean a ‘negation' of the law of value. What we are seeing here is that a given unit of production seems to be detached from the law of value, that this production takes place without any apparent concern for profitability.

Monopoly super-profits are realised through ‘artif­icial' prices, but on the global level of produc­tion this is still connected to the law of value. The sum of prices for production as a whole still expresses the global value of these products. Only the distribution of value among the various capitalist groups is transformed: the monopolies arrogate for themselves a super-profit at the expense of the less well-armed capitalists. In the same way we can say that the law of value continues to operate at the level of national production. The law of value no longer acts on a product taken individually, but on the entirety of products. This is a restriction in the law of value's field of application. The total mass of profit tends to diminish, because of the burden exerted by deficit branches of the economy on the other branches.”

We have said that there was no monopoly on clarity in the debates within PCInt and the same can be said for the GCF. Faced with the gloomy state of the workers’ movement after the war, they edged towards the conclusion that not only were the old institutions of the workers’ movement, parties and unions, irreversibly integrated into the capitalist state leviathan, but that the defensive struggle itself had lost its class character:

 “The economic struggles of the workers can only end in failure -- at best in main­taining living conditions which have already been degraded. They tie the proletariat to its exploit­ers by leading it to feel a solidarity with the system in exchange for an extra bowl of soup (which, in the last analysis, is only obtained through increasing ‘productivity'.[9]

It was certainly true that economic struggles could win no lasting gains in the new epoch, but it was not true that they served merely to tie the proletariat to its exploiters: on the contrary, they remain an indispensable precondition for breaking this “solidarity with the system”. 

The GCF also saw no possibility of capitalism achieving any kind of recovery after the war. On the one hand, they considered that there was an absolute dearth of extra-capitalist markets to permit a real cycle of expanded reproduction. In their legitimate polemic against the Trotskyist idea that bourgeois nationalist movements in the colonies or former colonies could undermine the world imperialist system, they argued that:

 “The colonies have ceased to represent an extra-capitalist market for the metropoles; they have become new capitalist countries. They have thus lost their character as outlets, which make the old imperialisms less res­istant to the demands of the colonial bourgeoisie. To which it must be added that these imperialisms' own problems have favoured -- in the course of two world wars -- the economic expansion of the colonies. Constant capital destroyed itself in Europe, while the productive capacity of the colonies or semi-colonies grew, leading to an explosion of indigen­ous nationalism (South Africa, Argentina, India, etc). It is noteworthy that these new capitalist countries, right from their creation as independent nations, pass to the stage of state capitalism, showing the same aspects of an economy geared to war as has been discerned elsewhere.

The theory of Lenin and Trotsky has fallen apart. The colonies have integrated themselves into the capitalist world, and have even propped it up. There is no longer a ‘weakest link': the domination of capital is equally distributed throughout the surface of the planet.”[10]

It was certainly true that the war enabled certain colonies, outside the main field of conflict, to develop along capitalist lines, and that globally speaking the extra-capitalist markets had become increasingly inadequate as an outlet for capitalist production. But it was premature to announce their complete disappearance. In particular, the ousting of the old powers like France and Britain from their former colonies, with their largely parasitic relationship towards their empires, enabled the great victor of the war – the USA – to find lucrative new fields of expansion, particularly in the far east.[11]  At the same time, there were extra-capitalist markets yet to be exhausted within certain European countries (notably in France), largely made up of those sections of the small peasantry that had not been totally integrated into the capitalist economy.  

The survival of certain solvent markets outside of the capitalist economy was one of the factors which made it possible for capitalism to re-animate itself for an unexpectedly long period after the war. But it was very much linked to the more general political and economic reorganisation of the capitalist system. In its 1945 report, the GCF had acknowledged that, while the overall balance sheet of the war was catastrophic, certain imperialist powers could indeed become stronger as a result of their victory in war. In fact, the USA had emerged in a position of unprecedented strength which enabled it to finance the reconstruction of the war-torn powers of Europe and Japan, evidently for its own imperialist and economic needs. And the mechanisms used to revive and expand production in this phase were precisely those which the GCF had itself identified: state capitalism, particularly in its Keynesian form, permitting a certain forced “harmonisation” between production and consumption, not only at national but even international level through the formation of huge imperialist blocs; and, along with this, a real deformation of the law of value, in the form of massive loans and even outright “gifts” from the triumphant USA to the defeated and ruined powers, which permitted production to resume and grow, but not without beginning the irreversible growth of a debt which would never be paid back, in contrast to the classic development of ascendant capitalism.

Thus through remoulding itself on a global scale, capitalism did experience, for the first time since the “Belle Epoque” at the beginning of the 20th century, a period of boom. This was not yet apparent in 1952, which was still dominated by post-war austerity. And rightly seeing that there had been no revival of the proletariat in the wake of the war, the GCF wrongly concluded that a third world war was on the short-term agenda. This mistake helped to accelerate the demise of the group which disbanded in 1952 – the same year as the split in the PCInt. Both these events were a confirmation that the workers’ movement was still living in the shadow of the profound reaction that followed the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. 

 “The Great Keynesian Boom”

By the mid 50s, as the phase of outright austerity came to an end in the central capitalist countries, it was becoming clear that capitalism was entering into an unprecedented boom. In France this was the period known as the “30 Glorious Years”; others refer to it as “The Great Keynesian Boom”. The former term is a rather obvious misnomer. It’s certainly questionable that it lasted for 30 years,[12] and it was less than glorious for a very considerable part of the global population. Nevertheless it saw very rapid growth rates in the western countries; and even in the much more sluggish and economically backward east there was a spurt of technological development which generated talk of Russia being able to “catch up” with the west, as alarmingly suggested by the USSR’s initial successes in the space race. The USSR’s “development” continued to be based on the war economy, as it had in the 1930s. But although the arms sector also exerted a heavy weight in the west, workers’ real wages in the main industrial countries increased considerably (particularly in relation to the very hard conditions that had prevailed during the period in which the economy was being reconstructed) and mass “consumerism” became a fact of working class life, combined with extensive welfare programmes (health, holidays, sick pay,) and very low rates of unemployment. This was what permitted the British Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to patronisingly proclaim that “most of our people have never had it so good."[13]

 An academic economist gives a brief summary of economic developments during this period:

Even a casual glance at numbers and growth rates reveals that growth and recovery after World War II was astonishingly rapid. Considering the three largest Western European economies - Britain, France, and Germany - the Second World War inflicted much more damage and destruction on a much wider area than the First. And (except for France) manpower losses were greater in World War II as well. The war ended with 24 percent of Germans born in 1924 dead or missing, and 31 percent disabled; post-war Germany contained 26 percent more women than men. In 1946, the year after the end of World War II, GNP per capita in the three largest Western European economies had fallen by a quarter relative to its pre-war, 1938 level. This was half again as much as production per capita in 1919 had fallen below its pre-war, 1913 level.

Yet the pace of post-World War II recovery soon surpassed that seen after World War I. By 1949 average GNP per capita in the three large countries had recovered to within a hair of its pre-war level, and in comparative terms recovery was two years ahead of its post-World War I pace. By 1951, six years after the war, GNP per capita was more than ten percent above its pre-war level, a degree of recovery that post-World War I Europe did not reach in the eleven post-World War I years before the Great Depression began. What post-World War II Europe accomplished in six years had taken post-World War I Europe sixteen.

The restoration of financial stability and the free play of market forces launched the European economy onto a two-decade long path of unprecedented rapid growth. European economic growth between 1953 and 1973 was twice as fast as for any comparable period before or since. The growth rate of GDP was 2 percent per annum between 1870 and 1913 and 2.5 percent per annum between 1922 and 1937. In contrast, growth accelerated to an astonishing 4.8 percent per year between 1953 and 1973, before slowing to half that rate from 1973 to 1979.[14]

Socialisme ou Barbarie: theorising the boom

Under the enormous weight of this avalanche of facts, the marxist view of capitalism as a crisis-prone system which had been in its epoch of decline for nearly half a century came under challenge on all fronts. And given the absence of generalised class movements (with some notable exceptions, such as the mass struggles in the eastern bloc in 1953 and 1956), official sociology began to talk about the “embourgeoisiement” of the working class, the recuperation of the proletariat by a consumer society which seemed to have solved the problems of managing the economy. This questioning of the fundamentals of marxism inevitably affected those who considered themselves to be revolutionaries. Marcuse agreed that the working class in the advanced countries had been more or less integrated into the system, and saw the revolutionary subject displaced towards oppressed ethnic minorities, rebellious students of the advanced countries and the peasants of the “third world”. But the most coherent challenge to the “traditional” marxist categories came from the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, a group whose rupture with official Trotskyism after the war had been welcomed by the left communists of the GCF.

In Modern Capitalism and Revolution,[15] written by the group’s main theoretician, Paul Cardan/Castoriadis analyses the main capitalist countries of the mid-1960s and concludes that “bureaucratic”, “modern” capitalism has succeeded in eliminating economic crises and can henceforward go on expanding indefinitely.

Capitalism has succeeded since the second world war in controlling the level of economic activity to a very considerable degree. Fluctuations of supply and demand are maintained within narrow limits. There have been profound modifications in the economy itself and in its relations with the state. The result is that depressions of the pre-war type are now virtually excluded...

Capitalist states have now been obliged publicly to assume responsibility for providing relatively full employment, and for eliminating major depressions. This they have more or less succeeded in doing, even if they cannot avoid phases of recession and inflation in the economy, let alone assuring its optimum, rational development. The situation of 1933 – which would correspond today to 20 million unemployed in the USA alone – is henceforth inconceivable. It would provoke an immediate explosion of the system. Neither workers nor capitalists would tolerate it.[16]

 Thus, Marx’s vision of capitalism as a crisis-prone system applies only to the 19th century and is no longer the case. There are no “objective” economic contradictions and economic crises, if they do occur, will from now on be essentially accidents (there is a 1974 introduction to the work which describes the recession of that period precisely as a result of the “accident” of the oil price rises). The tendency towards collapse as a result of inbuilt economic contradictions – in other words, a decline of the system – is no longer the basis for the socialist revolution, whose foundations must be sought elsewhere. Cardan argues that while economic convulsions and material poverty can indeed be overcome, what bureaucratic capitalism can never get rid of is the growth of alienation at work and leisure, the increasing privatisation of daily life,[17] and in particular the contradiction between the system’s need to treat the workers as dumb objects capable only of following orders, and the need of an increasingly sophisticated technological apparatus to count on the initiative and intelligence of the masses to enable it to function at all.

This approach recognised that the bureaucratic system had essentially annexed the old workers’ parties and unions,[18] increasing the masses’ lack of interest in traditional politics. It fiercely criticised the hollowness of the understanding of socialism propagated by the “traditional left”, whose advocacy of a fully nationalised economy (plus a bit of workers’ control, if you were selling the Trotskyist version) would merely offer the masses more of the same. Against these ossified institutions, and against the debilitating bureaucratisation which affected all the habits and organisations of capitalist society, SouB advocated the need for workers’ self-activity both in the day to day struggle and as the only means for reaching socialism. Since it was posed around the essential question of who really controls production in society, this was a far sounder basis for creating a socialist society than the “objectivist” view of the traditional marxists, who were waiting for the next big slump to step in to lead the workers to the promised land, not on the basis of a real increase in consciousness but simply on the back of a kind of biological reaction to impoverishment. This schema of revolution, in short, could never lead to a real transformation in human relations:

 And what about the origin of the 'contradictions' of capitalism, of its periodic crises, and of its profound historical crisis? According to the classical conception, the roots of all these lie in private appropriation, in other words in private property and the market. These, it is claimed, constitute an obstacle to the development of the productive forces, which is seen as the sole, true and eternal objective of social life. This type of criticism of capitalism consists, in the last analysis, in saying that what is wrong with capitalism is that it is not capitalist enough, that it is not doing its job well enough. To achieve 'a more rapid development of the productive forces' it is only necessary, according to the classical theory, that private property and the market be eliminated. Nationalization of the means of production and planning would then solve the crisis of contemporary society.

The workers don't know all this and can't know it. Their position in society forces them to suffer the consequences of the 'contradictions' of capitalism; it does not lead them to discover its causes. This knowledge cannot come to them from their experience in production. It can only come from a 'theoretical' knowledge of the 'laws' of capitalist economy. This knowledge is certainly accessible to individual, 'politically conscious' workers. But it is not available to the working class as a class. Driven forward by their revolt against poverty, but incapable of leading themselves (since their limited experience cannot give them a privileged viewpoint of social reality as a whole), the workers can only constitute an infantry at the disposal of a general staff of revolutionary generals. These specialists know (from knowledge to which the workers as such do not have access) what it is precisely that does not work in modern society. They know what must be done to modify it. It is easy to see why the traditional concepts of economics and the revolutionary perspectives which flow from them can only lead to – and historically have only led to – bureaucratic politics.

To be sure, Marx himself did not draw these conclusions from his economic theories. His political positions were usually, in fact, the very opposite. But what we have outlined are the consequences which objectively flow from these ideas. And these are the practices that have become more and more clearly affirmed in the historical development of the working class movement. These are the ideas that have finally culminated in Stalinism and which - shared by Trotskyism - have made it impossible for Trotskyism clearly to differentiate itself as a political tendency. For objectivist views of economics and history can only be a source of bureaucratic politics, that is, of politics which in the last analysis attempt only to improve the workings of the capitalist system, whilst preserving its essence.”[19]

It’s noticeable throughout this text that Cardan makes no attempt to distinguish the “traditional left” – ie the left wing of capital – from the authentic marxist currents which did survive the recuperation by capitalism of the old parties, and who strenuously advocated the self-activity of the working class despite an adherence to Marx’s critique of political economy. The latter (despite the post-war discussions between SouB and the GCF) are almost never mentioned; but more to the point, despite the lingering attachment to Marx contained in this passage, Cardan makes no attempt to explain why Marx did not draw “bureaucratic” conclusions from his “objectivist” economics, or to highlight the immense gulf between Marx’s conception of socialism and that of the Stalinists and Trotskyists. In fact, elsewhere in the same text, Marx’s own method is accused of objectivism, of erecting implacable economic laws which human beings can do nothing about, of falling into the same reification of labour power which he himself criticised. And despite some nods in the direction of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Cardan never accepts that the critique of alienation informs the whole of Marx’s work, which is nothing if not a protest against the reduction of man’s creative power to a commodity, but one which at the same time recognises this generalisation of commodity relations as the “objective” basis for the ultimate decline of the system. Similarly, despite some recognition that Marx did see a “subjective” side to the determination of the value of labour power, this doesn’t prevent Cardan from reaching his conclusion that “Marx, who discovered and ceaselessly propagated the idea of the crucial role of the class struggle in history, wrote a monumental work (Capital) from which the class struggle is virtually absent.[20]

Moreover, the economic contradictions which Cardan dismisses are presented in a very superficial manner. Cardan lines up with the neo-harmonist school (Otto Bauer, Tugan-Baranovski, etc) who tried to apply Marx’s schemas in Vol. 2 to prove that capitalism could indeed accumulate without crises: for Cardan, the regulated capitalism of the post-war period had finally brought about the necessary balance between production and consumption, eliminating forever the “market” problem. This is really just rehashed Keynesianism and the inherent limitations of trying to achieve a “balance” between production and the market would only too soon reveal themselves. The falling rate of profit is given equally short shrift in an appendix. The most telling aspect of this section is where he writes:

The whole argument is moreover irrelevant: it is a red herring. We have discussed it only because it has become an obsession in the minds of many honest revolutionaries, who cannot disentangle themselves from the fetters of traditional theory. What difference does it make to capitalism as a whole that profits today average, say, 12% whereas they averaged 15% a century ago? Would this, as sometimes implied in these discussions, slow down accumulation, and thereby the expansion of capitalist production? And even supposing it did: SO WHAT? When and by how much? And what is the relevance of this idea in a world where, not for a year, not for two years, but over the last quarter of a century production has expanded at rates undreamt of even in the heydays of capitalism? And even if this ‘law’ were true, why would it cease to be true under socialism?

The only 'basis' of the 'law' in Marx is something which has nothing to do with capitalism itself; it is the technical fact of more and more machines and fewer and fewer men. Under socialism, things would be even 'worse'. Technical progress would be accelerated -and what, in Marx's reasoning is a check against the falling rate of profit under capitalism, namely the rising rate of exploitation, would not have an equivalent under socialism. Would a socialist economy therefore come to a standstill because of a scarcity of funds for accumulation.”[21]

So for Cardan, a fundamental contradiction rooted in the very production of value is irrelevant because capitalism is going through a phase of accelerated accumulation. Worse: there will still be value production under socialism; and why not, since the production of commodities in itself does not inherently lead to crisis and collapse? Indeed, using basic capitalist categories like value and money could even prove to be a rational way of distributing the social product, as Cardan explains in his booklet Workers Councils and the Economics of a Self-managed Society (published by Solidarity in 1972, but originally titled 'Sur Ie Contenu du Socialisme' in the summer of 1957 in Socialisme ou Barbarie n° 22).

This superficiality made it impossible for Cardan to grasp the contingent and temporary nature of the post-war boom. 1973 was not an accident and it wasn’t primarily a result of the rise in oil prices – it was the explicit resurfacing of the basic economic contradictions that the bourgeoisie was trying so hard to deny and has spent the last 40 years trying to conjure away, with less and less effect. Today more than ever his prediction than a new depression is unthinkable seems ridiculously out of date. It is not surprising that the SouB and its successor in Britain, Solidarity, disappeared between the late 60s and the 80s, when the reality of the economic crisis was revealing itself with increasing severity to the working class and its political minorities. However, many of Cardan’s ideas – such as his castigation of “classical marxism” for being “objectivist”, for denying the subjective dimension of the revolutionary struggle – have proved remarkably persistent, as we shall see in another article.  

Gerrard, October 2011.

 

 


[1]. “Decadence of capitalism: Revolution has been both necessary and possible for a century”, International Review n° 132: en.internationalism.org/ir/2008/132/decadence_of_capitalism.

[2] See “Class struggle against imperialist war: Workers struggles in Italy, 1943”, International Review n° 75: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/075_1943.html.

[3]. See our book The Italian Communist Left for an account of the manner in which the PCInt was formed. For the GCF’s criticisms of the party’s platform, see “The second congress of the PCInt in Italy”, in Internationalisme no 36, July 1948, reprinted in International Review n° 36: en.internationalism.org/node/3136.

[4]. Bordigist “invariance”, as we have often pointed out, is actually extremely variable. Thus, while insisting on the integral nature of the communist programme since 1848, and hence the possibility of communism from that moment on, Bordigism was also obliged by its loyalty to the founding congresses of the CI to accept that the war marked the opening of a general, historic crisis of the system. As Bordiga himself wrote in “Characteristic Theses of the Party” in 1951:  “The world imperialistic wars show that the crisis of disaggregation of capitalism is inevitable as it has entered the phase when its expansion, instead of signifying a continual increment of the productive forces, is conditioned by repeated and ever-growing destructions”. We have written more about the ambiguity of the Bordigists on the problem of capitalism’s decline in International Review n° 77 en.internationalism.org/ir/077_rejection01.html.

[6]. Dialogue with the Dead, 1956. "Dialogue avec les morts", 1956, www.sinistra.net/lib/bas/progra/vale/valeecicif.html.

[9]. Ibid.

[10]. Ibid.

[11]. In his articles “Crises and cycles in the economy of capitalism in agony”, originally published in Bilan n°s 10 and 11 and republished in International Reviews n°s 102 and 103, which we examined in the previous article in this series, Mitchell had asserted that the markets of Asia would be one of the stakes in the coming war. He did not go beyond assertion, but it would be worth delving more deeply into this question, given that in the 1930s, this (and the far east in particular) was an area of the globe that contained the remnants of considerable pre-capitalist civilisations, and given the considerable importance of the capitalisation of the area to the development of capitalism in the last few decades.

[12].  The late forties was a period of austerity and hardship in most European countries. It was not until the middle fifties that the “prosperity” began to be felt by sections of the working class, and the first signs of a new phase of economic crisis appeared around 1967, becoming globally evident by the early 70s.  

[13]. Speech in Bedford, July 1957.

[14]. Slouching Towards Utopia? The Economic History of the Twentieth Century -XX. The Great Keynesian Boom: "Thirty Glorious Years", J. Bradford DeLong University of California at Berkeley and NBER, February 1997.

 

[15]. Paul Cardan, Modern Capitalism and Revolution: https://libcom.org/library/modern-capitalism-revolution-paul-cardan.

[16]. Cardan, op.cit. From the chapter “Some important features of modern capitalism”.

[17]. The Situationists, whose view of “economics” was strongly influenced by Cardan, went much further in the criticism of the sterility of modern capitalist culture and daily life.

[18]. The critique of the unions had its limitations however: the group had considerable illusions in the British shop stewards’ system, which had in reality long made its peace with the official union structure

[19]. Cardan, op. cit. From the chapter “Political implications of the “classical” theory”.

[20]. Ibid.

[21]. Cardan, op. cit. Appendix: “The falling rate of profit”.

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Decadence of Capitalism

2012 - 148 to 150

International Review no.148 - 1st Quarter 2012

The economic crisis is not a never-ending story

Since 2008, not a week has gone by without a new draconian austerity plan. Reductions in pensions, tax increases, wage freezes... nothing and nobody can escape. The whole of the world working class is sinking into poverty and insecurity. Capitalism is being hit by the most acute economic crisis in its entire history. The current process, left to its own logic, can only lead to the collapse of capitalist society. This is shown by the complete impasse facing the bourgeoisie. All the measures it takes are revealed as vain and fruitless. Worse! They are actually aggravating the problem. This class of exploiters no longer has any answers, even in the medium term. The crisis did not level out in 2008; it is getting worse and worse. And the impotence of the bourgeoisie is leading to tensions and conflicts in its ranks. The economic crisis is turning into a political crisis.

In the last few months, in Greece, Italy, Spain, the US... governments are becoming more and more unstable, increasingly unable to impose their policies as divisions between different factions within the national bourgeoisie grow in strength. The different national bourgeoisies are also often divided amongst themselves on a global scale when it comes to deciding what measures to take against the crisis. The result of all this is that measures are frequently only taken after months of delay, as we saw with the eurozone’s plan for bailing out Greece. As for the current anti-crisis measures, like the ones that came before them, they can only reflect the growing irrationality of the capitalist system. Economic crisis and political crisis are banging simultaneously on the door of history.

However, this major political crisis of the bourgeoisie is not in itself something that can be celebrated by the exploited. In the face of the danger of class struggle, the bourgeoisie maintains a sacred union, an iron discipline against the proletariat. However difficult the task facing the working class, it holds in its hands the power to destroy this dying world order and to build a new society. This goal can only be attained collectively, through the generalisation of the proletariat’s own struggles.

Why can’t the bourgeoisie find a solution to the crisis?

In 2008 and 2009, despite the gravity of the world economic situation, the bourgeoisie breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the situation seemed to stop getting worse. To believe them, the crisis was just a passing event. The ruling class and its servile specialists claimed in all languages that they had the situation in hand, that everything was under control. The world was merely seeing an adjustment of the economy, a small purge needed to eliminate the excesses of previous years. But reality has mocked the lying discourse of the bourgeoisie. The last quarter of 2011 has seen a whole series of international summits, every one of them described as “last chance meetings” aimed at saving the eurozone from falling apart. The media, conscious of this danger, talk of little else but the “debt crisis”. Every day the papers and the TV are filled with their analyses, each one in contradiction with the next. There is a real note of panic in their voices. And even then they often forget that the crisis is continuing to develop outside the eurozone: the USA, Britain, China, etc. World capitalism is faced with a problem which it cannot solve. This can be represented by the image of a wall that cannot be scaled: the “wall of debt”.

For capitalism, its overall debt has become fatal. It’s true that a debt in one part of the world is equal to a loan somewhere else, so that some people claim that world debt actually stands at zero. But this is a pure illusion, a clever accountant’s trick, a game written on paper. In the real world, all the banks for example are in a more or less permanent situation of bankruptcy. And yet their accounts are “balanced”, as they like to put it. But what is the real value of their shares in the Greek or Italian debts, or the ones in Spanish or US housing loans? The answer is clear: virtually nothing. The tills are empty and all that remains is debt and more debt.

But why, at the beginning of 2012, is capitalism facing such a problem? What is the origin of this ocean of money loans which has for so long been totally disconnected from the real wealth of society? Debt has its source in credit. These are the loans agreed by central or private banks to all the economic agencies in society. These loans become a barrier for capital when they can no longer be paid back, when it becomes necessary to create new debts to pay the interest on previous debts or to reimburse a small fraction of the actual debts.

Whichever organism gives out the money, whether central banks or private ones, it is vital, from the standpoint of global capital, that enough commodities are sold for a profit on the world market. This is a condition for the survival of capital. But this hasn’t been the case for the last 40 years. In order for all the commodities produced to be sold, it has become necessary for money to be loaned to pay for the goods, to reimburse previously contracted debts, and to pay back the interest accumulated on them. And this has meant contracting new debts. The time comes when the overall debt of particular banks or states can no longer be honoured, and in more and more cases this goes for the servicing of the debts. This marks the general crisis of debt. This is the moment when debt and the creation of growing amounts of fictitious money have become a poison contaminating capitalism’s entire body.

What is the real gravity of the world economic situation?

The beginning of 2012 has seen the world economy fall back into recession. The same causes always produce the same effects, but at a more serious and dramatic level. At the beginning of 2008, the financial system was on the verge of collapse. The new credits injected into the economy were soon eaten up and the economy went into recession. Since then, the American, British and Japanese central banks, among others, have injected further billions of dollars. Capitalism bought itself some time and was able to revive the economy in a very minimal way while preventing the banks and assurance companies from going under. How did all this turn out? The answer is now known. States are massively in debt to the central banks and the markets are taking over a very small part of the debt of the banks. Nothing has really changed.

At the beginning of 2012, the impasse facing global capital can be illustrated, among other things, by the €485bn earmarked by the European Central bank to save the banks in the zone from immediate bankruptcy. The ECB has lent money to the central banks of the zone in exchange for toxic shares. Shares which are part of the state debts of this zone. The banks in turn then have to buy up new state debts for those which are not collapsing. Each is holding up the next, each one is buying the next one’s debt with what is in effect money printed for the purpose. If one goes down, they all go down.

As in 2008, but in a much more drastic way, credit is no longer going into the real economy. Each player protects his own money in order to avoid collapse. At the beginning of this year, at the level of the private economy, investments in enterprises are becoming very rare. The impoverished populations are pulling in their belts. The depression is with us again. The eurozone, like the USA, has a near-zero growth rate. The fact that the USA saw a slightly better economic activity in comparison to the rest of the year does not mean any lasting change in the general tendency. In the short term, according to the IMF, growth in 2012 will be between 1.8% and 2.4% depending on the country. And then again, that’s if “everything goes well”, ie. if there is no major economic event, something noone would care to bet on right now!

The “emerging” countries, like India and Brazil, are seeing a rapid reduction in activity. Even China, which since 2008 has been presented as the new locomotive of the world economy, is officially going from bad to worse. An article on the website of the China Daily on 26th December said that two provinces (one being Guandong which is one of the richest in the country since it hosts a large part of the manufacturing sector for mass consumer products) have told Beijing that they are going to delay the payments on the interests for their debt. In other words, China is also faced with bankruptcy.

2012 is going to see a contraction of world economic activity on a scale which no one can yet predict. At best, world growth is calculated to be around 3.5%. In December, the IMF, OECD and all the economic think tanks revised their predicted growth figures downwards. It seems clear that the colossal injection of new credit in 2008 created the present wall of debt. Further debts contracted since then have only made the wall higher, and have been less and less effective in getting the economy moving. Capitalism is thus on the edge of a precipice: in 2011, the financing of debt, ie. the money needed to pay debts that had reached their deadline, and the interest on the overall debt, reached $10,000bn. In 2012, it is predicted to reach $10,500bn, while the world’s reserves are estimated at $5,000bn. Where is capitalism going to find the money to pay for this?

At the end of 2011 we saw not only the debt crisis of the banks and assurances, but also the growing implication of the sovereign debts of states. It is legitimate to ask who is going to go down first? A big private bank and thus the whole world banking system? A new state like Italy or France? The eurozone? The dollar?

From economic crisis to political crisis

In the previous International Review we pointed to the very wide disagreements between the main countries of the eurozone in facing the financial problem of the cessation of payment by certain countries, whether this was already happening (as in the case of Greece) or threatening to happen (as in the case of Italy), and the differences between Europe and the USA in dealing with the problem of world debt.1

Since 2008, all policies have led to a dead-end, while disagreements within the different national bourgeoisies about the debt and the problem of growth have led to tensions, disputes and open confrontations. With the inevitable development of the crisis, this “debate” is only just beginning.

There are those who want to reduce the debt through violent austerity budgets. For them, there is one slogan: drastic cuts in all state expenditure. Here Greece is a model showing the way for everyone. The real economy there has been through a 5% recession. Businesses are closing; the country and the population are sinking into ruin and poverty. And still this disastrous policy is being taken up all over the place: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Britain, etc. The bourgeoisie has the same illusion as the doctors of the Middle Ages who believed in the virtues of a good bleeding. But the economy will do no better from such a remedy than their patients did.

Another part of the bourgeoisie wants to monetise the debt, ie. transform it into issues of money. This is what the American and Japanese bourgeoisies have been doing on an unprecedented scale, for example. It’s what the ECB has been doing on a smaller scale. This policy has the merit of making it possible to play for time. It makes it possible to deal with debt deadlines on a short-term basis. It makes it possible to slow down the recession. But it has a catastrophic side effect: eventually it will result in a general fall in the value of money. Capitalism can no more live without money than a man can live without breathing. Adding debt to a debt, which is already, as in the US, Britain or Japan, preventing a real revival of the economy can only lead, in the end, to a more profound collapse.

Finally, there are those who think you can combine the two previous approaches. They are for austerity and growth based on the creation of money. This orientation is probably the clearest expression of the impasse facing the bourgeoisie. And yet it’s what they’ve been doing for the last two years in Britain and what Monti, the new chief of the Italian government, is calling for there. This part of the ruling class reasons as follows: “if we make an effort to drastically reduce expenditure, the markets will regain confidence in the capacity of states to repay their debts. They will then lend to us as tolerable rates and we can again go into debt”. The circle is complete. This part of the bourgeoisie really thinks it can go back in time, to the situation before 2007-8.

None of these alternatives are viable, even in the medium term. They all lead capital into an impasse. While the creation of money by the central banks seems to lead to a bit of respite, the journey will still end up at the same destination: the historic downfall of capitalism.

Governments are more and more unstable

Capitalism’s economic dead-end inevitably engenders a historic tendency towards political crisis within the bourgeoisie. Last spring, in the space of a few months, we saw spectacular political crises in Portugal, the USA, Greece and Italy. In a more discreet manner, the same crisis is advancing in other central countries like Germany, Britain and France.

For all its illusions, a growing part of the world bourgeoisie is beginning to grasp the catastrophic state of its economy. We are hearing increasingly alarmist statements. As this anxiety, disquiet and even panic spreads amongst the bourgeoisie, they are beginning to go back to some of the old, rigid certainties. Each part of the bourgeoisie is fixating on the best way to defend the national interest, according to the economic or political sector it belongs to. The ruling class is coming to blows over the various hopeless solutions we looked at above. Each political orientation proposed by the government team provokes violent opposition from other sectors of the bourgeoisie.

In Italy, the total loss of credibility in Berlusconi’s ability to impose the austerity plans that are supposed to reduce public debt led the former president of the Italian Council to quit, following pressure from the “markets” and the main representatives of the eurozone. In Portugal, Spain and Greece, over and above the national specificities, the same reasons led to the hurried departure of the governments in place.

The example of the USA is historically the most significant. This is the world’s leading power. This summer, the American bourgeoisie was torn apart around the question of raising the ceiling on debt. This has been done many times since the 1960s without posing any major problems. So why this time did it provoke such a crisis that the American economy was a hair’s breadth from total paralysis? It’s true that a faction of the bourgeoisie which has acquired a growing weight in the political life of the US ruling class, the Tea Party, is totally irresponsible even from the standpoint of defending the interests of the national capital. However, contrary to those who would like us to believe it, it’s not the Tea Party which is the main cause of the paralysis of the American central administration but the open confrontation between the Democrats and the Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives, with each one thinking that the solution put forward by the other is catastrophic, suicidal for the country. This led to a dubious, fragile compromise, which will probably, only last a short time. It will be put to the test during the forthcoming elections. The continuation of the economic weakening of the USA can only fuel the political crisis there.

But the growing impasse of the present policies can also be seen in the contradictory demands that the financial markets are making on governments. These famous markets are demanding at one and the same time draconian plans of “rigour” and at the same time a revival of economic activity. When they start losing confidence in the ability of a state to repay significant parts of its debt, they quickly raise the interest rates on their loans. The end result is guaranteed: these states can no longer borrow on the markets. They become totally dependent on the central banks. After Greece, the same thing is beginning to happen for Spain and Italy. The economic noose is tightening on these countries, adding more fuel to the political crisis.

The attitude of Cameron at the last EU summit, rejecting the same budgetary and financial discipline for everyone, spells the eventual end of the line for the Union. The British economy only survives thanks to its financial sector. Even thinking about controls over this sector is out of the question for the majority of British Conservatives. Cameron’s position has led to conflicts between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, making the governing coalition weaker than before. It has also sharpened dissensions in Wales and Scotland over the issue of belonging to the EU.

Finally, a new factor favouring the development of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie has raised its head in recent debates. An old demon, held in check for a long time, is now straining at the leash: protectionism. In the USA and the eurozone, many conservatives and populists of right and left are calling for new customs barriers. For this part of the bourgeoisie, which is now being joined by a number of “socialists”, the way forward is to reindustrialise your country, to “produce nationally”. China is already protesting against the measures that the USA has taken towards its imports. In Washington itself there is still much tension over this question. The Tea Party but also a significant part of the Republican party are pushing these demands to the limit, forcing Obama and the Democrats (as with the question of the debt ceiling) to dub these sectors as locked in the past and as irresponsible. This phenomenon is only just beginning. For the moment, no one can foresee how far it’s going to go. But what’s certain is that it will have an important impact on the coherence of the bourgeoisie as a whole, its ability to maintain stable parties and government teams.

However we look at this crisis within the bourgeoisie, it can only go in one direction, towards the growing instability of governing teams, including those in the leading powers of the planet.

The bourgeoisie divided by the crisis but united against the class struggle

The proletariat cannot celebrate the political crisis of the bourgeoisie in itself. Divisions and conflicts within the ruling class are no guarantee of success for its struggle. All proletarians and above all the young generations of the exploited need to understand that, however deep the crisis within the bourgeoisie, however acute its internal faction fights, it will always unite against the class struggle. This is known as the Sacred Union. This was the case during the Paris Commune of 1871. Let’s remember how the Prussian and French bourgeoisies managed to unite in time to crush the first great proletarian uprising in history. All the big movements of the proletarian struggle have come up against this Sacred Union. There is no exception to the rule.

The proletariat cannot count on the weaknesses of the bourgeoisie. Political divisions within the enemy class don’t guarantee its victory. It can only count on its own forces. And we have been seeing these forces emerging in a number of countries recently.

In China, a country where an important part of the world working class is now concentrated, struggles are taking place almost daily. There are explosions of anger involving not only the wage workers but the more general impoverished population, such as the peasantry. Miserable wages, unbearable working conditions, ferocious repression... Social conflicts have been developing, notably in the factories where production is being hit by the slow-down in European and American demand. Here in a shoe factory, there in a factory in Sichuan, there at HIP, a subsidiary of apple, at Honda, Tesco etc. “There is a strike almost every day, said labour rights activist Liu Kalming.2 Even if these struggles remain, for the moment, isolated and without much perspective, they show that the workers in Asia, like their class brothers and sisters in the West, are not ready to just knuckle down and accept the consequences of the economic crisis of capital. In Egypt, after the big mobilisations of January and February 2011, the feeling of revolt is still very much alive in the population. Generalised corruption, total impoverishment, the political and economic impasse, have pushed thousands of people onto the streets and the town squares. The government, currently led by the military, responds with slander and bullets, a repression made all the easier by the fact that, unlike last year, the working class has not been able to mobilise itself en masse. For the bourgeoisie this is where the danger lies: “you can understand the army’s anxiety about the insecurity and social turbulence that has developed in the last few months. There is a fear of the contagion of strikes in the enterprises where the employees are deprived of any social and union rights while any protest is seen as a form of treason” (Ibrahim al Sahari, a representative of the Centre of Socialist Studies in Cairo3).

Here it’s said clearly: what the bourgeoisie fears is a workers’ movement developing on its own class terrain. In this country, democratic illusions are strong after so many years of dictatorship, but the economic crisis can limit their impact. The Egyptian bourgeoisie, whatever faction is in government after the recent elections, cannot prevent the situation from worsening and the unpopularity of the government from growing. All these workers’ struggles and social movements, despite their limitations and weaknesses, express the beginnings of a refusal, by the working class and a growing part of the oppressed population, to passively accept the fate reserved for them by capitalism.

The workers in the central countries of capitalism have also not been inert in the last few months. On 30th November in Britain, two million people came onto the streets to protest against the permanent deterioration of their living conditions. This strike was the biggest for several decades in a country where the working class, which in the 1970s was the most militant in Europe, was crushed under the heel of Thatcherism in the 1980s. This is why seeing two million people demonstrating on the streets in Britain, even though it was a sterile, union controlled “day of action”, is a very significant sign of the revival of working class militancy on a world scale. The movement of the “Indignados”, especially in Spain, has shown in an embryonic way what the working class is capable of. The premises of its own strength appeared very clearly: general assemblies open to everyone, free and fraternal debates, the attempt to take charge of the struggle by the movement itself, solidarity and self-confidence (see the numerous articles about these movements that we have published on our website4). The ability of the working class to organise itself as an autonomous force, as a unified collective body, will be a vital element in the development of massive proletarian struggles in the future. The workers of the central countries, who are best placed to unmask the democratic and trade union mystifications which they have faced for decades, will also show the proletariat of the world that this is possible and necessary.

World capitalism is in the process of collapsing economically, and the bourgeois class is being more and more shaken by political crises. Every day, it becomes a little clearer that this system is totally unviable.

Counting on our forces also means knowing what we lack. Everywhere a movement of resistance against the attacks of capitalism is being born. In Spain, in Greece, in the USA, the criticisms coming from the proletarian wing of this movement are directed against this rotten economic system. We are seeing the beginnings of a rejection of capitalism. But then the key question is posed to the working class. We can see the necessity to destroy this system, but what are we gong to put in its place? What we need is a society without exploitation, without poverty and war. A society where humanity is at last united on a world scale and no longer divided into nations or classes, no longer separated by colour or religion. A society where everyone will have what they need to fully realise themselves. This other world, which has to be the goal of the class struggle when it launches its assault on capitalism, is possible. It is the task of the working class (those at work, the unemployed, future proletarians still in education, those who work behind a machine or at a computer, manual labourers, technicians, scientists etc) to undertake this revolutionary transformation and it has a name: communism, which obviously has nothing in common with the hideous monstrosity of Stalinism which has usurped the name! This is not a dream or a utopia. Capitalism, in order to develop itself, has also developed the technical, scientific and productive means which will make a world human society possible. For the first time in its history, society can leave behind the realm of scarcity and reach the realm of abundance and of respect for life. The struggles which are developing now all over the world, even if they are still very embryonic, have begun to re-appropriate this goal under the lash of a failing social order. The working class carries within itself the historic capacity to reach this goal.

Tino 10.1.12

2. In the journal Cette Semaine.

 

Recent and ongoing: 

Rubric: 

Economic Crisis

Debate: The state in the period of transition from capitalism to communism, Part 1

We publish below a contribution from a political group in the proletarian camp, OPOP,1 about the state in the transition period and its relationship with the organisation of the working class during this period.

Although this question is not of "immediate topicality", it is a fundamental responsibility of revolutionary organisations to develop theory that will enable the proletariat to carry out its revolution. In this sense, we welcome the effort of the OPOP to clarify an issue that will be of primary importance in the future revolution, if it is successful, in order to implement the global transformation of the society bequeathed by capitalism into a classless society without exploitation.

The experience of the working class has already contributed to the practical clarification and theoretical elaboration of this issue. The brief experience of the Paris Commune, where the proletariat took power for two months, has clarified the need to destroy the bourgeois state (and not to conquer it as revolutionaries previously thought) and for the permanent revocability of delegates elected by the workers. The Russian Revolution of 1905 gave rise to specific organs, the workers' councils, organs of working class power. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin in his book The State and Revolution condensed the gains of the proletarian movement on this issue at that time. It is the conception summarised by Lenin of a proletarian state, the Council-State, that is addressed in the OPOP’s text below.

For OPOP, the failure of the Russian Revolution (because of its international isolation) does not permit us to draw new lessons with regard to Lenin’s point of view. On this basis, it rejects the ICC’s conception that challenges the notion of the "proletarian state". While developing its critique, OPOP’s contribution takes care to define the scope of disagreement between our organisations, which we welcome, pointing out that we have in common the idea that "workers' councils must have unlimited power and [...] must constitute the core of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat".

The view of the ICC on the question of the state only continues the theoretical effort led by the left fractions (Italian in particular) that arose in response to the degeneration of the parties of the Communist International. While it is perfectly fair to find the root cause of the degeneration of the Russian revolution in its international isolation, this does not mean that this experience cannot provide lessons about the role of the state, thus enriching the theoretical basis that is Lenin’s State and Revolution. Unlike the Paris Commune, which was clearly and openly crushed by the savage repression of the bourgeoisie, in Russia it was somehow from "inside", from the degeneration of the state itself, that the counter-revolution came (in the absence of the extension of the revolution). How to understand this phenomenon? How and why could the counter-revolution take this form? It is precisely by basing ourselves on the theoretical gains made on the basis of this experience that we criticise the position of the "proletarian state" advocated in Lenin’s work, as well as some formulations of Marx and Engels made in the same sense.

Of course, unlike the “positive” gains of the Commune, the lessons we learn about the role of the state are "negative", and in this sense they are an object of open questioning, not having been decided by history. But as we said above, it is the responsibility of revolutionaries to prepare for the future. In a future issue of the International Review we will publish a response to the theses developed by OPOP. We can mention here, in a very summarised way, the main ideas on which this will focus:2:

  • it is inappropriate to speak of the state as being the product of a particular class. As Engels showed, the state is the product of the entire society divided into antagonistic classes. Identifying with the dominant production relations (and therefore with the class that embodies them), its function is to preserve the established economic order;

  • after the victorious revolution, different social classes still exist, even after the defeat of the bourgeoisie at the international level;

  • if the proletarian revolution is the act by which the working class constitutes itself as the politically dominant class, this class does not become the economically dominant class. It remains, until the integration of all members of society into associated labour, the exploited class of society and the only revolutionary class, that is to say bearing the communist project. As such, it must permanently maintain its class autonomy to defend its immediate interests as the exploited class and its historic project of communist society.

ICC

 


 

 

Workers' councils, proletarian state, dictatorship of the proletariat in the socialist phase of transition to a classless society

1. Introduction

The lefts are behind in the very urgent discussion on questions of strategy, tactics, organisation and also on the transition [to communism]. Among the many subjects that need answers, one that stands out particularly is that of the state, which deserves a systematic debate.

On this question, some left forces have a different view from ours, mainly regarding the councils, the real structures of the working class, which arise as organs of a pre-Commune-State, and by extension, of the Commune-State itself. For these organisations, the state is one thing and the councils another, totally different. For us, the councils are the form through which the working class constitutes itself at the organisational level in the state, as the dictatorship of the proletariat, seeing that the state means the power of one class over another.

The marxist conception of the proletarian state contains, for the short term, the idea of the need for an instrument of class rule, but for the medium term it indicates the need for the end of the state itself. What it proposes and what must prevail in communism is a classless society and the absence of the need for the oppression of man or woman, since there has never been more antagonism between different social groups than there is today because of private ownership of the means of production and the separation of direct producers from the means – and the conditions – of work and thus of production.

Society, which will then be highly developed, will enter a stage of self-government and the administration of things, where there will be no need for the transitory social organisations experienced since homo sapiens has existed, with the exception of the council form which is the most evolved form of the state (its simplified character, its dynamic of deliberate and conscious self-extinction and its social force are nothing but manifestations of its superiority over all other past forms of the state). The working class will use this form to pass from the first phase of communism (socialism) to a higher phase of society, a classless society. But to reach this stage, the working class must build, well in advance, the means of the transition, which are the councils on a global scale.

The task will then fall to marxist organisations, not to control the state, either from the outside or the inside, but to constantly struggle within the Commune-State built by the working class and all of the proletariat through the councils, so that it rises to the most revolutionary heights of its combat. The councils, in turn, will actually assume the struggle for the new state, with the understanding that it is they themselves who are the state, which was not without reason called by Lenin the Commune-State.

The Council-State is revolutionary as much in form as in content. It differs, in essence, from the bourgeois state of capitalist society as much as the other societies which precede it. The Council-State results from the constitution of the working class as the ruling class, as posed in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 written by Marx and Engels. In this sense, the functions it takes on differ radically from those of the bourgeois capitalist state, to the extent that a change takes place, a quantitative and qualitative transformation at the same moment as the rupture between the old power and the new form of social organisation: the Council-State.

The Council-State is at the same time and dialectically the political and social negation of the earlier order; this is why it is, equally dialectically, the affirmation and negation of the form of the state: negation in that it undertakes its own extinction and at the same time of all forms of the state; affirmation as an extreme expression of its own strength, the condition of its own negation, in that a weak post-revolutionary state would be unable to resolve its own ambiguous existence: to carry out the task of repression of the bourgeoisie as the first premise of its decisive step, the act of its disappearance. In the bourgeois state, the relation of dictatorship-democracy is achieved through a combined relationship of (dialectical) contradictory unity in which the great majority is subdued through the political and military domination of the bourgeoisie. In the Council-State, on the contrary, these poles are reversed. The proletariat, which previously had no political participation because of the process of manipulation and exclusion from decisions through which it was subdued, will play the dominant role in the process of class struggle. It will establish the greatest political democracy known to history, which will be associated, as it should, with the dictatorship of the exploited majority over a stripped and expropriated minority, who will do anything to organise the counter-revolution.

It is the Council-State, the ultimate expression of the proletarian dictatorship, that uses this power not only to ensure greater democracy for workers in general and the working class in particular, but before and above all, to suppress in an extremely organised manner the forces of the counter-revolution.

The Council-State condenses in itself, as has already been said, the unity between content and form. It is during the revolutionary situation, when the Bolsheviks organised the insurrection in Russia in October 1917, that this issue became clearer. At that time, it was impossible to distinguish between the project proposed by the working class, socialism, the content and form of organisation, and the new type of state it wanted to build on the basis of the soviets. Socialism, the power of the workers and the soviets; it was all the same, so that we could not talk about one without understanding that they were talking automatically about the other. Thus, it is not because in Russia a state organisation was built that moved further and further away from the working class that we must abandon the revolutionary attempt to establish the Soviet State.

The soviets (councils), through all the mechanisms and elements inherited from the bureaucracy in the USSR, were deprived of their revolutionary content to become, in the mould of a bourgeois state, an institutionalised body. But that does not mean we should give up the attempt to build a new type of state, functioning along basic principles which would necessarily be in line with the most important thing the working class has created through the historical process of its struggle, namely a form of organisation that needs only to be improved in certain aspects in order to complete the transition, but which, basically since the Paris Commune of 1871, has been through a number of rehearsals, a series of trials and errors, which will enable us to achieve the Council-State.

Today, the task of establishing the councils as a form of organisation of the state is situated not only in the perspective of a single country but at the international level, and that is the main challenge facing the working class. Therefore, we propose through this short essay, to make an attempt to understand what the Council-State is, or in other words, to make a theoretical elaboration on a question that the working class has already experienced practically, through its historical experience and in its confrontation with the forces of capital. Let’s turn to the analysis.

2. Preamble

To avoid duplication and redundancy, we consider it to be established that, in this text, we accept the letter of all the principal theoretical and political definitions that define the body of doctrine of Lenin’s State and Revolution. Further, we warn the reader that we will only recall the Leninist premises to the extent they are indispensable to theoretically establish some of the assumptions necessary for the really urgent need to update this subject. In addition, we will only do that if the premises in question are needed to clarify and establish the theoretical-political objective that concerns us, namely the relationship between the council system and the proletarian state (= dictatorship of the proletariat) with its prior form, the pre-state.

From another point of view, Lenin's above mentioned work proves equally necessary and indispensable, as it includes the most comprehensive overview of the passages by Marx and Engels relating to the state in the phase of transition, thereby putting within easy reach a more than sufficient quantity of existing and authorised positions produced on The State and Revolution in the whole political literature.

3. Some premises of workers' power

Commenting on Engels, in two passages of his text Lenin makes the following statements: “The state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms [...] According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes” and “...the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another”.3 Conciliation and domination are two very precise concepts in Marx, Engels and Lenin’s doctrine of the state. Conciliation means the negation of any contradiction whatsoever between the terms of a given relationship. In the social sphere, in the absence of contradictions in the ontological constitution of the fundamental social classes of a social formation, to speak of the state does not make sense. It is historically proven that in primitive societies there is no state, simply because there are no social classes, exploitation, oppression or domination by one class over another. On the other hand, when it comes to the ontological constitution of social classes, domination is a concept that excludes hegemony, as hegemony supposes the sharing – very unevenly – of positions within the same structural context. The result is that in the field of bourgeois sociality, which extends to that of the revolution, in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are situated and are fighting from diametrically antagonistic positions, to speak about hegemony of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat does not make sense, whereas one can talk of hegemony between the fractions of the bourgeoisie who share the same state power, and it also makes sense to speak of the hegemony of the proletariat over the classes with which it shares the common goal of taking power by overthrowing the common strategic enemy.4

Moreover, quoting Engels, Lenin speaks of public force, this characteristic pillar of the bourgeois state – the other being the bureaucracy – consisting of an entire specialised military and repressive apparatus, which is separated from society and above it, “...which no longer directly coincides with the population organising itself as an armed force.”5 The identification of this core component of the bourgeois order here has a clear objective: to show how, in return, it is equally essential to establish an armed force, even stronger and more coherent, by which the armed proletariat can suppress, with an even more resolute determination, the beaten but not dead class enemy, the bourgeoisie. In which body of the proletarian dictatorship must this repressive force be found?. This is a question to be addressed in a specific chapter of this text.

The other pillar on which bourgeois power rests is the bureaucracy, comprising state functionaries, who enjoy a pile of privileges, including honorary payments, positions assigned for an easy life, who accumulate all the benefits of practices inherent in a major and recurring corruption. As with the popular militias which are all the stronger to the extent that they are structurally simplified, so it is for the executive, legislative and judicial tasks, which are all the more efficient when they are also simplified, and for exactly the same reason. The executive tasks of the courts and legislative functions are strengthened to the extent that they are taken in hand directly by the workers in conditions where revocability is established in order to curb, from the start, the tendency for the resurgence of castes that has badly affected all societies born from "socialist" revolutions throughout the twentieth century.

The bureaucracy and professional law enforcement, the two main planks on which the political power of the bourgeoisie is based, the two pillars whose functions must be replaced by the workers with structures which are simplified (in the course of their extinction) but also much stronger and more efficient; simplification and strength thus oppose and attract each other in the movement that accompanies the whole transition process until there is no trace of the previous class society. The problem we are now posed is: what is the body which, for Marx, Engels and Lenin, must assume the dictatorship of the proletariat?

4. The dictatorship of the proletariat for Marx, Engels and Lenin

Our trio leaves no doubt about it:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."6

Or again, the proletarian state (sic) = "the proletariat organised as the ruling class." "The state, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class." (sic). So far, the sense of the reasoning of Lenin, Marx and Engels is: the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie by the revolution; by overthrowing the bourgeois state machine, it will destroy the state machine in question to immediately erect its own state, simplified and heading for extinction, which is stronger because it is run by the revolutionary class and assumes two types of tasks: to suppress the bourgeoisie and to construct socialism (the phase of transition to communism).

But where does Marx get this belief that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletarian state? From the Paris Commune ... simple! Indeed, “The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class".7 The question goes much further: members of the proletarian state (sic), the Commune-State, are elected in district councils, which does not mean that there are no councils of workers which put themselves at the head of such councils, as in Russia, in the soviets. The question of the hegemony of the workers’ leadership is guaranteed by the existence of a majority of workers in these councils and, of course, by the leadership which the party must exercise in such instances.

Only one ingredient is missing to articulate the position of proletarian state, Council-State, Commune-State, socialist state or dictatorship of the proletariat: the method of decision-making, and here it is here that we must refer to the universal principle that many marxists fail to understand: democratic centralism, “But Engels did not at all mean democratic centralism in the bureaucratic sense in which the term is used by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologists, the anarchists among the latter. His idea of centralism did not in the least preclude such broad local self-government as would combine the voluntary defence of the unity of the state by the ‘communes’ and districts, and the complete elimination of all bureaucratic practices and all ‘ordering’ from above.8. It is clear that the term and concept of democratic centralism is not the creation of Stalinism, as some like to argue, thus distorting this essentially proletarian method – but of Engels himself. Therefore, it cannot be given the pejorative connotation that comes from the bureaucratic centralism used by the new state bourgeoisie in the USSR.

5. Council system and dictatorship of the proletariat

The antithetical separation between the council system and post-revolutionary state is an error for several reasons. One of them is that it is a position which distances itself from the conception of Marx, Engels and Lenin in reflecting a certain influence of the anarchist conception of the state. To separate the proletarian state from the council system comes back to breaking the unity that should exist and persist in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Such a separation defines, on one side, the state as a complex administrative structure, to be managed by a body of officials – an aberration in the simplified conception of the state of Marx, Engels and Lenin – and on the another, a political structure, in the framework of the councils, to put pressure on the first (the state as such). This conception results in an accommodation to a vision influenced by anarchism that identifies the Commune-State with the (bourgeois) bureaucratic state. It is the product of the ambiguities of the Russian Revolution and places the proletariat outside of the post-revolutionary state, creating a dichotomy, which itself is the germ of a new caste breeding in an administrative body organically separate from the councils.

Another cause of this error, which is related to the preceding one, is in the establishing of a strange connection that identifies in an uncritical way the state that emerged in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union – a necessarily bureaucratic state – with the conception of the State-Commune of Marx, Engels and Lenin himself. It is an error that arises from a misunderstanding of the ambiguities that resulted from the specific historical and social circumstances that blocked not only the transition but also the beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR. Here, one ceases to understand that the dynamic taken by the Russian Revolution– unless you opt for the easy but very inconsistent interpretation in which deviations in the revolutionary process were the result of the policies of Stalin and his entourage – did not obey the conception of the revolution, the state and of socialism that Lenin had, but resulted from the restrictions of the social and political terrain from which the power of the USSR emerged, characterised among others, to recall, by the impossibility of the revolution in Europe, by civil war and the counter-revolution within the USSR. The resulting dynamic was foreign to the will of Lenin. He himself thought about this problem, but repeatedly came up with the ambiguous formulations present in his later thinking and just before his death. Such ambiguities were situated more in the advances and setbacks of the revolution than in the basic political theoretical conceptions of Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders who continued to agree with him.

A third cause of this error is to not take into account that the organisational and administrative tasks put on the agenda by the revolution are essentially political tasks, whose implementation must be carried out directly by the victorious proletariat. Thus, burning issues such as central planning – given a bureaucratic form in Gosplan (Central Planning Commission) has long been confused with "socialist centralisation" – are not purely "technical" questions but highly political and, as such, cannot be delegated, even if they are "checked" from the outside, by the councils, by means of a body of employees located outside the council system, where the most conscious workers are found. Today, we know that ultra-centralised "socialist" planning was only one aspect of the bureaucratic centralisation of "Soviet" state capitalism which kept the proletariat remote and outside of the whole system of defining objectives, decisions about what should be produced and how it should be distributed, the allocation of resources, etc.. Had it been a real socialist planning, all of this should have been the subject of wide discussion in the councils, or the Commune-State. Seeing that the proletarian state merges with the council system, the socialist state is “a very simple ‘machine’, almost without a ‘machine’, without a special apparatus, by the simple organisation of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, we would remark, running ahead).”"9

Another misunderstanding is in the non-perception that the real simplification of the Commune-State, as described by Lenin in the words reported earlier, implies a minimum of administrative structure and that this structure is so small and in the process of simplification/extinction, that it can be assumed directly by the council system. Therefore, it makes no sense to take as a reference the "soviet" state of the USSR to put in question the socialist state that Marx and Engels saw born in the Paris Commune. In fact, to establish a link between the Council-State and the bureaucratic state that emerged from the Russian Revolution, amounts to giving the proletarian state a bureaucratic structure that a true post-revolutionary state, simplified and in the process of simplification / extinction, not only does not possess but specifically rejects.

In fact, the nature and extent of the Council-State (proletarian state = socialist state = dictatorship of the proletariat= Commune-State = transition state) are beautifully summarised in this passage written by Lenin himself: “the ‘state’ is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word.10 But, you say, if that were the true conception of the socialist state of Lenin, why was it not "applied" in the USSR after the October Revolution, seeing that what appeared then was the exact opposite of all that, from the distortions of the extreme bureaucratic centralisation (from the army to the state bureaucracy to the production units) to the most brutal repression of the Kronstadt sailors? Well, it only reveals that revolutionaries of the stature of Lenin can potentially be overcome by contradictions and ambiguities of this magnitude – and this was in the specific national and international context of the October Revolution – that can lead, in practice, to actions and decisions often diametrically opposed to their deepest convictions. In the case of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, one of the impossibilities [of the revolution. Ed. Note] - and they were many - was sufficient to steer the revolution in an undesired direction. One of these impossibilities was more than sufficient: the situation of isolation of a revolution that could not retreat, but found itself isolated and had no choice but to try to pave the way for building socialism in one country, in Soviet Russia – a contradictory attempt which was initiated already at the time of Lenin and Trotsky. What were War Communism, NEP, and other initiatives, if not this?

And then what do we do? Do we stand firm on the conceptions of Lenin, Marx and Engels on the state, programme, revolution and the party so that, in the future, when practical problems such as the internationalisation of the class struggle, among others, show the real possibilities for the revolution and building socialism in several countries – do we put them forward and give substance to the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin? Or, conversely, should we, faced with the first difficulties, give up the positions of principle, trading them for cheap political imitations that can only lead to the abandonment of the perspective of the revolution and socialist construction?

6. For a conclusion: council, (socialist) state and (socialist) pre-state

a) The Council-State

After analysing the economic premises of the abolition of social classes, that is to say, the premise “that ‘all’ can take part in the administration of the state,” Lenin, always referring to the formulations of Marx and Engels, said that “it is quite possible, after the overthrow of the capitalists and the bureaucrats, to proceed immediately, overnight, to replace them in the control over production and distribution, in the work of keeping account of labour and products, by the armed workers, by the whole of the armed population.” “Accounting and control-that is mainly what is needed for the ‘smooth working’, for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of a single countrywide state ‘syndicate’.11. In addition, “Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing. The ‘socialist stage’ “will create such conditions for the majority of the population as will enable everybody, without exception, to perform ‘state functions’.12

All citizens, remember, organised in the council system, or in other words, in the workers’ state, seeing that for Marx, Engels and Lenin, simplifying tasks will reach a point where the basic "administrative" tasks, reduced to the extreme, not only can be taken over by the proletariat and people in general, but can be taken in charge by the council system, which, after all, is the state itself.

Thus, the proletarian state, the socialist state, the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing other than the council system, which will ensure the hegemony of the working class as a whole, will take over directly, without the need for any specific administrative body, both the defence of socialism and the management functions of the state and units of production. Finally, this unity of the proletarian dictatorship will be guaranteed by the simplified administrative/ political unit, in a single whole called the Council-State.

b) The pre-Council-State

The council system which, in the post insurrectionary situation, will be responsible for the structural transition (establishment of new relations of production, elimination of all hierarchy in production, rejection of all mercantile forms, etc.) and in the superstructure (elimination of all hierarchy inherited from the bourgeois state, of all bureaucracy, rejection of all ideology inherited from the previous social formation, etc.), is the same council system as the one that, before the revolution, was the revolutionary organisation that overthrew the bourgeoisie and its state. So this is the same body whose tasks have changed over the two stages of the same process of social revolution: having completed the task of the insurrection, it must start to implement a new task that will complete the real social revolution – the break with the social formation that has expired and the inauguration of a new one, socialism, which itself is soon to turn into the communist transition, the second classless society in history (the first was, of course, primitive society).

Well, that's the council system that we call the (proletarian) pre-state. We see that the name is, by its content, nothing original, as it was, is and always will be a proof of the revolutionary process opened up by the Paris Commune. There, the Communards who seized power from the districts were the same as those who had assumed state power – the dictatorship of the proletariat – and who had begun, although with obvious errors of youth, the construction of a socialist order. A similar process occurred again in October 1917. The first experiment could not, in the circumstances where it occurred, reach its completion and was struck by the counter-revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie, after barely two months of memorable life. The second, as we know, could not reach completion due to the lack of conditions, external and internal, including the impossibility of completing the construction of socialism in one country.

In both cases, there was a pre-state, but in both cases, a pre-state which, if on the one hand it could conduct the insurrection, on the other it could not be prepared in time for the task of building socialism. In the case of 1917, it was not until the eve of October that the only party (the Bolshevik party) equipped with the theoretical prerequisites to prepare the vanguard of the class organised in soviets, especially in St. Petersburg, could teach the class only the most urgent tasks of the insurrection. For us it seems that, despite the consciousness, especially by Lenin, of the fundamental importance of the soviets since 1905, it was only after February 1917, in the case of Lenin, that this consciousness became conviction. That is why the party of Lenin (whose return to Russia was easily predictable, as he had previously returned in 1905) did not worry about fully mobilising the militancy of its worker activists in the soviets (the Mensheviks had arrived earlier), or including them in the prior preparations of the workers for a resurgence of the soviets, sooner and by more effective training. Such training, including the most determined vanguard of the class organised in the soviets, was to include, under the fire of an incessant debate between these workers, the questions of the insurrectional seizure of power and notions of marxist theory concerning the establishment of their state and the construction of socialism. This debate was flawed, by the inability to perceive earlier the importance of the soviets, and by lack of time to take the debate among the workers of the soviets only two months before the insurrection. Nevertheless, the unpreparedness of the vanguard to seize power and to exercise it, through its intervention and its leading role, for the construction of socialism, was one of the unfavourable factors for a real dictatorship of the proletariat (on the basis represented by the councils) in the USSR. Such a gap, caused largely by the lack of a suitable pre-state, that is to say a pre-state that constitutes a school of revolution, was an additional difficulty in the shipwreck of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

As Lenin himself always pointed out, communist revolutionaries are men and women who must have a very solid marxist background. A solid marxist background requires relative knowledge of the dialectic, political economy, historical and dialectical materialism, that allows the militants of a party of cadres, not only to analyse and understand past and present circumstances, but also to capture the essentials of predictable processes, at least in terms of the broad lines (such levels of prediction can be identified in many of the analyses in Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks). Hence the fact that a real marxist training can provide militant cadres of a genuine communist party with the ability to anticipate the possible scenarios for the development of a crisis like the current crisis. Similarly, to anticipate a broad process of revolutionary situations does not constitute a "beast with seven heads."13

In addition, it is perfectly feasible to predict the most obvious thing in this world, the emergence of embryonic forms of councils – because, here and there, they are beginning to emerge in an embryonic way. They must be analysed, in all frankness, without prejudice, so that, once interpreted theoretically, workers can correct the mistakes and shortcomings of such experiences, so that they can multiply and reinforce their content, until they become, in a near future – this guarantee is provided by the advanced stage of the structural crisis of capitalism – in the context of concrete revolutionary situations, the system of councils, from the dialectical interaction of small circles (in the workplace, education and housing), factory committees, and councils (of districts, regions, industrial zones, national, etc.) that will form, at the same time, the backbone of the insurrection and, in the future, the organ of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

7. In conclusion: the ICC and the question of the post-revolutionary state

For us, the workers’ councils must have unlimited power, and as such must be the basic organs of workers' power, besides the fact that they must constitute the core of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. But it is from here that we differentiate ourselves from some interpreters of marxism who make a separation between the councils and the Commune-State, as if this Commune-State and the councils were two qualitatively distinct things. This is the position, for example, of the ICC (International Communist Current). After making this separation, such interpreters establish a link whereby the councils must exert pressure and their control over the "semi-state of the transition period", without which this state (= Commune) – that in the ICC's vision, "is neither the bearer nor the active agent of communism" – will not fulfil its immanent role as conserver of the status quo (sic) and "obstacle" to the transition.

For the ICC, “The state always tends to grow disproportionately. It is the ideal target of careerists and other parasites and easily recruits the residual elements of the old decomposing ruling class.”14 And it finishes its vision of the socialist state by stating that Lenin at least foresaw (this function of the state) when he “talked about the state as the reconstitution of the old Tsarist apparatus”.and when he says that the state born from the October Revolution tended “to escape our control and go in the opposite direction from the one we want it to go.” For the ICC, “The proletarian state is a myth. Lenin rejected it, recalling that it was “a workers’ and peasants’ government with bureaucratic deformations.”” Moreover, for the ICC:

The great experience of the Russian Revolution is there to prove it. Every sign of fatigue, failure or error on the part of the proletariat has the immediate consequence of strengthening the state; conversely each victory, each reinforcement of the state weakens the proletariat a little bit more. The state feeds on the weakening of the proletariat and its class dictatorship. Victory for one is defeat for the other.”"15

It also says, in other passages,16 that “The proletariat retains and maintains complete freedom in relation to the state. On no pretext will the proletariat subordinate the decision-making power of its own organs, the workers’ councils, to that of the state; it must see that the opposite is the case”; that the proletariat “won’t tolerate the interference of the state in the life and activity of the organised class; it will deprive the state of any right or possibility of repressing the working class” and that “The proletariat retains its arms outside of any control by the state”. “The precondition for this is that the class does not identify with the state.

What is the situation with this vision of the ICC comrades on the Commune-State? First, that neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin, as we have seen in the observations made above and taken from The State and Revolution, defend the conception of the state developed by the ICC. As we have seen, the Commune-State was, for them, the Council-State, the expression of the power of the proletariat and its class dictatorship. For Lenin, the post-revolutionary state was not only not a myth, as the ICC think, but the proletarian state itself. How can this state be so described by the ICC when at the same time it conceives it as a Commune-State?

Second, as we have already analysed above, the paradoxical separation between the councils and post-revolutionary state, posed by the ICC, distances itself from the conception of Marx, Engels and Lenin and reflects a certain influence of the anarchist conception of the state. We need to reiterate what we have said before, that to separate the proletarian state from the council system amounts to breaking the unity that should exist and exists under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that such a separation places, on the one hand, the state as a complex administrative structure and managed by a body of officials – a nonsense in the simplified design of the state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin – and, on the other, a political structure in which the councils exert pressure on the state as such.

Third, we repeat: this conception, which results from an accommodation to a vision influenced by anarchism that identifies the Commune-State with the bureaucratic (bourgeois) state, comes from the ambiguities of the Russian Revolution, putting the proletariat outside of the post-revolutionary state while actually creating a dichotomy that, itself, is the germ of a new caste reproducing itself in the administrative body separated organically from the workers' councils. The ICC confuses the concept of the state of Lenin with the state produced by the ambiguities of the Revolution of October 1917. When Lenin complained about the atrocities of the state as it developed in the USSR, this does not mean that he rejected his conception of the Commune-State, but the deviations from the Russian Commune-State after October.

Fourth, the comrades of the ICC do not seem to realise, as we also discussed above, the fact that the organisational and administrative tasks that the revolution puts on the agenda from the beginning, are essentially political tasks, whose implementation must be carried out directly by the victorious proletariat.

Fifth, the comrades of the ICC do not seem to realise that, as we also indicated above, the real simplification of the Commune-State, in the sense that Lenin expressed, makes the administrative structure so minimal that it can be managed directly by the council system.

Sixth and final point. Only by assuming directly and from within, simplified tasks under the guidance of the Council-State, of defence and socialist transition/construction, will the working class will be in a condition to prevent a schism occurring between a foreign state and the Council-State, so that it can exercise its control, not only over what happens within the state, but also within society as a whole.

For this, it is worthwhile to recall that the proletarian state, the Commune-State, the socialist state, the dictatorship of the proletariat are nothing other than the council system that has taken charge of the basic organisational tasks of the militias, the length of the working day, work brigades and other equally revolutionary types of tasks (revocability of positions, equal pay, etc.)... tasks, also simplified, concerning the struggle and organisation of a society in transition. For this, it will not be necessary to create an administrative monster, and still less a bureaucratic one, nor any kind of form inherited from the beaten bourgeois state or even something resembling the bureaucratic state capitalism of the ex-USSR.

It would be great if the ICC examines the passages we have highlighted in this text from Lenin’s State and Revolution, where this justifies, on the basis of Marx and Engels, the need for the Commune-State, the Council-State, the proletarian state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

OPOP

(September 2008, revised December 2010)

1. OPOP, OPosição OPerária (Workers' Opposition), which exists in Brazil. See its publication on revistagerminal.com. For some years the ICC has had a fraternal relationship and cooperated with OPOP, which has already resulted in systematic discussions between our two organisations, jointly signed leaflets and statements ("Brésil : des réactions ouvrières au sabotage syndical"), and joint public interventions ("Deux réunions publiques communes au Brésil, OPOP-CCI: à propos des luttes des futures générations de prolétaires"), and the reciprocal participation of delegations to the congresses of our organisations.

2. These are developed in the following articles: “Draft resolution on the state in the period of transition” in International Review no. 11, and “The state in the period of transition” in International Review no. 15.

3. ICC note. The State and Revolution, Chapter I, “The state – a product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms”.

4. This is an example of the confusions and ambiguities of the accumulation of theoretical and political categories, one next to the other, introduced into marxist doctrine by Antonio Gramsci, carried to their logical and political limits by his epigones, the logical difficulties of which (paradoxes) have been brilliantly investigated by Perry Anderson in his classic, The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.

5. ICC note. The State and Revolution, Chapter I, “Special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc.”

6. ICC note. Extract from The Civil War in France, cited by Lenin in The State and Revolution, Chapter II, “The eve of the revolution”.

7. ICC note Extract from The Civil War in France, cited by Lenin in The State and Revolution, Chapter III, “What is to replace the smashed state machine?”

8. ICC note. The State and Revolution, Chapter IV, “Criticism of the draft of the Erfurt Programme”.

9. ICC note. The State and Revolution, Chapter V, “The transition from capitalism to communism”.

10. ICC note. The State and Revolution, ibid.

11. ICC note. The State and Revolution, Chapter V, “The higher phase of communist society”.

12. ICC note. The State and Revolution, Chapter VI, “Kautsky’s controversy with Pannekoek”.

13. ICC note: The name of a Brazilian film about psychiatric hospitals in Brazil.

14. ICC note. “The state in the period of transition”, International Review no. 15.

15. ICC note. Ibid.

16. ICC note: the same article.

 

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Debate in the Revolutionary Milieu

Critique of the book 'Dynamics, contradictions and crises of capitalism', Part 1

 

Is capitalism a decadent mode of production and why? (I)

At the time of a major acceleration of the world economic crisis we have decided to return to the fundamental questions of the dynamic of capitalist society. Only by understanding them can we fight a system that is condemned to perish either by its own contradictions or by its overthrow and replacement by a new society. These questions have already been looked at in numerous publications of the ICC, so if we judge it necessary to raise them again it is to critique the vision developed in the book Dynamics, contradictions and crises of capitalism.1 This book explicitly defends, with quotations, the analyses of Marx concerning the characterisation of the contradictions and the dynamic of capitalism, notably the fact that the system, like other class societies that have preceded it, necessarily goes through an ascendant phase and a phase of decline. But the manner in which this framework of theoretical analysis is sometimes interpreted and applied to reality opens the door to the idea that reforms would be possible within capitalism which would permit the attenuation of the crisis. In opposition to this approach, the article that follows attempts an argued defence of the insurmountable character of the contradictions of capitalism.

In the first part of this article we examine whether capitalism has ceased to be a progressive system since the First World War, and if it has become, according to Marx's own words, “a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour”.2 In other words, do the production relations of this system, after having been a formidable factor in the development of the productive forces, constitute, since 1914, a brake on the development of these same productive forces? In a second part we will analyse the origin of capitalism's insurmountable crises of overproduction, and unmask the reformist mystification of a possible attenuation of the crisis by 'social policies'.

Has capitalism been a brake on the growth of the productive forces since the First World War?

The blind forces of capitalism, unleashed by the First World War, destroyed far more productive forces than in all the economic crises of capitalism since its birth. They plunged the world, particularly Europe, into a barbarism threatening to engulf civilisation. This situation would provoke, in reaction, a world revolutionary wave aiming to finish with a system whose contradictions was now a threat to humanity. The position defended at the time by the vanguard of the world proletariat followed the vision of Marx for whom “The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms.3 The Letter of Invitation (end of January 1919) to the Founding Congress of the Communist International declared: “the present period is that of the decomposition and collapse of the whole world capitalist system, it will be the collapse of European civilisation in general, if capitalism, with its insurmountable contradictions, is not defeated.”4 Its Platform underlined that: “A new epoch is born: the epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”.5

The author of the book, Marcel Roelandts, (MR) accepts this characteristic of the First World War and the international revolutionary wave that followed it, often in the same terms. His analysis partly restates the following elements in relation to the evolution of capitalism since 1914 and which, for us, has confirmed the diagnosis of the decadence of capitalism:

  • the First World War (20 million dead) lowered the production of the European powers involved in the conflict by more than a third, an unprecedented phenomenon in the whole history of capitalism;

  • it was followed by a phase of feeble economic growth leading to the crisis of 1929 and the depression of the 1930s. The latter caused a greater fall in production than that caused by the First World War;

  • the Second World War, even more destructive and barbaric than the first (more than 50 million dead) provoked a disaster to which the crisis of 1929 provides no possible comparison. The alternative posed by revolutionaries at the time of the First World War had been tragically confirmed: socialism or barbarism.

  • since the Second World War there hasn't been a single instant of peace in the world and instead hundreds of wars and tens of millions killed, without counting the resulting humanitarian catastrophes (famines). War, omnipresent in numerous regions of the world, had nevertheless spared Europe, the principle theatre of the two world wars, for a half century. But it made a bloody return there with the conflict in Yugoslavia that began in 1991;

  • during this period, except for the period of prosperity in the 50s and 60s, capitalism has not been able to avoid recessions that require the injection of more and more massive doses of credit. Growth has only been maintained by the fiction that these debts will be finally repaid;

  • after 2007-2008 the accumulation of colossal debt has become an insurmountable obstacle to the maintenance of even the weakest growth. Not only businesses and banks but also states have been fundamentally weakened or threatened with bankruptcy. A recession without end is now on the historical agenda.

We have limited ourselves here in this summary to the most salient elements of the crises and wars which have made the 20th century the most barbaric that humanity has even known. The dynamic of the economy is not necessarily the direct cause but it cannot be dissociated from the nature of this period.

With what method can we evaluate capitalist production and its growth?

For MR this picture of the life of society since the First World War is not sufficient to confirm the diagnosis of decadence.

For him, “if certain arguments of this analysis of capitalist obsolescence can still be defended, one is forced to recognise that there are others (since the end of the 1950s) which cannot.” He rests on Marx for whom capitalism can only be decadent if “the capitalist system becomes an obstacle for the expansion of the productive forces of labour”. So, according to MR, the quantitative data does not reasonably permit the idea “that the capitalist system is a brake on the productive forces” nor “that it has shown its obsolescence in the eyes of humanity. Moreover, he says, “in comparison with the period of the strongest growth of capitalism before the First World War, development since then (1914-2008) is clearly superior.6

The empirical data must necessarily be taken into account. But that is clearly not enough. A method is needed to analyse it. We cannot be content with an account sheet, but must go beneath the raw data to closely examine what production and growth are made of, in order to identify the actual existence of brakes on the development of the productive forces. This is not the point of view of MR for whom “those who maintain the diagnosis of obsolescence can only do so if they avoid confronting reality or use expedients to try and explain it: by credit, military expenses, unproductive expenses, the existence of a supposed colonial market, the so-called statistical manipulation or mysterious manipulations of the law of value, etc. Actually there are few marxists who have made a clear and coherent explanation of the growth of the Thirty Glorious Years7 and been able to discuss certain realities in flagrant contradiction with the diagnosis of the obsolescence of capitalism."8 We imagine that MR is of the opinion that he himself belongs to that rare category of marxists and therefore would quickly grasp the following question, to which no trace of response can be found in his book: in what way is the invocation of 'unproductive costs' an 'expedient' to explain the nature of growth in the phase of decadence?

In fact, understanding what capitalist production is made of corresponds completely to the needs of the marxist method in its critique of capitalism. It permits us to see how has this system, thanks to the social organisation of production, allowed humanity to make the enormous leap of developing the productive forces to a level where a society based on the free satisfaction of human needs becomes a possibility once capitalism is overturned. Can we say that the development of the productive forces since the First World War and the price paid for it by society and the planet, is a necessary condition for the victorious revolution? In other terms, has capitalism continued to be, since 1914, a progressive system, favouring the material conditions for the revolution and communism?

The quantitative data for growth

Graph 19 represents (in the horizontal lines) the average annual growth in different periods between 1820 and 1999. It also shows significant departures from the rates of growth, above and below the average figures.

The average rate of growth in Graph 1 has been restated in Table 1 concerning the period 1820-1999. To complete this table, we have estimated the average annual rate of growth for the period 1999-2009 using a statistical series relative to this period 10 based on a negative world growth of 0.5% in 2009.11

From the figures presented here, a certain number of elementary conclusions can be drawn:

  • the four most important dips in economic activity have all occurred since 1914 and correspond to the two world wars, the crisis of 1929 and the recession of 2009;

  • the most splendid period in the life of capitalism before the First World War was between 1870-1913. It is the period that most represents a mode of production that has completely freed itself from the relations of production inherited from feudalism and possessing, following imperialist conquest of the colonies,12 a world market whose limits have not yet been reached. Moreover, as a consequence of this situation, the sale of an important mass of goods can compensate for the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and free up a mass of profit sufficient for continued accumulation. It is also the period, which closes the phase of ascendance and opens up the phase of decadence marked by the outbreak of the First World War that occurs at the height of capitalist prosperity;

  • the period that follows the First World War and extends till the end of the 1940s fully confirms the diagnosis of decadence. In this sense we share the appreciation of MR for whom the characteristics of the period 1914-1945, and even beyond, up until the end of the 1940s, completely correspond to the description given by the revolutionary movement in 1919, in continuity with Marx, that the phase of the decadence of capitalism opens with the world war;

  • the period of the Thirty Glorious Years, between approximately 1946-1973, with far superior growth rates than those of 1870-1913, are in enormous contrast to the preceding period;

  • the following period, until 2009, shows a rate of growth slightly superior to the best phase of the ascendance of capitalism.

Do the Thirty Glorious Years put the analysis of decadence in question? Does the following period confirm that it has not been an exception?

The level of economic activity of each of these two periods is explained by the qualitative modifications of production since 1914, in particular the swelling of unproductive expenses, the way in which credit has been used since the 1950s, and by the creation of fictitious value through what is called the ‘financialisation’ of the economy.

Unproductive expenses: What are they?

We include in the category of unproductive expenses the costs of that part of production whose use value cannot be employed in any way in the simple or enlarged reproduction of capital. The clearest example is that of the production of armaments. Weapons may serve to make war but do not produce anything, not even other weapons. Luxury spending destined essentially to sweeten the life of the bourgeoisie also comes into this category. Marx speaks of it in pejorative terms: “A great part of the annual product is consumed as revenue and does not return to production as means of production: pernicious products (use values) which only assuage the most wretched whims and passions”.13

The reinforcement of the state machine

Another entry in this category are all the state expenses required to face up to the growing contradictions of capitalism on the economic, imperialist and social levels. Thus, beside arms spending one also finds the cost of the upkeep of the repressive and judicial apparatus, as well as that of the containment of the working class – the trade unions. It is difficult to estimate the part of the state expenses which is included in the category of unproductive expenses. A sector like education, which is necessary for the upkeep and development of the labour force and its productivity, also has an unproductive side of masking youth unemployment and making it tolerable. In a general way, as MR strongly argues, “The reinforcement of the state machine, as well as its growing intervention in society, is one of the most obvious manifestations of the phase of obsolescence of a mode of production (...) Fluctuating around 10% throughout the ascendant phase of capitalism, the share of the state in the OECD countries climbs progressively since the First World War to reach around 50% in 1995, varying between a low of about 35% for the US and Japan, and a high of 60-70% for the Nordic countries."14

Among these expenses, the cost of militarism is usually more than the 10% that the military budget reached in certain circumstances in some of the most industrialised countries, since the manufacture of armaments must be added to the cost of the different wars. The growing weight of militarism15 since the First World War is clearly not an independent phenomenon in the life of society but the expression of the high level of economic contradictions which constrain each power to increasingly engage in military preparations in order to survive in the world arena.

The weight of unproductive expenses in the economy

Unproductive costs, which certainly represent more than 20% of GDP, in reality only correspond to a sterilisation of a significant amount of accumulated wealth which therefore cannot be used for the creation of greater wealth, which is contrary to the fundamental essence of capitalism. We have here a clear manifestation of the braking effect on the development of the productive forces which has its origin in the relations of production themselves.

To these unproductive expenses may be added another type: that of illegal trafficking of all kinds, drugs in particular. This is an unproductive consumption but is however counted as part of GDP. Thus the laundering of the revenues of this activity represents several percentage points of world GDP: “Drug traffickers will have laundered around 1,600 billion dollars or 2.7% of world GDP in 2009 (...) according to a new report published on Tuesday by the United Nations Office against Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (...) The report of the UNODC indicates that all the benefits of this criminality, excluding tax evasion, will rise to about 2,100 billion dollars, or 3.6% of GDP in 2009”.16

To restore the truth about real growth, around 3.5% of the additional amount of GDP must be amputated because of money laundering for the different traffic.

The role of unproductive expenditure in the miracle of the Thirty Glorious Years

Keynesian measures, aimed at stimulating final demand and which thus helped to ensure that the problems of overproduction did not manifest themselves openly during any part of the period of the Thirty Glorious Years, were largely unproductive expenditures whose cost was supported by the state. Among them were wage increases, beyond what is socially necessary for the reproduction of labour power. The secret of the prosperity of the Thirty Glorious Years amounts to an enormous waste of surplus value that could then be supported by the economy due to the important productivity gains registered during this period.

The miracle of the Thirty Glorious Years, therefore, under favourable conditions, was enabled by a policy of the bourgeoisie which, educated by the 1929 crisis and the depression of the 1930s, took pains to delay the open return of the crisis of overproduction. In this sense, this episode in the life of capitalism fits well with what MR says: "The exceptional period of prosperity after the war appears in all points analogous with the periodic recoveries during the periods of ancient and feudal obsolescence. We therefore endorse our assumption that the Thirty Glorious Years only constitutes an interval in the course of a mode of production that has exhausted its historic mission." (Dyn p.65)
Would Keynesian measures be possible again? We cannot rule out scientific and technological advances that could again enable significant productivity gains and reduce the production costs of goods. Nevertheless this would continue to pose the question of a buyer for them since there are no more extra-capitalist markets and hardly any potential to increase demand through additional debt. Under these conditions the repetition of the boom of the Thirty Glorious Years appears totally unrealistic.

The financialisation of the economy

We reproduce here the most commonly accepted meaning of that term: "Financialization is strictly the use of funding and in particular to indebtedness on the part of economic agents. One can also call financialization of the economy the growing share of financial activities (banking, insurance and investments) in the GDP of developed countries in particular. It comes from an exponential multiplication of these types of financial activities and the development of the practice of financial operations, both by businesses and other institutions and by individuals. One can also speak of a rise of finance capital as distinguished from the narrower concept of capital focused on production equipment ".17 We distinguish ourselves completely from the anti-globalisation movement, and from the left the capital in general, for whom the financialisation of the economy is the cause of the current crisis in capitalism. We have widely developed in our press how it is exactly the opposite.18 Indeed, it is because the "real" economy has been plunged for decades in a deep slump that capital tends to shy away from this sphere which is less and less profitable. MR seems to share our view. That said, he does not seem interested in taking into account the significant implications of this phenomenon for the composition of GDP.

The U.S. is certainly the country where financial activity has been the most important development. In 2007, 40% of private sector profits in the U.S. were made by banks, which employ only 5% of employees.19 Table 2 shows, for the United States and Europe, the weight gained by financial activities20 (the parallel evolution of industrial production in the US over the same period has been given as a guide):

Unlike unproductive expenditures, we are not dealing here with a sterilisation of capital, but in the same sense as this, the development of finance leading to the artificial inflation of the estimate of the annual wealth of some countries ranging from 2% for the EU to 27% for the United States. Indeed, the creation of financial products is not accompanied by the creation of real wealth, so that, in all fairness, its contribution to national wealth is zero.

If we get rid of GDP activity corresponding to the financialisation of the economy, all major industrialised countries would see their GDP reduced by a percentage varying between 2% and 20%. An average of 10% seems acceptable in view of the respective weight of the EU and US.

The increasing recourse to debt from the 1950s

In our view, the failure to take into account the increase in debt which has accompanied capitalist development since the 1950s reveals the same prejudice that discards a qualitative analysis of growth.

Can we deny that it is a fact? Graph 2 illustrates the evolution of world debt as a whole (relative to the growth of GDP) from the 1960s. Over this period debt increases faster than economic growth.

In the United States (Graph 321) debt starts to take off at the beginning of the 1950s. It goes from less than 1.5 times GDP at that time to reach a figure that is more than 3.5 times GDP today. Prior to 1950 it reached a peak in 1933 due to private debt but then decreased again.

It should be noted that the 1946 peak in public debt (at a moment when private debt was weak) was the result of growth in public spending to finance the New Deal. It was fairly low at first but increased dramatically from 1940 onwards in order to finance the war effort.

From the 1950s-60s, debt acted as "solvent demand" allowing the economy to grow. This was an ever-increasing debt that was basically destined never to be re-paid, as testified by the present situation of excessive debt on the part of all the economic players in every country. This situation risks leading to the bankruptcy of the main economic players, the nation states that is, and so heralds the end of growth by means of increasing debt. In other words, this means the end of growth all together, except for limited periods within a general course towards depression. It is vital that our analysis takes into account that reality is inflicting a dramatic lowering of the growth rate since the 1960s. This is the boomerang effect of this shameless cheating with the law of value. MR rejects the expression "cheating with the law of value" to describe this practice of international capitalism. Nevertheless it is essentially the same as the protectionist measures taken in the USSR in order to artificially keep alive an economy that was less efficient than that of the main countries of the western bloc. The collapse of the eastern bloc revealed the truth. Will it take the collapse of the world economy to convince MR of the consequences of a mass of existing debt that cannot be repaid?

In order to make an objective and rigorous assessment of real growth since the 1960s, we should deduct the amounting accumulation of debt from the official increase in GDP between 1960 and 2010. In fact, as Graph 2 shows, the increase in world GDP is less relevant than the increase in world debt in this period, to the point that not only did this important period of post war boom fail to generate wealth but it also helped to create a global deficit which reduces the miracle of the post war boom to nothing.

The evolution in the living conditions of the working class

During the ascendant period the working class was able to exact lasting economic reforms in terms of working hours and wage increases. This was because of the struggle for demands and also because the system was able to grant them, thanks in particular to a significant increase in production. This situation changes with capitalism's entry into decadence when, with the exception of the post-war boom, productivity increases are increasingly placed at the service of each national bourgeoisie's mobilisation against the contradictions that assail it at all levels (economic, military and social) and it leads, as we have seen, to the strengthening of the state apparatus.

Wage increases following the First World War generally serve only to compensate for the constant increase in prices. The increases granted in France in June 1936 (the Matignon agreement: 12% on average) were wiped out in six months as from September 1936 to January 1937 alone prices increased by about 11%. In the same way, we know what remained one year later of the increases obtained in May 1968 with the Grenelle agreement.

On this point, MR says this: "In the same way, the communist movement has defended the idea that after the First World War it is impossible to win real and lasting social reforms. However, if we look at the evolution of real wages and working hours in the course of the century, not only do we find nothing to back up this conclusion, but also the facts show that the opposite is the case. Whereas real wages in the developed countries doubled or tripled at most before 1914, they increased six or seven-fold after that date: that is, three or four times more during the "decadent" period of capitalism than when it was ascendant."22

It is rather difficult to discuss this analysis as the figures given are very approximate. We can understand that it is difficult to do better given the material available on this question but a minimum of scientific rigour demands that at least the sources be cited from which extrapolations are made. Moreover, assertions are made about wage increases in the ascendance and decadence of capitalism with no indication of the precise period referred to, It is easy to see that an increase over thirty years cannot be compared to an increase over 100 years (unless it is given in the form of the annual mean increase, which obviously is not the case). In addition, it is important to understand the period so that the comparison can integrate other aspects of social life, which are of primary importance to our mind in placing the wage increases in perspective. Of particular importance is the development of unemployment. An increase in wages accompanied by a rise in unemployment can very easily result in a lowering of workers' living standards.

Following the passage that we have just discussed, there is a graph in the book whose title indicates that it concerns real wage increases in Great Britain from 1750 to 1910 and a financial deal in France concerning the years from 1840 to 1974. However the figures relating to the French deal for the period between 1840 to 1900 are missing and those concerning the period 1950-1980 are illegible. We can make more use of the information on Great Britain. From 1860 to 1900 it would seem that real wages increased from 60 to 100, which corresponds to an annual increase of 1.29% over the period.

In examining wages in decadence we divide the period into two sub-periods:

  • from 1914 to 1950; we do not have a series of statistics for this period but rather scattered and heterogeneous figures, which nevertheless indicate that living standards were affected by the Second World War and the 1929 crisis;

  • the subsequent period, which goes up to the present day, for which we have more reliable and homogenous data.

1) 1914-1950 23

For the European countries the First World War is synonomous with inflation and the shortage of goods. Once it ended the two camps were confronted with the need to repay a colossal debt (three times the national income in the case of Germany) that had been incurred in order to finance the war effort. The bourgeoisie saw to it that the working class and the petty bourgeoisie paid for it through inflation which, while reducing the amount of debt, also drastically reduced income and sent savings up in smoke. In Germany in particular, from 1919 to 1923, workers saw a non-stop reduction in their income, with wages much lower than before the war. In was the same in France and in England too but to a lesser extent. But in the case of the latter the entire inter-war period was characterised by permanent unemployment that paralysed millions of workers, a phenomenon that was unknown up to then in the history of capitalism, either in England or internationally. In Germany from the end of the period of astronomic inflation, around 1924, up to the 1929 crisis the number of unemployed stayed generally above 1 million ( 2 million in 1926).

In 1929, unlike Germany, but like France, Great Britain had not returned to its 1913 position.

The trajectory of the United States was very different. Before the war, American industry developed faster than in Europe. This tendency strengthened from the end of the war up to the beginning of the world economic crisis. So the United States experienced prosperity throughout the First World War and the subsequent period until the open crisis of 1929. But this crisis reduced the real wage of American workers to a level inferior to that of 1890 (it was 87% of the latter). The development over this period is presented in Table 3:24


2) from 1951 to the present day (compared to 1880-1910)

Table 4 contains statistics concerning the evolution of the wages of French workers:

  • expressed in Francs for the period 1880-1910;25

  • expressed in terms of a base of 100 for 1951 for the period 1951-2008.26

Table 4 demonstrates the following facts:

  1. The period 1951-1970, at the heart of the post-war boom, experienced the highest rate of wage increases in the history of capitalism, which is consistent with the phase of economic growth to which it corresponds and its specificities, such as, among other things, Keynesian measures to sustain demand with a view to increasing wages.

There are also other factors, which are by no means secondary, to explain this growth in wages:

  • the standard of living in France in 1950 was very low, which is shown by the fact that it was only in 1949 that ration cards, introduced in 1941 to tackle the poverty of the war period , were abolished;

  • from the 1950s the cost of reproducing the work force includes a number of significant expenses which did not exist previously: the increased demand for technical knowledge for a large number of jobs means that the children of the working class must receive more years of schooling and so remain at the cost of their parents longer; "modern" working conditions in large cities also increase costs. Although the modern proletariat is surrounded by household goods which they did not have in the 19th century, this does not mean that their standard of living is higher, because their relative exploitation goes on increasing. Many of these "household goods" did not exist previously; in bourgeois houses the domestic servants did everything by hand. They have now become indispensable in workers' households in order to save time because often both the man and woman have to work to support the family. Likewise, when the car appeared on the scene it was a luxury of the rich. Now it has become indispensable for many proletarians to get to work without having to spend hours on public transport with its inadequate services. It is the rise in the productivity of labour which has made it possible to produce such things, which are no longer a luxury, at a price that is compatible with the level of workers' wages;

  • The subsequent period, 1970-2005, saw wage increases that were on a par with those in the ascendant period of capitalism (1.18% versus 1.16% - bearing in mind that in Great Britain there was a 1.29% increase in the period 1860-1900). Having said this, we should take into account a number of factors that show that the living conditions of the working class did not really improve to that extent and that they even got worse than in the previous period:

  • this period witnessed a dramatic increase in unemployment, which greatly affected the standard of living in working class households. We have figures for unemployment in France, which are presented in Table 5:27

  • from the 1980s legislation aiming to lower the official unemployment figures led to changes in the way the number of unemployed are counted (for example, by excluding partial employment) and also ended up excluding unemployed from the figures by means of increasingly strict criteria. This basically explains the lower rate of increase in unemployment afterwards;

  • the period after 1985 witnessed the development of precarious work with fixed term contracts and part-time work, which are really disguised unemployment;

  • the assessment of the real wage, adjusted to take account of the official estimate of the cost of living, is greatly over-estimated by the official figures, to the point that the INSEE (National Institute for Economic Statistics and Studies) in France have been forced to admit that there is a difference between official inflation and "perceived" inflation, the latter being based on a household view of price increases in basic, essential products (the expenses that one cannot cut down on), which is much higher than official inflation.28

  • The period 2005-2008, although shorter than the previous period, is more indicative in its official rate of wage increases as around 0.5% because it heralds the future. In fact this increase of only 0.5% corresponds to a much more significant deterioration, in that all the factors mentioned for the previous period must still be taken into account but in much larger proportions. In fact, it is the statistics on wages that lead us to give 2008 as the end of the period beginning in 2005. From 2008 onwards the situation of the working class deteriorated drastically as is attested by the evolution in the figures regarding poverty and we cannot ignore this fact when studying the period. In 2009 the percentage of poor people in French cities has not only increased but their degree of poverty has also increased. They now represent 13.5% of the population, that is 8.2 million people, 400,000 more than in 2008.

What can we conclude from nearly a century of capitalist development?

We have seen that the inclusion in GDP of all unproductive expenses, of activities that are merely financial or criminal, greatly contributes to an over-estimation of the wealth created annually.

We have also seen that the contradictions of capitalism itself wipe out a significant percentage of capitalist production (particularly through "unproductive" production). As for the living conditions of the working class, they are by no means as brilliant as the official statistics try to make us believe.

In addition, there is an aspect that we have not brought out in our examination of production or of working conditions, that is, the cost exacted by the domination of capitalist productive relations since the First World War, in terms of the destruction of the environment and the exhaustion of the world's resources of raw materials. This is difficult to quantify but absolutely crucial for the future of humanity. This is another reason, and by no means a minor one, to exclude decisively any idea that capitalism has been a progressive system as regards the future of the working class or of humanity for nearly a century now.

MR notes that capitalist development in this period has been accompanied by war, barbarism and environmental damage. On the other hand, and rather surprisingly, he concludes his defence plea, which aims to show that the relations of production after the 1950s have not acted increasingly as a brake on the development of the productive forces, by affirming that the system is well into its decadence: "In our opinion there is therefore no contradiction between recognising, on the one hand, the undeniable prosperity of the post-war period and all its consequences and in nevertheless maintaining, on the other hand, the diagnosis that capitalism has been historically obsolete since the beginning of the 20th century. It follows that the vast majority of the working population does not yet see capitalism as an out-dated tool that it must get rid of: it is always possible to hope that 'tomorrow will be better than yesterday'. Although this scenario is being reversed in the old industrial countries today, it is by no means the case for the emerging countries."29 If you reject the marxist criteria of a brake on the productive forces to characterise the decadence of a mode of production, what then is it based on? MR's reply: the "domination of wages on the scale of a now unified world market". He explains it in this way: "The end of colonial conquest at the beginning of the 20th century and the domination of wages on the scale of a now unified world market marked an historic turning point and inaugurated a new capitalist phase"30 And in what way does this characteristic of the new phase of capitalism explain the First World War and the revolutionary wave of 1917-23? What is its link with the resistance struggles that are so necessary for a proletariat faced with the manifestations of capitalism's contradictions? We have found no reply to these questions in the book.

We will return in part to these questions in the second part of this article, in which we will also examine how MR adapts the marxist theory and puts it at the service of reformism.

 

Silvio (December 2011)

1. Marcel Roelandts. Éditions Contradictions, Brussels, 2010.

3. Ibid.

4. Letter of invitation to the Founding Congress of the Communist International. An English translation is published in Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, Pluto Press, London, Second Edition 1983.

5. Ibid. The translation in the book cited differs from that we have given: “A new system has been born. Ours is the epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the Communist revolution of the proletariat.

6. Roelandts, Dynamics, contradictions and crises of capitalism, pp.56, 57.

7. Usually known in English as 'the post-war boom'.

8. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.63.

9. This is adapted from a graph reproduced here. We have deleted estimates for the period 2000-2030.

10. equity-analyst.com/world-gdp-us-in-absolute-term-from-1960-2008.html.

11. Consistent with IMF statistics: World Economic Outlook, April 2011 p2.

12. “From 1850 to 1914, world trade has multiplied by 7, that for Great Britain by 5 for imports and by 8 for exports. From 1875 to 1913, overall trade for Germany has multiplied by 3.5, for Britain by 2 and for the United States by 4.7. Finally, national income in Germany has multiplied by nearly 4 between 1871 and 1910, the U.S. by nearly 5.” (thucydide.over-blog.net/article-6729346.html).

13. Economic Manuscripts.

14. Roelandts, Op. Cit., pp.48-49.

15. On this subject see our two articles in the International Review ns 52 and 53, "War, militarism and imperialist blocs in the decadence of capitalism”.

16. Drogues Blog.

18 .See in particular "World economic crisis: The answer is not financial regulation but overthrowing capitalism", World Revolution no. 348, October 2011.

19. lexinter.net/JF/financiarisation_de_l'economie.htm

21. A decade of debt, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff. Key words: Debt / GDP.

22. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.57.

23. The information in the form of figures or a qualitative assessment contained in the study of this period, whose source is not explicitly cited, are taken from the book The conflict of the century by Fritz Sternberg, Seuil edition.

24. Stanley Lebergott, Journal of the American Statistical Association.

27. For 1962 and 1973 the source is "La rupture: les décennies 1960-1980, des Trente Glorieuses aux Tente Piteuses", Guy Caire.

For 1975 to 2005 the source is: INSEE. www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=&ref_id=NATnon03337.

For 2010 the source is Google.

28. In fact official inflation is based on the variation in price of products that the consumer buys rarely or which are not essential.

29. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.67.

30. Roelandts, Op.Cit.p.41.

 

 

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Contribution to a history of the workers' movement in Africa (part 4): Second World War to 1968

 

It is well known that French imperialism liberally drew its cannon fodder from among the youth of its African colonies, as was demanded by its high level involvement in the Second World War. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers, the overwhelming majority of them young workers and unemployed, were enrolled and sacrificed in the bloody imperialist slaughter. With the conflict over, a period of reconstruction opened up for the French economy whose repercussions were felt in the colony in an unbearable exploitation that the workers began to courageously struggle against.

Bloody suppression of the soldiers’ revolt and strike action

It began with the revolt of the soldiers who had survived the great world butchery, who rebelled against the non-payment of money owed to them. Having returned home to a demob camp in Thiaroye (a Dakar suburb) in December 1944, hundreds of soldiers demanded a pension from the “provisional government” headed by General de Gaulle. The blunt response they received from their commanders was a hail of bullets. Officially 35 were killed in the attack, 33 injured and 50 arrested. This is how the workers and veteran fighters who had supported the “liberators” of France were thanked by the latter, who included in their ranks the “communist” and “socialist” members of de Gaulle’s government. The famous “French Resistance” gave a great lesson in “humanism” and “brotherhood” to its “native foot soldiers” in rebellion against the non-payment of their meagre pensions.

However, this bloody response of the French bourgeoisie to the demands of the rebels could not prevent the outbreak of sustained struggles. In fact a general unrest was about to unfold:

The teachers’ strike action broke out first, from December 1st to 7th 1945, and then it was the industrial workers from December 3rd to 10th. The strike broke out again in January, with the steelworkers again involved, but also employees in the commercial sector and the ancillary staff of the Governor General. The requisition measures taken by the Governor on January 14th 1946 provoked a general strike supported by 27 unions. The civil servants only resumed work on January 24th, those in the commercial sector on February 4th, and the steelworkers on February 8th.”1

Despite suffering terribly during the war, the working class was beginning to raise its head again in rebellion against poverty and exploitation.

But the resumption of combativity was taking place in a new environment that wasn’t conducive to working class autonomous action. In fact, the proletariat of French West Africa (FWA) in the post-war period could not avoid being caught between the advocates of Pan-African ideology (independence) and the colonial forces of the left of capital (SFIO, PCF and the trade unions). But despite this, the working class continued its struggle against the attacks of capitalism with great pugnacity.

The heroic and victorious strike of the railway workers between October 1947 and March 1948

During this period the railway workers across the whole of FWA went on strike to satisfy a number of demands, including that both Africans and Europeans should be employed on the same basis and in opposition to 3,000 employees being made redundant.

Railway workers were originally organised within the CGT. Some 17,500 of these workers left in 1948 following a very hard strike. During this strike, a number of the French employees had expressed violent opposition to any improvement in the situation of the African staff.”2

The railway strike ended victoriously through the active solidarity of workers in other sectors (dockworkers and others employed in the industrial sector) who went on strike for 10 days, forcing the colonial authorities to satisfy most of the strikers’ demands. Everything was decided during a big meeting in Dakar called by the Governor General. In the hope of putting a brake on the movement, the floor was given over to political notables and religious leaders whose mission was to beguile and to intimidate the strikers. And customarily, the most zealous were the religious leaders.

A campaign was undertaken by the ‘spiritual leaders’, the imams and the priests from different sects, to demoralise the strikers and especially their wives The imams, furious at the resistance of the workers to their injunctions, railed against the delegates, accusing them of every possible sin: atheism, alcoholism, prostitution, infant mortality, even going so far as to predict that these sinners would bring about the end of the world.3

But nothing was achieved. Despite being accused of all these “sins”, the railway workers were determined and their combativity stayed intact. It was strengthened even further when their appeal for solidarity in a general assembly found increasing support from workers in other sectors who chanted: “We, the builders, are for the strike! We, the port workers, are for the strike! We, the steelworkers…We, the…”.4

And indeed, the very next day, there was a general strike in almost every sector. However, before this could happen, the railway workers not only had to suffer pressure from the political and religious leaders, but were also subjected to terrible repression from the military. Some sources5 indicate that people died, and the colonial authority used its “sharpshooters” to suppress a “march of women” (the wives and relatives of the rail workers) to Dakar that was in support of the strikers.

The working class can only rely on itself. It’s symbolic that the CGT collected financial contributions from Paris, and back in FWA it criticised “those who wanted their independence” and who launched a “political strike”. In fact, the CGT took cover behind “the opinions” of the European citizens of the colony who rejected the demands of the “natives”. In addition, this behaviour of the CGT pushed the native railway workers to abandon the Stalinist union en masse following this magnificent class combat.

SFIO, PCF, unions and African nationalists divert the struggle of the working class

The railway workers’ strike that ended in March 1948 took place in an atmosphere of great political turmoil following the referendum giving birth to the “Union Francaise”.6 Hence the actions of the railway workers acquired a highly political dimension, obliging all the political colonial forces and those in favour of independence to tactically position themselves either in favour or against the strikers’ demands. So the PCF was seen hiding behind the CGT to sabotage the strike movement, while the SFIO in power attempted to suppress the movement using every possible means. For their part, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Sekou Toure, two rival Pan-Africanists who would become presidents of Senegal and Guinea respectively, openly declared themselves in support of the demands of the railway workers.

But the day after the strikers’ victory, the left forces and African nationalists clashed, each claiming to be for the working class. By exploiting the struggles of the working class to serve their own interests, they managed to divert the autonomous struggle of the proletariat from its real class objectives.

Thus, the unions took up the question of the Labour Code to poison relations between workers. Indeed, through this “code”, the French social legislation had established a real geographic and ethnic discrimination in the colonies: firstly, between workers of European origin and workers of African origin and secondly, between those hailing from different colonies, even between citizens of the same country.7 It turned out that the SFIO (forerunner to today’s French Socialist Party), which had promised the abolition of the iniquitous Labour Code in 1947, prevaricated until 1952, providing the unions, particularly those in favour of African independence, to focus the workers’ demands exclusively on this question by systematically raising the slogan of “equal rights for white and black”. This idea of equal rights and negotiating with Africans was openly opposed by the most backward European union, the CGT, and we should say that in this situation the CGT played a particularly despicable role insofar as it justified its position by the support it gained from its opposition.

Moreover, in response, the CGT militants of African origin8 decided to create their own union to defend the “specific rights” of African workers. All this gave rise to the formulation of increasingly nationalist and interclassist demands as this passage from the organisation’s rulebook illustrates:

The concepts adopted [those of French metropolitan unionism] insufficiently illuminate the evolution and the tasks of economic and social progress in Africa, especially since, despite the contradictions existing between the various local social strata, colonial rule makes inappropriate any references to class struggle and avoids the dispersal of forces into doctrinal competition.”9

Thus the unions were able to pass the act effectively because, despite the persistence of a ceaseless militancy of the working class between 1947 and 1958, all the movements struggling for wage claims and in order to improve working conditions, were diverted into fighting colonial rule and winning “independence”. Clearly, during the movement of the railway workers in 1947-48, the working class of the colony of FWA still had the strength to successfully take the struggle onto the class terrain, on the other hand, subsequently the strikes were controlled and directed towards the objectives of the bourgeois forces, the unions and political parties. It was precisely this situation that was the springboard for Leopold Sedar Senghor and Sekou Toure to draw the people and the working class behind their own struggle for the succession to colonial rule. And after the countries of the FWA proclaimed their “independence”, the African leaders decided immediately to integrate the unions into the bosom of the state by assigning them the job of policing the workers; in short, they were watchdog for the interests of the new black bourgeoisie that was now in charge. This is clear from the words of President Senghor:

Despite its service, because of its service, trade unionism must today change itself to have a more specific understanding of its precise role and its tasks. Because there are now well-organised political parties that represent the whole nation at the general political level, unionism must return to its natural role, which is primarily that of defending the purchasing power of its members… The conclusion to this analysis is that unions will broadly support the political programme of the majority party and its government.” 10

In short, the unions and political parties must share the same programme in order to defend the interests of the new ruling class. Union leader, David Soumah, echoed the words of Senghor:

Our slogan during this (anti-colonial) struggle was that the unions didn’t take any responsibility for production, that they did not have to worry about the repercussions their demands would have on an economy’s development when it was managed in the sole interest of the colonial power and organised by it for the expansion of its own national economy. This position has become irrelevant following the accession of the African countries to national independence and a change of role has become necessary for the unions.11

Consequently, during the first decade of “independence”, the proletariat of the former FWA was left without an effective class response, completely shackled by the new ruling class assisted by the unions in its anti-worker policy. It would be 1968 before we would see it re-emerge on the proletarian class terrain against its own bourgeoisie.

Lassou (to be continued).

1. El hadj Ibrahima Ndao, Senegal, a history of democracy’s conquests, Les Nouvelles Edit. Africaines, 2003.

2. Mar Fall, The state and the union question in Senegal, L’Harmattan, 1989.

3. Ousmane Sembene, God’s wooden sticks, Pocket, 1960.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. A “federation” between France and its colonies whose goal was to supervise the coming “independence”.

7. For example, the Senegalese residents of the districts of Goree, Rufisque, Dakar and Saint-Louis were considered to be “French citizens”, which was not the case for other Senegalese in the country.

8. It led to the creation of UGTAN (General Union for Black African Workers), a union that was moreover dominated by the railway corporation.

9. Quoted in Fall Op. Cit.

 

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

 

 

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The Decadence of Capitalism (xi): 40 years of open crisis show that capitalism's decline is terminal

 

While the post war-boom led many to conclude that marxism was obsolete, that capitalism had discovered the secret of eternal youth,1 and that the working class was no longer a force for revolutionary change, a small minority of revolutionaries, very often working in conditions of almost complete isolation, remained loyal to the fundamental tenets of marxism. One of the most important of these was Paul Mattick in the USA. Mattick responded to Marcuse’s search for a new revolutionary subject by publishing Critique of Marcuse, one dimensional man in class society (1972), which reaffirmed the potential of the working class to overthrow capitalism. But his most lasting contribution was probably Marx and Keynes, the limits of the mixed economy, first published in 1969 but based on studies and essays from the 1950s onwards.

Although by the end of the 1960s the first signs of a renewed phase of open economic crisis were becoming visible (for example in the devaluation of the pound sterling in 1967), to argue that capitalism was still a system mined by a deep, structural crisis was very much to swim against the stream. But here was Mattick, more than 30 years after his major work “The permanent crisis” had summarised and developed Henryk Grossman’s theory of capitalist breakdown2, still insisting that capitalism remained a regressive social system, that the underlying contradictions in the accumulation process had not been conjured away and were fated to return to the surface. Focusing on the bourgeoisie’s use of the state to regulate the process of accumulation, whether in the Keynesian “mixed economy” form favoured in the west, or the Stalinist version in the east, he showed that the obligation to interfere with the workings of the law of value was not a sign of the system overcoming its contradictions (as Cardan, for example, had argued, particularly in Modern capitalism and revolution) but was precisely an expression of its decay:

Notwithstanding the long duration of rather ‘prosperous’ conditions in the industrially-advanced countries, there is no ground for the assumption that capital production has overcome its inherent contradictions through state intervention in the economy. The interventions themselves point to the persistence of the crisis of capital production, and the growth of government-determined production is a sure sign of the continuing decay of the private-enterprise economy [...] The Keynesian solution will stand exposed as a pseudo-solution, capable of postponing but not preventing the contradictory course of capital accumulation as predicted by Marx3

Thus Mattick maintained that “capitalism has ceased to be a socially progressive system of production and has become – notwithstanding all superficial appearances to the contrary – a regressive and destructive one.4 Thus at the opening of chapter 19, “The imperialist imperative”, Mattick affirms that the drive to war cannot be done away with by capital because it is a logical result of blockages in the process of accumulation. But while “waste production by way of war might bring about structural changes of world economy and shifts of political power conducive to a new period of capital expansion for the victorious capitalist powers”, he quickly adds that the bourgeoisie should not be too reassured by this: “this kind of optimism cannot prevail in view of the destructiveness of modern warfare which may well include the use of atomic weapons.”5 But for capitalism “the recognition that war may be suicide, which is by no means unanimous, does not affect the drift towards a new world war.”6 The perspective announced in the last sentence of the book, therefore, remains the one which revolutionaries had put forward at the time of the First World War: “socialism or barbarism”.

There are however some flaws in Mattick’s analysis of capitalist decadence in Marx and Keynes. On the one hand he sees the tendency to distort the law of value as an expression of decline; on the other hand, he claims that the fully statified countries of the eastern bloc were no longer subject to the law of value and thus to the tendency towards crises. He even argues that, from the point of view of private capital, these regimes “may be described as state-socialism simply because it centralises capital in the hands of the state”,7 even if from the point of view of the working class, it has to described as state capitalism. In any case, “the state capitalist system does not suffer that particular contradiction between profitable and non-profitable production which plagues private-property capitalism...the state capitalist system may produce profitably and non-profitably without facing stagnation.8 He develops the idea that the Stalinist states in some sense constitute a different system, profoundly antagonistic to western forms of capitalism – and it is here that he seems to find the driving force behind the Cold War, since he writes that imperialism today “differs from the imperialism and colonialism of laisser faire capitalism because capital competes for more than just raw-material sources, privileged markets, and capital exports; it also fights for its very life as a private-property system against new forms of capital production which are no longer subject to economic value relations and the competitive market mechanism.9 This interpretation goes along with Mattick’s argument that the eastern bloc countries do not, strictly speaking, have their own imperialist dynamic.

The group Internationalism in the US, which later became a section of the ICC, noticed this flaw, in the article it published in Internationalism n 2 in the early 70s, “State capitalism and the law of value, a response to Marx and Keynes”. The article showed that Mattick’s analyses of the Stalinist regimes serves to undermine the concept of decadence which he defends elsewhere: for if state socialism is not subject to crises; if it is indeed, as Mattick also argues, more favourable to cybernation and the development of the productive forces; if the Stalinist system is not pushed to follow its imperialist drives, then the material foundations for the communist revolution begin to disappear and the historic alternative posed by the epoch of decline has also been obscured:

Mattick’s use of the term state capitalism, then, is misnomer. State capitalism or ‘state socialism’, as Mattick describes it, as an exploitative but non-capitalist mode of production, bears a startling resemblance to Bruno Rizzi’s and Max Schachtman’s description of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’, worked out in the years preceding the Second World War. The economic breakdown of capitalism, of the mode of production based on the law of value, which Mattick argues is inevitable, leads not to the historical alternatives, socialism or barbarism, but to the alternative socialism or barbarism or ‘state socialism’.”

Reality has come down on the side of Internationalism’s article. It’s true that the crisis in the east did not generally take the same form as in the west. In general it manifested itself in underproduction rather than overproduction, certainly regarding consumer goods. But the inflation which ravaged these economies for decades, and which was often the spark for major workers’ struggles, was one sign that the bureaucracy had by no means conjured away the effects of the law of value. Above all, the collapse of the entire eastern bloc at the end of the 80s, however much it also reflected an impasse at the military and social level, was also the “revenge” of the law of value on regimes which had indeed tried to circumvent it. In this sense, just like Keynesianism, Stalinism revealed itself a “pseudo-solution capable of postponing but not preventing the contradictory course of capital accumulation.”10

Mattick had been steeled by the direct experience of the German revolution and by the defence of class positions against the triumphant counter-revolution of the 30s and 40s. Another “survivor” of the communist left, Marc Chirik, had also maintained his militancy in a period of reaction and imperialist war. He had been a key member of the Gauche Communiste de France whose contribution we looked at in the previous article. During the 1950s he was in Venezuela and temporarily cut off from organised activity. But in the early 60s he started to gather a circle of young comrades around him, forming the group Internacionalismo which based itself on the same principles as the GCF, including of course the notion of the decadence of capitalism. But whereas the latter group had struggled to hold out in a dark period for the workers’ movement, the Venezuelan group expressed something stirring within the consciousness of the world working class. It was able to recognise with startling clarity that the financial difficulties beginning to gnaw away at the apparently healthy body of capitalism actually signified a new plunge into crisis, which would be met by an undefeated generation of the working class. As it wrote in January 1968: "We are not prophets, nor can we claim to predict when and how events will unfold in the future. But of one thing are conscious and certain: the process in which capitalism is plunged today cannot be stopped and it leads directly to the crisis. And we are equally certain that the inverse process of developing class combativity which we are witnessing today will lead the working class to a bloody and direct struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state". This group was one of the most lucid in interpreting the massive social movements in France in May of that year and Italy and elsewhere the following year as marking the end of the counter-revolution.

For Internacionalismo, these class movements were a response of the proletariat to the first effects of the world economic crisis, which had already produced a rise in unemployment and attempts to control wage rises. For others this was a mechanical application of outdated marxism: what May ‘68 showed above all was the proletariat’s direct revolt against the alienation of a fully functioning capitalist society. This was the view of the Situationists who dismissed the attempts to connect crisis and class struggle to the work of dinosaur-like sects. "As for the debris of the old non-Trotskyist ultra-leftism, they needed at least a major economic crisis. They subordinated any revolutionary movement to its return, and so saw nothing coming. Now that they have recognized a revolutionary crisis in May, they have to prove that this ‘invisible’ economic crisis was there in the spring of 68. Without any fear of being ridiculed, they are working at it now, producing schemas on the rise in unemployment and inflation. So for them, the economic crisis is no longer that terribly visible objective reality that was lived so hardly in 1929, but a son of eucharistic presence that supports their religion."11 In reality, as we have just seen, Internacionalismo’s view of the relationship between crisis and class struggle had not been doctored in retrospect: on the contrary, their faithfulness to the marxist method had enabled them to envisage, on the basis of a few unspectacular portents, the outbreak of movements like May68. The rather more noticeable deepening of the economic crisis after 1973 soon made it clear that it was the SI – who had more or less adopted Cardan’s theory of a capitalism that had overcome its economic contradictions –which was tied to a period in capitalism’s life that was now definitively over.

The hypothesis that May ‘68 reflected a profound resurgence of the working class was further strengthened by the international proliferation of groups and circles seeking to develop an authentically revolutionary critique of capitalism. Naturally, after such a long period of retreat, this new proletarian political movement was extremely heterogeneous and inexperienced. Reacting against the horrors of Stalinism, there was often a suspicion of the very notion of political organisation, a visceral reaction against anything that smacked of “Leninism” or the perceived rigidity of marxism. Some of these new groups lost themselves in frenetic activism which, lacking any long-term analysis, did not long survive the end of the first wave of international struggles begun in 1968. Others did not deny that there was a link between workers’ struggles and the crisis, but saw it from an entirely different standpoint: workers’ militancy had essentially produced the crisis by raising unrestrained wage demands and refusing to knuckle down to capitalist plans for restructuring. This view was put forward by the Groupe de Liaison pour l’Action des Travailleurs in France (one of Socialisme ou Barbarie’s many offshoots), and in particular by the workers’ autonomy current in Italy, which saw “traditional” marxism as hopelessly “objectivist” (we will come back to this in another article) in its understanding of the relationship between crisis and class struggle.

However, this new generation was also rediscovering the work of the communist left and an engagement with the theory of decadence was part of this process. Marc Chirik and some of the younger comrades from Internacialismo group had come to France and, in the heat of the 1968 events, helped to form the first nucleus of the group Révolution Internationale. From its inception, RI placed the conception of decadence at the heart of its political approach, and was able to convince a number of councilist and libertarian groups and individuals that their opposition to the unions, national liberation and capitalist democracy could only be properly understood and defended on the basis of a more coherent historical framework. The early issues of the journal Révolution Internationale saw the publication of a series on “The Decadence of Capitalism” which was later to be published as the first pamphlet of the International Communist Current. This text is available online12 and still contains the essential foundations of the ICC’s political method, above all in its broad historical sweep which goes from primitive communism through the various class societies before capitalism before examining the rise and decline of capitalism itself. As with the current series, basing itself on Marx’s notion of “epochs of social revolution”, it draws out some of the key elements and common characteristics of all class societies in periods when they have become a barrier to the development of mankind’s productive powers: intensification of wars between factions of the ruling class, growing role of the state, decomposition of ideological justifications, growing struggles of oppressed and exploited classes. Applying this general approach to the specifics of capitalist society, it attempts to show how capitalism since the beginning of the 20th century has in turn gone from being a “form of development” to a “fetter” on the productive forces, pointing to the phenomenon of world wars and numerous other imperialist conflicts, the revolutionary struggles that broke out in 1917, the enormous growth in the role of the state and the incredible waste of human labour through the development of the war economy and other forms of unproductive expenditure.

This general outlook, presented at a time when the first signs of a new economic crisis were becoming more than apparent, convinced a number of groups in other countries that a theory of decadence was an essential starting point for left communist positions. It was not only at the centre of the ICC’s platform but was also taken on board by other tendencies such as Revolutionary Perspectives and subsequently the Communist Workers Organisation in Britain. There were significant disagreements on the causes of capitalist decadence: the ICC pamphlet adopted Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis, broadly speaking, although its explanation of the post-war boom (seeing the reconstruction of war-shattered economies as a kind of new market) was later to be disputed within the ICC, and there have always been other views on economic questions in the ICC, in particular, comrades who favoured the Grossman-Mattick theory, which was also taken up by the CWO and others. But at this point in the re-emergence of the revolutionary movement, the “theory of decadence” seemed to be making significant gains.

Balance sheet of a moribund system

Our survey of the successive efforts of revolutionaries to understand the decline of capitalism has now reached the 1970s and 80s. But before looking at the developments – and the numerous regressions – that have taken place at the theoretical level since those decades and the present day, it seems useful to recall and update the balance sheet we drew in the first article in this series13, particularly at the economic level where there have been some dramatic developments since early 2008 when the first article appeared.

1. At the economic level

In the 70s and 80s the international class struggle went through a series of advances and retreats, but the economic crisis advanced inexorably, undermining the thesis of the autonomists that workers’ struggles themselves were the root cause of capitalism’s economic difficulties. The depression of the thirties, which coincided with a major historical defeat for the working class, had already provided a strong argument against the autonomists; and the visible evolution of the economic debacle even in times of retreat by the working class, such as we saw intermittently in the mid-70s and early 80s, and in a more sustained and profound way during the 1990s, implied that there was indeed an “objective” process at work here, something that was not fundamentally determined by the level of resistance coming from the working class. Nor was it subject to effective control by the bourgeoisie. Abandoning the Keynesian policies which had accompanied the boom years but which were now a source of runaway inflation, the bourgeoisie in the 80s now sought to “balance the books” with policies which set in motion a tide of mass unemployment and deindustrialisation in most of the key capitalist countries. In the decades that followed there were new attempts to stimulate growth by a massive recourse to debt, resulting in short-lived booms, but underneath accumulating profound tensions which were to explode to the surface with the crash of 2007-8. A general overview of the capitalist world economy since 1914 thus gives us the scenario not of a mode of production in ascent but of a system unable to escape its impasse whatever techniques it tries out:

  • 1914 to 1923: World War One and the first international wave of proletarian revolutions; the Communist International proclaims the dawn of the “epoch of wars and revolutions”;

  • 1924-29: brief recovery which does not relieve the post-war stagnation of the “old” economies and empires in the wake of the war; the “boom” is restricted mainly to the USA;

  • 1929: the exuberant expansion of US capital ends in a spectacular crash, precipitating the deepest and widest depression in capitalism’s history. There is no spontaneous revival of production as was the case with the cyclical crises of the early 19th century. State capitalist measures are used to re-launch the economy but they are part of a drive towards the Second World War;

  • 1945-67: a major development of state spending (Keynesian measures financed essentially through debt and based on unprecedented gains in productivity) create the conditions for a period of growth and prosperity unlike anything before it, although this excludes a large part of the “third world”;

  • 1967-2008: 40 years of open crisis, demonstrated in particular by the galloping inflation of the 70s and the mass unemployment of the 80s. However, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, the crisis is more “open” in some phases and in some parts of the globe than others. Elimination of restrictions on the movement of capital and on financial speculation; a whole series of industrial relocations to areas where labour power is cheap; development of new technologies and above all the resort to virtually unlimited credit for states, companies and households, create a “growth” bubble in which vast profits are made by small elites, frenzied industrial growth takes off in countries like China, and credit-card consumerism reaches new heights in the central capitalist countries. But the warning signs are discernable throughout this period: booms are regularly followed by busts (for example, the recessions of 1974-75, 1980-82, 1990-93, 2001-2, the stock market crash of 1987...). And after each recession the options open to capital become narrower, in marked contrast to the “busts” of the ascendant period when there was always the possibility of an outward expansion into geographic/economic areas hitherto outside of the capitalist circuit. Lacking this outlet to all intents and purposes, the capitalist class is increasingly forced to “cheat” the law of value which is condemning its system to collapse. This applies equally to the openly state capitalist policies of Keynesianism and Stalinism, which make no secret of their resolve to rein in the market through deficit financing and shoring up unprofitable economic sectors in order to sustain production, and the so-called “neo-liberal” policies which seemed to sweep all before them after the “revolutions” personified by Thatcher and Reagan. In reality, these policies are themselves emanations of the capitalist state, and with their encouragement of unlimited credit and speculation, they are in no way rooted in a respect for the classical laws of capitalist value production. In this sense, one of the most significant events prior to the current economic debacle is the collapse of the “Tigers” and “Dragons” of the far east in 1997, in which a phase of frenetic growth fuelled by (bad) debt suddenly comes up against a brick wall – the need to start paying it all back. This is a harbinger of what is to come, even if China and India subsequently step in to claim the role of “locomotive” that had been reserved for the other far eastern economies. Neither does the “technological revolution”, particularly in the sphere of computing, that was so hyped in the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, save capitalism from its inner contradictions: it raises the organic composition of capital and thus lowers the profit rate, and this cannot be compensated by a real extension of the world market. Indeed it tends to aggravate the problem of overproduction by spewing out more and more commodities while simultaneously throwing more workers onto the dole;

  • 2008-... World capital’s crisis reaches a qualitative new situation in which the “solutions’ applied by the capitalist state over the previous four decades, and above all the recourse to credit, explode in the face of the politicians, financiers and bureaucrats who had been practising them so assiduously and with such misplaced confidence in the preceding period. Now the crisis rebounds to the very centres of world capitalism – to the USA and the Eurozone – and all the recipes used to maintain confidence in the possibilities of constant economic expansion are revealed to be worthless. The creation of an artificial market through credit is now displaying its historical limitations, as it threatens to destroy the value of money and generate runaway inflation; at the same time the reining in of credit and attempts by states to slash their spending in order to begin paying back their debts only further restrict the market. The net result is that capitalism is now entering a depression which is in essence deeper and more insoluble than the one in the 1930s. And as depression descends on the west, the great white hope of a country like China carrying the global economy on its shoulders is also proving to be a complete illusion: China’s industrial growth is based on its capacity to sell cheap goods to the west, and if this market dries up, China faces economic meltdown.

Conclusion: whereas in its ascendant phase, capitalism went through a cycle of crises which were both the expression of its internal contradictions and an indispensable moment in its global expansion, in the 20th and 21st century capitalism’s crisis, as Paul Mattick argued from the 30s onwards, is essentially permanent. Capitalism has now reached a stage where the palliatives it has used to keep itself alive have become an added factor in its mortal sickness.

2. At the military level

The drive towards imperialist war also expresses the historic impasse of the capitalist world economy:

The more the market contracts, the more bitter becomes the struggle for sources of raw materials, and for the mastery of world market. The economic struggle between different capitalist groups concentrates more and more taking on its most finished form in struggles between states. The aggravated economic struggle between states can only be finally resolved by military force. War becomes the sole means, not of resolving the international crisis, but through which each state tries to overcome its problems at the expense of its rivals.

The momentary solutions found by individual imperialisms in economic or military victories have the effect not simply of worsening the situation of opposing imperialisms, but of still further aggravating the world crisis, and of destroying huge quantities of the values built up over decades and centuries of social labour.

Capitalism in the imperialist epoch is like a building where the construction materials for the upper stories are taken from the lower ones and the foundations. The more frenetic the upward building, the weaker becomes the base supporting the whole edifice. The greater the appearance of power at the top, the more shaky the building is in reality. Capitalism, compelled as it is to dig beneath its own foundations, works furiously to undermine the world economy, hurling human society towards catastrophe and the abyss”.14

Imperialist wars, whether local or world-wide, are the purest expression of capitalism’s tendency to destroy itself, whether we are talking about the physical destruction of capital, the massacre of entire populations, or the immense sterilisation of value represented by military production, which is no longer restricted to phases of open warfare. The GCF’s recognition of the essentially irrational nature of war in the period of decadence was somewhat obscured by the reorganisation and reconstruction of the global economy that followed the Second World War, but the post-war boom was an exceptional phenomenon which can never be repeated. And whatever mode of international organisation adopted by the capitalist system in this era, war has also been permanent. After 1945, when the world was divided between two huge imperialist blocs, military conflict generally took the form of endless “national liberation” wars as the two superpowers vied for strategic dominance; after 1989, the collapse of the weaker Russian bloc, far from mitigating the drive to war, made direct involvement of the remaining superpower much more frequent, as we saw in the 1991Gulf war, in the Balkans at the end of the 90s, and Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001. These interventions by the USA were largely –and very unsuccessfully – aimed at stemming the centrifugal trend opened up by the dissolution of the old bloc system, which has seen an aggravation and proliferation of local rivalries, expressed in the horrific conflicts that have ravaged Africa from Rwanda and Congo to Ethiopia to Somalia, exacerbated tensions around the Israel-Palestine problem, and come close to producing a nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan.

The first and second world wars brought about a major shift in the balance of power between the major capitalist countries, essentially to the benefit of the USA. Indeed the overwhelming domination of the USA after 1945 was a key factor in the post-war prosperity. But contrary to one of the slogans of the 1960s, war is not “the health of the state”. Just as its vastly bloated military sector helped bring about the collapse of the USSR, so the USA’s commitment to remaining the world’s gendarme has also become a factor in its own decline as an empire. The vast sums annihilated in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been offset by the quick profits nabbed by Halliburton or other crony capitalists; on the contrary they have helped to turn the USA from the world’s creditor into one of its principal debtors.

Some revolutionary organisations, like the Internationalist Communist Tendency, argue that war, and above all world war, is eminently rational as far as capitalism is concerned. They argue that by destroying the swollen mass of constant capital which is the source of the falling rate of profit, war in capitalism’s decadence has the effect of restoring the rate of profit and launching a new cycle of accumulation. This isn’t the moment to enter into this discussion, but even if such an analysis were right, this can no longer be a solution for capital. First because there is little evidence that the conditions for a Third World War – which require, among other things, the formation of stable imperialist blocs – are coming together in a world increasingly following the rule of “every man for himself”. And even if a Third World War was on the cards, it would certainly not initiate a new cycle of accumulation, but would almost certainly result in the obliteration of capitalism and probably of humanity15. That would be the final demonstration of capitalism’s irrationality, but none of us would be here to say “I told you so”.

3. At the ecological level

Since the 1970s revolutionaries have been obliged to recognise a new dimension to the diagnosis that capitalism has outlived its usefulness and has become a system bent on destruction: the increasing devastation of the natural environment, which is now threatening disaster on a planetary scale. The pollution and destruction of the natural world has been inherent to capitalist production from the beginning, but over the last century, and particularly since the end of the Second World War, it has been made all the more extensive and deeply rooted thanks to capitalism’s relentless occupation of every last corner of the planet. At the same time, and as a consequence of capitalism’s historic impasse, the spoliation of the atmosphere, the land, the seas, rivers and forests have been exacerbated by increasingly ferocious national competition for natural resources, cheap labour, and new markets. Ecological catastrophe, especially in the shape of global warming, has become a new horseman of capitalism’s apocalypse, and successive international summits have shown the inability of the bourgeoisie to take the most basic measures to stave it off.

A recent illustration: the most recent report from the International Energy Agency, a body not previously noted for making doom-laden predictions, argues that governments around the world have five years to reverse the course of climate change before it's too late. According to the IEA and a number of other scientific institutions, it is vital to ensure that global temperatures do not rise above 2 degrees. “To keep emissions below that target, civilization could continue with business as usual for only five more years before the total allowed budget of emissions would be ‘locked in.’ In that case, to meet the targets for warming, all new infrastructure built from 2017 onward would have to be completely emissions-free.”16 One month after this report came out, in November 2011, came the Durban summit which was heralded as a breakthrough because for the first time at any of these international meetings between states, it was agreed that there should be legally binding limits on carbon emissions. But these would have to be agreed in 2015 and would come into effect in 2020 – far too late according to the predictions of the IEA and many of the environmental bodies associated with the conference. Keith Allott, head of climate change at WWF-UK (World Wide Fund for Nature, Britain), said: "Governments have salvaged a path forward for negotiations, but we must be under no illusion — the outcome of Durban leaves us with the prospect of being legally bound to a world of 4C warming. This would be catastrophic for people and the natural world. Governments have spent crucial days focused on a handful of specific words in the negotiating text, but have paid little heed to repeated warnings from the scientific community that much stronger, urgent action is needed to cut emissions."17

The problem for the reformist conceptions of the ecologists is that capitalism is being strangled by its own contradictions and fights ever more desperately for its life. Caught in a crisis, capitalism cannot become less competitive, more cooperative, more rational, but is driven to the extremes of competition at all levels, and above all at the level of national state capitalist gladiators grappling in a barbarian Thunderdome for the least chance of immediate survival. It is forced to seek the most short-term profits, to sacrifice everything else to the idol of “economic growth” – ie, of the accumulation of capital, even if it is to the debt-addled and largely fictitious growth of these last few decades. No national economy can allow itself the least moment of sentiment when it comes to exploiting its national natural “property” to the absolute limit. Neither can there be, under the capitalist world economy, a structure of international law or governance that would be able to subordinate narrow national interests to the overall interests of the planet. Whatever the actual deadline posed by global warming, the ecological question as a whole provides further evidence that the continuing rule of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalist mode of production, has become a danger for the survival of humanity.

Let’s look at an edifying illustration of all this – and one which also elucidates the fact that the ecological danger, just like the economic crisis, cannot be separated from the threat of military conflict.

In recent months, oil companies have begun lining up for exploration rights to Baffin Bay, a hydrocarbon-rich region on Greenland’s western coast that until recently was too ice-choked for drilling. U.S. and Canadian diplomats have reopened a spat over navigation rights to a sea route through the Canadian Arctic that could cut shipping time and costs for long-haul tankers.

Even ownership of the North Pole has come into dispute, as Russia and Denmark pursue rival claims to the underlying seabed in hopes of locking up access to everything from fisheries to natural gas deposits.

The intense rivalry over Arctic development was highlighted in diplomatic cables released last week by the anti-secrecy Web site Wikileaks. Messages between U.S. diplomats revealed how northern nations, including the United States and Russia, have been manoeuvring to ensure access to shipping lanes as well as undersea oil and gas deposits that are estimated to contain up to 25 percent of the world’s untapped reserves.

In the cables, U.S. officials worried that bickering over resources might even lead to an arming of the Arctic. ‘While in the Arctic there is peace and stability, however, one cannot exclude that in the future there will be a redistribution of power, up to armed intervention,’ a 2009 State Department cable quoted a Russian ambassador as saying.”18

Thus: one of the most serious manifestations of global warming, the melting of the polar ice caps, which contains the possibility of cataclysmic flooding and a “feedback loop” of warming once the ice caps are no longer there to deflect the sun’s heat away from the Earth’s atmosphere, is immediately seen as a huge economic opportunity for a whole queue of nation states – with the ultimate consequence of burning more fossil fuels, further adding to the greenhouse effect. And at the same time, the struggle over dwindling resources – in this case oil and gas, but elsewhere it could be water or fertile land – produces a four or five way mini-imperialist conflict (Britain has also been involved in this dispute as well). This is a feedback loop of capitalism’s growing insanity.

The same article ends with the “good news” of a modest treaty signed between some of the contenders at the Artic Council meeting in Nuuk, Greenland. And we know how reliable are diplomatic treaties when it comes to forestalling capital’s inbuilt drive towards imperialist conflict.

The global disaster that capitalism is preparing can only be averted by a global revolution.

4. At the social level

What is the balance sheet of capitalism’s decline at the social level, and in particular for the main producer of capitalism’s wealth, the working class?

When the Communist International proclaimed, in 1919, that capitalism had entered its epoch of inner disintegration, it was also drawing a line under the period of social democracy, in which the struggle for durable reforms had been necessary and feasible. Revolution was necessary because henceforward capitalism could only make deeper and deeper attacks on working class living standards. As we have shown in previous articles in this series, this analysis was repeatedly confirmed over the next two decades, which saw the greatest depression in capitalism’s history and the horrors of the Second World War. But it came into question, even among revolutionaries, during the boom years of the 50s and 60s, when the working class of the central capitalist countries experienced unprecedented rises in wages, an impressive reduction in unemployment, and a series of state-backed welfare benefits: sickness pay, paid holidays, access to education and healthcare, and so on.

But do these advances really invalidate the claim, maintained by revolutionaries who adhere to the thesis that capitalism is in overall decline, that long-lasting reforms are no longer possible?

The issue here is not whether these gains were “real” or significant. They were and they do need to be explained. This is one of the reasons that the ICC, for example, opened up a debate about the causes of the post-war prosperity, internally and then in public. But what needs to be understood above all is the historic context in which these gains took place, because it can then be shown that they bear little resemblance to the steady improvement of working class living standards during the 19th century, the majority of them won through the organisation and struggle of the worker’s movement:

  • while it’s true that many of the post-war “reforms” were brought in to make sure that the war did not give rise to a wave of proletarian struggles on the model of 1917-19, the initiative for measures like the health service or full employment came directly from the capitalist state apparatus, particularly its left wing. They had the effect of increasing the working class’s confidence in the state and decreasing confidence in its own struggle;

  • even during the boom years, economic prosperity was severely limited. Large swathes of the working class, particularly in the third world but also in significant pockets of the central countries (example: the black workers and poor whites of the USA), were excluded from these gains. Throughout the “third world”, capital’s inability to integrate millions from the ruined peasantry and other strata into productive labour created the basis for today’s mega-slums, for world-wide malnutrition and poverty. And these masses were also the first victims of the inter-bloc rivalries which resulted in bloody proxy battles in a host of “underdeveloped” countries from Korea and Vietnam to the Middle East and the southern and eastern Africa;

  • further evidence of capitalism’s inability to really improve the quality of working class life can be seen at the level of the working day. One of the signs of “progress” in the 19th century was the continued lessening of the working day, from up to 18 hours in the early part of the century to the 8-hour day which was one of the main demands of the workers’ movement at the end of the century and which was formally granted in many countries between the 1900s and the 1930s. But since that time – and this includes the post-war boom - the working day has remained more or less stagnant, while technological development, far from freeing workers from drudgery, has led to de-skilling, widespread unemployment with more intensive exploitation of those that remain at work, longer journeys to work, and the boon of working non-stop away from the workplace thanks to mobile phones, lap-tops, and the internet;

  • whatever the gains made during the boom, they have been under more or less continuous assault for the past four decades and with the impending depression they are now being subject to even more massive attacks, with no prospect of any respite. Throughout the last four decades of crisis, capitalism has been relatively cautious in directly cutting wages imposing mass unemployment and dismantling the welfare state. The savage austerity measures now being foisted on countries like Greece are a harbinger of what is to come for workers everywhere.

On the broader social level, the decay of capitalism over such a long period carries a tremendous threat to the proletariat’s ability to become a class “for itself”. When the working class revived its struggles at the end of the 1960s, its capacity to develop a revolutionary consciousness was greatly hampered by the trauma of the counter-revolution it had been through – a counter-revolution which to a large extent had presented itself in the “proletarian” garb of Stalinism, making generations of workers deeply suspicious of their own political traditions and organisations. The fraudulent equation between Stalinism and communism was even pushed to the maximum when the Stalinist regimes collapsed at the end of the 80s, further eroding the self-confidence of the working class, its ability to evolve a political alternative to capitalism. Thus a product of capitalist decadence – Stalinist state capitalism – has been used by all factions of the bourgeoisie to stultify class consciousness.

During the 80s and 90s, the evolution of the economic crisis demanded the break-up of industrial concentrations and working class communities in the central countries, transferring much of industry to regions of the world where working class political traditions are not so strong. The creation of urban wastelands across much of the “developed’ world brought with it a weakening of class identity and a more general wearing away of social ties, with their counterpart in the search for a variety of false communities, which are not neutral but have terribly destructive effects. We can point to the attraction of a sector of disenfranchised white youth to extreme right wing gangs like the English Defence League in Britain; of Muslim youth, facing the same material situation, to fundamentalist Islam and jihadi politics. More generally we can point to the corrosive effects of gang culture in nearly all the urban centres of the industrialised countries, even if these have had their most spectacular impact on peripheral countries like Mexico where the country is gripped by an almost permanent civil war between unbelievably murderous drug gangs, some of them directly linked to a no less corrupt central state.

These phenomena – the frightening loss of any perspective for the future, the rise in nihilistic violence – are a slow ideological poison in the veins of the world’s exploited, making it increasingly difficult to see themselves as a unified class, a class whose essence is international solidarity.

At the end of the 80s there was a tendency in the ICC to see the waves of struggle of the 70s and 80s as more or less linear in their advance towards a revolutionary consciousness. This was criticised very sharply by Marc Chirik who, on the basis of interpreting terrorist bombings in France and the sudden implosion of the eastern bloc, was the first to put forward the idea that we were entering a new phase in the decadence of capitalism, which he described as a phase of decomposition. This new phase was determined fundamentally by a kind of social stalemate, where both the ruling class and the exploited class were unable to put forward their respective alternatives for the future of society: world war for the bourgeoisie, world revolution for the working class. But since capitalism can never stand still and its long-drawn out economic crisis was fated to plumb new depths, in the absence of any perspective society was doomed to rot on its feet, in turn bringing increasing obstacles to the development of working class consciousness.

Whether or not the theoretical parameters of the ICC’s concept of decomposition are accepted, essential to this analysis is its affirmation that this is the final phase of capitalism’s decay. The evidence that we are witnessing the last stages of the system’s decline, its actual death agony, has surely mounted considerably over the last few decades, to the point where “apocalyptic moods”, a recognition that we are on the edge of the abyss, have become more and more commonplace19. And yet, within the proletarian political movement, the theory of decadence is far from being unanimous. We will look at some of the arguments against the theory in the next article in this series.

Gerrard

1. See the previous article in this series in International Review 146

3. Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes: The limits of the mixed economy, Merlin Press 1969, London (1980 reprint), Chapter 14, “The mixed economy”, p152 and 163.

4. Mattick op. cit., Chapter 19 “The imperialist imperative”, p 261-2.

5. Mattick, op. cit., p 274 and 275.

6. Ibid.

7. Mattick, op. cit., Chapter 22, “Value and socialism”, p321.

8. Mattick, op. cit., Chapter 20, “State-capitalism and the mixed economy”, p291.

9. Mattick, op. cit., Chapter 19, “The imperialist imperative”, p.264-5.

10. Another weakness in Marx and Keynes is Mattick’s dismissive attitude to Rosa Luxemburg and her concern with the problem of the realisation of surplus value. The only direct reference to Luxemburg in the book is where he writes: “at the turn of the century, the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg saw in the difficulties of surplus-value realisation the objective reasons for crises and wars and for capitalism’s eventual demise.

All this has little to do with Marx, who saw that the actual world of capitalism was at once a production and a circulation process, to be sure, but who held nevertheless that nothing circulates unless it is first produced, and for that reason gave priority to the problems of the production process. If the production of surplus-value is adequate to assure an accelerated capital expansion, there is little reason to assume that capitalism will falter in the sphere of circulation” (chapter 9, “Capitalism in crisis”, p91-2).

Beginning from the tautology that “nothing circulates unless it is first produced” and from the marxist idea that an adequate production of surplus-value permits an accelerated capital expansion, Mattick draws an unwarranted deduction when he claims that the surplus value in question would necessarily be realised on the market. The same kind of reasoning can be found in a previous passage, where he writes:“Commodity production creates its own market in so far as it is able to convert surplus-value into new capital. The market demand is a demand for consumption goods and capital goods. Accumulation can only be the accumulation of capital goods, for what is consumed is not accumulated but simply gone. It is the growth of capital in its physical form which allows for the realization of surplus-value outside the capital-labour exchange relations. So long as there exists an adequate and continuous demand for capital goods, there is no reason why commodities entering the market should not be sold.” (chapter 8, “The realisation of surplus value”, p76-7)

Contrast this with Marx’s view that “constant capital is never produced for its own sake, but solely because more of it is needed in spheres of production whose products go into individual consumption”. Capital Vol III, chapter 18, “The turnover of merchnts capital.” p.305.

In other words, it is the demand for means of consumption which pulls the demand for means of production, and not the other way round. As we noted in a previous article in this series, Mattick himself (in Economic crises and crisis theories) is aware of this contradiction between his conception and certain formulations in Marx, like the one cited above (see https://en.internationalism.org/ir/146/great-depression, footnote 20).

But we don’t wish to enter into this debate again here. The main problem is that although Mattick of course recognises Rosa as a marxist and a genuine revolutionary, he joins that trend of thought which rejects the problem she posed about the accumulation process as nonsense and outside the basic framework of marxism. As we have shown, this is not the case with all of Rosa’s critics, such as Rosdolsky (cf https://en.internationalism.org/ir/142/luxemburg). This essentially sectarian approach has greatly hampered the debate between marxists on this problem ever since.

11. Situationist International n 12, p6.

13 https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2008/132/decadence_of_capitalism. For a more detailed approach, supported by statistics relating to the overall course of the historic crisis, its impact on productive activity, workers’ living standards and so on, see the article in this issue: ‘Is capitalism a decadent mode of production and why?”

14. Report on the international situation, Gauche Communiste de France, July 1945.

15. This does not of course mean that humanity is any safer under an imperialist system that is becoming more and more chaotic. On the contrary. Without the discipline imposed by the old bloc system, devastating local and regional wars have become more likely, and their destructive potential has been greatly increased by the proliferation of nuclear weapons. At the same time, since they could very well break out in areas away from the capitalist heartlands, they are less dependent on another element which has held back the push towards world war since the onset of the crisis in the late 60s: the difficulty of mobilising the working class in the central capitalist countries for a direct imperialist clash.

16. news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/11/111109-world-energy-outlook-2011

 

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International Review no.149 - 2nd Quarter 2012

Massacres in Syria, Iran crisis...The threat of an imperialist cataclysm in the Middle East

In Syria, every day brings new massacres. The country has joined the other theatres of imperialist war in the Middle East. After Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, now it’s Syria’s turn. Unfortunately this situation immediately poses a very disquieting question. What’s going to happen in the period ahead? The Middle East seems to be on the verge of a conflagration whose limits are difficult to foresee. Behind the war in Syria, it’s Iran which is the focus of imperialist fears and appetites, but all the main imperialist brigands are ready to defend their interests in the region. This is a part of the world that is on a war footing – a war that could have irrational and destructive consequences for the whole capitalist system.

Mass destruction and chaos in Syria: who is responsible?

For the international workers’ movement, for all the exploited of the earth, the answer to that question can only be: capital alone is responsible. This was already the case for the first and second world wars. But also with the incessant wars which, since 1945, have brought more deaths than the two world wars combined. It’s just over 20 years ago that the first George Bush, president of the USA at the time, well before his son became president, triumphantly declared that the world was entering a New World Order. The Soviet bloc had literally crumbled, the USSR was no more, and along with this we were supposed to see the disappearance of wars and massacres. Thanks to victorious capitalism, and under the benevolent protection of the USA, peace would now reign throughout the world. All these lies would soon be exposed by reality. Was it not the same president who, not long after this cynical and hypocritical speech, unleashed the first Iraq war?

In 1982 the Syrian army bloodily crushed the rebellious population of Hama. The number of victims has never been reliably counted: estimates vary between 10,000 and 40,000.[1] At the time nobody talked about intervening to protect the population; nobody demanded the resignation of Hafez el-Assad, the father of today’s Syrian president Bashir al-Assad. The contrast with the situation today is quite considerable! The reason is that in 1982, the world scene was still dominated by the rivalry between the two great imperialist blocs. Despite the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by the Ayatollahs at the beginning of 1979 and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan a year after, American domination over the region was not contested by the other great powers and it even guaranteed a certain stability.

Since them things have changed a lot: the collapse of the old bloc system and the weakening of US “leadership” have given free rein to the imperialist appetites of regional powers like Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Israel...the deepening of the crisis is more and more reducing the populations to poverty and is sharpening feelings of exasperation and revolt against the existing regimes.

Today no continent is escaping the rise in imperialist tensions, but all the dangers are most concentrated in the Middle East. And the centre of all this at the moment is Syria. It began with several months of demonstrations against unemployment and poverty, involving the exploited from all kinds of backgrounds: Druze, Sunni, Christian, Kurds, men, women and children all together in their protests for a better life. But the situation in this country has taken a sinister turn. Social protest has been recuperated and dragged onto a terrain which has nothing to do with its original motives. The working class in this country is very weak and, given the present state of workers’ struggles throughout the world, this sad outcome was more or less inevitable.

The different factions of the Syrian bourgeoisie leapt onto the back of this rebellious, distressed population. For the government and the pro-Assad armed forces, the stakes are clear. It’s a question of staying in power at any price. For the opposition, whose different sectors are quite willing to fight among themselves and who are only kept together by the need to get rid of Assad, it’s a question of taking power for themselves. During the recent meetings of these opposition forces in London and Paris, no minister or diplomat wanted to be very precise about their composition. Who does the Syrian National Council or the National Coordination Committee or the Free Syrian Army actually represent? What is the influence within them of the Kurds, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafist jihadis? This is just a mish-mash of bourgeois cliques, each one rivalling the other. One of the reasons that the Assad regime has not been overthrown is that it has been able to play on the internal rivalries within Syrian society. The Christians look askance at the Islamists and fear that they will suffer the same fate as the Copts in Egypt; some of the Kurds are trying to negotiate with the regime; and the latter holds onto the support of the Alawite religious minority, to which the presidential clique belongs.

In any case, the National Council would have no significant political or military existence if it were not supported by outside forces, each one trying to pull its chestnuts from the fire. These include the countries of the Arab League, with Saudi Arabia at the front, and Turkey, but also France, Britain, Israel and the USA. 

All these imperialist sharks are using the pretext of the inhumanity of the Syrian regime to prepare for total war in this country. Via the Russian channel The Voice of Russia, relaying the Iranian public TV channel Press TV, information has come out that Turkey is planning, with US support, to attack Syria. The Turkish state is massing troops and materiel at its Syrian frontier. This information has been taken up by all the western media. And in Syria itself, ballistic missiles made in Russia are being readied in underground bunkers in the region of Kamechi and Deir ez-Zor, near the frontier with Iraq. Because the Assad regime is also supported by foreign powers, notably China, Russia and Iran.

This ferocious battle between the most powerful imperialist powers on the planet is also being waged inside the den of thieves known as the UN, where Russia and China have twice vetoed draft resolutions on Syria. The most recent one proposed by the Arab League calls for nothing less than the ousting of Bashir al-Assad. After several days of sordid negotiations, the hypocrisy of all concerned was as clear as daylight. On March 21st the UN Security Council, with the accord of Russia and China, adopted a declaration that aimed to put a stop to the violence through the dispatch of a famous special envoy, Kofi Annan, leading a delegation which, it was clearly understood, had no power to constrain anyone. Which means that this was strictly for those who believed in it.

The question that we can pose here is very different. How is it that, for the moment, not one of the foreign imperialist powers involved in this conflict has yet intervened directly – obviously for its own national interests – as was the case for example in Libya a few months ago? Mainly because the factions of the Syrian bourgeoisie ranged against Assad officially oppose it. They don’t want a massive foreign military intervention and they have let this be known. Each one of these factions has the legitimate fear that this would make it impossible to set itself up in a new regime. But this is no guarantee that the threat of all-out imperialist war, which is knocking at Syria’s door, won’t break out in the near future. In fact, the key to this situation is to be found elsewhere.

We need to ask why this country is attracting such interest from the imperialist powers. The answer to this question is to be found some kilometres from Syria. We have to turn our eyes to Syria’s eastern frontier to discover what’s essentially at stake in the whole drama around the conflict in Syria. Its name is Iran.  

Iran at the heart of the world imperialist torment

On February 7th last year the New York Times declared: “Syria is already the beginning of the war with Iran”. A war that has not been unleashed overtly but which lurks in the shadows behind the Syrian conflict.

The Assad regime is Tehran’s main ally in the region and Syria is an essential strategic zone for Iran. The alliance with this country gives Tehran a direct opening to the strategic space of the Mediterranean and Israel, with military means directly on the borders of the Zionist state. But this potential, hidden war has its roots in the fact that the Middle East is once again a focus for all the imperialist tensions built into this rotting system.

This region of the world is a great crossroads between east and west. Europe and Asia meet in Istanbul. Russia and the northern countries look across the Mediterranean to the African continent and the major oceans. And above all, as the world economy is on the verge of toppling over, black gold has become a vital economic and military weapon. Everyone has an interest in controlling it. Without oil, no factory can run and no plane can take off. This is one of the key reasons why all the imperialisms are involved in this part of the world. However, none of these motives are the most direct and pernicious motives pushing this region towards war.  

For several years, the USA, Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been orchestrating an ideological campaign against Iran. This campaign has been accelerating violently of late. The recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) let it be understood that there is a possible military dimension to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And an Iran possessing nuclear weapons is intolerable for a number of imperialist states. The rise to power of a nuclear Iran, imposing itself across the whole region, is quite unacceptable for these imperialist sharks, all the more because of the permanent instability created by the Israel-Palestine conflict. Iran is completely encircled militarily. The American army is installed on all its frontiers. As for the Persian Gulf, it’s so stuffed full of war ships that you could cross it without getting your feet wet. The Israeli state doesn’t cease proclaiming that it will never allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons and that it will have the capacity to build one within the next year. Israel’s declaration to the world is terrifying because this is a very dangerous situation: Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a country of over 70 million people with a “respectable” army.

Catastrophic consequences

Economic

But Iran’s use of atomic weapons is not the only danger, nor the most pressing: Iran’s political and religious leaders have asserted recently that they would respond with all means at their disposal if their country were attacked. Iran has a capacity to do harm which is difficult to measure. If it was led to block all navigation through the Straits of Hormuz by sinking its own ships, this would be a disaster for the global economy.

A major part of world oil production would not be able to reach its destination. The capitalist economy, already in an open crisis of senility, would automatically be hurled into a maximum force storm. The damage to an already sick economy would be enormous.

Ecological

The ecological consequences could be irreversible. Attacking Iranian atomic sites, which are buried under thousands of tons of concrete and rock would require an air assault using tactical nuclear weapons. The military experts of all these imperialist powers have explained this. If this happened, what would become of the entire Middle East? What would be the repercussions for the populations and the ecosystem on a planetary scale? None of this is the product of the morbid imagination of a mad Doctor Strangelove, or the scenario of a new disaster movie. This plan is an integral part of the strategy studied and prepared by the Israeli state and, for the moment from a certain distance, by the US. The Israeli military HQ, in the course of its preparations, has studied the possibility, if a conventional air attack proved unsuccessful, of moving on to this level of destruction. It’s capital in its decadence that is becoming mad.

Humanitarian

Since the outbreak of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, total chaos rules in these countries. War goes on and on. There are daily murderous bombings and shootings. The populations desperately try to survive from day to day. The bourgeois press says it openly: “Afghanistan is suffering from a general lassitude. The fatigue of the Afghans is met with the fatigue of the westerners.[2] But while for the bourgeois press the world is simply tired of the war in Afghanistan, for the population itself it’s more a matter of exasperation and despair. How can you survive in a situation of permanent war and decomposition? And if war against Iran took place, the human catastrophe would be even more widespread. The concentration of the population, the means of destruction that would be used, oblige us to envisage the worst. The worst would be Iran in flames and the Middle East in total chaos. None of the mass murderers who run the world’s states are capable of saying where war in Iran would end. What would happen to the population of this whole region? The prospects are genuinely frightening.        

Divided national bourgeoisies, imperialist alliances on the verge of a major crisis

Just considering some of the possible consequences of an attack on Iran scares those sectors of the bourgeoisie that are trying to maintain a minimum of lucidity. The Kuwaiti paper Al-Jarida has recently leaked some messages which the Israeli secret services want to be made public. Their previous director Meir Dagan has said that “the perspective of an attack on Iran is the stupidest idea I have ever heard”. This opinion also seems to be shared in another branch of the Israeli security services: Shin Bet.  

It’s a well known fact that a whole section of the Israeli state does not want this war. But it’s also well-known that part of the Israeli political elite, organised around Netanyahu, does want to unleash it at a moment judged propitious for the Israeli state. In Israel, in the face of these questions of imperialist policy, a political crisis is brewing. In Iran, the religious leader Ali Khamenei is at loggerheads over this issue with the president Mohamed Ahmadinejad. But the most spectacular split is between the US and Israel. The US administration does not, at the present time, want open war with Iran. The Americans’ experience in Afghanistan and Iraq is hardly encouraging, and the Obama administration would prefer to rely on increasingly heavy sanctions. US pressure on Israel, aimed at making the latter adopt a more patient stance, is enormous. But the historic weakening of US leadership is also having its impact on its traditional ally in the Middle East. Israel is affirming loud and clear that there is no way it will allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, whatever the opinion of its closest allies. The grip of the American superpower continues to weaken and even Israel is now openly challenging its authority. For certain bourgeois commentators, we could see the first real breaks in the hitherto unquestioned US/Israel alliance. 

The major player in the region on the immediate level is Turkey, which has the most significant armed forces in the Middle East (more than 600,000 in active service). Although in the past Turkey was a reliable ally of the US and one of the few local allies of Israel, with the rise of the Erdogan regime the most “Islamist” sector of the Turkish bourgeoisie is trying to play its own card of “democratic” and “moderate” Islamism. It is trying to profit as much as it can from the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. This also explains the turnaround in its relations with Syria. There was a time when Erdogan took his holidays with Assad, but once the Syrian leader refused to bow to the demands of Ankara and negotiate with the opposition, the alliance broke down. Turkey’s efforts to export its model of “moderate” Islam are also in direct opposition to the efforts of Saudi Arabia to increase its own influence in the region on the basis of ultra-conservative Wahabism.

The possibility of a war over Syria, and then in Iran, is serious enough to persuade the two biggest allies of these countries, China and Russia, to react with increasing strength. For China, Iran is of considerable importance because it supplies it with 11% of its energy needs.[3] Since its industrial take-off, China has become a new major player in the region. Last December, it warned of the danger of a global conflict around Syria and Iran. It thus declared through the Global Times:[4]

The West suffers from an economic recession, but its efforts to overthrow non-Western governments due to politics and military interests culminate. China, as well as its mammoth neighbour Russia, should keep on high alert and adopt countermeasures if necessary.

China should not shrink before a possible showdown with the West but seek a solution favouring itself. China will adopt concrete measures to show its determination to take its own path. Such a choice is important for China's interests.”[5]

Even if a direct confrontation between the world’s big imperialist powers can’t be envisaged in the current global context, such declarations show how serious the situation is.

Capitalism is heading straight for the abyss

The Middle East is a powder keg and there are some who would be willing to put a match to it. Certain imperialist powers are coldly preparing to use types of nuclear weapons in a coming war with Iran. 

The military and strategic means are already there. In dying capitalism the worst scenario is always the most probable and we cannot rule it out. In any case, the trajectory of this senile and obsolete system is increasingly irrational. Imperialist war amounts to a real self-destruction of capitalism. That capitalism, which has already been condemned by history, should disappear is not a problem for the proletariat and for humanity. Unfortunately this self-destruction of the system goes together with the threat of the total destruction of humanity. But recognising that capitalism is caught up in a process leading to the ruin of civilisation should not be a reason for despair or passivity. In the last issue of this Review, for the first part of this year, we wrote “The economic crisis is not a never-ending story. It announces the end of a system and the struggle for another world”. This assertion was based on the real evolution of the international class struggle. This world-wide struggle for another world is now beginning. Certainly with all kinds of difficulties, still very slowly, but it is now definitely present. And this new force in movement, illustrated most clearly by the struggle if the Indignados in Spain, enables us to see that there is a real possibility of ridding the planet from the barbarism of capital.

Tino 11/4/12

 

[2].  le Monde, 21.3.12.

[4]. The international current affairs journal belonging to the official People’s Daily in China

 

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Massive mobilisations in Spain, Mexico, Italy, India: The union barrier against self-organisation and unification of struggles

While governments of every country are bent on imposing more and more violent austerity plans, the mobilisations of 2011 – the movement of the Indignant in Spain, Greece, etc., and the occupations in the United States and other countries – continued during the first quarter of 2012. However, the struggles came up against a powerful union mobilisation that managed to seriously hold back the process of self-organisation and unification, which began in 2011.

How do we get out from under the unions’ thumb? How do we once again find and revive the tendencies that appeared in 2011? We are going to try to give some elements of a response to these questions.

Massive demonstrations

We will begin by briefly recalling the struggles (see our territorial press for a more detailed chronology).

In Spain, brutal social blows (in education, health and basic services) and the adoption of a “Labour Reform”, which makes sacking easier and allows firms to immediately lower wages, have provoked big demonstrations, particularly in Valencia but also in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao.

In February, there was an attempt to create a climate of police terror in the street, by using the pupils of secondary education as punch-bags, and workers of all generations came onto the streets to struggle shoulder to shoulder with the schoolchildren. The wave of protests spread throughout the country, generating demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona, Saragossa, Seville, which were often spontaneous or decided upon during the course of improvised assemblies.[1]

In Greece, a new general strike in February led to massive demonstrations throughout the country. Participating in them were employees of the public and private sectors, young and old, as well as the unemployed. Even some cops joined in. Workers from the hospital at Kilki occupied their workplace, calling for solidarity and for the participation of the whole of the population, and launching an appeal for international solidarity.[2]

In Mexico, the government concentrated most of its attacks against workers of the teaching sector, waiting to generalise them to other sectors, in the context of the general degradation of living conditions in a country where it was said they were “armour-plated against the crisis”. Despite the extremely strong union grip, the teachers demonstrated in large numbers in the centre of Mexico.[3]

In Italy, in January several strikes broke out against the avalanche of job losses and the measures adopted by the new government: among rail workers, in firms like Jabil ex-Nokia, Esselunga di Pioltello in Milan; FIAT at Termini Imerese, Ceramica Ricchetti in Mordado/Bologna; the refineries at Tapani; among the precarious workers of the Gasliani de Genes hospital, etc; and, also among sectors close to the proletariat such as lorry drivers, taxi drivers, shepherds, fishermen, peasants... That said, these movements have been very dispersed. An attempt at co-ordination in the Milanese region failed, as it remained imprisoned within a trade unionist vision.[4]

In India, a country which, together with China is considered to be “the future of capitalism”, a general strike convoked by the unions broke out on February 28. More than a hundred unions representing 100 million workers throughout the country answered the summons (although far from all workers were called out by their union). This mobilisation was widely hailed as one of the most massive strikes in the world up to now. However, it was above all a day of demobilisation, a way of letting off steam in response to a growing wave of struggles since 2010, at the spearhead of which were the automobile workers (Honda, Maruti-Suzuki, Hyundai Motors). Thus, recently, in the car production factories, workers acted on their own initiative and didn’t wait for union orders to mobilise, showing strong tendencies for solidarity and a will to extend to other factories. They also expressed tendencies to self-organisation and the setting up of general assemblies, as in the strikes at Maruti-Suzuki in Manesar, a new town whose development is linked to the industrial boom in the region around Delhi. During the course of this struggle, the workers occupied the factory against the advice of “their” union. Workers’ anger rumbled on and that’s why the unions were agreed on a common appeal for the strike... in order to put up a united face against the working class![5]

2011 and 2012: one and the same struggle

Young people, the unemployed and precarious workers have been the motor force of the actions of the Indignants and Occupy in 2011, even if these mobilised workers of all ages. The struggle tended to organise itself around general assemblies, which went together with a critique of the unions. It didn’t put forward any concrete demands, focussing instead on the expression of indignation and looking for explanations for the situation.

In 2012, the first struggles in response to the attacks of the state came in a different form: here the spearhead is made up of  “established” workers of 40-50 years old from the public sector, strongly supported by the “users” (heads of families, parents of the sick, etc.), who were joined by the unemployed and youth. The struggles polarised around concrete demands and the tutelage of the trade unions is very much present.

It seems then as if it’s a matter of “different” if not “opposed” struggles as the various media try to make us think. The first are supposedly “radical”, “political”, animated by some “idealists having nothing to lose”; the second on the contrary, are made up of fathers of families impregnated with a union consciousness who don’t want to lose their “acquired privileges”.

Such a characterisation of these “two types of struggle”, which obscures the profoundly common social tendencies, has the political aim of dividing and opposing both reactions from the proletariat, which are products of the maturation of consciousness and express the beginnings of a response to the crisis, and which will have to unite in the perspective of massive struggles. It’s much more a question of two pieces of a puzzle that have to fit together.

This however will not be easy. A struggle where the workers play a more and more active and conscious part, in particular in the most advanced sectors of the proletariat, is a real necessity and its first condition is a clear assessment of all the weaknesses affecting the workers’ movement.

The mystifications

One of them is nationalism which has particularly affected Greece. Here, the anger provoked by the unbearable austerity has been channelled “against the German people”, whose so-called “wealth”[6] is supposed to be at the origins of the misfortunes of the “Greek people”. This nationalism is used to propose “solutions” to the crisis based upon “getting back economic national sovereignty”, an autarkic vision shared by both the Stalinists and neo-fascists.[7]

The so-called rivalry between right and left is another of the mystifications with which the state tries to weaken the working class. We can particularly see it at work in Italy and Spain. In Italy, the eviction of Berlusconi, a particularly repugnant individual, has allowed the left to create an artificial euphoria – “We are finally free!” – which has been a strong factor in the dispersion of the workers’ responses that we saw in the beginning of the austerity plans imposed by the “technocratic” government led by Monti.[8] In Spain, the authoritarianism and the brutality of the repression which traditionally characterises the right has allowed the unions and the parties of the left to attribute the responsibility for the attacks to the “wickedness” and venality of the right and divert discontent towards the “defence of the social and democratic state”. In this sense we can see a convergence of mystifications, both from the traditional forces for corralling the working class, the unions and the parties of the left, and those more recently deployed by the bourgeoisie in order to face up to the movement of the Indignant, in particular DRY (“Democracia Real Ya!” – “Real Democracy Now!”). As we’ve said: “the strategy of DRY, in the service of the democratic state of the bourgeoisie, consists in fact of putting forward a citizens’ movement of democratic reform to try to avoid the appearance of a social movement of struggle against the democratic state, against capitalism.[9]

The union barrier

In 2011, the bourgeoisie in Spain was surprised by the movement of the Indignant, which, paradoxically, managed to quite freely develop the classical methods of the workers’ struggle: massive assemblies, open demonstrations, wide-ranging debates.[10] This is connected to the fact that it was mobilised not on the terrain of the firm but in the streets and that the young and precarious workers, who constituted its motor force, fundamentally distrusted all “recognised” institutions such as the unions.

Today, the implementation of austerity plans is on the agenda for all states, particularly in Europe, provoking strong discontent and a growing militancy. These states don’t want to be taken by surprise and, to this end, they accompany the attacks with a political operation that obstructs the emergence of a united, self-organised and massive struggle of the workers that can take forward the tendencies which appeared in 2011.

The unions are the spearhead of this operation. Their role is to occupy the social ground by proposing demonstrations which create a labyrinth where the efforts, combativity and the growing indignation of the masses of workers cannot be expressed, or flounders on a field mined with divisions.

We clearly see this in one of the preferred tools of the unions: the general strike. In the hands of the unions, such endless mobilisations, which often bring together a good number of workers, cut the class off from any possibility of taking charge of a struggle and turning it into a massive riposte to the attacks of the bourgeoisie. No less than sixteen general strikes have been called in Greece in the last three years! There have already been three in Portugal; another is being prepared in Italy; a strike – limited to the education sector! - was announced in Britain; we’ve already talked about the strike in India at the end of February; and, in Spain, following the general strike of September 2010, another was announced for March 29th.

The multitude of general strikes convoked by the unions is of course an indication of the pressure exercised by the workers, of their discontent and combativity. But, for the most part, the official general strike is not a step forward. Rather it’s a way of letting off steam faced with social discontent.[11]

The Communist Manifesto argued that “The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers”; the principal acquisition of a strike is found in the unity and consciousness, the capacity for initiative and organisation, the expressions of solidarity and the active links that are allowed to be established.

It is these acquisitions that the top-down general strikes and the union methods of struggle weaken and distort.

The union leaders announce the general strike in a loud press and TV song and dance, launching great proclamations invoking “unity” but, at places of work, the “preparation” for the general strike in fact constitutes an immense manoeuvre of division, confrontation and atomisation.

Participation in the general strike is presented as the personal decision of each worker. In many firms, there are even management or administration staff who ask workers about their possible participation, with all that means in terms of blackmail and intimidation. This is what the “constitutional” right of the “citizen” to strike comes down to!

This manoeuvre faithfully reproduces the lying schema of the dominant ideology, according to which each individual is autonomous and independent, deciding “in all conscience” what to do. The strike is another of the thousand agonising dilemmas that life imposes on us in this society and to which we must respond alone in the greatest distress: must I accept this work? Must I profit from this occasion? Must I buy this object? Who should I vote for? Should I go on strike? From these dilemmas we come out with the feeling of being still more alienated: it is the world of competition, of the struggle of each against all, of everyone for themselves, that’s to say the quintessence of this society.

The days preceding the general strike see a proliferation of scenes of conflict and tensions between workers. Everyone confronts agonising questions: should I strike knowing we will get nothing? Am I letting down my comrades who are on strike? Can I afford the luxury of losing a day’s pay? Will I lose my job? The workers are caught between a rock and a hard place: on one side the unions, who try to make those that don’t take part feel guilty, on the other the bosses, who make all sorts of threats. It’s a real nightmare of confrontations, of divisions and tensions between workers, exacerbated by the question of whether to maintain a “minimum service”, which is a new source of conflicts.[12]

The capitalist world functions as an addition of millions of “free individual decisions”. In reality, none of these decisions are free but are subjected to a complex network of alienated relationships; from the infrastructure of the relations of production – the market and wage labour – up to the immense structure of juridical, military, ideological, religious, political and policing relations.

Marx said that the real intellectual richness of the individual depends entirely on the richness of real relationships”[13] these latter being the pillar of proletarian struggle and of the social force which alone will be able to destroy capitalism, whereas union summonses dissolve the social relations and enclose the proletarians in isolation, the corporatist prison, suppressing the conditions which would allow them to consciously decide: the collective body of the workers in struggle.

It’s the capacity of the workers to collectively discuss the pros and cons of an action that gives them their strength, because it is in this framework that they can examine the arguments, the initiatives, the clarifications, taking into account doubts, disagreements, feelings, the reservations of everyone, in a framework where they can take common decisions. It is this way of carrying out a struggle where the greatest number of workers can involve themselves with their responsibilities and convictions.

It is precisely all this which is thrown into the bin by the union call to “forget the talking shop” and “get rid of sentimentalism”, in the so-called “strength we get from blocking production or services where we work”. The working class draws its strength from the central place that it occupies in production, from the fact that it produces almost all the riches that the bourgeoisie appropriates. Thus, through the strike, the workers are potentially capable of stopping the whole of production and paralysing the economy. But in reality, the tactic of the “immediate blockade” is often used by the unions as a means to divert the workers away from their first priority, which is to develop the struggle through taking charge of it and its extension.[14] Moreover, in the period of the decadence of capitalism, and especially in periods of crisis such as we’re living through today, it’s the capitalist system itself, with its chaotic and contradictory functioning, which is responsible for the paralysis of production and its social services. Blockages in production – which can often last well over 24 hours! – are put to the profit of capitalism in order to eliminate stocks. Regarding services such as teaching, health or public transport, blockades can be used by the state in order to pit the “users”, most of them workers, against their comrades on strike!

The fight for a single and massive struggle

During the movements of 2011, the exploited masses were able to act on their own initiative and take up their most profound aspirations, expressing themselves according to the classical methods of the working class, inherited from the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, May 68 etc. The present imposition of union tutelage makes this “free expression” more difficult, but the latter will continue to find a way. Against the union grip, workers’ initiatives are beginning to appear: in Spain for example we’ve seen several expressions of them. At the demonstration of March 29th in Barcelona, Castillon, Alicante, Valencia and Madrid, strikers carried their own banners, formed pickets to explain their mobilisation, claimed the right to speak at union meetings, held alternative assemblies... It is significant that these initiatives happened in the same way as those which developed around events in France in 2010 against the retirement reform.[15]

We are faced with the need to join a combat on booby-trapped ground in order to open up the way to authentic proletarian struggle. The rule of the unions seems insurmountable but conditions are ripening for the wearing out of their authority and thus for strengthening the autonomous capacities of the proletariat.

The crisis, which has already lasted five years and threatens to break out in new convulsions, little by little dispels illusions about “light at the end of the tunnel”, and reveals in its turn a profound preoccupation about the future. The growing bankruptcy of the social system becomes more and more evident, with everything that this implies about living conditions, human relations, thought, culture... Whereas during periods when the crisis wasn’t so sharp, the workers seemed to be able to follow a road mapped out in advance, despite the often terrible sufferings that go along with exploitation, this road is progressively disappearing. And this dynamic is today worldwide.

The tendency, which was already expressed in 2011 with the movement of the Indignant in Spain and Occupy[16] to take to the streets and squares in large numbers, is another powerful lever of the movement. In the present life of capitalism, the street is a place of alienation: traffic jams, solitary crowds buying, selling, managing, running businesses... When the masses take over the streets for “another use” – assemblies, massive discussions, demonstrations – they can become a space of freedom. This allows the workers to begin to glimpse the social force it is capable of becoming if it learns to act in a collective and autonomous fashion. It sows the first seeds of what could be the “direct government of the masses” through which it educates itself, frees itself from all the rags that this system sticks to its body, and finds the strength to destroy capitalism and construct another society.

Another force that pushes the movement towards the future is the convergence of generations of workers in the struggle. This phenomenon has been seen in miniature in struggles such as those against the CPE in France (2006)[17] or in the revolts of youth in Greece (2008).[18] The convergence all working class generations in common action is an indispensable condition for undertaking a really revolutionary struggle. At the time of the Russian revolution in 1917, proletarians of all ages kept close to each other, from children raised on the shoulders of their brothers or fathers, up to white-haired oldsters.

There is a whole range of factors that will help the working class to develop its powers, but this will not be immediate or easy. Hard battles, animated by the persevering intervention of revolutionary organisations, punctuated by often bitter defeats and moments of difficulty, confusion and temporary paralysis, will still be necessary in order to allow the full delivery of this power. The weapon of criticism, a firm criticism of errors and weaknesses, will be fundamental in order to go forward.

On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here![19]

C.Mir 27/3/12

 

 

[1]. See in  Spanish: “Por un movimiento unitario contra recortes y reforma laboral” (https://es.internationalism.org/node/3323);“Ante la escalada represiva en Valencia” (https://es.internationalism.org/node/3324).

[6]. Deliberately forgetting the 7 million ‘mini-jobs’ (paid at 400 Euro a month) that the working class in Germany endures.

[7]. A minority of workers in Greece are aware of this danger, hence the appeal for international solidarity by the hospital workers of Kilkis and the students and teachers of the occupied law school in Athens

[8]. Which didn’t even owe its birth to the election charade!

[9]. See: “Le mouvement citoyen ‘Democracia Real Ya!: une dictature sur les assemblées massives” ;https://fr.internationalism.org/content/4693/mouvement-citoyen-democracia-real-ya-dictature-assemblees-massives.

[10]. The bourgeoisie didn’t really give the movement a free hand - it used new but ‘inexperienced’ forces like DRY against it.

[11]. If we are to believe the “disquiet” and “anger” of the big business leaders and politicians, the general strike really does seem to worry them, as though it was the equivalent of some kind of revolution. But history has shown that all this is a comedy show, regardless of what this or that individual member of the ruling class might think

[12]. Let’s recall what we said in the article “Report on the class struggle” in International Review n° 117 (2004): “In 1921, during the March Action in Germany, the tragic scenes of the unemployed trying to prevent workers from entering the factories was an expression of desperation in the face of the retreat of the revolutionary wave. The recent calls of French leftists to block the public transport taking employees to work, or to prevent pupils from going to their exams [during the movement of spring 2003 in France]; the spectacle of west German unionists wanting to prevent east German steel workers – who no longer wanted a long strike for a 35 hour week – going back to work [at the end of the steel workers’ strike in 2003], are dangerous attacks against the very idea of the working class and its solidarity. They are all the more dangerous because they feed on the impatience, immediatism and mindless activism which decomposition breeds. We are warned: if the coming struggles are a potential crucible of consciousness, the bourgeoisie is out to convert them into graveyards of proletarian reflection.https://en.internationalism.org/ir/117_class_struggle.html

[13]. The German Ideology, “Feuerbach”.

[14]. Read our article “What can we learn from the blockade of the oil refineries in France?” https://en.internationalism.org/wr/343/refineries.

[15]. See International Review n° 144: “France, Britain, Tunisia: The future lies in the international development of the class struggle” (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/144/editorial). These struggles in 2010 politically and practically prepared the ground for the evolution of class consciousness in 2011

[16]. For a balance sheet of these movements, see “2011: from indignation to hope” (https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201203/4766/statement-social-movements-2011).

[17]. See  International Review n° 125, “Theses on the Spring 2006 student movement in France” (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students).

[18]. See International Review n°136 ‘The youth revolts in Greece confirm the development of the class struggle” (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2009/136/intro).

[19]. Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

 

Recent and ongoing: 

Rubric: 

International Class Struggle

Critique of the book 'Dynamics, contradictions and crises of capitalism', Part 2

Is capitalism a decadent mode of production and why? (ii)

Overproduction, a fundamental contradiction of capitalism, is linked to the existence of wage labour. This will be analysed in this second part of our article in order to reply to important questions on which we have serious disagreements with Marcel Roelandts’ book Dynamics, contradictions and crises of capitalism:[1] Why does increasing workers’ wages not resolve the problem of overproduction? Where does the demand exterior to the workers come from and what are its role and limitations? Is there a solution to the overproduction at the heart of capitalism? How to characterise those currents that propose wage increases as the solution to capitalism’s crises? Is capitalism doomed to a catastrophic collapse?

Is there a solution to the crisis at the heart of capitalism?

The nature of overproduction

Overproduction is a characteristic of capitalist crises, unlike the crises of the modes of production that preceded it, which were characterised by scarcity.

This is a product, in the first place, of the way that this mode of production exploits the workforce, wage labour, which means that the workers must always produce more than would suffice for their own needs. It is this characteristic that is basically explained in the following passage by Marx:

The mere relationship of wage-labourer and capitalist implies […] that the majority of the producers, the workers,must always be over-producers, produce over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs.[2]

This then presupposes the existence of demand that is exterior to that of the workers as the latter by definition can never be enough to absorb all of capitalist production.

It is forgotten that, as Malthus says, ‘the very existence of a profit upon any commodity pre-supposes a demand exterior to that of the labourer who has produced it’ and hence ‘the demand of the labourer himself can never be an adequate demand’.”[3]

It is precisely when the demand external to that of the workers is insufficient that overproduction appears: “If the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs.”[4]

The contradiction is all the more violent as, on the one hand, the workers’ wage is reduced to the minimum socially necessary to reproduce the workforce and, on the other hand, the productive forces of capitalism tend to be developed to the maximum:

The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.”[5]

Why do wage increases for the workers fail to resolve the problem of overproduction?

There are various procedures that enable the bourgeoisie to mask overproduction:

  1. By destroying excess production in order to prevent its availability on the market from lowering the selling price. This is what happened in the 1970s and 1980s in particular with agricultural production in the countries of the European Economic Community. This procedure has the disadvantage for the bourgeoisie of revealing the contradictions of the system and of arousing indignation as the produce destroyed in this way is in desperately short supply for a large part of the population.
  2. By reducing the use of productive capacity or even destroying a part of it. An example of this way of drastically reducing production was the Davignon plan set in motion in 1977 by the European Commission to carry out the industrial reconstruction of the metal industry (with tens of thousands of redundancies) in the face of the overproduction of steel internationally. It led to the destruction of a large number of blast furnace plants in several European countries and the redundancy of tens of thousands of steel workers, which produced important struggles, in particular those in France in 1978 and 1979.
  3. By increasing demand artificially, that is, generating demand that is not based on the need for investment to become more profitable but is motivated by the need to keep the productive apparatus working. This is typically the case with Keynesian measures, in which the state pays out and which therefore have repercussions on the competitive edge of the national economy which uses such measures. This is why it can only be used if conditions allow it to compensate for the loss of competivity by means of a significant increase in productivity. This kind of measure may involve either wage increases or else public works programmes which yield no immediate profit.

These three procedures, although different in form, have the same significance for capitalist development and can basically be reduced to the first and most obvious example; the deliberate destruction of production. It may seem shocking, from a workers’ point of view, to hear that wage increases that are not justified by the need to reproduce the workforce are a “waste”. It is obviously a waste from the viewpoint of capitalist logic (which has nothing to do with the well-being of the worker), according to which paying the worker more in no way increases his productivity.

MR, who thinks that the mechanism at work during the post-war boom has been understood by very few marxists,[6] has not himself understood, or does not want to understand, that according to Marx, “the aim of capital is not to minister to certain wants, but to produce profit[7] (quoted at the end of the article), whether the consumption is that of the working class or of the bourgeoisie.

We may call this wastage “regulation”, as does MR, without acknowledging that we are talking about wastage; this perhaps allows him to make his thesis more acceptable. But this by no means changes the fact that, to a large extent, the prosperity of the post-war boom is the wastage of a part of the gains of productivity used to produce for production’s sake.

Where does demand exterior to the workers come from?

For MR, and contrary to the position of Rosa Luxemburg whose theory of accumulation he criticises, the demand that does not come from the workers can quite well come from capitalism itself, and not necessarily from societies based on productive relations not yet capitalist and which have co-existed with capitalism for a long time.

According to Marx this demand does not come from the workers or from the capitalists themselves but from the markets that have not yet entered the capitalist mode of production.

In his book MR refers to Malthus’ opinion on this point: “It should be noted that this ‘demand exterior to that of the worker who has produced it’ concerns, according to Malthus, demand that is entirely within capitalism because it concerns social strata whose purchasing power comes from surplus value and not from extra-capitalist demand according to the Luxemburgist theory of accumulation”.[8] Marx, who supports Malthus on this point, states categorically that this demand cannot come from the worker: “The demand created by the productive labourer himself can never be an adequate demand, because it does not go to the full extent of what he produces. If it did, there would be no profit, consequently no motive to employ him.[9] He also states explicitly that for Malthus this demand comes from “social strata whose purchasing power comes from surplus value” but at the same time he rejects Malthus’ motivation on the defence of the interests of the “Church and State hierarchy”: “Malthus is interested not in concealing the contradictions of bourgeois production but on the contrary, in emphasising them, on the one hand, in order to prove that the poverty of the working classes is necessary (as it is, indeed, for this mode of production) and, on the other hand, to demonstrate to the capitalists the necessity for a well-fed Church and State hierarchy in order to create an adequate demand for the commodities they produce. […] Thus he emphasises the possibility of general overproduction in opposition to the view of the Ricardians.[10] So just because Malthus thinks that adequate demand may come from “social strata whose purchasing power comes from surplus value” does not mean that Marx does so too. On the contrary, the latter is very explicit on the point that adequate demand cannot come either from the workers or the capitalists: “The demand of the workers does not suffice, since profit arises precisely from the fact that the demand of the workers is smaller than the value of their product, and that it [profit] is all the greater the smaller, relatively, is this demand. The demand of the capitalists among themselves is equally insufficient.[11]

On this point, we should point out that MR’s intentions are not entirely honourable when, in order to give his readers the means to broaden their reflection, he reports Marx’s opinion on the need for demand other than that coming from the workers and capitalists. Otherwise how can we explain why he did not cite the following passage in which Marx explains explicitly the need for “orders from abroad”, from “foreign markets” to sell the goods produced:

How could there otherwise be a shortage of demand for the very commodities which the mass of people lack, and how would it be possible for this demand to be sought abroad, in foreign markets, to pay the labourers at home the average amount of necessities of life? This is possible only because in this specific capitalist interrelation the surplus-product assumes a form in which its owner cannot offer it for consumption, unless it first reconverts itself into capital for him. If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities among themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it.”[12]

This quotation does not give us details enabling us to characterise these “foreign markets” or the “orders” from abroad but it states explicitly that the demand referred to cannot come from the capitalists themselves because the aim of production is the valorisation of capital, not consumption, and nothing prevents us from reflecting on this fact. Nor can the demand in question come from some other economic agent within capitalism which lives off the surplus value extracted and redistributed by the bourgeoisie. Who is left then within capitalist society? No-one, and this is why it is necessary to have recourse to “foreign markets”, that is, those not yet integrated into the relations of capitalist production.

This is exactly what the Communist Manifesto tells us when it describes the conquest of the planet by the bourgeoisie, impelled by the need to find ever larger outlets:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. (…) The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”[13]

Marx gives us a more detailed description of the way exchange takes place with non-capitalist mercantile societies of various kinds to make it possible for capital to benefit both from an outlet and also from a supply source that is necessary for its development: “Within its process of circulation, in which industrial capital functions either as money or as commodities, the circuit of industrial capital, whether as money-capital or as commodity-capital, crosses the commodity circulation of the most diverse modes of social production, so far as they produce commodities. No matter whether commodities are the output of production based on slavery, of peasants (Chinese, Indian ryots), of communes (Dutch East Indies), of state enterprise (such as existed in former epochs of Russian history on the basis of serfdom) or of half-savage hunting tribes, etc – as commodities and money they come face to face with the money and commodities in which the industrial capital presents itself and enter as much into its circuit as into that of the surplus-value borne in the commodity-capital, provided the surplus-value is spent as revenue; hence they enter in both branches of circulation of commodity-capital. The character of the process of production from which they originate is immaterial. They function as commodities in the market, and as commodities they enter into the circuit of industrial capital as well as into the circulation of the surplus-value incorporated in it. It is therefore the universal character of the origin of the commodities, the existence of the market as world-market, which distinguishes the process of circulation of industrial capital.[14]

Did the primitive phase of accumulation modify capital’s relationship with its external sphere?

In addition, MR also reproduces the second part of the above quotation from the Communist Manifesto, taking care however to emphasis that “all the capacity and limitations of capitalism drawn out by Marx in Capital were arrived at by simply extracting its relationship with its external non-capitalist sphere. To be exact, Marx analyses the latter solely within the framework of primitive accumulation because he chooses to deal with the other aspects of ‘the extension of the external field of production’ separately in two volumes, one of which is specifically devoted to international trade and the other to the world market”.[15]

He goes on to affirm that, for him, “foreign markets” ceased to play an important role for the development of capitalism once the primitive phase of accumulation had been completed: “However once its basis had been cemented by three centuries of primitive accumulation, capitalism operated essentially on its own foundations. As for the importance and dynamism of capitalist production, its external environment became fairly marginal to its development.[16]

Marx’s reasoning shows, as we have seen, the need for an external market. The description he gives of this external zone in the Communist Manifesto shows that it consists of commodity-producing societies that have not yet entered into capitalist relations of production. Marx obviously does not explain in detail why this sphere must be external to capitalist relations of production; however the necessity for it flows from the characteristics of capitalist production. If Marx or Engels had thought (as MR does) that there had been important changes since the first publication of the Manifesto regarding capital’s relationship to its external sphere and that the “foreign markets” had ceased to have the role that they had during primitive accumulation, we can suppose that they would have felt the need to mention it in the prefaces to the subsequent editions of the Manifesto,[17] as both of them witnessed, in different periods, the triumphal march of capitalism after the phase of primitive accumulation. Not only did they not do so but, what is more, book III was begun in 1864 and “finished” in 1875. One would think that at the time, Marx would have acquired sufficient hindsight on the question of the phase of primitive accumulation (from the end of the Middle Ages to the middle of the 19th century) and yet in this work he continues the idea contained in the Communist Manifesto by referring to “orders from abroad”, “foreign markets”.

MR persists in his thesis, claiming that it corresponds to Marx’s vision: “This is why we think, with Marx, that ‘the tendency to overproduction’ does not result from insufficient extra-capitalist markets, but rather from “the immediate relations of capital” within pure capitalism: ‘It goes without saying that we do not intend to analyse in detail here the nature of overproduction; we will just remark the tendency towards overproduction which is present in the immediate relations of capital. So here we can leave aside all that regards other possessing or consuming classes, etc, who do not produce but rather live off their revenue, that is, those who engage in exchange with capital and as such constitute an exchange point for it. We will mention them only where they are really important, that is, at the origins of capital’ (Grundrisse, chapter on capital).”[18]

What the quotation from Marx says is that, in examining overproduction, we can leave aside the role played by the possessing classes in their exchange with capitalism because, from this point of view they have no more than a marginal role. The possessing classes referred to here are those that remained  from the old feudal order. On the other hand, what the quotation does not say is exactly what MR wants to make it say; that the “foreign markets”, “orders” that arrive from “abroad” have no more than a marginal role in relation to overproduction. It is precisely this that is at the heart of the polemic.

The accumulation theory of Rosa Luxemburg put to the test

It was Rosa Luxemburg who demonstrated that capitalist enrichment as a whole depended on goods produced within it and exchanged with pre-capitalist economies, that is, those that practice commodity exchange but which have not yet adopted the capitalist mode of production. Rosa Luxemburg simply developed Marx’s analysis and, when she felt it necessary, she also made a critique, in the Accumulation of Capital, regarding accumulation schemas, in which there were certain errors in her opinion because they do not include the intervention of extra-capitalist markets, although these are indispensable for the realisation of enlarged reproduction. She attributed this error to the fact that Capital is an unfinished work and Marx was saving the study of capital in relation to its environment for a future work.[19]

MR criticises the accumulation theory of Rosa Luxemburg. In his view Marx deliberately disregards the sphere of extra-capitalist relations when describing accumulation schemas and he also thinks that he was theoretically correct to do so: “Understanding the place that Marx assigns to this sphere in the historic development of capitalism enables us to understand why he eliminates it from his analysis in Capital: not just as a methodological hypothesis as Luxemburg thinks, but because it represents an obstacle that capitalism had to get rid of. By ignoring this analysis, Luxemburg fails to understand the deeper reasons leading Marx to disregard this sphere in Capital.”[20] On what basis does MR make such an affirmation? By using the argument which we have already rejected, that for him and for Marx, the “markets abroad” no longer played anything but a marginal role in capitalist development after its phase of primitive accumulation.

MR puts forward another three arguments which, according to him, support his critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s accumulation theory.

1)For Rosa Luxemburg, the strength of capital depends on the importance of the pre-capitalist sphere and its exhaustion is its death knell. The view held by Marx is the opposite: ‘As long as capital is weak, it still itself relies on the crutches of past modes of production, or of those which will pass with its rise. As soon as it feels strong, it throws away the crutches, and moves in accordance with its own laws.’ This sphere does not therefore constitute an area in which capitalism could nourish itself in order to expand, but a crutch that weakened it and which it had to get rid of in order to gain strength and develop according to its own laws.”[21] This conclusion is at the least hasty and forced.[22] The Manifesto contains an idea very close to that contained in the above quotation from Marx taken from Capital, but it is expressed in a way that, contrary to what MR thinks, makes it possible to assert that the pre-capitalist milieu acted as a terrain that nourished capitalism:

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.”[23]

2) The best estimates of sales towards the third world show that capitalism’s enlarged reproduction did not depend on extra-capitalist markets outside the developed countries: ‘In spite of a wide-spread view to the contrary, there has never been, in the history of the developed western world, a period in which the outlets offered by the colonies, or even of the whole of the third world, played a big role in the development of its industries. The third world does not even represent a very important outlet…, the third world absorbs an estimated 1.3%  to 1.7% of the total volume of production from the developed countries, of which only 0.6% to 0.9% from the colonies.’ (Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l’histoire economique, p 104-105). This percentage, which is already very small, is in fact an over-estimate as only a part of the sales to the third world are destined for the extra-capitalist sphere.[24]

We will deal with this objection more generally by taking into consideration the following: “It is those countries which have a vast colonial empire which have the lowest growth rates, although those that sell on the capitalist market have much higher rates! This is true throughout the history of capitalism , and particularly when the colonies played, or should have played, their most important role! So in the 19th century, when the colonial markets intervened most, all the un-colonised capitalist countries experienced much more rapid growth than did the colonial powers (71% faster on average – an arithmetic mean of the growth rates not weighted according to the respective populations of the countries). It is enough to take the growth rates of the GDP per inhabitant during the 25 years of imperialism (1880-1913) that Rosa Luxemburg describes as the most prosperous and dynamic period of capitalism:

  1. Colonial powers: Great Britain (1.06%), France (1.52%), Holland (0.87%), Spain (0.68%), Portugal (0.84%);
  2. Countries not or little colonised: USA (1.56%), Germany (1.85%), Sweden (1.58%), Switzerland (1.69%), Denmark (1.79%) (Annual average growth rate; source: www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison).”[25]

We can answer this in a few words. It is wrong to identify extra-capitalist markets and colonies because the extra-capitalist markets also include the internal markets that the colonies have not yet subjected to the relations of capitalist production. During the period 1880-1913, all the countries referred to above benefited at least from access to their own internal extra-capitalist market and also to that of the other industrialised countries. Moreover, because of the international division of labour, commerce with the extra-capitalist sphere was also of benefit indirectly to countries who did not actually possess colonies.

As for the United States, they are a typical example of the role played by extra-capitalist markets in economic and industrial development. Following the destruction of the slave economy of the southern states by the civil war (1861-1865), capitalism spread over the next 30 years towards the American west in a constant process that we can summarise thus: the massacre and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population; the setting up of an extra-capitalist economy by means of the sale and concession of the new territory annexed by the government to the colonisers and small scale cattle ranchers; destruction of this extra-capitalist economy through debt, fraud and violence and the extension of the capitalist economy. In 1898, a document of the American State Department explained: “It is more or less certain that each year we will be faced with an increasing overproduction of goods from our factories and workshops that will have to be placed on foreign markets if we want American workers to work all year around. Increasing foreign consumption of the foods produced in our factories and workshops has become a crucial question for the authorities of this country as it is for commerce in general.[26] It then experienced a rapid imperialist expansion: Cuba (1898), Hawaii (also 1898), Philippines (1899), the zone around the Panama canal (1903). In 1900, Albert Beveridge (one of the main defenders of American imperialist policy) stated in the senate: “The Philippines will always be ours…. And behind the Philippines there are the unlimited markets of China…. The Pacific is our ocean… Where will we find consumers for our surplus? Geography gives us the answer. China is our natural client.” We do not need “the best statistics” to prove that the trump card that made it possible for the United States to become the main world power before the end of the 19th century was the fact that it had privileged access to huge extra-capitalist markets.

3) There is another argument in the book that needs a short comment: “Reality therefore is in conformity with Marx’s vision and is the opposite of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory. This can be easily explained by various reasons that we cannot go into here. We will mention briefly that as a general rule, any sale of goods on an extra-capitalist market exits the circle of accumulation and so tends to act as a brake on the latter. The sale of goods outside capitalism may well allow individual capitalists to realise their goods but it brakes the global accumulation of capitalism because such sales represent a loss of the material means of the accumulation circle within pure capitalism.”[27]

Far from being a hindrance to accumulation, sales to extra-capitalist sectors actually benefit it. Not only do goods sold to the extra-capitalist sphere not hinder accumulation owing to the dynamism of this mode of production which, by its very nature, tends constantly to produce in excess, but in addition it makes it possible for the sphere of capitalist productive relations to receive payment (the product of the sale) which, in one way or another, increase the capital accumulated.

An examination of MR’s “arguments” for affirming that the existence of a substantial extra-capitalist sector did not constitute the condition for a significant development of capitalism, shows that they are not consistent. But obviously we are willing to consider any critique of the method that we have used in our own critique.

The limits of the market exterior to capitalism

The abundance of extra-capitalist markets in the colonies made it possible, up until the first world war, to sell off the excess production of the main industrial countries. But within these countries in this period there were still extra-capitalist markets, more or less important (Great Britain was the first industrial power to exhaust them), that served as an outlet for capitalist production. During this phase in the life of capitalism the crises were less violent. “However different they were in many ways, all of these crises had one thing in common: they represented a relatively brief interruption in the gigantic ascendant movement which on the whole can be considered as continuous.[28]

But the extra-capitalist markets were not limitless, as Marx emphasised: “the market is limited externally in the geographical sense, the internal market is limited as compared with a market that is both internal and external, the latter in turn is limited as compared with the world market, which however is, in turn, limited at each moment of time.”[29] It was Germany that was the first to demonstrate this reality.

The phase of rapid industrial development experienced by this country took place in a period in which the division of the world’s riches was more or less completed and the possibility of new imperialist openings was increasingly rare. In fact, this nation state arrived on the world market at a time in which the territory formerly free of European domination had been almost completely divided up and reduced to the rank of colonies or semi-colonies of these older industrial states, which were its most formidable competitors. Overproduction and the need to export at all cost were the factors that oriented German foreign policy from the beginning of the 20th century (on this point see the developments in Conflict of the Century, pp.51, 53 and 151 in the French edition). The reduced access to extra-capitalist markets was a consequence of their transformation by the big colonial powers into protected hunting grounds. This was to such an extent that the dawn of the 20th century was marked by the increase in international tensions borne from imperialist expansion, which led to world war in 1914 when Germany initiated a war to re-divide the world and its markets.

MR mentions the great disparity of analysis within the revolutionary vanguard to explain the onset of decadence marked by the outbreak of the first world war: “Although this historic sentence (capitalism’s entrance into a spiral of crises and wars) was generally shared within the communist movement, the factors put forward to explain it found much less agreement”.[30] He omits, however, to mention the remarkable level of agreement between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on the analysis of a war to repartition the world. Lenin expresses it in this way: “…the characteristic feature of this period is the final partition of the globe – not in the sense that a new partition is impossible – on the contrary, new partitions are possible and inevitable – but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only re-division is possible; territories can only pass from one ‘owner’ to another, instead of passing as unowned territory to an ‘owner’.[31]

To talk of the need for countries endowed with fewer colonies to re-divide the world, is not the same as saying that there is a lack of extra-capitalist markets relative to the needs of production. An identification between the two has too often been made. In fact at the beginning of the 20th century there were still plenty of extra-capitalist markets (in the colonies and even within the industrialised countries), the exploitation of which was still able to produce leaps forward in capitalist development. This is the point that Rosa Luxemburg put forward in 1907 in her Introduction to Political Economy: “With each step that it takes in its development, capitalist production inevitably nears the period in which it must develop more and more slowly and with increasing difficulty. The development of capitalism in itself has a long road ahead of it because capitalist production as such is no more than a tiny part of world production. Even in the oldest industrial countries in Europe there still exist, side by side with large-scale industrial businesses, lots of little, backward, artisan enterprises; the greater part of agricultural produce, peasant production, is not capitalist. Besides that, in Europe there are entire countries in which large-scale industry has hardly developed, where local production is of a peasant or artisan character. On the other continents, with the exception of North America, capitalist enterprises form no more than small scattered islands in the midst of huge regions that have not yet gone over even to production with simple trading. (…) The capitalist mode of production has room for enormous expansion if it must drive out backward forms of production everywhere. Its evolution is moving in this direction.[32]

It was the 1929 crisis that gave warning of the lack of substantial extra-capitalist markets, not in absolute terms but relative to the need for capitalism to export goods in increasingly large quantities. These markets were by no means exhausted. The developments in industrialisation and the means of transport made in the capitalist metropoles made it possible to better exploit the existing markets, to the extent that they could still play a role in the 1950s as a factor in the prosperity of the post war boom.

However at this stage, according to Rosa Luxemburg, the question of the very impossibility of capitalism was raised: “Thus, this evolution traps capitalism in a fundamental contradiction: the more that capitalist production replaces more backward modes of production, the more narrow become the limits to the market created by the search for profit, in relation to the expansion of existing capitalist enterprises. This becomes quite clear if we try to imagine for a moment that the development of capitalism has advanced to such an extent that, over the whole face of the globe, everything is produced in a capitalist way, that is, exclusively by private capitalist entrepreneurs, in large factories, with modern wage workers. Now the impossibility of capitalism leaps to view.”[33] How was this impossibility overcome? We will come back to this later when examining the question of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism.

There is no solution to overproduction within capitalism

The fact that it is not possible under capitalism to resolve the crises of overproduction by increasing workers’ wages or by constantly increasing the solvent demand that does not come from the workers, means that overproduction cannot be overcome within capitalism. In fact this can only be done by abolishing wage labour and replacing capitalism by a society of freely associated producers.

MR cannot reconcile himself to this implacable and unavoidable logic for capitalism and its reformers. In fact he has amply quoted Marx in various ways around the theme “the worker cannot provide adequate demand” and has then rapidly forgotten it and contradicted the fundamental idea that “if the ‘demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself’ disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs.” So he makes it seem that the crisis of overproduction is a result of the diminution of the mass of wages, which is none other than a recycling of the Malthusian concepts that Marx fought against: “the mass of wages in the developed countries increases by an average of two thirds of the total revenue and has always been a large component of the final demand. Its diminution restricts the markets and results in a slump which is the basis of the crises of overproduction. This reduction in consumption directly affects wages but it also indirectly affects businesses because demand is restricted. In fact the corresponding increase in profits and the consumption of the capitalists only manages in a very partial way to compensate for the relative reduction in wage demand. It is even less the case as reinvestment of profits is limited by the general contraction of the markets.[34]

It is undeniable that the reduction in wages, as well as the development of unemployment, has a negative effect on the economic activity of businesses producing consumer goods, in the first place those producing the necessaries for the reproduction of the work force. But it is not the compression of wages that causes the crisis. The reverse is the case. It is because of the crisis that the state or the bosses are led to sack workers or reduce wages.

MR has turned reality on its head. His reasoning becomes “if the demand of the labourer himself shrinks up, then the collapse occurs.” He therefore thinks that the cause of the last stock exchange crash that took place immediately before the book was written (4th quarter 2010) lies in the compression of wage demand: “The best proof is the dynamic that led to the last stock exchange crash: as wage demand was drastically compressed, growth was obtained only by boosting consumption (graph 6.6) through an increase in debt (which began in 1982: graph 6.5), a reduction in the level of savings (which also began in 1982: graph 6.4) and an increase in patrimonial income.[35] This more or less attributes the present level of debt to the compression in wage demand.

From that to the idea that the crisis is the product of the rapacity of the capitalists is a small step.

As we will show, and as is quite clear to anyone who approaches this question seriously and honestly, MR defends an analysis of the basic causes of the economic crises of capitalism that is different from that defended by Marx and Engels in their time. This is well within his rights, and even his responsibility if he thinks it necessary. In fact, whatever the value and the depth of the considerable contribution that Marx brought to proletarian theory, he was not infallible and his writings should not be treated like holy texts. This would be a religious approach that is totally foreign to marxism and also to any scientific method. Marx’s writings should also be subjected to the critical marxist method. This is the approach adopted by Rosa Luxemburg in the The Accumulation of Capital (1913) when she brings out the contradictions contained in Book II of Capital. Having said this, when one questions a part of Marx’s writings, political and scientific honesty requires one to follow this trajectory explicitly and clearly. This is what Rosa Luxemburg did in her book and it produced a huge outcry from the “orthodox marxists” who were scandalised that she could openly criticise the writings of Marx. Unfortunately, this is not what MR does when he discards Marx’s analysis while pretending to remain faithful to it. For our part, we defend Marx’s analyses on this point because we think that they are correct and that they reflect the real life of capitalism.

In particular, we completely defend the revolutionary vision that they contain and we resolutely close the door against a reformist vision. Unfortunately this is not the case with MR, who declares his faithfulness to Marx’s texts and then does a bit of fast footwork to smuggle in a reformist vision “gently”. This, without doubt, is the most deplorable aspect of his book.

How can we characterise the currents who propose to resolve the capitalist crisis by means of wage increases?

Marx defended the need for the struggle for reforms but he energetically denounced the reformist tendencies that tried to imprison the working class and who “saw in the wage struggle only the wage struggle” and not a school for struggle in which the class forges the weapons of its definitive emancipation. In fact Marx criticised Proudhon for seeing “in misery only misery” and the trade-unions who “fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system”.[36] When capitalism’s entry into decadence put the proletarian revolution on the agenda and made any real reformist policy within the system impossible, there was a huge mystification trying to derail the proletariat from its historic goal by getting it to believe that it could still eke out a place for itself within the system, in particular by bringing to power good teams, good people, generally those belonging to the left or extreme left of the political apparatus of capital. For this reason, once the proletarian revolution is historically on the agenda, the defence of the struggle for reforms is no longer an opportunist side-track within the workers’ movement, it is openly counter-revolutionary. This is why it is a responsibility of revolutionaries to combat any illusions spread about by the left of capital that try to make the reform of capitalism seem credible, while encouraging the resistance struggles of the working class against the degradation of its living conditions within capitalism. These struggles are indispensable in preventing it from being ground down by the constant encroachments of capitalism in crisis and are an indispensable preparation for the confrontation with the capitalist state.

In this respect it is worthwhile showing, as we have already done, how MR’s theory offers gaping holes for reformism. His book mentions his political commitment. Permit us to doubt this somewhat given his dealings with representatives of “marxism”, who are also politically committed but very clearly in the defence of reformist theses. This is why we think it necessary to underline the homage he pays to the contribution of “certain marxist economists”: “too little attention is given to the evolution of the rate of surplus value, the problems of re-distribution, the state of the class struggle and the development of the proportion of wages. It is only because of the work of certain marxist economists (Jacques Gouverneur, Michel Husson, Alain Bihr, etc) that these concerns are coming a little to the fore. We agree with them and hope that they will be followed by others”. [37] The first of these, Jacques Gouverneur, who “provided” MR with “numerous indications for deepening Capital[38] is the author of a “working document[39] with a revealing title, “Which economic policy against crisis and unemployment?”, in which he pleads against neo-liberal policies and for a return to an assortment of Keynesian policies that are “alternative policies” (increase in public levies – essentially on profits – to finance socially useful production…”). As for Michel Husson, a member of the scientific council of Attac, who “has taught much” to MR “through the rigour and enormous richness of his analyses”,[40] let’s hear his reflections on struggling against unemployment and precarious work: “So we must examine the left’s proposals on labour questions. On this point, the programme of the Socialist Party is very weak, even if it contains some interesting proposals (as do all programmes) […] rather than increasing wealth, we should change its re-distribution. In other words, we cannot count on growth and especially not on changing its content, which is absolutely impossible with the present re-distribution of income. This means, in the first place, the need to deflate financial taxes and seriously review the fiscal laws on capital revenue.[41] And finally, Alain Bihr, who is less well-known than his reformist predecessors: although less right-wing than Husson, he is not backward in making his contribution to the campaign aiming to attribute the ravages of capitalism to liberalism: “The adoption of neo-liberal policies, their being carried out resolutely and followed methodically for more than thirty years has had the effect of creating the conditions for a crisis of overproduction by compressing wages too much: in brief, a crisis of overproduction because of under-consumption related to wages.” All of these people have taught MR, if he did not already know it, that the root of capitalist crises is to be found, not in its insurmountable contradictions, but in its neo-liberal policies, a bad division of wealth and consequently the state must be called upon to put into practice Keynesian policies, tax the revenues of capital, increase wages, in a word: try to regulate the economy.

MR also seems to sympathise with the idea, dear to Alan Bihr, that the proletariat is in crisis because of the capitalist crisis and that de-unionisation is a demonstration of this so-called crisis in the working class,[42] when he writes: “the fear of losing one’s job destroys workers’ solidarity and the percentage unionised has diminished to begin a rapid decline from 1978-79. A significant aspect of this is the isolation of the long struggle of the British miners in 1984-85.[43] This is no mean contribution to the bourgeoisie’s discourse, when we consider that the main factor in the isolation and defeat of the British miners was the union and the illusions that persisted in the working class regarding its radical version, “base unionism”.

Is capitalism condemned to a catastrophic collapse?

Now that it has reached a certain stage in its history, capitalism can only cast society into greater and greater convulsions, destroying the progress that it had previously ushered in. It is within this context that the class struggle of the proletariat unfolds with the perspective of overthrowing capitalism and bringing about a new society. If the proletariat does not manage to raise its struggle to the highest level of consciousness and organisation necessary, capitalism’s contradictions will make a new society impossible and will lead to “the common ruin of the contending classes”, as was the case with certain class societies in the past: “oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.[44]

Within this context it is important to understand whether, over and above the increasing barbarism inherent to the decadence of capitalism, the economic characteristics of the crisis must of necessity make it impossible at a given moment for the system to go on functioning according to its own laws, so making accumulation impossible.[45] This is essentially the view of a number of marxists and we share it.[46] So, for Rosa Luxemburg, “The impossibility of capitalism leaps to view” once “the development of capitalism has advanced to such an extent that, over the whole face of the globe, everything is produced in a capitalist way” (see the preceding quotations from the Introduction to Political Economy).[47] Even so, Rosa Luxemburg makes the following precision: “This is not to say that capitalist development must be actually driven to this extreme: the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe.”[48]

Likewise Paul Mattick,[49] who also thinks that the system’s contradictions must lead to economic collapse, although he thinks that these contradictions are basically expressed in the form of a fall in the rate of profit and not in the saturation of the markets, recalls how this question has been approached historically: “The discussion around Marx’s theory of accumulation and crisis led to the development of two antithetical views, each giving rise to several variants. One insisted that the accumulation of capital has absolute limits and that an economic breakdown of the system is inevitable. The other held this to be absurd, maintaining that the system would not disappear from economic causes. It goes without saying that the reformists, if only to justify themselves, adopted the latter position. But even ultra-leftists – Anton Pannekoek, for example – saw the idea that the breakdown of capitalism would be a ‘purely economic’ process as a falsification of historical materialist theory. [] He thought the shortcomings of the capitalist system as Marx described them and the concrete phenomenon of crisis, produced by the anarchy of the economy, were sufficient to provoke the development of revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat and thus to lead to proletarian revolution.[50]

MR does not share this view of capitalism condemned by its fundamental contradictions (saturation of the markets, fall in the rate of profit) to a catastrophic crisis. On the contrary, he sees it like this: “In fact, there is no material point alpha at which capitalism will collapse, whether this be percentage X of the rate of profit or a quantity Y of outlets or a number Z of extra-capitalist markets. As Lenin says in Imperialism the highest stage: ‘there is no situation from which capitalism cannot find a way out’!”[51]

MR explains his vision thus: “The limits to modes of production are above all social, a product of their internal contradictions and by the collision between relations that have become obsolete and the productive forces. This means that it is the proletariat which will abolish capitalism and that the latter will not die out of its own accord because of its ‘objective’ limits. This is the method put forward by Marx: ‘Capitalist production tends constantly to over-reach its inherent limits (editor’s note: the periodic depreciation of constant capital accompanying crises in the production process); it manages to do so only by means that once more raise barriers before it but on a scale that is even more forbidding, and then again on an even greater scale, the same barriers rise up again before it.’ (Le Capital, 1032. La Pleiade Economie II  [our translation from the French]). This is by no means a catastrophic vision, but rather sees the growing contradictions of capitalism raising the stakes to an ever higher level. However, it is clear that even if capitalism will not sink of its own accord, it will not however escape its destructive antagonisms.[52]

It is hard to see how the proletariat could overthrow capitalism if, as MR persists in trying to prove in his book, the whole history of this system since the second half of the 20th century has been exerting itself against the reality of impediments to the development of the productive forces.

Having said this, although it is right to say that only the proletariat can abolish capitalism, this in no way means that capitalism cannot collapse under the weight of its basic contradictions, which obviously is by no means the same as its revolutionary replacement by the proletariat. Nowhere in his text does MR formally demonstrate that this is impossible. Instead of this he tacks onto the crisis of the decadent period, the characteristics of the crises as they were manifested in the period of Marx. Moreover, in describing the latter he does not base his analysis on the quotations of Marx about the saturation of the markets, such as this one, for example: “…in the cycle through which capital passes during its reproduction - a cycle in which it is not simply reproduced but reproduced on an extended scale, in which it describes not a circle but a spiral – there comes a moment at which the market manifests itself as too narrow for production. This occurs at the end of the cycle. But it merely means: the market is glutted. Over-production is manifest. If the expansion of the market had kept pace with the expansion of production there would be no glut of the market, no overproduction..[53] MR prefers those passages in which Marx deals only with the problem of the rate of profit. This allows him to claim that capitalism can always recover from its crises while covering himself with the authority of Marx. In fact, within this framework the devaluation of capital wrought by the crisis is often the condition for the recovery of a rate of profit that makes it possible for accumulation to take off again at a higher level. The only problem is that to attribute the present crisis first and foremost to the contradiction “fall in the rate of profit” is to side-step the reality that has produced the level of debt that we have today. There is another problem with this approach and one which confronts MR with the contradictions of his speculative constructions; that is, elsewhere he actually says: “It is completely incongruous to affirm – as is too often done – that the perpetuation of the crisis since the 1980s is due to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.[54]

In fact even prior to the first world war the development of capitalism made it impossible to characterise the crises as a cyclical phenomenon. Engels referred to this development in a note within Capital, in which he says: “The acute form of the periodic process with its former ten-year cycle, appears to have given way to a more chronic, long drawn out, alternation […] Thus every factor, which works against a repetition of the old crises, carries within itself the germ of a far more powerful future crisis.[55] This description from Engels of the beginning of the open crisis shows us a precursor of the crisis of capitalist decadence, which is violent, generalised and deep and is by no means cyclical. It is rather prepared by a whole accumulation of contradictions, as witnessed by the occurrence of two world wars, the 1929 crisis and the 30s, and the present phase of the crisis that began at the end of the 1960s.

To say, as does MR, on the basis of quotations from Marx always dealing with the fall in the rate of profit and taken out of context: “The very mechanism of capitalist production therefore removes the obstacles that it creates[56] can only contribute to minimising the depth of the contradictions that undermine capitalism in its decadent phase. This can only lead to underestimating the seriousness of the present phase of the crisis, in particular, by relegating to second place the contradictions in question and talking twaddle about how capitalism can be regulated.

The objection could be made that Rosa Luxemburg’s predictions have been shown to be inexact because the drying up of the last extra-capitalist markets in the 1950s did not lead to the “impossibility” of capitalism. In fact, it is clearly the case that capitalism did not collapse at that moment. However it could go on developing only by mortgaging its future through the injection of higher and higher doses of credit that can never be re-paid. The insoluble problem confronting the bourgeoisie now is that whatever austerity cures it inflicts on society, it is unable to reduce the level of debt. On the one hand, payment defaults and the bankruptcy of some of the economic players, including nation states, mean that this same situation infects their partners as well, thus aggravating conditions leading to the collapse of the house of cards. On the other hand, being unable to kick-start the economy adequately by means of new debts or printing money, capitalism cannot avoid a dive into recession. Contrary to the magic formulas spouted in this book, this dive is not preparing a future resurgence through the devaluation of capital that comes with it. However, it is preparing the ground for the revolution.

Silvio 12/11

 

[1]. Éditions Contradictions, Brussels, 2010.

[2]. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, Chapter XVII, “Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it (The very nature of capital leads to crises)”, Section 12 “Contradictions between production and consumption under conditions of capitalism, over production of the principal consumer goods becomes general overproduction.”.

[3]. Marx, Grundrisse, chapter on Capital notebook IV, p.420 (Penguin).

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. Marx. Capital. Volume III, Part V: “Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital”, Chapter 30: “Money-Capital and Real Capital”.

[6]. “This analysis of the basis of Keynsian-Fordist regulation has rarely been understood in the marxist camp. As far as we know, it was only in 1959 that a coherent understanding of the post-war boom was developed for the first time.” (p.74). MR then reproduces an extract of an article published in October 1959 in the internal bulletin of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. In fact the group Socialisme ou Barbarie understood the post-war boom so well that the 1950s boom caused it to stumble and, in confusion, to cast doubt on the basis of marxist theory. On this point, see the article “The post-war boom did not reverse the decline of capitalism” in International Review n° 147, https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201111/4596/post-war-boom-did-not-reverse-decline-capitalism. Paul Mattick is also cited by MR for developing an understanding of the phenomenon of the post-war boom. We really do not think that the author agrees with the following passage from Mattick: “Since the economists do not distinguish between economy in general and the capitalist economy, it is impossible for them to see that “productive” and “capitalistically productive” means two different things and that public, like private investments are capitalistically productive only if they create surplus value not because they supply material goods or amenities” .(Crisis and crisis theory, chapter 4, “Splendour and miseries of the mixed economy”, our emphasis). In other words, Keynesian measures do not produce surplus value and result in the sterilisation of capital.

[7]. Capital. Volume III, Part III, “The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”,  Chapter 15, “Exposition of the internal contradictions of the law.”

[8]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.27.

[9]. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 3, Chapter 19, 12. ‘The Social Essence of Malthus’s Polemic against Riccardo. Malthus’s Distortion of Sismondi’s Views on the Contradictions in Bourgeois Production’.

[10]. Marx, ibid..

[11]. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2, Chapter XVI, “Ricardo’s theory of profit”, Section 3 “Law of the diminishing rate of profit”; (e) “Ricardo’s Explanation for the Fall in the Rate of Profit and Its Connection with His Theory of Rent.”

[12]. Marx, Capital, Volume III, Part III: “The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”, Chapter XV “Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law”, III “Excess Capital and Excess Population”.

[13]. Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”.

[14]. Marx, Capital Volume II, Part II, Book One: “The Process of Circulation of Capital”, Chapter 4: “The Three Formulas of the Circuit”.

[15]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.36 (our emphasis).

[16]. Ibid., p.38.

[17]. As they did in the preface to the 1872 edition when they pointed out the inadequacies laid bare by the experience of the Paris Commune and as Engels did in the 1890 edition where he shows the evolution made by the working class since the first edition of the Manifesto.

[18]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.38. Marx passage translated by us from the French

[19]. On these questions we recommend the articles “Rosa Luxemburg and the Limits to Capitalist Expansion”, and “The Comintern and the virus of ‘Luxemburgism’ in 1924” in International Review n°s 142 and 145.

[20]. Roelandts, Op Cit.p.36.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. We reproduce in full the quotation from Marx in its context, which is to deal with the relationship between capitalism and free competition: “The predominance of capital is the presupposition of free competition, just as the despotism of the Roman Caesars was the presupposition of the free Roman 'private law'. As long as capital is weak, it still itself relies on the crutches of past modes of production, or of those which will pass with its rise. As soon as it feels strong, it throws away the crutches, and moves in accordance with its own laws. As soon as it begins to sense itself and become conscious of itself as a barrier to development, it seeks refuge in forms which, by restricting free competition, seem to make the rule of capital more perfect, but are at the same time the heralds of its dissolution and of the dissolution of the mode of production resting on it..”(Grunndrisse, Chapter on Capital, Fixed and Circulating Capital, Competition. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch12.htm)

[23]. Marx. Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Bourgeois and proletarians”, our emphasis.

[24]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p 39.

[25]. Ibid., pp.39-40.

[26]. Quoted by Howard Zinn, A Popular History of the United States, p. 344, Agone edition, 2002 (in French).

[27]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.40.

[28]. Fritz Sternberg, The Conflict of the Century. p.75. Éditions du Seuil (in French).

[29]. Marx. Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, Chapter XVII, “Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it (The very nature of capital leads to crises)”, Section 13 “The expansion of the market does not keep in step with the expansion of production. The Ricardian conception that an unlimited expansion of consumption and production is impossible.”

[30]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.47.

[31]. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, “The Division of the World among the Big Powers”.

[32]. Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy, “The Tendencies in the World Economy” (https://www.marxists.org/francais/luxembur/intro_ecopo/intro_ecopo_6.htm) (in French).

[33]. Following on from the previous quotation taken from the Introduction to Political Economy.

[34]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.14.

[35]. Ibid., p.106.

[36]. Marx. Value, Price and Profit, “The Struggle between Capital and Labour and its Results”.

[37]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.86. Michel Husson is, according to Wikipedia, an old militant of the Parti socialiste unifié (PSU, social-democratic), of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR, Trotskist), of which he is a member of the central committee. He is a member of the scientific council of Attac and supported the candidature of José Bové (alternative-worldist) to the French presidential election of 2007. Alain Bihr, also according to the same source, espouses libertarian communism and is known as a specialist of the French extreme right (in particular the National Front) and of negationism.

[38]. Ibid., p.8.

[39]. www.capitalisme-et-crise.info/telechargements/pdf/FR_JG_Quelles_politiques_Žéconomiques_contre_la_crise_et_le_chômage_1.pdf

[40]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.8.

[41]. Chronique, 6 May 2001 (regards.fr/nos-regards/michel-husson/la-gauche-et-l-emploi).

[42]. An idea that we have already criticised in an article in our International Review n° 74, “The Proletariat is still the revolutionary class” (https://en.internationalism.org/node/3416).

[43]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.84.

[44]. Marx: Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Bourgeois and Proletarians.

[45]. On this question see the article “For revolutionaries, the Great Depression confirms the obsolescence of capitalism”, International Review n°144 (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/146/great-depression).

[46]. MR puts forward the idea that the objective impossibility of capitalism inherent in Luxemburg’s vision is responsible for the immediatism evident in the 3rd Congress of the Communist International in which “the KAPD (an oppositional split from the German Communist Party) defended a theory of an offensive at all costs based on the Luxemburgist vision stating that the proletariat would be confronted with “the objective economic impossibility of capitalism” and confronted with “the inevitable economic collapse of capitalism…” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital)”. (Roelandts Op. Cit., p.54). When Rosa Luxemburg defends the idea of the effective impossibility of capitalism, this perspective cannot be applied to the near future. But we find that the author, or those close to him, defend a fraudulent vision by attributing to Rosa Luxemburg such a perspective in the short term, given the inadequacy of the extra-capitalist markets relative to the needs of production. This will be explained in a subsequent note. For a clearer understanding of the causes of immediatism as manifested in the workers’ movement in relation to the perspective, we refer the reader to the article “The Decadence of Capitalism: the Age of Catastrophes”: International Review n° 143 (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/143/decadence-08-age-of-catastrophes).

[47]. “For a good explanation and critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s accumulation theory” (p.36); MR directs us to the following article: “Théorie des crises Marx – Luxemburg (I)” (https://www.leftcommunism.org/spip.php?article110)). From the site recommended by him, we have read the article “L’accumulation du capital au XXe siècle – I” (https://www.leftcommunism.org/spip.php?article223) and we were surprised to learn that, according to Rosa Luxemburg in her work The Accumulation of Capitalcapitalism reached ‘the ultimate phase of its historic career: imperialism’” because “the field for expansion offered to it was minimal compared to the high level attained by the development of capitalist productive forces…”. Unable to believe our eyes, we went back to the work referred to and found that the reality was quite different. What is minimal for Rosa Luxemburg (compared to the high level reached by the development of the productive forces of capitalism), is not, as the article says, the field for expansion offered to capitalism but the last non-capitalist territories still free in the world. The difference is important because at the time the colonies contained a significant proportion of extra-capitalist markets that were either virgin or not yet exhausted whereas such markets were much rarer outside of the colonies and the industrialised countries. Re-establishing what Rosa Luxemburg really said shows the fast footwork of MR’s friends. In this quotation we have emphasised what is stated in the incriminated article and we have highlighted an important idea that is disregarded by the author of the article: “Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment. Still the largest part of the world in terms of geography, this remaining field for the expansion of capital is yet insignificant as against the high level of development already attained by the productive forces of capital.(The Accumulation of Capital, III: “The historic conditions of accumulation”, 31: “Protective tariffs and accumulation” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch3...).

[48]. The Accumulation of Capital, III:  “The historic conditions of accumulation”, 31: “Protective tariffs and accumulation”.

[49]. For more information on the political positions of Paul Mattick read the article “For revolutionaries, the Great Depression confirms the obsolescence of capitalism” in International Review n° 146, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/146/great-depression.

[50]. Paul Mattick. Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Chapter 3, “The Epigones”. https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1974/crisis/index.htm

[51]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., pp.117-118. This passage from Lenin is missing from the version on-line on marxists.org of Imperialism the highest stage. But there is one very like it in Lenin’s Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the CI:There is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x03.htm#fw1). However it is not referring to the economic crisis but to the revolutionary crisis.

[52]. Ibid., p.53.

[53]. Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, Chapter xvii, “Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it (The very nature of capital leads to crises)”; “[13. The expansion of the market does not keep in step with the expansion of production. The Ricardian conception that an unlimited expansion of production and of the internal market is possible]”.

[54]. Roelandts, Op. Cit., p.82.

[55]. Engels note to Capital, Volume III, Section V “Division of profit into interest and profit of enterprise, interest-bearing capital”, chapter 30, “Money-capital and real capital I”.

[56]. The reference made by MR is the following, Capital, book I, 4th German edition, Editions Sociales 1983, p.694. It does not give enough detail about what section of the book is being referred to. There is no obvious equivalent to this sentence in French on marxists.org. However there is a passage of Marx that contains the same idea as that quoted, almost word for word, in Volume I of Capital. This is it, “The mechanism of the process of capitalist production removes the very obstacles that it temporarily creates (Book 1, Part VII “The Accumulation of Capital”, Chapter 25 “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”, Section 1 “The Increased Demand for Labour Power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remaining the Same”). It is at this precise point in Capital that MR has turned to feed his idea, where the omission of a “sometimes”, both in the Éditions sociales and in the transcription of a passage from it by MR, is wonderfully convenient in serving the theme of his book, to present capitalism as always able to be born again out of its crises.

 

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Contribution to a history of the workers’ movement in Africa (v): May 1968 in Senegal

This is the last part of our series of five articles on the class struggle in French West Africa, centred in particular on Senegal. The series covers the period from the end of the 18th century up to 1968 and began publication in International Review n°145.

May 1968 in Africa, an expression of the recovery of the international class struggle

A “May 68” actually took place in Africa, more precisely in Senegal, with characteristics very similar to those of the “French May” (student unrest forming a prelude to the emergence of the workers’ struggles) – which is not surprising given the historical ties between the working class of France and that of its former African colony.

If the global nature of “May 68” is generally acknowledged, its expression in certain corners of the world is nonetheless little known, or simply ignored: “This is largely explained by the fact that these events occurred at the same time as others of a similar nature around the world. This has made it easier for analysts and propagandists who followed the events to blur the significance of the Senegalese May 68, by opting for a selective reading emphasising the university and high school student side in the crisis at the expense of its other dimensions.[1]

In fact the “Senegalese May” was better known among students: students sent messages of protest from around the world to the government of Senghor which was suppressing their fellow African comrades. We should also note that the University of Dakar was the only university in the colonies of French West Africa (FWA) until after “independence”, which explains the presence within it of a significant number of foreign African students.

The organs of the bourgeois press had different interpretations of what caused the outbreak of the May movement in Dakar. For some, like Afrique Nouvelle (Catholic), it was the crisis in education that was the root cause of the movement. Marches Tropicaux et Mediterraneens (for the business community) considered it an extension of the movement in France. Jeune Afrique pointed out the connection between the student political unrest and the social unrest of wage earners.

There was another point of view that made a connection between this movement and the economic crisis: it came from Abdoulaye Bathily, one of the oldest participants in the famous revolt when he was then a student; later, in his role of researcher, he would make a general appraisal of the events of “May in Dakar.” We will quote him a lot in this article for his testimonies from inside the events.

The Sequence of Events

May 1968 has gone down in history characterised across the world by the massive social upheaval in which students and high school pupils were the spearhead. In Africa, Senegal was very clearly the theatre for the university and high school protests. Many contemporary observers concluded that the events in Dakar were nothing more than an extension to May 68 in France [...] Having participated directly, and at the highest level in the students’ struggle in Dakar, in May 68, this thesis has always appeared to me to be wrong. [...] The explosion of May 68 was undoubtedly fostered by a particularly tense social climate. It was the culmination of an unprecedented agitation by employees in the towns, the unsatisfactory national economic indicators from the continued French rule, and members of the bureaucracy disgruntled that the technical advisers were in control of the state. The agricultural crisis also contributed to the growing tension in the towns and in Dakar, notably from the influx from the rural areas [...]. The memorandum of the Union Nationale des Travailleurs de Senegal [UNTS] on May 8th calculated that purchasing power had declined by 92.4% since 1961.”[2]

So, this was the context in which Dakar, between May 18th and June 12th, also experienced a “May 68” which almost definitely undermined the pro-French regime of Senghor with wildcat general strikes by the students and then by the workers, before the government stepped in to end the movement, with the police and military imposing a brutal clampdown and with French imperialism providing critical support.

The “Senegalese May” had been preceded by several clashes with the Senghor government, especially between 1966 and 1968, when students organised demonstrations in support of “national liberation” struggles and against “neo-colonialism” and “imperialism”.

Similarly, there were “warning strikes” in high schools. Students at the high school in Rufisque (a suburb of Dakar) walked out of lectures on 26th March 1968 following disciplinary measures taken against a student. The movement lasted three weeks and the agitation and protests against the government spread to schools across the region.

The trigger for the movement

The movement of May 1968 was initially sparked off by the decision by the government of President Senghor to cut the number of monthly instalments of student grants from 12 to 10 per year, and by so doing to greatly reduce the spending on these, citing “the difficult economic situation facing the country”.

The news of the government decision spread like wildfire on the campus, causing widespread anxiety and provoking a general feeling of revolt. It was the only topic of conversation on the campus. Upon election, the new executive committee of the Democratic Union of Senegalese students [UDES] started to campaign over student grants, amongst students in the high schools and also with the trade unions.”[3]

Indeed, after this government announcement there were constant protests and the opposition to the government grew, especially on the eve of the elections that were denounced by the students, as the heading of one of their leaflets demonstrates: “From the economic and social situation in Senegal to the eve of the election farce on February 25th...” The agitation continued and on May 18th students decided to announce a “general strike” following the failure of negotiations with the government about their conditions, and there was a massive strike in all the faculties.

Galvanised by the clear success of the strike, and angered by the government’s refusal to meet their demands, the students called an unlimited general strike and a boycott of exams from May 27th. Already, before this, meetings were taking place on campus and in high schools generally; in brief, this was a showdown with the government. For its part, the government seized control of all the official media and announced a series of repressive measures against the strikers, hoping to stir some opposition from the workers and peasants to the students, who it labelled “privileged”. And the Senegalese Progressive Union (Senghor's party) tried to denounce the “anti-nationalist position” of the students’ movement, but without any real echo; quite the contrary, the government campaigns only increased the anger of the students and gave rise to workers’ solidarity and won sympathy from the public.

The meetings of the Student Union of Dakar (UED) were the focal point of the agitation on the campus. They attracted a considerable number of students, pupils, teachers, unemployed youths, political activists and, of course, many government spies. Over time, they were the barometer indicating the size of the political and social protest movement. Each meeting was a sort of gathering of the Senegalese opposition and of those on campus from other countries. The interventions were punctuated by pieces of revolutionary music from around the world.”[4]

Indeed, a real showdown was on the cards. In fact, at midnight on May 27th, students awoke to hear the sound of boots and to see the arrival en masse of police who cordoned off the campus. Then a crowd of students and pupils gathered and converged on the residential quarters to mount picket lines.

By encircling the university campus with police, the government hoped to prevent any movement onto or out of the campus.

 “So, some of their colleagues were deprived of meals and others of their beds because as the UED repeatedly said, the social conditions were such that many of their colleagues (those without grants) ate in the town or slept there from the lack of housing on campus. Even medical students who treated patients in the hospital would be stuck in the town along with the other students in a medical emergency. It was a typical example of where academic freedoms were violated.[5]

On May 28th, during an interview with the rector and the deans of the university, the UED demanded the lifting of the police cordon, while university authorities required students to make a declaration within 24 hours “to declare that the strike is not aimed at overthrowing the Senghor government”. Student organisations responded that they were not allied with any specific regime and that within the time granted to them, they wouldn’t be able to consult their members. After this, the President of the Government ordered the closure of all the academic institutions.

 “The anti-riot squad, reinforced by the police, went on the offensive and entered the living quarters one after the other. They had orders to remove the students by all means possible. So with truncheons, rifle butts, bayonets, tear gas grenades, sometimes crazed, smashing doors and windows, these henchmen entered the students’ rooms looking for them. The riot squads and the police behaved just like looters. They stole what they could and smashed up things blocking their path, tore up clothes, books and notebooks. Pregnant women were abused and workers mistreated. Married women and children were beaten in their homes. There was one death and many wounded (around one hundred) according to official figures.[6]

The explosion

The brutality of the government's reaction led to an outburst of solidarity and sympathy for the student movement. There was strong disapproval throughout the capital of the regime’s brutal behaviour and against police cruelty and the confinement of large numbers of students. On the eve of May 29th all the ingredients were present for a social conflagration because things had reached fever pitch for the students and salaried workers.

The high school students were already massively involved in the “warning strikes” of March 26th, and on May 18th were the first to start an indefinite strike. After this the university students and those in the high schools started to link up. And one after the other, all the institutions in secondary education declared a total and unlimited strike, formed struggle committees and called for demonstrations with the university students.

Alarmed by the increased numbers of young people joining the protests, on the same May 29th President Senghor made an announcement to the media of an indefinite closure of all learning establishments (high schools and colleges) in the vicinity of Dakar and St. Louis, and called on parents to keep their children at home. But with little success.

The closure of the university and the high schools only increased social tension. University students who had escaped the police cordons, high school students and other young people began erecting barricades in neighbourhoods like Medina, Grand Dakar, Nimzat, Baay Gainde, Kip Koko, Usine Ben Talli, Usine Nyari Talli, etc.. On the 29th and 30th particularly, young demonstrators occupied the main streets of Dakar. Vehicles belonging to government officials and the leading personalities of the regime were tracked down. It was rumoured that many ministers were forced to abandon their official cars, famous cars like the Citroen DS 21. In people’s eyes, and those of the university and high school students in particular, this type of official vehicle symbolised ‘the lavish lifestyles of the comprador and political-bureaucratic bourgeoisie.[7]

Faced with growing combativity and the escalation of the movement, the government reacted by tightening its repressive measures, extending them to the whole population. So, the government issued a decree that from May 30th all public buildings (cinemas, theatres, cabarets, restaurants, bars) would close day and night until further notice; and also, that meetings, demonstrations and gatherings of more than 5 persons would be prohibited.

A workers’ general strike

Faced with these martial measures and with continued police brutality against young people in struggle, the whole country stirred and the revolt intensified, this time with more of the salaried working class becoming involved. It was at this point that the official union apparatus, notably the National Union of Workers of Senegal, the umbrella body for several unions, decided to make its play to avoid being bypassed by the rank and file workers.

The rank and file unions pressed for action. On May 30th, at 18.00 hours, the regional union, UNTS de Cap-Vert (a region of Dakar), following a joint meeting with the National headquarters of UNTS, announced plans for an indefinite strike from midnight on May 30th.”[8]

Given the difficult situation facing his regime, President Senghor decided to address himself to the nation and spoke threateningly to the workers urging them to disobey the call for a general strike, while accusing the students of being “under a foreign influence”. But despite the real threats of the government to requisition certain categories of workers, the strike was well supported in both the public and the private sectors.

General assemblies were planned in the labour union hall for 10am on May 31st, in which the invited strikers’ delegations would decide the next steps for the movement.

But the police had cordoned the area off. At 10 o’clock the order to attack the workers inside the hall was given. Doors and windows were smashed, cabinets pulled apart, records destroyed. Tear gas and truncheons overwhelmed the most foolhardy workers. In response to the police brutality, the workers in amongst the students and the lumpen proletariat, attacked vehicles and shops, some of which were torched. The next day Abdoulaye Diack, Secretary of State for Information, revealed to reporters that 900 people were arrested in the labour union hall and the surrounding area. Among these, there were 36 union leaders including 5 women. In fact, during the week of crisis, no less than 3,000 people were arrested. Some union leaders were deported [...]. These actions only heightened popular indignation and readied the workers for the fight.”[9]

Indeed, directly after this press conference when the government’s spokesman gave statistics about the victims, the strikes, demonstrations and riots were intensifying and so the bourgeoisie decided to call a halt.

The unions, allied to the government and the employers, felt it was necessary to make concessions to the workers to avoid them adopting a hard line, since in the demonstrations they had been able to sense their power.”[10]

Therefore, on June 12th, after a series of meetings between government and unions, President Senghor announced an 18 point agreement to end the strike with a 15% increase in wages. Accordingly, the movement officially ended on that date, which did not prevent further discontent and the resurgence of other social movements, because the strikers were really suspicious regarding any promises from the Senghor government. And, in fact, just weeks after signing the agreement to end the strike, social movements were spreading more than ever, with some lively episodes, right up until the early 1970s.

Ultimately, it is worth noting the state of disarray in which the Senegalese government found itself at the height of its confrontation with the “May movement in Dakar”:

From June 1st to 3rd, it seemed that there was a power vacuum. The isolation of the government was expressed in the inertia of the ruling party. Faced with the scale of the social explosion, the party machine of the UPS (Sengho’s party) did not react. The UPS Students’ Federation was happy to covertly distribute leaflets against the UDES in the early stages. This situation was all the more striking since the UPS had boasted three months earlier about having won a landslide victory in the parliamentary and presidential elections in Dakar on February 25th, 1968. But now it was unable to provide an acceptable response to what was happening.

Rumour had it that ministers were holed up in the administrative building, the seat of the government, and that senior party and state officials were hiding in their homes. This was very strange behaviour from party leaders who claimed to have a majority in the country. At one moment, the rumour ran that President Senghor had taken refuge in the French military base at Ouakam. These rumours were made even more believable following the news in Dakar that De Gaulle had “fled” to Germany on May 29th.[11]

Indeed, the Senegalese government was truly reeling and in this context, it was quite symptomatic that de Gaulle and Senghor were seeking the protection and support of their respective armies at the same time.

Moreover, at the time, other more persistent “rumours” clearly indicated that the French army had forcibly intervened to prevent the protesters marching on the presidential palace, inflicting several deaths and injuries.

Let’s also recall that the Senegalese government did not only use its normal guard-dogs, namely the police, to bring an end to the movement but that it also had recourse to the more reactionary forces like the religious leaders and peasants from the remote countryside. At the height of the movement, on May 30th and 31st, the leaders of the religious cliques were invited to use media day and night by Senghor to condemn the strike in the strongest terms and to urge the workers to go back to work.

As for the peasants, the government tried unsuccessfully to turn them against the strikers, by making them come to town to support pro-government demonstrations.

The recruiters had led the peasants to believe that Senegal had been invaded from Dakar by a nation called ‘Tudian’ (student) and that they were being called on to defend the country. Groups of these peasants were actually located in the alleyways of Centennial (now Boulevard General de Gaulle) with their weapons (axes, machetes, spears, bows and arrows).

But they very quickly realised that they had been taken for a ride. [...] The young people dispersed them with stones and divided up their food amongst themselves. [...] Others were vilified on their way to Rufisque. In any event, the riot revealed the fragility of the political standing of the UPS and of the regime in the urban areas, particularly in Dakar.[12]

Undoubtedly, the government of Senghor would utilise every means available, including the most obscure, to bring the social uprising against its regime to an end. However, to permanently extinguish the fire, the most effective weapon for the government could only be that in the hands of Doudou Ngome. He played his part at the time as the leader of the main union, the UNTS. He would “negotiate” the terms for smothering the general strike. Moreover, as a thank you, President Senghor would make him a minister a few years later. It’s another illustration of the strike-breaking role of the unions who, in cahoots with the former colonial power, definitely saved Senghor’s neck.

The high-school students’ role in starting the movement

 “The high schools in the Cap-Vert region, ‘aroused’ by the strike at Rufisque High School in April, were the first to spring into action. These students were especially quick to take to the streets as they saw themselves, like the university students, as victims of the education policy of the Government and were concerned in particular by the cut-backs in the grants. As future university students themselves, they were actively involved in the struggle of the UDES. The strike spread rapidly from Dakar to other secondary schools around the country from May 27th [...] The leadership of the students’ movement was very unstable, and from one meeting to the next, the delegates, and there were many, changed. [...] An important nucleus of very active strikers also drew the attention of the teacher training college for young girls at Thies. Some student leaders even moved to the old town and coordinated the strike from there. Subsequently, a national committee of the high schools and other secondary education colleges in Senegal was formed, becoming a sort of general staff of the student movement.”[13]

Here the author is describing the active role of the high-school students in the mass movement of May 68 in Senegal, in particular the way the struggle was organised with general assemblies and ‘co-ordinations’. Indeed, in every high school, there was a struggle committee and general assembly with an elected and revocable leadership.

The magnificent involvement of the high school students, both male and female, was highly significant as this was the first time in history that this part of the youth were mobilised in large numbers to protest against the new ruling bourgeoisie. If the starting point of the movement was a solidarity action with one of their comrades, victimised by the school authority, the high-school students, like the other students and workers, also saw the need to fight against the effects of the capitalist crisis that the Senghor government wanted to make them pay for.

Western imperialism comes to Senghor’s aid

At the imperialist level, France was keeping close track of the crisis that the events of 1968 had given rise to, and for good reason; it had a lot invested in Senegal. Indeed, apart from its military bases (sea, air and land) located around Dakar, Paris had appointed a “technical advisor” to each ministry and to the president’s office to steer the policies of the Senegalese government in a direction that would clearly serve its own interests.

In this respect, we can recall that before being one of the best “pupils” of the Western bloc, Senegal was for a long time the principal historic bastion of French colonialism in Africa (from 1659 to 1960) and for this reason Senegal participated with its foot soldiers in all the wars that France was involved in around the world, from the conquest of Madagascar in the 19th century, to both World Wars and the wars in Indochina and Algeria. It was therefore only natural for France to use its role as “local gendarme” of the Western imperialist bloc in Africa to protect Senghor's regime using every means at its disposal:

In the aftermath of the events of 68, France intervened with support from its EEC partners to rescue the Senegalese regime. The State was not able to meet its debts following negotiations that took place on June 12th. In a speech on June 13th, President Senghor said that the agreement with the unions would cost 2 thousand million francs (local currency). A week after these negotiations, the European Development Fund (EDF) agreed to the stabilisation fund for groundnut prices with an advance of 2 thousand and 150 million francs (local currency) ‘intended to mitigate the effects of the fluctuations in world prices during the 1967/68 campaign’. [...] But even the U.S., which had been taken to task by the President Senghor during the events, participated with the other Western countries in restoring a peaceful social climate in Senegal. Indeed, the U.S. and Senegal signed an agreement for the construction of 800 housing units for middle income groups for a total of 5 million dollars.”[14]

It is clear that in doing this the main issue for the Western bloc was avoiding the collapse of Senegal and its defection into the enemy camp (that of China and Eastern Bloc).

Thus, having regained control of the situation, President Senghor immediately set off to visit the “friendly countries”, and Germany, amongst them, welcomed him to Frankfurt, just after the bloody suppression of the strikers in Senegal. This welcome in Frankfurt is also highly instructive because Senghor went there to get help and to be “decorated” by a country that was a leading member of NATO. On the other hand, this visit was an opportunity for the German students, for whom “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit was the mouthpiece, to show support in the streets for their Senegalese comrades, as the newspaper Le Monde reported, 25/09/1968:

 “Daniel Cohn-Bendit was arrested on Sunday in Frankfurt during demonstrations against Mr Leopold Senghor, President of Senegal, and he was charged on Monday afternoon (along with 25 of his comrades) by a local German magistrate of inciting riot and illegal assembly...”

In their struggle, the Senegalese students would also receive support from their comrades overseas who often occupied the Senegalese embassies and consulates. News of the movement in Senegal reverberated throughout Africa:

 “In Africa, there were further repercussions from the events in Dakar owing to the actions of the national unions (student unions). On returning to their home countries African students, expelled from the University of Dakar, continued campaigning. [...] The African governments of that time regarded the students from Dakar with suspicion. And in so far as most of them showed their irritation at the way their nationals were expelled, they also feared the contagion of their country with the ‘subversion arriving from Dakar and Paris’.”[15]

Actually, almost all African regimes feared “contagion” and “subversion” from May 68, starting with Senghor himself who had to resort to violent repressive measures against the educated youth. Hence, many of the strikers experienced prison or forced military service not dissimilar to deportation into military camps. And equally, large numbers of foreign African students were expelled en masse; some of whom were ill-treated on their return home.

Some lessons from the events of May 68 in Dakar

“May in Dakar” was unquestionably one of the links in the chain of a worldwide May 68. The significance of the involvement of the Western imperialist bloc in saving the Senegalese regime was an indication of the power of the movement of the workers and the university and high school students.

But over and above the radicalism of the student action, the movement of May 68 in Senegal, with its working class involvement, came about through a return to the spirit and the form of the proletarian struggle that the working class of the colony of French West Africa had achieved at the beginning of the 20th century, but which the African bourgeoisie in the government had succeeded in stifling, especially during the early years of “national independence”.

May 68 was thus more than an opening to another world breaking with the counter-revolutionary period; it was a moment of awakening for many protagonists, especially the youth. Through their involvement in the fight against the forces of the national capital, they exposed a number of myths and illusions, including the “end of the class struggle” under the pretext there was no antagonism between the (African) working class and the (African) bourgeoisie.

It should also be noted the police repression and imprisonment of thousands of strikers proved insufficient for achieving victory over the social movement; it also had to be lured into the union trap and the intervention of France and the Western bloc in support of their “favourite junior partner”. But it was also necessary to meet the demands of students and workers with a large increase in pay.

The basic thing is that the strikers did not “sleep” for long after the agreement that ended the strike because the following year, the working class took up the fight more than ever participating fully in the wave of international struggles that May 68 set in train.

Finally, it is noteworthy that this movement used truly proletarian modes of organisation, proletarian strike committees and general assemblies, strongly demonstrating self-organisation; in short, a clear taking of the struggles into their own hands by the strikers. This is one specific aspect that characterises the struggle of a fraction of the world working class, fully involved in the battle to come for the communist revolution.

Lassou 5/12



[1]. Abdoulaye Bathily, May 1968 in Dakar or the university revolt and democracy, Edit. Chaka, Paris, 1992.

[2]. Bathily, ibid.

 

[3]. Ibid. It is worth recalling here what we already said in the first part of this article in International Review no.145: “…if we largely recognise the seriousness of the researchers who provide these reference sources, we do not necessarily share some of their interpretations of historic events. It’s the same for certain ideas, for example when they talk about ‘union consciousness’ instead of ‘class consciousness’ (of workers), or again ‘union movement’ (instead of workers’ movement). Otherwise, up to another order, we have confidence in their scientific rigour as long as their theses don’t come up against historical facts and don’t prevent other interpretations.” [NB. Part of this section was omitted from the version of the article published in the English language edition of International Review n° 145.]

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. Ibid.

 

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Ibid.

[8]. Ibid.

 

[9]. Ibid.

[10]. Ibid.

[11]. Ibid.

[12]. Ibid.

 

[13]. Ibid.

[14]. Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

 

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Decadence of capitalism part XIII: rejection and regressions

In the previous article in this series, we noted that among the new revolutionary groups which emerged out of the world-wide revival of class struggle in the late 60s, the “theory of decadence”, which had been defended by an intransigent minority despite the apparent triumph of capitalism evidenced by the post-war boom, gained a number of new adherents, providing a coherent historical framework for the revolutionary positions which this new generation had initially come to in a more or less intuitive manner: opposition to trade unions and reformism, rejection of national liberation struggles and of alliances with the bourgeoisie, recognition of the so-called “socialist” states as a form of state capitalism, and so on.

Given that, in the late 60s and early 70s, the open economic crisis of capitalism was only just beginning, and since, over the past four decades, the insoluble nature of this crisis has become increasingly evident, you might have expected that a majority of those attracted towards internationalism over those decades would have been rather easily convinced that capitalism was indeed an obsolete, decaying social system. In reality, not only has this not been the case, but - and this is particularly true with the new generations of revolutionaries which started to appear on the scene during the first decade of the 21st century – one could even speak of a persistent rejection of the theory of decadence, and at the same time a real tendency for many who had previously been convinced of the concept to put it into question and even to jettison it openly.

The attractions of anarchism

With regard to the rejection of the theory by the newer generations of revolutionaries, we are talking to a large extent about internationalist elements influenced by various forms of anarchism. Anarchism has enjoyed a major resurgence during the 2000s in particular and it is not difficult to see why it has such an attraction for young comrades who are eager to fight against capitalism but deeply critical of the “official” left, for a considerable part of which the collapse of “really existing socialism” in the eastern bloc has been such a debacle. Thus the new generation often turns to anarchism as a current which seems not to have betrayed the working class like the social democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist traditions.

It would take an article in itself to analyse why, especially in the central capitalist countries, so many of the new generation have been drawn towards different brands of anarchism rather than towards the communist left, which is certainly the most coherent of all the political currents which remained loyal to proletarian principles after the terrible defeats of the period from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s. A key element is certainly the problem of the organisation of revolutionaries – the “party question” – which has always been a bone of contention between marxists and the revolutionary strands of anarchism. But our main focus here is the specific question of capitalism’s decadence. Why do the majority of the anarchists, including those who genuinely oppose reformist practices and see the need for international revolution, reject this idea so vehemently?

It’s true that some of the best elements in the anarchist current have not always had this reaction. In a previous article in this series we saw how anarchist comrades like Maximoff, faced with the world-wide economic crisis and the push towards a second imperialist world war, had no difficulty in explaining these phenomena as expressions of a social relation which had become a fetter on human progress, of a mode of production in decline.

But these views were always in a minority within the anarchist movement. At a deeper level, while many anarchists are happy to acknowledge Marx’s unique contribution to our understanding of political economy, they have had a much harder idea with the historical methodology which underlay Marx’s critique of capital. Ever since Bakunin, there has been a strong tendency among anarchists to see “historical materialism” (or, as some prefer, the materialist approach to history) as a form of rigid determinism which underestimates and depreciates the subjective element of revolution. Bakunin in particular saw it as a pretext for an essentially reformist practice on the part of the “Marx Party”, which argued at that time that since capitalism had not yet exhausted its historical usefulness for mankind, the communist revolution was not yet on the immediate agenda, and the working class had to focus on building up its resources and its self-confidence within the confines of bourgeois society: this was the basis for its advocacy of trade union work and the formation of workers’ parties which would, among other activities, contest bourgeois elections. For Bakunin, capitalism was always ripe for revolution. And by extension, if the marxists of the present historical epoch conclude that the old tactics are no longer valid, this is often derided by present-day anarchists as a retrospective justification for Marx’s errors, a way of avoiding the uncomfortable conclusion that the anarchists were right all along.  

We are only touching the surface here. We will come back later to the more sophisticated version of this argument presented by the Aufheben group, whose series criticising the notion of decadence has been seen as definitive by so many in the libertarian communist milieu. But there are other elements to consider in the present generation’s rejection of what for us is the theoretical cornerstone of a revolutionary platform today, and they are less specific to the tradition of anarchism.

The paradox we face is the following: while for us capitalism seems to be becoming more and more rotten, to the point where we can speak of the terminal phase of its decline, for many others capitalism’s success in prolonging this process of decay offers evidence that the very concept of decline has been refuted.  In other words: the more a long senile capitalism approaches its catastrophic end, the more some revolutionaries see capitalism as being capable of almost endless rejuvenation.

It is tempting to apply a little psychology here. We have already noted[1] that the prospect of its own demise is an element in the bourgeoisie’s rejection not only of marxism but even of its own efforts at a scientific understanding of the problem of value, once it became clear that such an understanding meant recognising that capitalism could only be a transient system, condemned to perish by its own inherent contradictions. It would be surprising if this ideology of denial did not affect even those who are attempting to break from the bourgeois world-view. Indeed, since the bourgeoisie’s flight from reality grows increasingly desperate the closer it comes to its actual demise, we would expect to see this defence-mechanism permeating every layer of society, including the working class and its revolutionary minorities. After all, what could be more terrifying, more conducive to the reaction of running away or burying your head in the sand, than the real possibility of a dying capitalism crushing us all in the throes of its final agony?     

But the problem is more complex than this. For one thing, it is connected to the manner in which the crisis has evolved in the past 40 years, which has made it much harder to diagnose the real severity of capitalism’s fatal disease. 

As we noted, the first decades after 1914 offered strong evidence that the system was in decline. It was not until the post-war boom had really got underway, in the 50s and 60s, that a number of elements in the proletarian political movement began to voice profound doubts about the notion that capitalism had reached its epoch of decadence. The return of the crisis – and of the class struggle – at the end of the 1960s made it possible to see the transient nature of the boom and rediscover the foundations of Marx’s critique of political economy. But while in essence this approach has been vindicated by the “permanent” nature of the crisis since the end of the 60s and, above all, by the more recent explosion of all the contradictions that have been building up over this period (the “debt crisis”), the length of the crisis is also testament to capitalism’s extraordinary capacity to adapt and survive, even if it has meant flouting its own laws and piling up even more devastating problems for itself in the long term. The ICC has certainly, on occasions, underestimated this capacity: some of our articles on the crisis in the 80s – a decade where brutal mass unemployment had once again become part of daily life - did not really foresee the “boom” (or rather booms, since there were numerous recessions as well) in the 90s and 2000s, and we certainly did not foresee the possibility of a country like China industrialising itself at the frantic pace we have seen during the 2000s. For a generation reared in these conditions, where rampant and unabashed consumerism in the advanced countries made the consumer society of the 50s and 60s seem quaint by comparison, it is understandable that talk of capitalism’s decline should be seen as somewhat old hat. The official ideology of the 90s and well into the 2000s was that capitalism had triumphed all along the way and that neo-liberalism and globalisation were opening the door to a new and indeed unprecedented era of prosperity. In Britain, for example, the economic mouthpiece of the Blair government, Gordon Brown, claimed in his 2005 budget speech that the UK was experiencing its most sustained period of economic growth since records began in 1701. Little wonder that “radical” versions of these ideas should be taken up even among those arguing for revolution. After all, the ruling class itself continues to dispute about whether it had finally done away with the cycle of “boom and bust”. This problematic has been echoed by many “pro-revolutionaries”, who can cite Marx on the periodic crises of the 19th century and explain that while there may still be periodic crises, each one would serve to clear out the economy’s dead wood and bring about a new spurt of growth. 

Regressions from the coherence of the Italian left

This was all very understandable, but it was perhaps less forgivable in the ranks of the communist left, who had already acquired some education about the diseased basis of capitalist growth in the epoch of its decline. And yet ever since the 70s, we have seen a series of defections from the theory of decadence in the ranks of the communist left, and the ICC in particular, often accompanying quite severe organisational crises.

This is not the place to analyse the origins of these crises. We can say that crises in political organisations of the proletariat are an inevitable part of their lives, as a glance at the history of the Bolshevik party or the Italian and German left will quickly confirm. Revolutionary organisations are part of the working class, and this is a class that is constantly subjected to the immense pressure of the dominant ideology. The “vanguard” cannot escape this pressure and is obliged to engage in a permanent combat against it. Organisational crises generally occur at the point where a part or whole of the organisation is confronted with – or succumbing to - a particularly acute dose of the dominant ideology. Very often these convulsions are initiated or exacerbated by the necessity to confront new situations or by wider crises in society.

The crises in the ICC have nearly always been centred around questions of organisation and political behaviour. But it is also noticeable that virtually all of the most important splits in our ranks have called into question our view of the historic epoch as well.  

The GCI: is progress a bourgeois myth?

In 1987, in International Review n° 48, we began the publication of a new series entitled “Understanding the decadence of capitalism”. This was in response to a growing body of evidence that elements in or around the revolutionary movement were having second thoughts about the concept of decadence. The first three articles in the series[2] were a response to the positions of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, which had originated as the result of a split with the ICC at the end of the 70s. At least some of the elements who initially formed the GCI had seen themselves as continuators of the work of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, opposing what they saw as the councilist deviations of the ICC.  But following further splits within the GCI itself the group evolved towards what the IR articles described as “anarcho-punk Bordigism”: a strange combination of concepts drawn from Bordigism, such as the “invariance” of marxism, and a regression towards the voluntarist outlook of a Bakunin. Both these elements led the GCI to vehemently oppose the idea that capitalism had been through an ascendant and a decadent phase, principally in the article “’Theories of decadence or decadence of theory?”  Le Communiste n° 23, 1985.

The IR articles refuted a number of the charges levelled by the GCI. It attacked the GCI’s gross sectarianism which threw proletarian groups who argue that capitalism is decadent into the same sack as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Moonies and neo-nazis; they exposed their ignorant claim that the concept of decadence arose after the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave when “certain products of the victory of the counter-revolution began to theorise a ‘long period’ of stagnation and ‘decline”; above all they show that what underlies the GCI’s “anti-decadentism” is an abandonment of the materialist analysis of history in favour of  anarchist idealism.

What the GCI really rejects in the concept of decadence is the notion that capitalism was once an ascendant system, was still capable of playing a progressive role for humanity: in fact, the GCI, rejects the very notion of historical progress. For them, this is mere ideology, justifying capitalism’s “civilising” mission: “The bourgeoisie presents all the modes of production which preceded it as ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ and, as historical evolution moves on, they become progressively ‘civilised’. The capitalist mode of production, of course, is the final and highest incarnation of Civilisation and Progress. The evolutionist vision thus corresponds to the ‘capitalist social being’, and it’s not for nothing that this vision has been applied to all the sciences (ie all the partial interpretations of reality from the bourgeois point of view): the science of nature (Darwin), demography (Malthus), Logical history, philosophy (Hegel)...”[3]

But because the bourgeoisie has a certain vision of progress, where everything culminates in the rule of capital, it does not follow that all concepts of progress are false: this is precisely why Marx did not reject the discoveries of Darwin but saw them – correctly interpreted, using a dialectical rather than a linear vision  - as an additional argument in favour of his view of history.

Neither does the marxist view of historical progress mean that its adherents line themselves up with the ruling class, as the GCI claims: “The decadentists are thus pro-slavery up till a certain date, pro-feudal up till another ...pro-capitalist until 1914! Thus, because of their cult of progress, they are at every step opposed to the class war waged by the exploited, opposed to the communist movements which had the misfortune of breaking out in the ‘wrong’ period…”[4] The 19th century marxist movement, while generally recognising that capitalism had not yet created the conditions of the communist revolution, still saw its role as intransigently defending the class interests of the proletariat within bourgeois society, and “retrospectively” it saw the absolutely vital importance of the revolts of the exploited in previous class societies, even while recognising that these revolts could not have resulted in a communist society.

This superficial radicalism of the GCI is frequently found among those who openly espouse anarchism, and indeed has sometimes provided them with a more “sophisticated” and semi-marxist justification for holding on to their old prejudices. While the latter might acknowledge certain of Marx’s theoretical contributions (critique of political economy, concept of alienation etc), they simply can’t abide his actual political practice, which meant building workers’ parties that participated in parliament, developing the trade unions and even in some cases supporting bourgeois national movements. All these practices (with the possible exception of developing the trade unions) were bourgeois (or authoritarian) then and they are bourgeois (or authoritarian) now.

In fact, however, this blanket rejection of a whole section of the past workers’ movement is no guarantee for a genuinely radical position today. As the second article in the series concludes: “for marxists the forms of the proletarian struggle depend on the objective conditions in which it is taking place and not on the abstract principles of eternal revolt. Only by basing yourself on an objective analysis of the balance of class forces, seen within its historical dynamic, can you judge the validity of a strategy or form of struggle. Without this materialist basis, any position you take up on the means of the proletarian struggle is built on sand; it opens the door to disorientation as soon as the superficial forms of eternal revolt – violence, anti-legalism – appear on the scene”. As proof it cites the GCI’s flirtation with the Shining Path in Peru – an ideological stance it has repeated in its more recent pronouncements on the jihadi violence in Iraq.[5]

 IP:  the charge of “productivism”

The series we published in the 80s also contained a response to another group that had emerged from a split in the ICC in 1985: the External Fraction of the ICC, which published the review Internationalist Perspective. The EFICC, falsely claiming that it had been expelled from the ICC and devoting a large part of its early polemics to proving the ICC’s degeneration and even its Stalinism, had begun life with the declared intention of defending the ICC’s platform from the ICC itself – hence the name of the group. However, before long, it began to question more and more of the ICC’s basic political framework, and central to this was our approach to the problem of decadence. The name “EFICC” was eventually dropped and the group adopted the title of its publication. Unlike the GCI, however, IP has never declared that it rejects the very notions of the ascendancy and decadence of capitalism: its stated aim was to deepen and clarify these concepts. This is certainly a laudable project in itself. The problem for us is that its theoretical innovations add little that is genuinely deep and serve mainly to dilute the basic analysis.

On the one hand, IP began more and more to develop a “parallel” periodisation of capitalism, based on what it defined as the transition from the formal domination to the real domination of capital, which in IP’s version more or less corresponds to the same historical time frame as the “traditional” shift into the period of decline in the first part of the 20th century. In IP’s view, the increasing global penetration of the law of value into all areas of social and economic life constitutes the real domination of capital, and it is this which provides us with a key to understanding the class lines which the ICC previously based on the notion of decadence: the bankruptcy of trade union work, of parliamentarism and support for national liberation, and so on.

It is certainly true that the actual emergence of capitalism as a world economy, its effective “domination” of the globe, corresponds to the opening of the period of decadence; and that, as IP also point out, this period has indeed seen the increasing penetration of the law of value into virtually every corner of human activity. But as we argued in our article in IR 60,[6] IP’s definition of the transition from formal to real domination takes a concept elaborated by Marx and stretches it beyond the specific meaning he gave to it. For Marx the transition in question was rooted in the change from the period of manufacturing – where artisan labour was grouped together by individual capitalists, without really altering the old methods of production – to the factory system proper, based on the collective labourer. In essence this change had already taken place in Marx’s day, even when capitalism only “dominated” a small part of the planet: its future expansion was to be based directly on the “real domination” of the process of production. Our article thus found more consistency in the Bordigists of Communisme ou Civilisation who argued that communism had been possible since 1848 because for them this marked the actual transition to real domination.

But there was another prong to IP’s questioning of the concept of decadence it had inherited from the ICC: the charge of “productivism”: In one of the earliest salvos, Macintosh claimed that all the groups of the communist left from Bilan to existing groups like the ICC and IBRP suffered from this malady: they were  "hopelessly, and inextricably entangled with the productivism that is capital's Trojan horse within the camp of Marxism. This productivism makes the development of technology and the productive forces the very standard of historical and social progress; within its theoretical purview, as long as a mode of production assures technological development it must be judged to be historically progressive”.[7] The ICC’s pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism[8] came in for particular criticism. Rejecting Trotsky’s idea, expressed in the 1938 programmatic document The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, that mankind’s productive forces had actually ceased to grow, our pamphlet defined decadence as a period in which the relations of production act as a fetter on the development of the productive forces but not an absolute barrier, and conducted a thought experiment to show how much capitalism might have developed had it not been held back by its in-built limitations. 

Macintosh honed in on this passage and countered it with various figures which for him indicated such fearsome rates of growth in the epoch of decadence that any notion of decadence as a slackening of the development of the productive forces would have to be replaced by a notion which saw that it was precisely the growth of the system which was so profoundly anti-human – as witness, for example, the deepening ecological crisis.

Articles written by other members of IP continued in the same vein, for example, “For a non-productivist understanding of decadence” by E.R. in IP 44.[9] However, there had already been a rather penetrating reply to Macintosh’s text by M Lazare in IP 29.[10] Leaving aside its occasional caricature of the ICC’s alleged caricatures, this article shows quite well how Macintosh’s critique of productivism was still somewhat caught in a productivist logic.[11] First, it challenged Macintosh’s use of figures, which purport to show us that capitalism had grown by a factor of 30 in the 80 years since 1900. ML pointed out that this figure looks much less impressive when it is broken down to an annual rate, giving us average growth of 4.36% per year. But, more importantly, he argues that if we are talking quantitatively, then despite the impressive growth rates that capital in decline has been capable of displaying, when we look at the gigantic waste of productive forces entailed by bureaucracy, arms, war, advertising, finance, a host of useless “services” and recurring or quasi-permanent economic crisis, the “actual” expansion of real productive activity would have been far, far greater. In this sense the notion of capital as a fetter which holds back but does not totally block the development of the forces of production, even in capitalist terms, remains essentially valid. As Marx put it, capital is the living contradiction, and “the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.”[12]

However, and again quite rightly, ML does not leave the argument there. The question of the “quality” of the development of the productive forces in decadence is posed immediately you bring factors like waste and war into the equation. Contrary to certain of ML’s insinuations, the ICC view of decadence has never been purely quantitative, but has always focused on the social and human “cost” of the prolonged survival of the system. Above all, there is nothing in our view of decadence which excludes the idea, also brought in by ML, that we need to have a much deeper concept of what the development of productive forces actually means. Productive forces are not inherently capital, a delusion fostered both by the primitivists who see technological development itself as the source of all our woes, and the Stalinists who measured the progress towards communism in tons of cement and steel. At root, mankind’s “productive forces” are his powers of creation, and the movement towards communism can only be measured by the degree to which humanity’s creative capacities have been liberated. The accumulation of capital  -“production for production’s sake” - was once a step towards this, but once it has laid down the prerequisites of a world communist society, it ceases to play any further progressive role. In this sense, far from being ruled by a productivist vision, the Italian communist left were among the first to criticise it openly, since they rejected Trotsky’s hymns to the miracles of socialist production in Stalin’s USSR, and insisted that the interests of the working class (even in a “proletarian state”) were necessarily antagonistic to the demands of accumulation (ML also notes this, contrary to Macintosh’s accusations against the left communist tradition)

For Marx, and for us, capital’s “progressive mission” can be gauged by the degree to which it contributes towards freeing man’s creative powers in a society where the measure of wealth is no longer labour time but free time. Capitalism constituted an unavoidable step towards this horizon, but its decadence is signalled precisely by the fact that this potential can now only be realised by abolishing the laws of capital.

It is crucial to envisage this problem in its full historical dimension, one that embraces the future as well as the past. Capital’s attempts to maintain accumulation in the straitjacket imposed by its global limitations creates a situation where not only is humanity’s potential being held back – its very survival is under threat as contradictions in the capitalist social relation express themselves more and more violently, pushing society towards ruin. This is surely what Marx hints at in the Grundrisse when he talks about development as decay.[13]

A current illustration: China, whose dizzying rates of growth have so besotted many of the former stalwarts of decadence theory. Has Chinese capital developed the productive forces? In its own terms, yes, but what is the global and historic context in which this is taking place? It’s certainly true that the expansion of Chinese capital has increased the size of the global industrial proletariat, but this has come about through a vast process of de-industrialisation in west, which has meant the loss of many key sectors of the working class in the original countries of capital, along with a great deal of their traditions of struggle. At the same time, the ecological costs of the Chinese “miracle” are gigantic. The raw materials needed for Chinese industrial growth result in the accelerated pillaging of the world’s resources and the resulting production brings with it a grave increase in global pollution. At the economic level, China is entirely dependent on the consumer markets of the west. Both with regard to the internal market, and to exports, the longer-term prospects of the Chinese economy are not at all positive, just like those of Europe and the US. The only difference is that China is beginning from a higher point of departure.[14] But its advantages, or at least some of them, could be lost if it in turn falls victim to a series of bankruptcies.[15] Sooner or later China can only become part of the recessionary dynamic of the world economy.

 Marx, in the late 19th century, saw reasons to hope that capitalist development would not be necessary in Russia because he could see that on a world scale the conditions for communism were already coming together. How much truer is this today?   

Hesitations in the IBRP?

In 2003-4 we began a new series on decadence – in response to a number of new assaults on the concept, but in particular to alarming signs that the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (now the Internationalist Communist Tendency), which had in general based its political positions on a notion of decadence, was also being influenced by the prevailing “anti-decadentist” pressures.

In a statement “Comments on the latest crisis in the ICC” dated February 2002 and published in Internationalist Communist Review n°21, the concept of decadence is criticised as being “as universal as it is confusing […] alien to the critique of political economy [] foreign to the method and the arsenal of the critique of political economy”. We are also asked “What role then does the concept of decadence play in terms of the militant critique of political economy, i.e. for a deeper analysis of the characteristics and dynamic of capitalism in the period in which we live? None. To the extent that the word itself never appears in the three volumes constituting Capital.[16]

A contribution published in Italian in Prometeo n°8, Series VI (December 2003), and in English in Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, third series, summer 2004,[17] “For a definition of the concept of decadence”, contained a whole series of worrying assertions.

The theory of decadence is apparently seen as leading to a fatalist notion of the trajectory of capitalism and the role of revolutionaries:  “The ambiguity lies in the fact that decadence, or the progressive decline of the capitalist mode of production, proceeds from a kind of ineluctable process of self-destruction whose causes are traceable to the essential aspect of its own being [...] the disappearance and destruction of the capitalist economic form is an historically given event, economically ineluctable and socially predetermined. This, as well as being an infantile and idealistic approach, ends up by having negative repercussions politically, creating the hypothesis that, to see the death of capitalism, it is sufficient to sit on the banks of the river, or, at most, in crisis situations (and only then), it is enough to create the subjective instruments of the class struggle as the last impulse to a process which is otherwise irreversible.” 

 Decadence no longer seems to result in the alternative between socialism and barbarism, since capitalism is endlessly capable of renewing itself: “The contradictory aspect of capitalist production, the crises which are derived from this, the repetition of the process of accumulation which is momentarily interrupted but which receives new blood through the destruction of excess capital and means of production, do not automatically lead to its destruction. Either the subjective factor intervenes, which has in the class struggle its material fulcrum and in the crises its economically determinant premise, or the economic system reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions, without creating in this way the conditions for its own self-destruction

As in the 2002 statement, the new article argued that the concept of decadence has little to do with a serious critique of political economy: it could only be considered useful if we can “prove” it economically, by examining the tendencies in the rate of profit: “Nor is the evolutionary theory valid, according to which capitalism is historically characterised by a progressive phase and a decadent one, if no coherent economic explanation is given (...) The investigation of decadence either individuates these mechanisms which regulate the deceleration of the valorisation process of capital, with all the consequences which that brings with it, or it remains within a false perspective, which prophesises in vain (...) But the listing of these economic and social phenomena, once they have been identified and described, cannot, by itself, be considered as a demonstration of the decadent phase of capitalism. These are only the symptoms, and the primary cause which brings them into existence is to be identified in the law of the profit crisis.” 

The two International Review articles written in reply[18] showed that while the Internationalist Communist Party  - Battaglia Comunista, the TCI’s section in Italy, from whom this contribution originated – had always been somewhat inconsistent in its adherence to the notion of decadence, this marked a real regression to the “Bordigist” view which had been one of the elements leading to the 1952 split in the Internationalist Communist Party. Bordiga – whose position was strongly opposed by Damen, as we saw in a previous article in this series[19] -  had claimed that the “theory of the descending curve” was fatalist, while also denying any objective limits to the growth of capital. As for the idea of economically “proving” decadence, the recognition that 1914 opened up a qualitative new phase in the life of capital had been affirmed by marxists like Lenin, Luxemburg and the communist left above all on the basis of social, political and military factors – like any good physician, they had diagnosed the disease from its most evident symptoms, above all world war and world revolution.[20]

We are unclear about how this discussion has been pursued within the ICT following the publication of this article by Battaglia[21]. The fact remains however that both the articles we have mentioned here are a reflection of a more general flight away from the coherence of the Italian left, an expression of this trend within one of the most solid groups of this tradition.

The regression from decadence theory from elements in the communist left may be seen by some as a liberation from a rigid dogmatism and an opening towards theoretical enrichment. But while we are the last to deny the need to elucidate and deepen the whole question of capitalism’s ascent and decline,[22] it seems to us that what we are facing in the main here is a retreat from the clarity of the marxist tradition and a concession to the enormous weight of bourgeois ideology, which is necessarily predicated on faith in the eternal, self-rejuvenating nature of this social order. 

Aufheben: It is capital that is “objectivist”, not marxism

As we said at the beginning of this article, this problem – the incapacity to grasp capitalism as a transient form of social organisation which has already proved its obsolescence – is particularly prevalent in the new generation of politicised minorities, who are strongly influenced by anarchism. But anarchism as such has little to offer at the theoretical level, above all when it comes to the critique of political economy, and is usually obliged to borrow from marxism if wants to give the appearance of real depth. To some extent, this has been the role of the Aufheben group in the libertarian communist milieu in Britain and internationally, much of which has eagerly awaited the yearly production of the Aufheben magazine to provide it with weighty analyses of the questions of the hour written from the standpoint of “autonomist marxism”. In particular, the series on decadence[23] has been seen by many as the definitive refutation of this concept of capitalist decline, seen as a heritage of the mechanical marxism of the Second International, an “objectivist” view of the dynamic of capitalism which totally underestimates the subjective dimension of the class struggle.

 “For the left Social-democrats it is seen as essential to insist capitalism is in decay - is approaching its collapse. The meaning of 'marxism' is being inscribed as accepting that capitalism is bankrupt and thus that revolutionary action is necessary. Thus they do engage in revolutionary action, but as we have seen, because the focus is on the objective contradictions of the system with revolutionary subjective action a reaction to it, they do not relate to the true necessary prerequisite of the end of capitalism – the concrete development of the revolutionary subject. It seemed to the more revolutionary members of the movement such as Lenin and Luxemburg that a revolutionary position was a position of belief in breakdown while the theory of breakdown had in fact worked to allow a reformist position at the start of the Second International. The point was that the theory of capitalist decline as a theory of capitalism's collapse from its own objective contradictions involves an essentially contemplative stance before the objectivity of capitalism, while the real requirement for revolution is the breaking of that contemplative attitude.[24]

Aufheben considers that both the Trotskyists and left communists of today are the heirs of this (left) social democratic tradition: “Our criticism is that their theory contemplates the development of capitalism, the practical consequences of which being the fact that the trots move after anything that moves in order to recruit for the final showdown while the left communists stand aloof waiting for the pure example of revolutionary action by the workers. Behind this apparent opposition in ways of relating to struggle, they share a conception of capitalism's collapse, which means that they do not learn from the real movement. Although there is a tendency to slip into pronouncements that socialism is inevitable, in general for the decadence theorists it is that socialism will not come inevitably - we should not all go off to the pub - but capitalism will breakdown. This theory can then accompany the Leninist building of an organisation in the present or else, as with Mattick, it may await that moment of collapse when it becomes possible to create a proper revolutionary organisation. The theory of decay and the Crisis is upheld and understood by the party, the proletariat must put itself behind its banner. That is to say 'we understand History, follow our banner'. The theory of decline fits comfortably with the Leninist theory of consciousness, which of course took much from Kautsky who ended his commentary on the Erfurt Program with the prediction that the middle classes would stream ‘into the Socialist Party and hand in hand with the irresistibly advancing proletariat, follow its banner to victory and triumph’.

As can be seen from this claim that the theory of decadence leads logically to a “Leninist” theory of class consciousness, Aufheben’s general outlook has been influenced by Socialisme ou Barbarie (whose abandonment of the marxist theory of crisis in the 1960s was examined in a previous article in this series[25]) and in particular by Italian autonomism.[26] Both these currents shared a criticism of an “objectivist” reading of Marx, where a focus on the remorseless working out of the economic laws of capital minimises the impact of the class struggle on the organisation of capitalist society and fails to grasp the importance of the subjective experience of the working class in the face of its exploitation. At the same time Aufheben were aware that Marx’s theory of alienation is founded precisely on the subjectivity of the proletariat and criticised Cardan (S ou B’s main theoretician) for erecting a criticism of Marx which failed to take into account this key element of his thought: “S or B's 'fundamental contradiction' does not grasp the full radicality of Marx's critique of alienation. In other words they presented as an innovation what was actually an impoverishment of Marx's critique. [27]

The autonomists also went beyond Cardan’s superficial idea that Marx had written “a monumental work (Capital) from which the class struggle is virtually absent.[28] Harry Cleaver’s book Reading Capital Politically, published in 1979, which explicitly identifies itself with the tradition of “autonomist marxism”, demonstrates very well that in Marx’s approach, capital is defined as a social relation and as such necessarily includes the proletariat’s resistance to exploitation, which in turn modifies capital’s way of organising itself. This was evident, for example, in the struggle for the reduction of the working day and the switch to the extraction of relative surplus value rather than absolute surplus value (during the 19th century), and the system’s growing need for state planning to deal with the proletarian danger (in the 20th century).

This is a valid corrective to a mechanistic “Kautskyite” view which did indeed develop during the period of the Second International, according to which the inexorable laws of capitalist economy will more or less guarantee that power will fall “like a ripe fruit” into the hands of a well-organised social democratic party. Furthermore, as Cleaver also points out, this approach, which really does underestimate the subjective development of class consciousness, is not avoided by a kind of ultra-Leninism which interposes the party as the only true element of subjectivity, as in Trotsky’s famous dictum that “the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.[29] The party is indeed a subjective factor, but its capacity to grow and influence the class movement depends on a much wider development of proletarian combat and consciousness.

It’s also true that the bourgeoisie is obliged to reckon with the struggle of the working class in its attempts to manage society - not only at the economic level but also at the political and military level. And the ICC’s analyses of the world situation have certainly taken this into account. Several examples can be given: when we interpret the choice of political teams to run the “democratic” state, we always define the class struggle as a central element. This is why during the 1980s we talked about the bourgeoisie’s preference for keeping left parties in opposition to better deal with proletarian reactions to austerity measures. By the same token, the strategy of privatisation not only has an economic function dictated by the abstract laws of the economy (generalising the sanction of the market to every stage of the labour process), but also a social function aimed at fragmenting the proletariat’s response to attacks on its living standards, which are no longer seen as emanating directly from a single boss, the capitalist state. On the more historical plane, we have always maintained that the weight of the class struggle, whether overt or potential, plays a crucial role in determining the “historic course” towards war or revolution. We cite these examples to show that there is no logical link between holding a theory of capitalist decline and denying the factor of class subjectivity in determining the general dynamic of capitalist society.

But the autonomists lost the plot altogether when they concluded that the economic crisis which broke to the surface at the end of the 1960s was itself was a product of the class struggle.  Even if workers’ struggles can at certain moments deepen the bourgeoisie’s economic difficulties and block its “solutions”, we also know only too well that the economic crisis can reach catastrophic proportions in phases when the class struggle is in profound retreat. The Depression of the 1930s provides us with the clearest evidence of this. The view that workers’ struggles provoked the economic crisis had a certain plausibility in the 70s when both phenomena appeared at the same time, but Aufheben themselves are able to see its limitations in the section in the series on decadence which deals with the autonomists: “The class struggle theory of crisis lost its way somewhat in the '80s, for while in the seventies the breaking of capital's objective laws was plain, with capital's partial success the emergent subject was knocked back. It appears that during the '80s we have seen the objective laws of capital given free reign to run amok through our lives. A theory which connected the manifestations of crisis to the concrete behaviours of the class found little offensive struggle to connect to and yet crisis remained. The theory had become less appropriate to the conditions”[30].

So what is left of the equation between decadence theory and “objectivism”? Earlier on we mentioned that Aufheben correctly criticised Cardan for ignoring the real implications of Marx’s theory of alienation. Unfortunately, they commit the same error when they amalgamate the theory of capitalist decline with the “objectivist” vision of capital as nothing more than a machine regulated by its clockwork, inhuman laws. But for marxism, capital is not something hovering above humanity like God; or rather, like God, it is engendered by human activity. But this is an alienated activity, which means that it takes on a life independent of its creators – in the end, both of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, since both are driven by the abstract laws of the market towards an abyss of economic and social disaster.  This objectivism of capital is precisely what the proletarian revolution aims to abolish, not by humanising these laws but replacing them with the conscious subordination of production to human need.

In World Revolution n°168 (October 93)[31] we published an initial response to Aufheben’s articles on decadence. The central argument in the article is that, in attacking the theory of decadence, Aufheben are rejecting Marx’s entire approach to history. In particular, by raising the charge of “objectivism”, they ignore the critical breakthrough made by marxism in rejecting both vulgar materialist and idealist methodologies, and thus in overcoming the dichotomy between the objective and the subjective, between freedom and necessity.[32]

Interestingly, not only did Aufheben’s original articles on decadence recognise the inadequacy of the autonomists’ explanation of the crisis: in a highly critical introduction to the series that accompanies the online version of the series on libcom.org,[33] they admit that they had failed to grasp precisely this relationship between the objective and the subjective factors in a number of marxist thinkers (including Rosa Luxemburg, who certainly defended the notion of capitalist decline) and accepted that our criticisms of them on this key point had been quite valid. Indeed, they realised after the publication of the third article that the whole series had gone off the rails and for this reason had been abandoned. This self-critique is not particularly well known, while the original series continues to be referenced as a final smack down for decadence theory.

Such self-examination can only be welcome, but we are not convinced that its results have been especially positive. The most obvious indication being that, precisely at a time where the economic impasse facing this system seems more and more obvious, the most recent editions of Aufheben show that the group has been engaging in a mountain of labour to produce a very disappointing molehill: for them, the “debt crisis” which broke out in 2007 is not in the least an expression of an underlying problem in the accumulation process but arises essentially from the errors of the financial sector. What’s more it could quite easily lead to a new and extended “upswing” like the one that supposedly preceded it in the 90s and 2000s.[34] We have not got the space to go further into this article here, but this is beginning to look like anti-decadentism reaching the final phase of its decline.  

A very provisional conclusion

We will end this particular polemic here, but the debate about this whole issue will certainly continue. It has been made increasingly urgent by the fact that for more and more people, above all in the younger generation, are becoming aware that capitalism really does have no future, that the crisis is indeed terminal. This is more and more the question to be debated in the class battles and social revolts that the crisis is provoking all over the globe. It is more than ever vital to provide a clear theoretical framework for understanding the historic nature of the impasse facing the capitalist system, of insisting that this is a mode of production that is out of control and is heading towards self-destruction, and thus of pointing out the impossibility of all reformist solutions aimed at making capital more human or democratic. In short, of demonstrating that the alternative of socialism or barbarism, proclaimed loudly and clearly by revolutionaries in 1914, is more relevant today than ever. Such a call is anything but a plea for passive acceptance of the way society is going. On the contrary it is a demand for the proletariat to act, to become increasingly conscious and to open up the road to a communist future which is possible, necessary, but anything but guaranteed. 

Gerrard 5/12

                  

 

[3]. Ibid.

[4].  Ibid.

[7]. Internationalist Perspective n° 28, autumn 1995

[9]. internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_44_decadence-2.html.

[10]. internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_29_decadence.html

[11]. Macintosh was not the first or last of our former members to be so dazzled by capitalism’s growth rates that they began questioning or abandoning the concept of capitalist decadence. Towards the end of the 90s, in the wake of a serious crisis centred once again on the question of organisation, a number of former members of the ICC constituted the Paris Discussion Circle, among them RV, who wrote the Decadence of Capitalism and the articles responding to the GCI’s critique of “decadentism”. Although the question of decadence had never been a focus of the debates around the internal crisis, the Circle very quickly published a major text rejecting the concept of decadence altogether – its essential argument focusing on the considerable development of the productive forces since 1914 and above all since 1945 (cercledeparis.free.fr/indexORIGINAL.html).  

 

 

[12]. Capital Volume 3, chapter 15 part II.

[13]. On this last point, see our article from the series Communism is not just a nice idea but a material necessity: 'The study of Capital and the foundations of Communism'.

[14]. The IMF estimates that “the Chinese economy could see its growth cut in half if the crisis of the eurozone gets worse” (Les Echos. www.lesechos.fr/entreprises-secteurs/finance-marches/actu/0201894521951-...).

[15]. To maintain growth rates in spite of the world economy slowing down, China has been betting on its internal market, through local administrations running up mounting debts. But here again there is no miracle in sight. You can’t get into endless debt without creating the risk of bankruptcy, and this certainly applies to the Chinese commercial banks: “to avoid a cascade of defaults on payment (the latter) have put off into the future a large part of the debts of local bodies, or are in the process of doing so” (Les Echos)

[20]. The IR 120 article also exposes the hypocritical claims of a group of elements who really had been excluded from the ICC for their unacceptable behaviour: the “Internal Fraction of the ICC”, who published a fawning article about Battaglia’s contribution. Having attacked the ICC for abandoning the concept of decadence via the theory of decomposition (which has no meaning outside of a concept of decadence) the political project of this “Fraction”– to attack the ICC while flattering the IBRP -  was revealed very clearly in this article.

[21]. It seems that the article from Prometeo 8 was a discussion document and not a statement of position by the IBRP or one of its affiliated groups, which made the title of our response (“Battaglia Comunista abandons the marxist concept of decadence”) somewhat inappropriate

[22]. For example: the debate on the economic basis of the post-war boom (see https://en.internationalism.org/ir/133/economic_debate_decadence, and articles in subsequent issues) and the recognition that decadence has a history, leading to the concept of decomposition as the final stage of capitalist decline.

[23]. “Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory?, which began with issue n° 2, summer 1993.

[26]. “The rise and fall of Autonomia Operaia”, IR 16: https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR016_auto_operaia.htm

[28]. Cardan, Modern capitalism and revolution. From the chapter “Political implications of the “classical” theory”.

[29] The Death Agony of Capitalism. See the article in this series in IR 146: “Decadence of Capitalism: For revolutionaries, the Great Depression confirms the obsolescence of capitalism” https://en.internationalism.org/ir/146/great-depression

[32] . See also the article in this series in International Review n° 141” The theory of capitalist decline and the struggle against revisionism”, which contains a criticism of Aufheben’s notion that decadence theory begins in the Second International. https://en.internationalism.org/ir/141/capitalist-decline-revisionism

[33]. https://libcom.org/article/aufheben-decadence In this introduction, Aufheben make it clear that at the beginning of the group, the ICC’s writings had been an important reference point. However, they argue that our dogmatic and sectarian approach to them (for example at a meeting in London about the future of the European Union) convinced them that it was not possible to discuss with us. It is true that the ICC had a sectarian approach to Aufheben to some extent, and this was also reflected in our 1993 article, for example at the end when we say to the group that it would be better if it was to disappear.

[34]. The concluding paragraphs of the article, published in 2011, read: there seems little to suggest we have entered a long downswing, or that capitalism is now mired in stagnation other than the financial crisis itself. Indeed the rapid recovery in profits, and the confidence of much of the bourgeoisie in the long-term prospects of renewed capital accumulation, would seem to suggest otherwise. But if global capitalism is still in the middle of a long upswing, with historically high rates of profits, how are we to explain the unforeseen financial crisis of 2007-08?

“As we have long argued, against the ‘stagnationist’ orthodoxy, ‘upswing’  theory has been correct in grasping that the restructuring of the global accumulation of capital that has occurred in the past decade, particularly the integration into the world economy of China and Asia, has led to the restoration of profit rates and, as a consequence, a sustained economic upswing. But as we now recognise, the problem is that the upswing theory has failed to adequately grasp the importance of the emergence of global banking and finance, and the role this has played in bringing about this restructuring.

“Thus, in order to overcome the limitations of both the ‘stagnationist’ and ‘upswinger’ theories of the crisis it was necessary to examine the relation between the emergence and development of global banking and finance and the global restructuring of real capital accumulation that has occurred over the past thirty years. On the basis of this examination we have been able to conclude that the financial crisis of 2007-8 was caused neither by an accident due to misguided policy, nor a crisis in the financial system that simply reflected an underlying crisis of stagnation of the real accumulation of capital. But instead, the underlying cause of the financial crisis was an oversupply of loanable money-capital within the global banking and financial system that has arisen since the late 1990s. This in turn has been the result of developments in the real accumulation of capital - such as the rise of China, the take off of the ‘new economy’ and the continued liquidation of the ‘old economy’ - that have been central to sustaining the long upturn.

Hence, we might tentatively conclude that the nature and significance of the financial crisis is not that of a decisive turning point leading to an economic downturn or the end of neoliberalism as many have supposed, but more of a point of inflection pointing to a new phase in the long upturn.  The significance of this new phase and the implications it has for the future development of global capitalism and the struggle against it is a question that we have no space to take up here. Aufheben no. 19 https://libcom.org/article/return-crisis-part-2-nature-and-significance-crisis

 

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Polemic

Postscript to Decadence of Capitalism XIII: Rejection and Regressions

 

Postscript to the last article in our series on the decadence of capitalism, ‘Decadence of capitalism: rejection and regressions’ (IR 149)[1]

The aim of the original article was to respond to the widespread trend among a number of currents in or around the revolutionary movement to reject the notion of capitalist decadence, a foundation stone for the class positions contained in our platform. We pointed out that this tendency has affected elements in the communist left as well as those coming from anarchism or ‘libertarian’ versions of marxism. One of the groups we referred to was the Internationalist Communist Tendency, formerly the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. We pointed to two articles published in 2002 and 2003 which seemed to us to be expressions of this same trend, since both contained formulations which put the basic concept into question, identifying it with a fatalistic notion that all revolutionaries have to do is sit on their hands and wait for the inevitable collapse of the system and its equally inevitable replacement by socialism.

We noted in our article that the second of the two articles mentioned ‘For a definition of the concept of decadence’[2],   published in Italian in Prometeo n°8, Series VI (December 2003), and in English in Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, third series, summer 2004, was in fact an individual contribution and did not necessarily express the views of either the Italian affiliate of the (then) IBRP or the IBRP as a whole. We also admitted that we were not clear how the discussion about this question within the ICT has evolved since the publication of this text.

As far as we know, the ICT has not published any of the internal discussions relating to this question, so we could be forgiven for some degree of ignorance about how the debate had turned out. However, as a comrade of the ICT in the UK pointed out to the author of the above article in a recent conversation, we should certainly have taken note of the text IBRP’s ‘Refining the concept of decadence’ published in September 2005[3], which contained the following introduction: “The document which follows is the result of a wide-ranging debate among all the organisations which adhere to the International Bureau. The common work is a measure of the increasing degree of homogeneity of the Bureau itself which is a fundamental premise for us to reach the objective which we have set ourselves – the rebuilding of the revolutionary party on an international scale.”

In short, this is a collective statement by the IBRP/ICT that reaffirms the organisation’s conviction that capitalism is a system in decline, posing humanity with the perspective of socialism or a relapse into barbarism. There are many elements in the text which we could take issue with – an over-reliance on Lenin’s particular concept of capitalist decay, including his vision of a labour aristocracy, and the persistence of a redundant polemic against unnamed elements who conclude that the notion of capitalist decadence means that socialist revolution is inevitable. We will certainly come back to some of these ideas in future contributions. However, in its essence, it seems to us that this was a healthy response of the IBRP to some more important confusions which had appeared in the organisation and which were expressed in the previously cited articles.

We would also like to point to a more recent article which has appeared on the ICT website which we also think has a number of positive features: ‘Capitalist crisis, causes and consequences, a brief overview’[4]. In contrast to the 2003 Prometeo contribution, which argues in favour of capitalism’s capacity for perpetual renewal through crises, the new article explicitly affirms that the current world economic crisis is a sign of a terminal stage in capitalism’s decline. And it also opens the door to a more fruitful debate within the revolutionary camp by beginning with the assertion that “Among the various revolutionary organisations the explanation for the capitalist crisis generally centres on two main issues, the tendency for profit rates to decline and the difficulty in finding markets for the enormous productive capacity capitalism generates”. Although the ICT obviously adheres to the first position, we would interpret this paragraph to mean that the second approach still lies within the marxist tradition and is not alien to it.

In pointing out that revolutionary organisations can be affected by the siren songs of bourgeois ideology – in this case, the refrain that capitalism is still a vibrant, ascending system – we do not exempt ourselves from this pressure. On the contrary, the majority of cases referred to in the IR 149 article have their origins in the ICC itself. What is important however is that proletarian organisations have the capacity to fight against such pressure not merely by repeating the basic acquisitions of the past, but by developing them and taking them forward on a firm theoretical foundation.

Gerrard, February 2013.

 

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International Review - Special Issue - Imperialism in the Far East, past and present

For some years now, it has been clear that the rise of China as both an economic and a military power poses some major questions for the analysis of the world situation. This is why we have decided to devote a special online issue of the International Review to an overview of imperialism in the Far East from the 19th century to the present day, in order to situate current events within a general and historical setting.

You can read the articles online in this website, or by downloading the PDF.

Capitalism in the ascendant: prior to World War I

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Imperialism in the Far East

Japan: a newly emerging capitalist force

Between the middle of the 17th and the middle of the 19th century, Japan cut itself off from the rest of the world. No foreigner was allowed into the country, no Japanese was allowed to leave the country without permission, trade with other countries was limited to very few ports. Even if there was a very limited and weak dynamic of trade developing within the country, the real historical breakthrough occurred when the country after almost two centuries of self-imposed seclusion was forcefully opened up by capitalism. As Marx and Engels analysed in the Communist Manifesto in 1848: “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.... It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production..”(first chapter of the Communist Manifesto, Bourgeois and Proletarians).

In 1853, shortly after the first opium war had ravaged China, US navy vessels first appeared in Japanese waters and enforced mainly free trade. Following continuous Japanese resistance against the penetration of foreign traders, in June 1863 US, Dutch, French and British ships bombarded the Japanese coast. After this united military aggression, which showed that at that time the foreign capitalist nations could still work together in the opening up of Japan, the Japanese ruling class renounced from any resistance against the foreign capitalists and quickly started to introduce profound political and economic changes.

In Japan the worm eaten feudal-absolutist order of the Tokugawa-Shogunate (the ruling feudal family) was replaced by a strongly united state under the government of the Meiji emperor in 1868. “Capitalism did not come because a rising bourgeoisie vanquished the feudal class in a revolutionary struggle, but because a feudal class transformed itself into a bourgeoisie.”. Although there have been “forces for change from feudal absolutism in the direction of capitalism, they were too weak for a revolution”. (Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils, "Japanese imperialism"). They had to rely on the opening up of capitalism from “outside”. The midwives helping to give birth to capitalism in Japan were the foreign capitalists, who gave a big boost to the rising Japanese bourgeoisie.

The transition from feudal to bourgeois society was not accompanied by a political revolution.

Unlike most Europeans countries, where private capital acted as the driving force in the economy and where liberalism propagated a laissez-faire policy, in Japan it was the Japanese State which was going to play a dominant role in the advancement of capitalism. In 1868 the emperor nominated the first planning commission. The Japanese ruling class started to study systematically the conditions of capitalist functioning in other countries with the aim of copying and applying them as efficiently as possible.1

Only a few ships were sufficient for the foreign capitalist nations to enforce their penetration in Japan. Unlike other countries of the far East, Japan was not occupied, no foreign armies settled on the islands.

At the same time, since Japan was a group of islands with almost no raw materials, it had to rely on the supply of raw materials from other countries. The country closest to Japan is Korea – behind which lie the Manchuria region of China and Russia. In the south there is another island Taiwan. While most of the European states quickly had to direct their zeal of conquest towards far distant areas (often in other continents as in Africa, Asia, South America) Japan found its zone of expansion in the immediate proximity. Only 10 years after being opened up by foreign capitalists, Japan fell upon Taiwan. In 1874 Japan occupied the southern tip of Formosa. But this first major attempt to expand alarmed Britain and China, which sent 11,000 troops to the southern part of Taiwan. At that time Japan did not yet have enough military power to engage in a larger combat and consequently withdrew from Taiwan.

Soon after that Japan started to turn its ambitions towards Korea. In 1885 Japan and China signed a treaty, according to which neither of the countries would send troops to Korea without the permission of the other country. Following this temporary 'stalemate', Japan decided to build a fleet which could control the Chinese Sea.

As we shall see, Japan embarked upon a first war with China in 1894 and 10 years later with Russia in 1904. Thus barely 3-4 decades after capitalism had started to establish in Japan, the country went to war with two of its rivals in the area.

Unhampered by any colonial power, Japan quickly became one itself, and even if it arrived late on the world market it quickly became the dominant force in the region, which had to expand forcefully and become the main challenger in the area.

As a consequence its military expenditure was constantly on the rise. At the end of the 19th century, Japan began to finance its army by credits which were fuelled by British and American funds. 50% of its foreign loans went into war and armaments. Government spending tripled between 1893–1903, and it doubled again during the course of the Russian-Japanese 1905 war. Its modern fleet was composed of battleships made in Great Britain, its canons were German Krupp-made guns. When Japan defeated China in the 1894 war, it allowed Japan to impose a tremendous financial burden on its neighbour, forcing it to pay 360 million yen, large parts of which only served to finance a war program of armament expansion. The national debt rose from 235 million yen in 1893 to 539 million in 1903, it then soared to 2,592 million yen in 1913 as a result of large war bond issues. 2

Thus Japan had become the biggest imperialist shark in the region already in the ascendant phase of capitalism. The country could not have gained this dominant position without the early central role of the State and its militarist orientation.

1 There was almost no private industry during the early phase of Japanese capitalism. The first Ministry of Industry was founded in 1870. At the beginning of the 1870s paper money was introduced. In 1872 the first railway way line was opened between Tokyo and Yokohama (i.e. 40 years after the first railways were operated in GB). The country roads, which were barricaded by the provincial potentates, had to open for general traffic. Road taxes were abolished. In 1869 the four classes, Samurai, peasants, traders and craftsmen were all declared equal, the difference of clothes amongst the classes were abolished, peasants were entitled to grow the crop they chose. For more information see: Anton Pannekoek: The Workers' Councils.

2Mainly as a result of the Sino-Japanese war, and of growing armament and colonial enterprise which followed in its wake, the expenditures of the national government tripled from 1893-1903. Again, they more than doubled in the course of the Russo-Japanese war (...) To finance this burden taxes were progressively boosted... The indemnity of 360 million yen secured from China in 1895 was also largely used to finance an interwar program of armament expansion. These resources proved inadequate, however, and resort was had to extensive borrowing. The national debt rose from 235 million yen in 1893 to 539 million in 1903. It then soared to 2592 million yen in 1913... Nearly 50% of the government‘s entire budget in 1913 was devoted to the Army and Navy, military pension and war debt service... In fact, the “extraordinary” military expenditures charged to the war with Russia were largely balanced by borrowings in London and Paris. Before the war (i.e. in 1903) the outstanding total of Japan’s national loans issued abroad amounted to only 98 million yen. By the end of 1913 it had climbed to 1525 million (...) foreign loans had an inflationary effect within the country.

(William Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan, p. 35, Princeton, 1954), see also: W.W. Lockwood, The State and Economic Entreprise in Japan, Princeton, 1969)

 

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China: a decomposing society prised open by opium and war

When being opened up by capitalism, both Japan and China were ruled by declining dynasties. As in Japan, the local mode of production in China was also unable to compete with capitalism. Neither on a commercial, nor above all on a military level was the ruling Manchu dynasty able to resist foreign capitalist penetration. As in Japan, the triumphant march of capitalism did not come through the imposition of a trading capitalist class from within the country, but capitalism was mainly imposed from outside.

Within the framework of this article we have no space to go at greater length into the reasons for this profound stagnation of Chinese society. In the 1850s, Marx and Engels started to analyse the deeper roots of this phenomena. “China, one of those faltering Asian empires, which one after the other fell prey to the entrepreneurial spirit of the European race, was so weak, so much collapsed, that it did not even have the strength to go through the crisis of a people’s revolution, so that an acute indignation has turned into a chronic and probably incurable disease, an empire, so much decomposed, that it was almost unable to rule its own people or to offer resistance to the foreign aggressors".1

In his works, Marx, in order to understand the reasons why major non-European civilisations did not evolve towards capitalism, put forward the concept of an Asiatic mode of production.2

Two opium wars played a vital role in the opening of China for capitalism.

After opium was massively imported by the British East Indian company in the early 19th century, the Chinese ruling class for fear of losing competitiveness in relation to its rivals, tried to curb the consumption of opium in the late 1830s. No less than twenty million people were addicted to the vice at the time. Many state officials were addicted to opium. The high level of consumption in itself was already an expression of a decomposing society.

The most advanced European capitalist country, Britain, (later with French participation) used the resistance of the Chinese ruling class against the massive ‘invasion’ of opium as a pretext for sending its troops. Britain, the ‘most civilised’ nation of the west became the biggest opium dealer and used the prohibition of drugs through the Chinese authorities as a means for unleashing two wars.

In two opium wars (1839-42, 1856-60) Britain, (with France at its side in the second war) imposed a crushing military defeat accompanied by a series of massacres against the Chinese troops.

As a result of the overwhelming British military victory in the first opium war, Britain was granted concessions over Hong Kong and five trade zones along the coast. But the second opium war brought already a qualitative change. By then above all the European countries aimed at finding new markets for goods manufactured in Europe. Thus as a result of the second war the Europeans opened up China not only for opium, but above all for European trade products.

Complete isolation was the prime condition of the preservation of Old China. That isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of England, dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air.” (Marx “Revolution in China and Europe) 14.6.1853, New York Daily Tribune) And Marx pointed out: “We hear nothing of the illicit opium trade, which yearly feeds the British treasury at the expense of human life and morality.3

And as elsewhere the imposition of capitalism was accompanied by violence. “Of the more than 40 Chinese treaty ports each one of them has been bought with rivers of blood, massacres and ruin” (Rosa Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, p. 342). The foreign capitalists (under the slogan of free trade and accompanied by opium and war) tore down the restrictions of Manchu ruled China to enable capitalist development. Unlike Japan, which was also opened up violently through foreign capitalist countries, but which was never occupied or pulled into a series of wars, China was to be split up into spheres of influence.

During the period of the 1860/70s, all the outlying parts of the Chinese empire were grabbed by foreign powers. And towards the end of the 19th century China had lost entire Indo-China to France, Burma to GB, Korea to Japan, all territories north of the Amur river to Russia, Turkistan and Mongolia had been practically annexed by Russia, Tibet by Britain, Manchuria was disputed by Russia and Japan, even China proper was as good as annexed.

At the end of the 19th century Britain laid a heavy hand on the entire Yangtze Valley, the centre of economic life of China, France appropriated Hunan, Germany seized Shantung and Tsingtao. The USA did not require any concession; they acted as a supporter of an "open door policy" towards China.

Inside China had grown a sort of small "imperium in imperio" in the shape of foreign settlements. Small areas of Chinese territory had assumed the character of so many outposts of imperialism.

Whereas India was under British rule alone (once the British had defeated the French in 1757) China quickly became some sort of colony of international imperialism, with different countries trying to grab pieces. But due to the presence of so many aspirants, the possibility of annexation of China by any one single power being out of the question, colonisation of China took the form of creating „spheres of influence“. The resistance to the out and out annexation of China could no longer come from China itself, formal annexation was prevented by the rivalry amongst the imperialist powers.

Still, until the early 1890s the division of Chinese territory into zones of influence could proceed without major clashes amongst the European rivals.

However, once the level of imperialist rivalries especially amongst the European countries reached new proportions and they shifted their focus from Africa to Europe and Asia, the level of rivalries in the far East took on a new qualitative form.

The consequences of the penetration of foreign capitalist countries meant that while the foreign capitalist nations had imposed capitalism, at the same time a powerful development of Chinese capital was obstructed because the foreign national capitals were mainly interested in plundering and selling their goods at the expense of Chinese competitors. They hampered the development of an autonomous Chinese industry, barring the road to a real industrialisation. Thus while no Chinese faction of the ruling class was able to spark off a capitalist development, at the end of the 19th century foreign companies controlled almost the entire Chinese economy.


1 "The success of Russian policy in the far East", 1858, Marx-Engels-Werke 12, p. 622 (our translation from the German).

2 The analysis of pre-capitalist societies was taken up in several texts by Marx and Engels. As their investigations evolved, their concept also gradually changed. For a more detailed analysis see - Perry Anderson in his “Lineages of the Absolutist State”, London 1974. See see International Review n°135 for a discussion of this question.

3 "English cruelties in China", written 22.03.1857, published 10.04.1857

 

Historic events: 

Geographical: 

The Taiping rising – the bourgeoisie unable to make its own revolution

With a background of the demoralising results of the opium war, a collapsing social order, peasant revolts against famine and an unbearable tax burden, an irreversible collapse of the State machinery, and the penetration of foreign capitalist companies, both the peasantry as well as important factions of the property owning classes, who had no allegiance to the ruling Manchu dynasty, embarked upon a revolt in 1850 – which became known as the Taiping revolt.

Driven by a strong hatred against the exploitation by the Manchu dynasty, peasants threw themselves into revolts. Their movement merged with the aspirations of a young trading class, eager to promote trade and industry, which also wanted to get rid of the fetters of the Manchu dynasty.

Often instigated by secret societies, the revolts started off in the south of the country, spreading further north. The movement quickly received support from hundreds of thousands of peasants and opponents of the Manchu dynasty. Even a separate state was founded in 1851 - Taiping Tienkuo (“Heavenly empire of peace”), and a “heavenly Emperor” was proclaimed (Hung). The movement set up a monarchy with a strong theocratic tinge, directed against the power and privileges of the landed aristocracy. Expressing the aspirations of the peasantry to fight against its exploitation, private property was declared to be abolished, only collective financial management and grain storages were allowed, common ownership of land was proclaimed, farm land was collectivised and no longer considered as private property, taxes were lowered, equality of men and women was proclaimed, foot binding forbidden, free choice of husband/wife, the consumption of opium, tobacco and alcohol forbidden. Artisans produced articles which were distributed under the supervision of the State.

In 1852/53 the Taiping regime advanced its troops swiftly through Hunan and conquered Nanking, proclaiming the city as the capital of their state, which they maintained from 1853-1864. The Taiping rebels set up an army of more than 50,000 soldiers who controlled large areas of south and south eastern China. However, in 1864 the Taiping edifice collapsed. In a series of bloody wars, more than 20 million people got killed. British and French troops played a decisive role in the crushing of the movement by the Manchu dynasty. The Indian communist M.N.Roy rightly mentions some of the reasons for the defeat, when he wrote, “The weakness of the capitalist mode of production, the immaturity amounting to practical absence of the proletariat, which also resulted from the inadequate development of the capitalist mode of production, and lastly foreign intervention – all these contributed to the defeat of the first great movement which objectively tended towards the creation of a modern China”.1 Roy however saw too much revolutionary potential in this movement. In an earlier article2 we dealt with the limits of the Taiping movement. For reasons of space we cannot dwell on these in more detail.

Marx made the following assessment of the movement and its limits: “What is original about this Chinese revolution is its subject. They are not aware of any task, apart from the change of dynasty. They have no slogans. They are a still greater abomination for the popular masses than for the old rulers. Their destiny appears to be no more than to oppose conservative stagnation with a reign of destruction grotesque and loathsome in form, a destruction without any new or constructive kernel whatever (...) The Taiping rising is the offspring of a fossile social life”.3

Unable to throw off the weight of the decaying social order, unable to turn the penetration of capitalism which was being imposed by foreign countries into a powerful stimulation for a broader capitalist development, the ruling class in China could not make a bourgeois revolution, which would have paved the way for the unhampered development of capitalism. Thus China was made into a cripple in the 19th century – leaving the country with fetters that it was to carry over into the 20th century.


1 Roy, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China, New Delhi, 1946, p. 113

2 International Review no 81 & 84

3 Marx: 7.7.1862 in Die Presse, “On China”

 

Historic events: 

Geographical: 

People: 

The 1900 Boxer rising: an excuse for foreign intervention

The crushing of the Taiping revolt led to a drastic worsening of the situation of the peasants. In the context of an increased burden of taxation, the destruction of the livelihood for millions of peasants and artisans, who went down under the weight of the import of foreign goods, forcing them to come to the cities where there was only a very weak industrial development – these economic fetters contributed to the outbreak of what was later to become known as the Boxer uprising.

In May 1900 looting masses of dispossessed and frustrated peasants, led by a secret organisation of the Boxers blocked railway lines, ransacked factories and Western diplomatic missions. In an atmosphere of pogroms against foreigners, and in the absence of social and political demands, the Manchu dynasty took sides with the rioters, because their movement was not directed against any capitalist rule, but only against Christians and foreigners, offering no perspective whatsoever to the exploited classes.

At the moment when all the foreign missions were threatened by looters, the foreign imperialists united their forces to quell the movement. At the same time, this common intervention posed the question of a pecking order amongst the imperialists, because it was clear whoever took the lead in repressing the rising could become the dominant force in Beijing. The scramble for the leadership in the repression of the movement revealed a new qualitative level of inter-imperialist rivalries.

As Rosa Luxemburg in Reform or Revolution had already stated in 1899: “If presently China is becoming the stage for threatening conflicts, the struggle is not only about the conquest of China for European capitalism but fully fledged antagonisms between European countries have been “transferred” to China and they now erupt on Chinese soil...”.1

Britain wanted Japan to take the lead because it hoped that Japan would act as a counter-weight to Russia. Russia strongly opposed Japanese intervention. In the end, Russia accepted the German proposal for a German led intervention, as neither Great Britain nor Japan would have agreed to Russian leadership.

But before the German troops reached Beijing, Russian troops had already started (and almost completed) the massacre. Thus Russia used the Boxer rising as a lever for increasing its influence in China. In October 1900 Russia occupied the whole of Manchuria, in order to counter the extended influence of Western European powers in China. But Russia was unable to block the penetration of European powers and Japan. In view of the danger of China being torn into pieces by the European powers, in particular vis a vis Russian attempts to grab large parts of the northern part of China, Germany and Britain in August 1900 negotiated with the goal of maintaining the territorial integrity of China and maintaining the principle of an “open door”. Britain was hoping to use the Germans against Russia in Manchuria, Germany in turn aimed at pushing Britain and Japan into hostilities against Russia. Following increased Russian presence, Japan and Britain signed an alliance in January 1902, with the aim of containing a Russian threat. While all European states agreed to a US proposal of an 'open door' towards China, Russia, which had most to lose from this proposal, voted against this. Soon afterwards the USA joined the British-Japanese alliance against Russia. Hence one of the permanent characteristics since the early 20th century has been the USA opposing a strengthened position for Russia and Japan. They have always posed as a 'defender' of the weaker country (in this case China) to prevent Russia and Japan from becoming too powerful.

As for China, following the crushed Boxer rising, the foreign capitalists forced the Chinese State to pay 450 million Tael "compensation payment" to the foreign countries, after having been forced to pay already a sum of 200 million Tael to Japan following the Chinese defeat in the war against Japan in 1894.

In 1911 the Chinese emperor was deposed and the first Chinese republic proclaimed. Formally the bourgeoisie had taken over the government to run the country. But while a bourgeois republic was now proclaimed, this did not mean that the country had gone through a bourgeois revolution, leading to the formation of a nation, able to compete on the world market. In reality, no ignition for a powerful industrial development occurred. Far from being a “united” nation, centrifugal tendencies gained the upper hand, as we shall see in the second part of this article.

Although formally in power the bourgeoisie was no longer a revolutionary class. Unable to push the country towards a big industrialisation, the ruling class could only push the whole nation into war and destruction.


1 (Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or revolution, chapter on customs politics and militarism, Gesammelte Werke, first volume, p. 397).

 

Historic events: 

Geographical: 

Conflict over Korea

At the same time when European and US capitalism started to penetrate into Japan and China, these capitalist countries also tried to open up Korea.

There were many parallels in the development of Korea with China and Japan. In Korea, much as Japan, all contact with Westerners was fraught with peril. Only relations with China were permitted in the mid 19th century. Until the mid 1850s the only foreigners present in Korea were missionaries. As the capitalist nations started to show their presence in the region, any Korean activity against foreign citizens was taken as a welcome pretext to impose their presence by force. Thus when in 1866 French missionaries were killed in Korea, France sent a few military ships to Korea, but the French troops were beaten. In 1871 the USA sent several ships up the Taedong River to Pyongyang, but the US ships were also defeated.

However, during that phase there was yet no determination amongst the European countries or the USA to occupy Korea.

The USA was still under the impact of the civil war (1861-1865), and the westward expansion of capitalism was still in full swing in North America; England was engaged in putting down revolts in India and focussing its forces (with France) on penetrating into China. Russia was still colonising Siberia. So while the European countries were focussing their forces on China and other areas of the world, Japan seized its chance and quickly started to push for the opening of Korea for its commodities.

Through a show of force Japan managed to secure a treaty opening three Korean ports for Japanese traders. Moreover Japan, in order to thwart off Chinese influence, "recognised" Korea as an independent country. The declining Chinese empire could do nothing but encourage Korea to look for protection from a third state in order to resist pressure from Japan. The USA was amongst the first countries to recognise Korea as an independent state in 1882. In 1887 Korean forces for the first time turned to the USA asking for “support against foreign forces”, i.e. against Japan, Russia and Britain.

As Japan increased its exports, Korea became more and more dependent on trade with Japan. 90% of Korea’s exports went to Japan in the mid 1890s, more than 50% of its imports came from Japan.

The flood of foreign commodities which poured into the mainly peasant dominated country contributed sharply to the ruin of many peasants. The pauperisation in the countryside was one of the factors which provoked a strong anti-foreigner resentment.

Similar to the Taiping movement in China during the 1850-60s, a popular revolt – the Tonghak (“Eastern Learning”) unfolded in Korea in the 1890s (though it had seen precursors already in the 1860s), marked by a strong weight of peasant revolt directed against the penetration of foreign goods. There was as yet no working class presence in the movement, due to the very limited number of factories in the country.

Anti-feudal forces and peasants dominated the movement, which put forward a mixture of nationalist, religious and social demands.

Tens of thousands of peasants fought with primitive weapons against local rulers. The tottering ruling feudal class, feeling threatened by the Tonghak-movement and unable to suppress the movement alone, appealed to Chinese and Japanese forces to help them in repressing the movement.

The mobilisation for repressing the Tonghak movement by Chinese and Japanese forces was staged as a springboard for fighting over the control of the Korean peninsula. China and Japan clashed for the first time in modern history – not over the control of their respective territories, but over the control of Korea.

In July 1894 Japan started war with China, which lasted half a year. Most of the fighting took place in Korea, although Japan’s main strategic objective was not just control over Korea but also over the strategically important Chinese Liaotung Peninsula at the Chinese Sea.

The Japanese troops drove the Chinese army out of Korea, occupied Port Arthur(a Chinese port city on the Liatong peninsula in the Chinese Sea) , then the Liaotung peninsula, Manchuria – and started heading for Beijing. In the face of the strong Japanese superiority, the Chinese government asked the USA to broker a truce. As a result of the war, China had to concede Japan the Liaotung peninsula, Port Arthur, Dairen, Taiwan and the Pescadore Islands, accept a compensation payment of 200 million Tael (360 million yen) and open Chinese ports to Japan. The Chinese “compensation” payment was going to fuel the Japanese arms budget, because the war had been very expensive for Japan, costing about 200 million Yen, or three times the annual government budget. At the same time this “compensation” payment was draining the resources of China even more.

But already then, following the first sweeping Japanese victory, the European imperialist sharks opposed a too crushing Japanese victory. They did not want to concede Japan too many strategic advantages. In a “triple-intervention” Russia, France and Germany opposed the Japanese occupation of Port Arthur and Liaotung. In 1895 Japan renounced from Liaotung. Still without any ally at the time, Japan had to withdraw (the British-Japanese treaty was only signed in 1901). Initially Germany, France and Britain wanted to grant loans to China, but Russia did not want China to become too dependent on European rivals and offered its own loans. Until 1894 Britain had been the dominant foreign force in the region, in particular in China. Britain did not want any Japanese expansion into China and Korea, but until then Britain considered Russia the biggest danger in the region.

While the Japanese war triumph over China meant that Japan now was considered by the other imperialist rivals as an important rival in the far East, it was striking that the main battlefield of the first war between China and Japan was Korea.

The reasons are obvious: surrounded by Russia, China and Japan, Korea’s geographic position makes it a springboard for an expansion from one country towards another. Korea is inextricably lodged in a nutcracker between the Japanese island empire and the two land empires of Russia and China. Control over Korea allows control over three seas – the Japanese sea, the Yellow sea and East China Sea. If under the control of one country, Korea could serve as a knife in the back of other countries. Since the 1890s, Korea has been the target of the imperialist ambitions of the major sharks in the area initially only three: Russia, Japan and China - with the respective support and resistance of European and US sharks acting in the background. Even if, in particular, the northern part of Korea has some important raw materials, it is above all its strategic position which makes the country such a vital cornerstone for imperialism in the region.

As long ago as the 19th century, for Japan as the leading imperialist power in the far East, Korea became the vital bridge towards China.

The China-Japanese war over Korea was going to deal a big blow to the Chinese ruling class, at the same time it was an important spark to Russian imperialist appetites.

However, it is impossible to limit the conflict to the two rivals alone, because in reality, this war illustrated the qualitative general sharpening of imperialist tensions.

Japan’s main gains on Chinese territory – for example the Liaotung Peninsula – were immediately countered by a group of European powers. By 1899 Britain had strengthened its position in China (Hong Kong, Weihaiwei, the island guarding the sea lanes to Beijing), it held a monopoly in the Yangtze valley, Russia had seized Port Arthur (see below) and Tailenwan (Dairen, Dalny), was encroaching upon Manchuria and Mongolia, Germany had seized the Kaochow Bay and Shantung, France was given special privileges in the Hunan Province. “The Chinese war is the first even in the world political era in which all the cultural states are involved and this advance of the international reaction, of the Holy Alliance, should have been responded to by a protest by the united workers parties of Europe”.1

The 1894 China-Japanese war in fact brought all the main imperialist rivals of Europe and the far East into conflict with each other – a process which was to gain more momentum, as soon as another European imperialist shark appeared in the far East.


1 (Rosa Luxemburg in a speech at the party conference in Mainz in Sept. 1900, in Rosa Luxemburg, Collected Works/Gesammelte Werke, vol 1/1, p. 801)

 

 

Historic events: 

Geographical: 

The advance of Russian imperialism and the world wide sharpening of imperialist tensions

Russia’s drive for expansion pushed it towards central Asia and the far East. In the West its rivalries with Germany, France and GB were prevailing, around the Black Sea it clashed with the Ottoman Empire (in the Crimean war 1854-56 it had already confronted Britain and France), in central Asia it clashed with Britain, (Britain waged two wars over Afghanistan (1839-42, 1878-1880, in order to fend off Russian influence in Afghanistan). In the far East it had to come into conflict mainly with Japan and especially Britain – which was the dominant European imperialist force in the far East.

But the Russian expansion in the last quarter of the 19th century crystallised only a general drive of all capitalist nations for the conquest of new territories and markets on the whole globe.

In 1884 France occupied Annam (Vietnam) and blockaded Taiwan, Britain annexed Burma in 1885, the Berlin Conference settled the carve up of Africa in 1885.

As for the far East, with the appearance of Russia in this zone of conflicts, a new qualitative level was reached. With Russia as a European country directly challenging the increasing domination of Japan, this meant that any Russian move would automatically trigger off a whole chain of realignments amongst the European rivals, according to their rivalry or possible alliance with Russia.1

Following the opening of the Suez canal in 1869, and with the growing importance of the far East for the European imperialist rivals, Russia pushed ahead the construction of the Trans-Siberian railways in 1891. Unable to finance this gigantic project on its own, it had to borrow French capital. Japan, which aimed at expanding towards China and Korea, feared that any Russian advance towards the East might endanger its position.

Russia was advancing its pawns in the far East. Benefiting from Chinese weakening in its war with Japan in 1894, Russia signed a secret deal with China in 1896 claiming to act as a protecting force against Japan. In 1898 Russia conquered Port Arthur.

In order to counter the Russian advance and manoeuvres in the far East and central Asia, Britain proposed to Russia the division of China and the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves - Russia rejected this.

Since the rivalry between GB and Russia could not be settled, Russia had to try and "appease" Japan as long as it could. Following the failed arrangement between Russia and Britain, Russia tried to settle with Japan for respective zones of influence.

In 1902 negotiations started between Japan and Russia over their respective zones of influence in the far East. In essence Russia proposed to give Japan a free hand over Korea provided Japan would not use the peninsula as a staging base for military operations, Russia even proposed that territory north of the 39th parallel in Korea be declared a neutral zone which neither country would be permitted to station troops in, while Russia wanted control over Manchuria and other border zones to China (half a century later the country was divided at the same 38th parallel in the Korean war in 1953). Japan proposed to Russia that it take control over Korea and it would allow Russia to be in charge of the protection of railway lines (only!) in Manchuria, but not be given any territorial control.

But the negotiations showed that it had become impossible for Russia and Japan to try and divide their zones of interests without war.

Japan looked for allies. On January 30th 1902 Japan and Britain signed a treaty. They recognised the right of Japan and Britain to intervene in Chinese and Korean affairs, promised neutrality if one of the parties was at war over its zone of interest, and support in case of war against other countries. The treaty between Britain and Japan led Japan to believe that it could launch a war against Russia with the hope that no other country would support Russia since GB was threatening in the background. And the German government assured the Japanese government in case of a war between Russia and Japan, Germany would remain neutral. Germany was hoping if Russia started a war in the East, this would give Germany more room for manoeuvre against France – a Russian ally – and Britain.

By dealing at greater length with the complicated strategic details of these conflicts we wanted to show the development of extremely complex and strongly intertwined military rivalries, where it became clear that if one of the main antagonists moved, a whole chain reaction by other rivals was unleashed. All the countries were not only positioning themselves, but would also be involved in the unleashing of a lurking war.


1 During the first phase of Russian expansion towards the East, i.e. during the first half of the 19th century and even until the 1870’s the division of new territories could still sometimes be settled by the sale and purchase of new territories. For example, Russia sold Alaska to the USA at the price of 7.2 million US dollars in 1867. And even after Russia earlier on had occupied Xinjiang, the most western Chinese province, Russia sold this large area in 1881 to China.

 

 

Geographical: 

The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05: prelude to World War I

Following the Russian refusal to accept Japanese demands for control over Korea, on February 8th 1904 Japan attacked the Russian fleet in Port Arthur and Tchemulpo.

The Russian-Japanese war heralded some of the characteristics of the wars in decadence.1

The first war in the 20th century between two major powers led to an unheard of mobilisation of the two countries – involving new levels of human, economic and military resources:

  • The war exhausted the finances of the victorious country, creating a pile of debts for Japan. Government expenditure more than doubled during the war, its budget had run into a gigantic deficit.

  • In the defeated country, Russia, the war sparked off a proletarian rising in 1905, showing that only the proletariat can act as a spanner to the war. Rosa Luxemburg concluded at the 1907 Stuttgart congress of the 2nd International: “But the Russian revolution [of 1905] did not only emerge from the war, but it also served to interrupt the war. Otherwise czarism would surely have continued the war” (speech in the commission on “Militarism and international conflicts”: (Collected Works, volume 2, p. 236).

  • Although Japan was able to wrist off big territorial gains from Russia the new situation reached at the turn of the century showed that no country could enrich itself at the expense of the loser without interfering in the imperialist interests of the other rivals.

10 years before World War I the Japanese triumph over Russia, which had confirmed its leading position in the far East, caused a strong counter-reaction by its imperialist rivals.

This first major war in the 20th century – unfolding in the far East between Russia and Japan – confirmed what Rosa Luxemburg predicted at the turn of the 19th century. In 1899 she wrote in the Leipziger Volkszeitung: “With the division and the integration of Asia, European capitalism no longer has any new areas for its conquest at its disposal, after this the world will be divided and every part of the world will be claimed by one ruler. Sooner or later the new orient question will enter the same phase in which the old one ‚fossilised‘: Step by step, the European opponents will start moving closer towards each other so that in the end they will finally stop after having reached the point where they face each other head on. And the economic and political forces which have been set free, the highly developed big industry, the gigantic militarism, will then start to be a terrible burden on the whole of society, because they will no longer find any outlet.”.2 Only 9 years later World War I confirmed this new level of imperialist relations.

The consequences of the Russian-Japanese war went far beyond the two warring countries.

The USA, which just half a century earlier (in the mid 1850s) had spearheaded the opening of Japan for capitalism, started to confront a Japan which was colliding with the USA over the dominant position in the Pacific and the far East.

While after the 1894-95 war between China and Japan, the “triple intervention” by France, Germany and Russia prevented 'excessive' conquests by Japan, this time round it was the USA and GB which opposed a too crushing victory and too big a strengthening of the Japanese position.

While the USA and Britain supported Japan at the beginning of the war, they withdrew financial support towards the end of the war to put pressure on Japan, since the USA considered Japan more and more as their main rival in the far East. And when the USA supported the Russian-Japanese “peace deal”, which admitted Japanese hegemony in Korea, Japan had to concede to the USA their right of intervention in the Philippines. At the same time the USA considered that Japanese control over Korea was a means of preventing further Russian expansion towards the East. Still, the USA which was “trailing” behind the European countries during their 19th century imperialist conquests, because it was still busy with fostering the expansion of capitalism in its own Western part, had arrived “late” in the division of shares in the far East. The first US “gain” were the Philippines, which they grabbed from Spain in 1898 in the first war during that period waged for the re-division of existing conquests (it was the first war that the USA waged outside of their own territories). During that period the USA annexed Hawaii and gained control over Wake, Guam in the Pacific.

While the European countries and Japan appeared as the "aggressors" towards China, the USA could pretend to act as China's "defender".


1 The war lasted 18 months. The main battle zones were Port Arthur, the railway line and the road leading to Mukden and Liaoyang. In the siege of Port Arthur more than 60,000 Japanese soldiers died. The biggest battle was that for Mukden, from 23rd February until the 16th March 1905 – more than 750,000 soldiers participated in the battle. More than 40,000 Japanese soldiers died. It was both a naval war and a war between territorial armies. Russia sent a large part of its fleet (40 ships) from the Baltic Sea in October 1904 along the African coast to the Chinese waters. But the Russian navy arrived only in May 1905 in far Eastern waters. In a big sea battle, the well prepared Japanese navy inflicted Russia a crushing defeat, in which most of the Russian ships were drowned by Japanese forces.

Russia had to concede southern Sakhalin, southern Manchuria and Korea to Japan, Japan received Port Arthur and Dairen. As a result, five years later, Japan could declare Korea its colony.

2 Rosa Luxemburg, Collected Works, Vol. 1/1, p. 364, 13.3.1899.

 

Historic events: 

Capitalism in decay: the Far East becomes a battlefield of world wide imperialist rivalries

Looking back at the development of Japan, China and Korea in the 19th century we can see that they were all opened up by capitalism by force. Capitalism did not emerge from within, but it was “imported” from the outside. Unlike many European countries, where a revolutionary bourgeois class was able to cast aside the fetters of feudalism, there were no such bourgeois revolutions carried out by the local bourgeoisie.

Yet while these three countries were opened by foreign capitalists during the same period in the 19th century, they followed three different paths.

Japan was the only country to become an independent capitalist power after a short period. Soon after having been opened by foreign capitalism Japan in turn started to act as a capitalist force searching for new markets and zones of control in the bordering region. Within a few decades Japan became the big regional power. Unlike China and Korea which were quickly crippled in their capitalist development, Japan embarked upon a rapid accumulation of capital. While not handicapped in its capitalist development as its neighbours were by foreign countries, the early dominant role of militarism and of the State are a typical feature in the development of this country.

Even if Japan, much like Germany, arrived “late” on the world market, Japan, unlike Germany, which had to challenge the already “established” imperialist powers, was not a ‘have-not’. It was the first country in the area to establish its zone of influence in the “scramble for colonies” (establishing its control over Korea, parts of Manchuria and Taiwan). Japan was involved and triumphant in all the big wars in the far East – with China in 1894, with Russia in 1905 – and it was also the big regional winner of World War I even if it was not directly involved. Thus Japan could climb on “top of the regional imperialist ladder” before World War I, establishing its position at the expense of the other rivals.

In China, which was ruled by a declining dynasty until the arrival of capitalism, capitalism was also “implanted” from outside. While the Chinese ruling class was unable to induce a powerful capitalist development, the foreign capitalists – while opening up the country to capitalism – imposed strong fetters on the development of national capital. Thus already in the 19th century, the country, marked by all the features of a “handicapped” development, was torn apart by foreign imperialist powers. As we shall see later, China was to carry these characteristics all along the 20th century. While Japan was a leading expanding imperialist force, China had become the most fought over area amongst the European and Japanese imperialist sharks.

Korea in turn, also opened up by foreign capitalists, became the main target of Japanese imperialism. But being an invasion corridor for the appetites of all neighbours, it was condemned to suffer from this specific geo-strategic constellation. Ever since the imposition of capitalism in the far East, Korea has been a permanent battle field of the struggle between the regional and international rivals. Until 1905 Korea was fought over principally by China, Japan and Russia; since the onset of capitalist decadence, as we shall see when looking at the history of the 20th century, Korea has remained an important military and strategic target for all imperialist countries in the far East.

The forth rival in the region, Russia, in its expansion towards the far East, while defending its own imperialist interests in the region, was dragging with it a whole flock of European rivals.

During an initial period of 2-3 decades in the 19th century, the opening of the far East to capitalism unfolded under conditions, where the major European powers and the USA were not yet colliding with each other, because there was still enough “room for expansion”. The situation changed, as the scramble for colonies drew to a close and as the remains could only be divided with one rival gaining something at the expense of the other. The China-Japan war in 1894 and the Russia-Japan war in 1905 showed that it had become impossible that all countries would “receive a piece of the cake”, but that the division had been completed and a new distribution was only possible through war.

Already three years before the outbreak of World War I Rosa Luxemburg noted: “During the past 15 years there was the war between Japan and China in 1895, which was the prelude to the East-Asian period of world politics, 1898 the war between Spain and the USA, 1899-1902 the Boers War with British involvement in South Africa, 1900 the China-expedition of the European big powers, 1904 the Russian-Japanese war, 1904-1907 the German Herero-war in Africa, 1908 the Russian military intervention in Persia, at the present moment [1911] the French military intervention in Morocco, not to mention the incessant colonial skirmishes in Asia and Africa. The mere facts show that during the past 15 years there was almost no year without a war”.1

The level of imperialist rivalries could be kept within certain limits until the turn of the 20th century. But when antagonisms sharpened on a world scale, the world wide rivalries also manifested themselves in the far East. The 1905 war between Russia and Japan heralded World War I and the series of wars which followed in the 20th century.

At the turn of the 20th century, the far East experienced a reshuffling of the imperialist hierarchy. After 1905 Japan had risen to the top of the imperialist pecking order in the region but it was already confronted by the USA and GB as the two remaining imperialist giants in the area. The USA soon after started to “contain” Japan – initially through the policy of “making deals” (such as the one over the Philippines for recognising Japanese interests in Korean) – later, as with the 2nd world war, by going to war against each other.

The development of capitalism in the 19th century in the far East thus illustrates how much the qualitative change that occurred towards the turn of the 19-20th century expressed a new epoch in the global development of capitalism.

There was no more any bourgeois revolution on the agenda, the bourgeoisie in the far East had become as reactionary as elsewhere. And the capitalist system was going to show all its contradictions in the far East, pulling this densely populated part of the globe into a series of wars and destruction.


1 (Peace Utopia, Volume 2, p. 496, May 1911, Leipziger Volkszeitung)

 

Historic events: 

The road to World War II

The imperialist position of Japan

The imperialist constellation in the far East had undergone profound changes with the end of World War I.

Already after the Russian-Japanese 1905 war Japan continued to remain the dominant force in the far East, but after World War I Japan was no longer going to clash mainly with European rivals. Instead the main rivalry was going to unfold with the USA who was the big winner of World War I. Following the period after World War I the USA and Japan became the main imperialist sharks in the far East for several decades.

Japan was the main beneficiary of World War I without ever being directly involved on a large scale in the fighting. Unlike the other winner states in Europe (Britain, France), who had to pay a high price for their victory, Japan was not ruined through the war. Instead Japan managed to improve its position substantially – first it speeded up its industrialisation; secondly it improved its trade position at the expense of the European rivals and become a big arms supplier. Imports and exports tripled during World War I, steel and concrete production doubled, big progress in chemical and electro-technical equipment was achieved and Japan managed to write off its foreign debts during the war – which it had “contracted” because of its war against Russia in 1905. It became a donor nation. It also expanded its commercial navy and became a big ship building nation, increasing its ship building capacity by a factor of 8.

However, as soon as the war was over in 1918, the war boom collapsed and Japan found itself in a big economic crisis.

On the imperialist level, Japan strengthened its position mainly in relation to China above all at the expense not only of the loser country – Germany – but also at the expense of other European imperialist rivals, which were absorbed by the war carnage in Europe. After having occupied Korea in 1909 Japan hoped to become the uncontested ruling imperialist power in China as well.

Already in the first weeks after the outbreak of the war in 1914, Japan snatched the German settlement of Tsingtao in China and occupied German possessions in the Pacific (Marshall and Caroline Islands) which Japan saw as a counterweight to the US presence in Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam.

As Russia disappeared from the imperialist scene, Japan tried to claim the dominant position in China. As soon as the imperialist countries launched a counter-revolutionary offensive against the proletarian bastion in Russia in 1918, Japan was the first country to participate in the invasion and the last country to leave Siberian territory in 1922. Instead of sending 7,000 troops as demanded by the USA, Japan sent 72,000 soldiers, declaring openly its imperialist appetites towards Russia.

After Japan emerged as the big beneficiary of the war, the USA tried to contain Japanese military might.

And while the European countries disarmed partially after World War I, Japan did not really reduce its military expenditure significantly. Between 1888 and 1938 total military expenditure corresponded to 40-50% of the national budget through this period.1

Yet while Japan was a ‘winner’ of World War I it had not been able to make any major territorial gains through the war. Although not a “have-not” (as it had Korea under its control since 1909) it was under the strongest pressure to challenge the status quo in the region and try to expand towards the Asian continent.

Whereas imperialist tensions in Europe receded after World War I to a large extent because of the wave of revolutionary struggles of the working class, imperialist tensions in the far East evolved differently.

Once again, Japan was going to clash with Russia as soon as Russia reappeared as an imperialist power on stage (see further down). In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria and proclaimed the foundation of a new state – Manchukuo. The creation of this new state, which was nothing but a vassal of the biggest imperialist shark in the region, meant that Japan had above all a springboard for the ensuing further expansion of Japan towards Southern China at its hand.


1 Lockwood, Economic Development of Japan, p. 292

 

Historic events: 

Geographical: 

China: the descent into militarist chaos

In the previous article we saw that the Chinese bourgeoisie had been unable to pave the way for a capitalist modernisation. Although in 1911 the Chinese republic was proclaimed by ousting the old Manchu dynasty, no strong central bourgeois government had arisen. This historical weakness of the Chinese bourgeoisie meant that China was going to go down, under a spiral of militarism, even if at the beginning foreign powers were not yet directly involved in the military escalation. But China became one of the birthplaces of a new phenomena - warlordism - which was going to put its stamp on the whole 20th century.

The emergence of warlordism

Faced with an increasingly powerless central government, certain provinces declared their independence from Beijing after 1915. In most of the provinces warlords became the dominant force.

Their sources of income were: (forced) exactions of taxes mainly from peasants; they lived on the basis of banditry and the drug trade(opium). It was no coincidence that drug trade, which more than half a century before had been curbed, then revived. Production of opium had almost been stopped by 1916, but warlords gave large areas of land to opium growth, there was even a ‘laziness tax’ on those farmers who did not plant opium. Land tax was raised 5 to 6 times by warlords and many taxes were collected in advance - in some areas collected for decades in advance. The warlords recruited a large number of soldiers from the peasantry and lumpenised elements. With the disintegration of the dynasty and the fragmentation of China at the beginning of the 20th century, an increasing number from among the floating mass of poor and landless peasants began to enrol in the professional armies of the regional ‘warlords’. Most warlord soldiers were unreliable, since most of them were jobless and hungry people who fought without a cause but only for money. As a result many of these soldiers changed sides or ran away in battle. This is why soldiers had to be constantly recruited, often forcefully. At the same time in many areas peasants were forced to join secret societies for self-protection against marauding troops.

Because there was no united nation state with a central government at its head, capable of defending national unity, each warlord could claim his territory. But at the same time these were not aiming at splitting off from the Chinese ‘empire’ and setting up a new nation. Generally they were not tied to a particular sector of society and they were not particularly involved in the defence of particular sectors of the economy. They were classical “parasites”, feeding off the population without any special ideological, ethnical or religious basis. The goals of their military operations were neither so much the largest possible extension of their area of domination nor wars of conquest to open up new markets or to plunder raw materials. In a certain sense they waged war 'on the spot' and pillaged the country. As a result trade became restricted. The transport system suffered heavily not only from the direct war ravages but also because of the fact that it had to carry a lot of troops and because of the payment of special taxes to the militarists.

All the resources of society were absorbed by militarism. Frequent dictatorial seizure of goods, the irresponsible handling of money by the warlords (whenever money was needed to finance their legions of soldiers and arms purchases they printed as much money as they needed) meant a terrible burden on the economy. In short they revealed a pure process of decomposition, a rotting on the feet of society. They expressed the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to unite the country. The fragmentation of the country into a number of fiefdoms (smaller units), which were under the control of marauding warlords, meant a gigantic fetter on the productive forces; it also showed that in China national liberation was no longer on the agenda, because the nation could no longer be an adequate framework for the development of the productive forces.

Even if during World War I the foreign imperialists tried to influence and win over different warlords, the wars waged by the local warlords at that time were not yet dominated by the rivalries amongst the foreign sharks.

The disastrous results of Comintern policy

In 1915 the southern province Hunan declared its independence and between 1916-1918 a growing polarisation between Northern and Southern warlords led to a wave of military conflicts. Thus when World War 1 came to an end in 1918 in Europe, China had been fractured by rival military regimes to the extent that no one authority was able to subordinate all rivals and create a unified and centralized political structure. The nation state had to be abolished altogether, if society was to avoid demise into militarism and chaos. As the Communist International recognised in its Manifesto of 1919 “The national state, which gave a mighty impulse to capitalist development, has become a fetter on further development of the productive forces.” But while the Communist International was far sighted in its clarity of the need to abolish all states, this emphasis of its founding congress was quickly clouded afterwards. The more the revolution went into retreat and the more the Comintern became desperate in its attempts to win support for the isolated revolution in Russia, it practised an opportunistic policy. At its 4th World Congress in 1922 the Comintern propagated a united front between certain Communist Parties and what it called the "left" or "democratic" wings of the respective bourgeoisie. In China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in accordance with the Comintern in 1922 declared in its “First Manifesto of the CCP on the Current Situation” (June 10, 1922) “We welcome a war to achieve the triumph of democracy, to overthrow the military... The proletariat’s urgent task is to act jointly with the democratic party to establish a united front of democratic revolution... This struggle along a broad united front is a war to liberate the Chinese people from a dual yoke – the yoke of foreigners and the yoke of powerful militarists in our country.”.1

This orientation of launching a coalition of proletarian and bourgeois forces with the goal of fighting a war against foreign capital was strongly opposed by the emerging forces of the Communist Left.

Within the framework of this article we cannot elaborate more on this aspect of developments. We have extensively dealt with this question in a series of articles in our International Review.2

The “united front” course of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a disaster for the working class since it forced the workers to submit to the KMT (Kuomintang) and it contributed to the triumph of the KMT as the dominant force of the Chinese bourgeoisie.

As we have illustrated in other articles of our press, the experience of the wave of struggles in 1925-27 showed, that the Comintern imposed united front policy paved the way for an even higher degree of militarization.

While in Europe there was a time span of two decades between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II (heralded by the war in Spain in 1936), China irreversibly continued in its descent into militarism immediately after the end of World War I. From the early 1920s on a series of wars between different warlords continued to wreck the country. The number of regular troops rose from 500,000 in 1916 to two million in 1928. The number of armed people must have been much higher, each defeat of an army led to an explosion in the number of bandits.

Amongst the forces of the Chinese bourgeoisie, the KMT was the most coherent and most determined in its defence of the interests of national capital. Chiang Kai-shek’s party could only pursue the attempts of unification of the country on a militarist path. With the support of the CCP, in spring 1926 Chiang Kai-shek launched a military expedition to eradicate various feuding warlords in central and northern China. In spring 1927, at a time, when a massive wave of strikes shook the most important Chinese city, Shanghai, the KMT, the force which for years had been hailed by the Comintern as the “the democratic party” with whom the working class should struggle for a “democratic revolution” showed its real face. The KMT spearheaded the massacre of thousands of workers in Shanghai and Nanking. The first KMT led government - known as the first 'National Government' - was established in Nanking on April 18, 1927. This first government of a “unified” China could only rise to power through a massacre of the working class. But even if the Nanking government meant the highest level of centralisation of national capital since 1911, militarism did not come to a halt. Because, although China’s unity was nominally established around the Nanking government in 1928, the Central government was forced to pursue its combat against war lords without interruption – because neither in the north nor in other areas had the local warlords been eliminated, even after the establishment of the Nanking central government.


1 (“First Manifesto of the CCP on the Current Situation”, June 10, 1922, in Conrad Brandt, Benjanmin Schwarz and John K. Fairbank, A Documentary History of Chinese Communism, New York: Atheneum, 1971, pp. 61-63)

2 (see”A link in the chain of imperialist war” International Review no 81, 84, 94 series).

 

Unified China's first governmental programme: more militarization

Even if the period after 1928 was not marked by wars of the same size and intensity as in the previous years, the following years saw a number of military campaigns which bled the country. For example:

1929: Attempts to disband the swollen armies failed, the Kwangsi army’s insurrection and a revolt in Hunan were suppressed.

1930: A bloody war involving a million men erupted in North China from March to September 1930. Between 1931–1935 several campaigns against the troops of the Communist Party were launched.

Even if warlordism receded slowly in the early 1930s, a real unification of the country was never achieved, and the more force the centralised government gained, the more militarised the regime became. The weight of armed conflicts in society can be gauged by the fact that military government expenditure in China never fell below 44% of the State budget between 1928-1934.

The civilian population – hostage of all rivals

Following the offensive of the Nanking government troops against the CCP forces, some 90,000 poorly equipped Red Army forces were chased across the country and had to embark upon the “Long March”. After this military hunt only 7000 Red Army troops reached the remote area of Yennan in northern Shaanxi. In this war between two “unequal” forces, the CCP systematically applied a military tactic which was going to mark the military conflicts during the 20th and well into the 21st century. As a typical weapon of the “underdog”, which is unable to recruit a “standing army” with the full equipment of an army financed and run by a State and its government, the Red Army forces started to develop a guerrilla war. Although in previous wars of the 19th century there had been some limited partisan activities, this phenomenon took on a new proportion in the deluge in China.

The Red Army turned civilians into a human shield, i.e. targets to protect the movement of the regular “Red Army”. At the same time, the brutal terrorisation of the peasants and the extraction of enormous taxes through the Nanking government forced millions of peasants either to abandon their land and flee or this drove many of them into the arms of the Red Army. They became cannon fodder between two opponents. War started to ravage almost permanently not only around the big cities but above all in the country.

The war rages

What was mystified by the Maoists as a heroic war was in reality the plague of “moving” (rolling) war with millions of refugees and a policy of scorched earth.

The more imperialist tensions sharpened internationally, the more China also became involved in these. At the time, when inside China the military expeditions against different warlords continued after 1928, the first major clash with a foreign country occurred with Russia in 1928/29. No sooner had a “central government” been set up in Nanking, then it claimed and occupied the Northern Manchurian railway, which until then had been under Russian control. In a first violent confrontation of Stalinist Russia with its imperialist rival in the far East, Russia mobilised 134,000 soldiers and succeeded in defeating the Chinese troops, which could not offer any major resistance due to the dispersal of their forces in the combats against different warlords.

The Sino-Japanese war: internationalism

Supporting the 'just' war of China today means linking up with English, American, French imperialism. It means to work for the 'Holy Union' (Union Sacrée) in the name of a 'revolutionary future' which will be illustrated – as in the case of Spain – by piles of dead bodies of workers and the triumph of the 'order'.

On both sides of the fronts there is a rapacious, dominant bourgeoisie, and which only aims at massacring workers. On both sides of the fronts there are workers led to the slaughter. It is wrong, absolutely wrong to believe that there is a bourgeoisie which the Chinese workers could – even temporarily – side with to 'struggle together even for only a short time', since only Japanese imperialism must be defeated in order to allow the Chinese workers to struggle victoriously for the revolution. Everywhere imperialism sets the pace, and China is only the puppet of the other imperialisms. To find their way to revolutionary battles, the Chinese and Japanese workers must return to the class struggle which will lead to their unification. Their fraternisation should cement their simultaneous assault against their own exploiters (…). Only the Fractions of the International Communist Left will oppose all the currents of traitors and opportunists and will hold high the flag of the struggle for the revolution. Only they will struggle for the transformation of the imperialist war which pours blood over Asia into a civil war of the workers against their exploiters: fraternisation of the Chinese and Japanese workers, destruction of the fronts of ‘national wars’, struggle against the Kuomintang, struggle against Japanese imperialism, struggle against all the currents which mobilise the workers for imperialist war.” (journal of the Italian Left, Bilan, n°44, October 1937, p1415)

However, the main antagonism was unfolding between China and Japan. In 1931/32 Japan occupied Manchuria and proclaimed the new state Manchukuo. Early 1932 Japan attacked and bombed Shanghai. At that time – i.e. after Japan had occupied Manchuria – the KMT led government still pursued the policy of trying to eliminate other warlords and above all the Communist Party. It was only in 1937, once Japan had started its war drive from Manchukuo into China, that the Chinese bourgeoisie united and pushed its own rivalries temporarily into the background – but this unification could only be that of a united war front against Japan.

The need to develop a “united war front” against Japan also meant that the Chinese bourgeoisie had to reposition itself in its relationship to foreign imperialists.

Until 1937 each wing of the Chinese bourgeoisie pursued a different foreign policy orientation. While the CCP was oriented towards Stalinist Russia and received support from Moscow, the KMT counted on the help of Germany and other states. Chiang Kai-shek himself, who after 1920 had received support from the degenerating Comintern and rising Stalinism until 1927, tried to avoid a head-on confrontation with Japan. In the early 1930s he signed a factual “truce” with Japan, only to give him more leeway to attack the troops of the Communist party. But with the advance of Japanese troops from Manchukuo to Beijing and towards Shanghai in 1937, Chiang had to drop his alliance with Germany – which was establishing an alliance with Japan. Global imperialist rivalries compelled every local rival to choose his allies and the historic course on a world level towards war was also going to determine the antagonisms in the far East.1


1 Already by 1921 Germany had started delivering arms to China. Arms of all types were needed for the continuing Chinese wars. Most of the German arms reaching China in the early 1920’s were clearly from the stocks that Germany had hidden from the Versailles arms inspectors. A former Chief of Staff to Ludendorff – Max Bauer – became military advisor to Chiang-Kai-shek in 1926. In 1928 while the Chinese army had some 2.25 million men under arms, the German military adviser Bauer recommended that China retain only a small core army and integrate the rest of the soldiers into militia forces. German army advisers trained a central army of 80.000 men, which soon grew to a crack force of 300.000. In the battle for Shanghai in 1937 German military advisers were dressed in Chinese uniforms and directed Chinese troops right up to the Japanese front lines. German military advisers recommended Chiang to fight a war of attrition against Japan and employ guerilla tactics against the Japanese army. Only by summer 1938 were German military advisers recalled from China once the Nazi-regime chose to work towards an alliance with Japan. Just before German advisers left, Chiang had signed a treaty whereby German advisers should train the whole Chinese army until 1940. (German Military Mission to China 1927-38, Arvo L. Vecamer, see also https://www.feldgrau.com/china.html)

 

 

The war between China and Japan – the second biggest theatre of war in World War II

The war between the two countries was going to be one of the bloodiest, most destructive and longest in the 20th century. Whereas World War I had spared the far East from a direct military escalation, the far East was then going to be the second major theatre of war.

The Sino-Japanese war: opportunism

In my declaration to the bourgeois press I said it is a duty of all workers organisations in China to participate actively and to be front fighters in the war against Japan, without renouncing in any way whatsoever from their program and their autonomy. But this is ‘social patriotism’ – the Eifellists [the Grupo de Trabajadores Marxistas/Comunismo] shout. This is capitulation before Chiang Kai-shek! This is abandoning the principle of class struggle! During imperialist war Bolshevism propagated revolutionary defeatism. In the case of the Spanish civil war and the Chinese-Japanese war we are faced with imperialist wars. (…) “On the Chinese war we take up the same position. The only salvation for the workers and peasants of China is to fight as an autonomous force against both armies, against the Chinese army as well as against the Japanese army”. Already these few lines from the documents of the Eiffelists [Grupo de Trabajadores Marxistas] of September 1, 1937 allow us to conclude: Either these are traitors or total idiots.... China is a semi-colonial country, which – in front of our eyes - is being transformed into a colonial country by Japan. In the case of Japan it is fighting an imperialist, reactionary war. In the case of China, it is fighting a progressive war of liberation... Japanese patriotism is the horrible face of international banditism. Chinese patriotism is legitimate and progressive” (letter to Diego de Rivera, in Trotsky on China, p, 547, Trotsky, Works, Hamburg, 1990)

In a first phase, between 1937-1941, the war was more or less “limited” to fighting between Japan and China, which was backed above all by Russia. The second phase began in 1941, when a new war front opened up between Japan and the USA. When Japan started the occupation of China the army was hoping to stage a blitzkrieg and have everything under control within a few months. The opposite was going to be the case. In August 1937 Japan entered into a massive military battle with more than half a million soldiers involved in the fight for the city of Shanghai. Other big battles followed around Wuhan and in December 1937 for Nanking. It is estimated that between August 1937 and November 1938 alone some 2 million Chinese and some 500,000 Japanese soldiers fell.

Yet, despite the heavy Chinese losses, the Japanese army was not able to force the Chinese troops onto their knees. Between October 1938 and the attack on Pearl Harbour (on the 7th December 1941) the China war “stagnated”. Japan only managed to control some enclaves which corresponded to 10% of the territory. In addition, the Japanese government lost financial control over expenditures (the share of arms in the budget rose from 31% in 1931-32 to 47% in 1936-37, at the end of the 1930s arms spending counted for 70% of the budget)..

The more desperate the Japanese military strategy became, the more terror it applied following the motto “kill, burn, loot everything you can”.

When Japanese troops entered the capital city of Nanking in 1937 they committed one of the most atrocious massacres; around 300,000 people were killed in a relentless carnage in Nanking alone. The Chinese troops in turn were making partisan attacks and practising a scorched earth policy.

During the war with Japan, the Chinese bourgeoisie managed to establish only a very fragile “united front”. Even if, following the Japanese attack on China in 1937, the Chinese bourgeoisie closed ranks, in January 1941 both KMT nationalist troops and the Maoist armies clashed again. As the war unfolded, Red Army forces – after many advances and retreats – became the dominant force, reversing the hierarchy which had existed at the beginning of the conflict.

Thus after 1941, after decades of repeated wars in China, after four years of more or less bilateral war between China and Japan, the conflict in Asia then escalated into an all-out confrontation in the whole of Asia. Between 1941 and 1945 the war engulfed all the countries in East Asia and also Australia.

Initially Japan made some quick gains – after its crushing victory at Pearl Harbour. Within a few months Japan conquered large areas of South-East Asia. Its troops occupied the British colony Hong Kong, large parts of the Philippines, landed in the Dutch Indies (later Indonesia), and penetrated into Burma. Within 100 days they reached the coast of Australia and India.1

Whereas World War I had largely spared the far East and South-East Asia from the war, these areas became now involved for the first time in such carnage.2    


1 In most countries, Japan tried to draw local supporters of “national independence” from the colonial powers Britain and Holland into its orbit. Thus in India Japan gained the support of Indian nationalists who wanted to split from their colonial power Britain. The German Nazi regime had succeeded in recruiting nationalists in the Middle East for its offensive, Japanese imperialism presented itself as a force of “liberation” from British colonialism.

2 The carnage over the South East Asian Japanese war conquests left behind an extremely high blood toll. The battle over the Philippines was one of the bloodiest. For example in the fight for the island Leyte some 80,000 Japanese soldiers died, in the fight for Luzon 190,000 Japanese soldiers fell, the defence of Okinawa cost the lives of 110,000 Japanese soldiers, the US army lost some 50,000 soldiers in the conquest of Okinawa alone.

 

A spiral of destruction

The USA for the first time used napalm bombs against housing districts in Japan. On March 9th 1945, the US bombing raid on Tokyo cost the lives of 130,000 people, 267,000 buildings on a surface of 41 square miles were destroyed, and more than one million people became homeless. The second biggest city Osaka was bombed on March 13th, some 4,000 people died, some 100,000 houses were destroyed. Altogether more than 600,000 buildings were destroyed in Japan in 4 bombing raids. In June 1945 – 2 months before the two nuclear bombs were dropped – in Tokyo and Kobe some 50% of the houses were in ruins. The same scorched earth policy was practised in Nagoya, Osaka and Kawasaki.

By the end of the war more than 2 million houses were destroyed and some 13 million people made homeless by napalm bombs alone. While the US justifications of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki try to present this barbaric attack as an exception, saving the life of thousands of US-soldiers, in reality the nuclear bombs on these two cities were a culmination point of a whole spiral of destruction and annihilation, leading yet again in the years following World War II to a systematic build-up of a nuclear arsenal.1

The balance sheet of the 1937-45 war was particularly disastrous for the two major Asian powers China and Japan.

The war cost the lives of 15-20 million people in China and Japan. Japan, the country which had unleashed the war, was the big loser and became utterly exhausted and militarily crippled. It was the first time for centuries that war had raged on Japanese territory. Japan lost all its conquests (from its colonies Korea and Manchuria to its short-lived war conquests in South-East Asia). Unlike Germany, Japan was not divided into several zones of occupation; the main reason being that the conflict between the USA and the USSR had already taken much sharper proportions in East Asia than in Europe a few months before the war ceased in May 1945. Most Japanese cities were destroyed, its population was starving, and much of its navy was sunk or damaged. During the war Japan lost some 1200 commercial ships (which corresponded to 63 % of its trade tonnage). In short the country was “amputated”.

Having lost control over the war spiral, Japan had to submit to US domination and was occupied for the first time. It lost is status as the first regional imperialist shark to the USA.

Destruction in China were equally devastating. The human death toll mounted to several million people. Paradoxically Korea, the Japanese colony, was spared largely from the hostilities – only to become a new theatre of war a few years later.


1 "The US flagship USS Indianopolis, which had carried the first atomic bomb across the Pacific, before it was dropped on Hiroshima, was sunk by Japanese torpedoes. While the largest part of the crew survived, some 600 marines - clinging to their rescue boats once the boat capsized - were killed by sharks. Nuclear disaster for the Hiroshima population! Death through sharks in the sea for the US-soldiers, who carried the bomb!" (Andrew Wiest, Campaigns of World War II, The Pacific War, London, 2000)

 

 

World War II ends, the Cold War begins

Once the war in Europe came to an end in May 1945 and the booty in Europe was divided amongst the winners, the battle over the domination of Asia unleashed. Already when the fighting in Europe was drawing to a close, 3 zones of conflict immediately became fierce battle grounds in East Asia.

The first zone of conflict was the domination over Japan. It was obvious that the collapse of the Japanese military regime and its elimination from China and Korea would leave a power vacuum, which could only increase the appetites of all imperialist gangsters.

The first country to try and occupy this “vacuum” was Russia, which barely 4 decades earlier in the 1904-1905 war had suffered a big defeat by Japan. However, in a first phase, i.e. after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 (and also later in 1944/early 1945, at the time of the Yalta conference held in February 1945) the USA still assumed since fighting with Japan was reaching unheard of intensity in the far East that it would want Russian participation in defeating Japan, which meant that they wanted above all Russian cannon fodder for the final battles with Japan. Although economically exhausted and with a death toll of more than 20 million people, the USSR had been able to strengthen itself on the imperialist chess board. At the Yalta conference the USSR laid claim on Manchuria, the Kuril archipelago, Sakhalin and Korea north of the 38th parallel; the Chinese ports of Dalian and Lüshün (named Port Arthur when occupied by the Russians) should become a Russian navy base. Stalin’s regime targeted Japan directly. Thus Russia once again aimed at expanding its rule towards East Asia. With the war drawing to an end in Europe, Russia’s strategic interests had changed. Russia, had been benefiting from the carnage between China and Japan and later from the war between Japan and the USA. If Japan was tied down in war with China and the USA, Japan would not be able to attack Russia in Siberia, as Nazi-Germany had been trying to push Japan to do. Since Russia and Japan had the common interest to keep their back clear from any aggression, (Russia wanting to keep away Japan, the ally of its enemy Germany; and Japan wanting to keep Russia, the ally of the USA, in a neutral position) the two countries practised a “non-aggression policy” towards each other during World War II. But towards the end of 1944/45 when the end of the war in Europe was in sight, the USA pushed Russia to take part in the storm against Japan. Stalin even managed to wrist off US military and logistic support for the arming and transport of Russian troops to the east.

At Yalta, the USSR and the USA still agreed, that once the war had come to an end in Europe, the USSR would receive its share after the defeat of Japan. However, once the war was over in Europe, which saw the USSR as a big winner receiving large parts of Eastern Europe and the Eastern part of Germany, US-imperialism had already changed its strategy. The USA no longer wanted any Russian participation in the war against Japan.

Russian imperialism, however, stuck to its guns, it wanted to seize its chance and mobilised an army of 1.5 million soldiers, more than 5.000 tanks, and 3.800 planes within 100 days after the end of the war in Germany.1 Its troops marched through northern China and occupied a territory of the size of Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland taken together. Russia declared war on Japan on August 9th, the day when the USA threw the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and on August 10th Russian troops stormed into Japanese occupied Korea advancing rapidly to the 38th parallel just north of Seoul. With Russian troops having become the occupying force of large parts of China and of northern Korea and mobilising for a landing in Japan, the USA saw their position threatened. The USA had to pay an exorbitant price – having to throw two nuclear bombs on Japan, but at the same time this step was above all aimed at preventing Russia from falling over Japan.

Although militarily Japan was already substantially weakened through the massive carpet bombings before August 1945 and although parts of the Japanese bourgeoisie tried to settle for a truce, the USA decided to launch the first atomic bombs against two Japanese cities because the fight for domination over East Asia saw already a new polarisation between Russia and the USA.

Thus the first major, albeit indirect, clash between Russia and the USA occurred over Japan. But a second theatre of confrontation had already cropped up – the battle over China, where the collapse of Japanese rule sparked the appetites of all the imperialist gangsters.


1The defeat of the Russian army in 1904 left bitter memories in the hearts of our people. It has been a stain on our nation. Our people have waited, believing that they would one day have to smash Japan and wash away this stain. Our old generation has waited 40 years for that day to come.” (quoted by Jörg Friedrich, Yalu, An den Ufern des dritten Weltkrieges, (On the verge of the 3rd world war) Berlin, 2007).

 

The People’s Republic of China: another imperialist, militaristic monster

During World War II, when an alliance of the USA, the USSR and the two rivalling factions of the Chinese bourgeoisie, Kuomintang and the Maoist led Red Army were fighting against Japan, Mao had proposed his “good services” to the USA, praising his troops as a more determined and more capable ally to the USA.

As the war ceased with Japan, the conflict within the Chinese bourgeoisie burst again into the open – fuelled by the imperialist appetites of Russia and the USA. After 1945 the USA, who had backed up the Chinese United Front against Japan, mobilised all their support for the KMT. In a first step, following the Japanese surrender, the USA through its logistical facilities carried back about one million Japanese soldiers from China to Japan (about one fifth of the whole Japanese army), so that the Japanese soldiers would not fall into Russian hands.

Following this operation to rescue Japanese troops, between October and December 1945 half a million Kuomintang soldiers were also airlifted by US troops from south west to northern China and the coastal centres.

As we showed above, the “United Front” between the Stalinist Red Army and the KMT-forces was a very precarious one, interrupted by repeated conflicts and direct confrontations. Japan had fought against two rivalling wings of Chinese capital that were constantly at loggerheads. But once the “common enemy” – Japanese imperialism – had disappeared, the antagonism between the two warring Chinese factions exploded. In June 1946 war started again between Mao and Chiang. After the deluge of an 8 year long war between China and Japan, then another war ravaged the country. With some 3 million soldiers on its side at the beginning of the conflict, the KMT was initially superior in numbers to the Red Army. The KMT received massive support from the USA. In contrast Russia, which returned forcefully on the imperialist front in east Asia in August 1945, occupied Manchuria which Japan had to abandon, but in its first phase it could not offer as much material (above all military) support to the Red Army troops. On the contrary, due to lack of resources Russia dismantled local equipment and shifted it back to Russia.

With the background of an economic collapse largely due to the incessant war economy(the army used up to 80-90% of the budget), the KMT lost much of its support and many soldiers changed sides. Already between 1937-45 money supply increased 500 times. After 1945, under the impact of the war economy, hyperinflation continued with the ensuing pauperisation of the working class and peasants, who turned away massively from the KMT.

After almost 3 years of continuous fighting, the Red Army managed to impose a crushing defeat on the KMT troops. As many as two million KMT soldiers and supporters fled to Taiwan.

In October 1949 Mao’s troops declared ‘mainland’ China to be an independent state. The People’s Republic was proclaimed. However, this was not a “socialist revolution”; it marked the military triumph of one wing of the Chinese bourgeoisie (supported by Russia) over another wing of Chinese capital (supported by the USA). The new People’s Republic arose on the ruins of a country, which had gone through a 12 year long war - preceded by 3 decades of conflicts waged by insatiable warlords. And as so many other “new” states which were founded in the 20th century, it was proclaimed through a division into two parts, Taiwan and “mainland” China, leaving behind a permanent antagonism which has lasted until today.

Ravaged by decades of war economy, supported not by a technically superior USA, but by Russia, which as in eastern Europe initially plundered raw materials and dismantled equipment in Manchuria and could not offer the same material support, the People’s Republic was going to be marked by a great backwardness.

And no sooner had the China war finished in 1949 did the war between North and South Korea break out.

Korea: From its liberation as a colony to plunging into war and division

Two wars had already been fought for the control over the Korean peninsula at the turn of the 19/20th century. In the first one China and Japan clashed in 1894; and in 1904 Russia and Japan had gone to war over hegemony in Korea and Manchuria. Stalin, at the Yalta Conference in 1945, insisted on a division of Korea along the 38th parallel, i.e. a division into north and south, which Russia had already claimed in 1904 before being driven out of the area by Japanese imperialism.

Previously, in August 1945, Russia had occupied Korea down to the 38th parallel just north of Seoul. This constellation lasted from 1945 – 1950, i.e. during the period of the war in China. However, the formation of the Chinese People’s Republic added a new element to the imperialist crab basket. After receiving the Russian go-ahead, Kim Il Sung, who had fought for the Russians during World War II, started an offensive beyond the 38th parallel with the hope of driving off the US forces in a blitz from Korean territory.

The war went through four phases:

  • In a “blitz-offensive” North-Korean troops marched on Seoul on 25th June 1950. By September 1950 the whole of South Korea was conquered by North Korea, only the area around the city of Pusan resisted the North Korean offensive in a bloody siege and remained in South-Korean hands.

  • In a second phase – following the massive mobilisation of US led troops – Seoul was recaptured on September 27th.. The US led UN troops continued their offensive towards the north, and at the end of November 1950 they occupied Pyongyang and reached the Yalu, the border between China and Korea.

  • In a third phase, Chinese and North Korean soldiers started a counter attack. On 4th January 1951 Seoul was recaptured by Chinese North Korean troops (with a mobilisation of 400,000 Chinese and 100,000 North Korean soldiers).

  • In yet another counter attack Seoul fell back into US hands in March 1951. Between spring 1951 and the end of the truce (July 27th, 1953) the front line hardly moved. The war quickly got “dead-locked” and no major gains were made for 2 years.

The war was a horrendous confrontation between the two superpowers and it became one of the most murderous, destructive ones in the period of the cold war.

During the war the USA tested all sorts of weapons (e.g. they used the chemical weapons Anthrax and Napalm). The intensity of the destructions was so big that almost all towns that were attacked were bombed to the ground, for example the two capitals Seoul and Pyongyang were both flattened under US bombs. The US commander said “we can no longer think of any North Korean town to be bombed, there is hardly any house left standing”. The air force had orders to “destroy every means of communication and every installation, factory, city and village”. The civilian population was taken hostage and fire bombed – in some cases cities were 95% destroyed by fire bombs. Within a year almost the whole country had been bombed to ruins. Neither side managed to impose its military goals. The war “unleashed” rapidly, but it took years to come to a truce. On a military level, the war ended where it started, the border line (as established before the unleashing of the war) did not move.

It is estimated that about two million people died in North Korea, and around one million people in the South. General Curtis LeMay, who directed the bombing of Tokyo in 1945, drew this balance sheet: “We burned down every town in North Korea anyway and some in South Korea too. Over a period of three years or so we killed off 20% of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure” 1

North Korea lost 11% of its population, with a very high death toll amongst the civilian population. The North Korean army lost some 500,000 soldiers (dead, wounded and missing), the Chinese army suffered some 900,000 casualties, the South Korean army some 300,000, and the USA suffered the fourth largest number of casualties in US history; 142,000 soldiers died altogether.

The war was the first massive military appearance of Chinese imperialism. China, which had been dependent on Russian arms sales, at the same time tried to compensate its limited arsenal of weapons by the almost unlimited use of human cannon-fodder. Mao did not hide the ruthless and reckless military ambitions of his regime, when he declared in 1952: “The war has been a great learning experience for us… These exercises are better than any military academy. If we continue fighting another year then we will have rotated all our troops to become acquainted with war”. 2 Even when the war was drawing to a close in 1953 China was preparing its sixth offensive with the largest number of soldiers ever mobilised for an offensive against the USA. Already by October 1951 China had mobilised 1.5 million soldiers, and the country was pulverising half of its state budget for the war.

In October 1951 the USA had to quadruple their defence spending to cover the spiralling costs of the war.

Both sides were ready to throw in all their military and economic weight. Stalin, Mao, Chiang and Truman had all formed one front against the Japanese only 6 years beforehand, at the time of World War II. During the Korean war they were searching for possible ways of annihilating each other. The military authorities envisaged the nuclear bombing of 24 Chinese cities, amongst the planned targets of nuclear attacks were Shanghai, Nanking, Beijing, Mukden.

Ever since, the country has been a permanent zone of conflicts with the highest level of militarization. South Korea is supported by the USA, for whom the country is an important bridgehead. Much like Japan, South Korea was quickly reconstructed with US help.

The North which is both a vital buffer zone but also an important bridgehead for threatening Japan is a crucial key for China’s and Russia’s imperialist strategies. Reconstructed following the Stalinist model, the Northern part shows many parallels with the former Eastern European regimes. Although more developed economically than the South before 1945 and more equipped in raw materials and energy resources, the North developed a similar backwardness –typical of regimes suffocated by militarism and run by a Stalinist clique. In the same way as the Soviet Union was unable to survive through economic competitiveness on the world market but only through military means and the permanent threat of the use of its army, North Korea is unable to compete with economic means on the world market. Its major export product are weapons.

The end of World War II and of the Korean war had left the whole of mainland China, Japan and the Korean peninsula in ruins. War had ravaged large areas of Asia. Moreover, one of the consequences of the new imperialist constellation of the cold war was that two countries, China and Korea were divided into two parts, (the People’s Republic and Taiwan, North and South Korea) each side being an ally of one of the blocks. Both Japan and South Korean, which had been flattened by war, quickly received US funds to speed up their reconstruction in order to turn them into strong economic and military supporters of the USA in their confrontation with the Russian rival and its allies.


1 (Jörg Friedrich, Yalu, p. 516).

2 (Jörg Friedrich, Yalu, p. 425)

 

Imperialism in Asia in the 21st century

Rubric: 

Imperialism in Asia

Imperialism in Asia in the 21st century - Introduction

During the first half of 2012 several successful or failed long-distance missile tests by Korea (North and South), China, India and Pakistan have turned a spotlight on the ambitions of all the bigger Asian countries. At the same time gigantic orders of warships have highlighted the ongoing militarisation of the blue waters1 across all Asia. In fact, all the Asian countries have been forced to position themselves in relation to the newly emerging powers China and India. Their ambitions and the US strategy of creating a counter-weight to China have unleashed an arms race engulfing all Asia.

While commentary in the press has until recently concentrated mainly on their double-digit growth figures, the economic rise of the two Asian powers has inevitably been accompanied by a rise in their imperialist ambitions. To understand this situation, we first need to place it within a broader historical context.

Asia's overall weight in world production is returning to the historical norm prior to the rise of European capitalism. Between the 11-17th century China commanded the world's biggest fleet. Until the 18th century, China led Europe technically. In 1750 China's share of world manufacturing was almost one third, whereas Europe's still stood at only one quarter. But with the 19th century expansion of capitalist powers into China and India, both countries2 were overshadowed and their relative share of world production declined.

Today, China is recovering its original position as one of the world's major centres of production and power. But can its return to centre-stage be "peaceful" and "harmonious" as its leadership claims?

All the Far Eastern countries3 rely heavily on sea lanes which run through three bottle-necks: the South China Sea (SCS), the Strait of Malacca (between Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia) and the Strait of Hormus (between Iran and Dubai). “More than half of the world's annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through the Straits of Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok, (Indonesia) with the majority continuing on into the South China Sea. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Malacca leading into the South China Sea is more than three times greater than Suez Canal traffic, and well over five times more than the Panama Canal. Virtually all shipping that passes through the Malacca and Sunda Straits must pass near the Spratly Islands”.4

90% of Japan's imported oil passes through the South China Sea. Almost 80% of China’s oil passes through the Strait of Malacca. At the moment the largely USA dominates these bottlenecks. As an emerging power China finds this situation unbearable – because their control by a single power like the USA could strangle China.

Although the 20th century's first major imperialist conflict took place between two Asian powers (the Russo-Japanese war of 1905), the main battles of World War I took place in Europe and the battle fields in Asia remained marginal, World War II, however, involved Asia far more deeply in the general destruction. Some of the fiercest and bloodiest battles took place in Asia. After World War II, while the European continent was divided by the “Iron Curtain”, stretching across Central Europe through divided Germany, four Asian countries were divided in two: Korea, China, Vietnam (since reunited) and India. Whereas in Europe the Iron Curtain came down in 1989, the divisions in Asia continue to exist, each of them creating permanent conflicts and some of the world's most militarised border zones (North / South Korea, Peoples' Republic of China / Taiwan, Pakistan / India). But now it is not only the conflicts between the divided countries which continue to fuel imperialist tensions, it is above all the rise of a new challenger, China, and the reactions by the neighbouring countries and the challenged super-power, the USA, which aggravate the tensions.


1 This refers to the notion of a "blue-water navy", a rather imprecise term which generally indicates a navy capable of projecting power in international waters outside its own coastal waters.

2 India of course was not a country in the 19th century. Indeed India as a single political unit cannot be said to have existed until the British Raj.

3 The term "Far East" is of course entirely Euro-centric. For the USA, the region is the "Far West", while for Asian countries themselves the region is obviously central. We therefore use the term purely as a matter of convention and literary convenience.

 

Asia 1945-1989

While the confrontation between the Russian bloc countries and the US bloc was at the centre of the Cold War after 1945, China has the specificity of having clashed simultaneously with the two bloc leaders of the time, the USA and Russia. Thus the imperialist rivalries in the East have never been limited to conflicts between the two blocs: ever since its liberation from Japanese colonialism China has shown a tendency to try to “go it alone”. When the East-West confrontation ended in 1989, the seeds of a new confrontation between China and the USA, which had been retarded by the situation of the Cold War between 1972-1989, were to germinate. In the context of a general disorder on the imperialist stage, China's economic emergence necessarily set the clock ticking for new military confrontations with the USA.

The imperialist development in Asia has been marked by the specificity of India and China.

China entered the post-war period devastated by militarism: repeated intervention by Western imperialism during the 19th century, the collapse of central state power and the rise of warlordism, Japanese invasion and more than ten years of bitter and barbaric warfare, then civil war between the Kuomingtang and the Red Army, until the Communist Party of China (CPC) seized power in 1949. All this left the country in a state of extreme economic backwardness (made even more catastrophic by the attempt to catch up with the developed world during the "Great Leap Forward") and militarily weak, dependent on the sheer weight of numbers of a poorly armed peasant army. In the case of India, whose economy was equally backward in relation to foreign competitors due to the long weight of colonialism, the new ruling faction which took over power after independence in 1947 aggravated this condition with its semi-isolationist policy. Both India and China cut themselves off in different degrees from the world market. Thus Stalinism in the specific form of Maoism in China, semi-isolation in the specific form of Ghandism in India were historic chains which meant the two rivals started their emergence from a low initial level of development. The determination of the Chinese ruling class to adapt its forces substantially and with a long-term view to challenging the USA is thus all the more striking.

Since 1989 a change has been unfolding in Asia's imperialist hierarchy: overall, China and India have been on the rise, Japan has been on a relative decline, while Russia, after almost disappearing from the world scene after the implosion of the USSR, is making something of a comeback. The position of the only remaining superpower, the USA, has been weakened – not only in Asia but throughout the world. The USA is now struggling to maintain its superiority in Asia.

The situation in Asia is dominated by a complex web of shifting alliances and counter-alliances. Each state is trying to fend off the ambitions of its rivals, while all of them want to restrain China's dominance without becoming mere puppets of the only power able to confront China: the USA. This web of alliances can be seen all along the different zones of conflict from North Korea via Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the Indian Ocean, to the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.

China's imperialist ambitions in continuity with decades of militarism

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded on the basis of the partition between the PRC and Taiwan – each with their supporting bloc (the USA and Russia). The history of the PRC since its foundation has been marked by a series of military conflicts with its neighbours:

  • 1952: China was heavily involved in the Korean War. This was the first big clash between the USA and the Soviet Union and China on the Korean peninsula.

  • 1950-1951 Chinese troops occupied Tibet. Between 1956-59 there was prolonged fighting between the Chinese army and Tibetan guerrillas.

  • 1958: China bombarded Taiwan's Quemoy and Matsu islands.

  • 1962: China was involved in a border dispute with India in the Himalayas. Since then China has been a staunch defender of Pakistan in its stand-off with India.

  • 1963-64: After having been allies for more than a dozen years China and the Soviet Union split. While the Soviet Union was engaged in an arms race with the US bloc, an additional confrontation arose between China and the Soviet Union. In March 1969 a serious clash occurred at the Ussuri River with dozens of Russian soldiers killed or wounded. By 1972, 44 Soviet divisions were stationed along the 7000km border with China (Russia had “only” 31 stationed in Europe). One quarter of Soviet aviation was transferred to its eastern border. In 1964 the USA envisaged the possibility of a nuclear attack - together with Russia - against China. And in 1969 the Russians still had plans to launch nuclear missiles against China.1 The conflict between the USA and China ebbed in the early 1970s. After a long and bloody war trying to prevent South Vietnam from falling into Russian hands, in 1972 the USA succeeded in “neutralising” China, while the confrontation between China and Russia continued and took the form of proxy wars. Thus between 1975-1979, soon after the end of war in Vietnam, a first proxy war broke out between Vietnam (supported by Russia) and Cambodia (supported by China); others followed, particularly in Africa.

  • 1979: China fared disastrously in a 16-day war with Vietnam, where both sides mobilized between them more than one million soldiers and left tens of thousands of victims behind. The Chinese army's weaknesses were made glaringly obvious. In 1993 it abandoned the “people’s war” or “war of attrition” tactics, based on the sacrifice of an unlimited number of soldiers. The adaptation to war under high-tech conditions was initiated after this experience.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 the PRC entered a tri-partite alliance with the U.S. and Pakistan, to sponsor Islamist Afghan armed resistance to the Soviet Occupation (1979–89). China acquired military equipment from America to defend itself from Soviet attack. The Chinese People's Liberation Army trained and supported the Afghan Mujahidin during the Soviet o2.

Thus during the first four decades of its existence, the People’s Republic of China was involved in armed conflict with almost all of its neighbors: the Soviet Union, Korea and the USA, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, India. And for many years during the Cold War, China clashed with both bloc leaders simultaneously. Of the fourteen separate nation states that border China, ten still have outstanding frontier disputes with it. Thus the present sharpening of tensions in particular with the USA is not new, it is in continuity with decades of conflict. That said, in recet years a new polarisation around China has emerged.

While for decades the PRC had its troops massed at the Russian border, concentrated its forces for protecting its coast line and maintained readiness to wage war with Taiwan, in the early 1990s the PRC systematically started to adapt to the new world situation created by the collapse of the USSR.


 

China takes to the seas

Beijing policy during the past 20 years has aimed at:

1) Developing a long-term strategy to operate in blue-water seas, combined with efforts to acquire or develop its weapons for cyberspace and space, and to enhance its aviation's range and striking power. The long-term aim is to prevent the USA from being the dominant force in the Pacific - the military call this “anti-access/area denial” capabilities. The idea is to use pinpoint ground attack and anti-ship missiles, a growing fleet of modern submarines, cyber and anti-satellite weapons to destroy or disable another nation’s military assets from afar. This marks a shift away from devoting the bulk of the PLA's modernisation drive to the goal of capturing Taiwan. Whereas historically the goal of recapturing Taiwan and acting as a coastal force defending its coast line with a certain “continental” outlook was the main strategic orientation, China now aims to advance into blue-water. This more assertive posture was influenced by the 1995-96 Taiwan Straits crisis that saw two US carriers humiliate Beijing in its home waters. China is investing heavily in “asymmetric capabilities” designed to blunt America’s once-overwhelming capacity to project power in the region. Thus China aims to be able to launch disabling attacks on American bases in the western Pacific and push America’s carrier groups beyond what it calls the “first island chain”, sealing off the Yellow Sea, South China Sea and East China Sea inside an arc running from the Aleutians in the north to Borneo in the south. In the western Pacific, that would mean targeting or putting in jeopardy America’s aircraft-carrier groups and its air-force bases in Okinawa, South Korea and even Guam. Since World War II, America's allies in the Asia-Pacific region have counted on the U.S. to provide a security umbrella. But now "The assumption that U.S. and allied naval surface vessels can operate with high security in all parts of the Western Pacific is no longer valid" a US report has said. U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups, it said, are becoming "increasingly vulnerable" to Chinese surveillance and weaponry up to 1,200 nautical miles from China's coast1.

2) At the same time China wants to have a presence at various maritime bottle-necks, which means expanding into the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Unable to snatch territories from its neighbours in the north, east and west, it must focus its forces on imposing its presence in the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean (far sea defence) and towards the Middle East. This means above all it must undermine the still dominant US position in the blue waters. While claiming a dominant position in the South China Sea, it has started to set up a “string of pearls” around India and is stretching out its fingers towards the Middle East.


 

A deadly “string of pearls”

In addition to the long-standing close links with the regimes in Pakistan and Burma, China has been following a “string of pearls” strategy of setting up bases and building diplomatic ties. Some examples:

  • Signature of a military agreement with Cambodia.

  • Funding the construction of a canal across the Kra Isthmus in Thailand. The canal is planned to be 102 kilometres long and 500 metres wide and is to link the Indian Ocean to China’s Pacific coast – a project on the scale of the Panama Canal. It could tip Asia’s balance of power in China’s favour by giving China’s fleet and merchant navy easy access to a vast oceanic continuum stretching all the way from East Africa to Japan and the Korean Peninsula. This proposed canal would challenge Singapore’s position as the main regional port and help Chinese vessels to avoid the straits of Malacca. This has great strategic significance for the naval balance of power, and challenges India’s present dominant position in the Bay of Bengal1.

  • Construction of strategic infrastructure in Tibet and Myanmar.

  • Developing a port facility in Sittwe, Myanmar.

  • Electronic intelligence gathering facilities on islands in the Bay of Bengal.

  • Assistance to Bangladesh in developing its deep-sea port in Chittagong, sales of missile boats to Bangladesh.

  • Extensive military aid to Sri Lanka. China helped Sri Lanka to win the war against the Tamil Tigers in 2009, it also invested in the development of ports in Hambantota.

  • Building a naval base at Marao in the Maldives.

  • Setting up its first military base abroad in Seychelles.

  • Developing the Gwadar port on the south-west coast of Pakistan. China’s involvement in the construction of the deep-sea port of Gwadar has attracted much attention given its strategic location, about 70 kilometres from the Iranian border and 400 kilometres east of the Strait of Hormuz - the world's major oil supply route. It has been suggested that it will provide China with a “listening post” from where it can monitor US naval activity in the Persian Gulf and Indian activity in the Arabian Sea.

  • An anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden.

The construction of such a “string of pearls” would allow China to threaten shipping at the three crucial bottlenecks in the Indian Ocean – Bab el Mandeb (connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden), the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Malacca. Chinese naval officers speak of developing in the long-term three ocean-going fleets to patrol the seas around Japan and Korea, the Western Pacific, the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean.

As an emerging power, China claims more weight and influence, but this can only be at the expense of other countries, in particular at the expense of the USA. This polarises the whole regional situation. Countries are drawn towards China, or into the arms of the USA, whether they like it or not.

The Chinese ruling class want to make us believe that Beijing’s rise is meant to be a peaceful one, and that China has no expansionist intentions, that it will be a different kind of great power. The reality of the past 20 years shows that China's rise is inseparable from increased imperial and military ambitions. While it is unthinkable that China could today defeat the USA or set up a new Chinese-led bloc, the main impact of China’s rise has been to undermine US superiority: its ambitions have triggered a new arms race. In addition, its increased weight world wide has encouraged the weakened former bloc leader, Russia, to act side-by-side with China in many conflicts with the USA (e.g. Syria, Iran) and to support (overtly or covertly) all those regimes which are denounced by the USA as “rogue states" (North Korea, Iran) or which are “failed states” such as Pakistan. Although Russia is also not interested in seeing China becoming too strong, and while Moscow has no intention of becoming a servant of China, Russia has realised that acting together with China against the USA offers it greater new room for manoeuvre. This explains Russia's naval exercises with China in the Yellow Sea.

The arms race between China and its rivals

Since 1989, the Chinese military budget has risen by an average of 12.9 percent per year: according to GlobalSecurity.org, it is now the second-largest on the planet. The overall US budget for national security – not counting the various wars Washington is embroiled in – is running at over $800 billion, although some estimates place it above $1 trillion. Global research group IHS has forecast Beijing's military outlay to double from its 2011 US$119.8 billion, to US$238.2 billion by 2015. That exceeds the amount spent by the region's 12 key defense markets, including Japan and India. In 2011 Chinese military spending was 80% higher than that of Japan, and 200% higher than those of India. China's military budget in 2011 was 2.5 times bigger than the 2001 figure and has doubled every five years. China's military budget takes up 30% of the Asian total, although according to Western defense officials those totals do not include arms imports. Thus in reality the overall military budget is much higher. If the forecast is accurate, China’s military spending will overtake the combined military spending of NATO’s top eight members, bar the US. And while in the year 2000 the US military budget was still 20 times higher than the Chinese, in 2011/2012 the relation is 7:1.2

China's modernisation efforts have been directed mainly at developing longer range missiles and increasing its cyber-war capabilities. Its navy is now believed to be the third largest in the world behind only the US and Russia. The PLA's infantry contingent has been reduced, while the navy, air force and the Second Artillery Corps – responsible for China’s nuclear missiles – have all been increased.

While Chinese growth rates have often reached double figures, its military budget has grown even faster. To be sure, the Chinese army started from a weak position of, since the majority of its forces were land forces, poorly equipped and mainly seen as cannon fodder for big land battles. The Chinese military has little fighting experience. Their troops have not seen action since 1979 when they were given a drubbing by Vietnam. In contrast US troops have been fighting, modernising, and adapting their weaponry and tactics constantly, developing anti-satellite weapons, anti-ship missiles, cruise missiles, and cyber-warfare capabilities. The PLA's ability to undertake complex joint operations in a hostile environment is untested. China’s missile and submarine forces could pose a threat to American carrier groups near its coast, but it will be some time until they can do so further afield. Learning to use all these newly acquired weapons in battle il likely to take years. Nevertheless, these ambitious armaments projects and China's expansionist strategy mean that the USA now perceives it among "major and emerging powers” as the country with “greatest potential to compete militarily” with the United States. Although even according to the Pentagon the Chinese military is "still decades away from possessing a comprehensive capability to engage and defeat a modern adversary beyond China's boundaries", leaders in the USA warn that “China's military is growing and modernizing." "We must be vigilant. We must be strong. We must be prepared to confront any challenge. But the key to that region is going to be to develop a new era of defense cooperation between our countries, one in which our military shares security burdens in order to advance peace." (the 2012 US defence secretary Panetta3).

As a consequence of the construction of the “string of pearls” and the growing Chinese presence in the Pacific, its neighbours have been compelled to adapt their military planning. Some examples:

Japan has switched from having its weapons targeted principally at the Soviet Union to focus more on China. Despite the effects of the economic crisis Japan plans to spend $284 billion between 2011 and 2015 – including the deployment of more US Patriot missiles; the navy is to receive more blue-water ships. Japan and China are currently engaged in a dispute over a group of rocky islets lying on the edge of the continental shelf about 100 miles north-east of Taiwan (in Japanese Senkaku-island, Diaoyu Islands in Chinese). 4

In 2006, South Korea launched a 15-year military-modernization program projected to cost some $550 billion, with about one-third slated for arms purchases. In 2012 it tested cruise missiles with a range of 930 miles, able to reach any location in North Korea. In view of the latest clashes with North Korea more money is to be made available for additional weapons.5

Australia is increasing its armaments budget, and has agreed to the deployment of an additional 2500 US soldiers and the construction of a new US base in the country.


2 Sources:
defensetech.org/2011/05/19/pla-chinese-military-doesnt-compare-to-u-s-military
csis.org/press/csis-in./panetta-outlines-us-military-strategy-asia
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/budget.htm
Shen Dingli in Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2012

4 factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=819&catid=22&subcatid=148

 

South China Sea: first link in a chain of conflicts

It not only contains oil and gas resources strategically located near large energy-consuming countries but also is the world's second busiest international sea lane that links North-East Asia and the Western Pacific to the Indian Ocean and the Middle East, traversing the South China Sea. More than half of the world's shipping tonnage sails through the South China Sea each year. Over 80% of the oil for Japan, South Korea and Taiwan flows though the area.

Jose Almonte, former national security adviser to the Philippine government, is blunt about the strategic importance of the area: The great power that controls the South China Sea will dominate both archipelagic and peninsular Southeast Asia and play a decisive role in the future of the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean – together with their strategic sea lanes to and from the oil fields of the Middle East.1

The South China Sea is not only a vital shipping lane, it is also estimated to be rich in oil, natural gas, precious raw materials and fisheries whose rights of exploitation have not been agreed. These military-strategic, economic factors create an explosive mixture.

The conflicts between the littoral states over the domination in this zone is not new. In 1978 Vietnam and China clashed over the control of the Spratly islands (Vietnam, which was supported by Moscow at the time, claimed the Spratly islands for itself, the Chinese leader Deng Tsiao Ping warned Moscow that China was prepared for a full-scale war against the USSR). China's more aggressive stand took another turn after 1991 when China took the first steps to fill the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of US forces from the Philippines in 1991. China revived its "historical" claims to all the islets, including the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos, and 80% of the 3.5 million km2 body of water along a nine-dotted U-shaped line, notwithstanding a complete absence of international legal justification. Despite negotiations no resolution has been forthcoming over the two large island groups—the Paracels (or Xisha and Zhongsha), over which China clashed again with Vietnam in 1988 and 1992. The islets can be used as air and sea bases for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance activities, and as base points for claiming the deeper part of the South China Sea for Chinese missile submarines and other vessels. China is reported to be building an land-sea missile base in southern China’s Guangdong Province, with missiles capable of reaching the Philippines and Vietnam. The base is regarded as an effort to enforce China’s territorial claims to vast areas of the South China Sea claimed by neighbouring countries, and to confront American aircraft carriers that now patrol the area unmolested. China has even declared the zone as “a core interest” - raising it to the same level of significance as Tibet and Taiwan.

The SCS is the most fragile, the most unstable zone because China does not compete with just one big rival. It faces a number of smaller and weaker countries – Vietnam, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia – all of which are too small to defend themselves alone. As a result all the neighbouring countries have to look for help from a bigger ally. This means first and foremost the USA, but also Japan and India which have offered these states their “protection”. The latter two countries have participated in a number of manoeuvres in the area, for example with Vietnam and Singapore.

A main focus of the arms race which has been triggered in Asia can be seen in the SCS countries. Although Vietnam does not have the military and financial means to go toe-to-toe with China, it has been purchasing weapons from European and Russian companies – including submarines. Arms imports are on the rise in Malaysia. Between 2005 and 2009 the country increased its arms imports sevenfold in comparison to the preceding five year period. The tiny city-state of Singapore, which plans to acquire two submarines, is now among the world's top 10 arms importers. Australia plans to spend as much as $279 billion over the next 20 years on new subs, destroyers and fighter planes. Indonesia wants to acquire long-range missiles and purchase 100 German tanks. The Philippines are spending almost $1 billion on new aircraft and radar. China has about 62 submarines now and is expected to add 15 in coming years. India, South Korea and Vietnam are expected to get six more submarines apiece by 2020. Australia plans to add 12 over the next 20 years. Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia are each adding two. Together, the moves constitute one of the largest build-ups of submarines since the early years of the Cold War. Asian nations are expected to buy as many as 111 submarines over the next 20 years.2


 

2 (www.wsj.com - February 12,2011)

 

Another hotspot: the Indian Ocean…

The Pacific and the SCS are not the only theatre of imperialist rivalries: the Indian Ocean is becoming another area of confrontation.

The sea lanes in the Indian Ocean are considered among the most strategically important in the world—according to the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, more than 80% of the world’s seaborne trade in oil transits through Indian Ocean bottlenecks, with 40% passing through the Strait of Hormuz, 35% through the Strait of Malacca and 8% through the Bab el-Mandab Strait. Half the world’s containerized cargo sails through this vital waterway. It is not just a question of sea lanes and trade, however. More than half the world’s armed conflicts are presently located in the Indian Ocean region. In addition to being the theatre of the imperialist ambitions of China and India, there is the permanent threat of a potential nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, permanent conflict around Iran, Islamist terrorism, increasing piracy in and around the Horn of Africa, and conflicts over diminishing fishery resources.

In fact the Indian Ocean is a crucial “interface” between the zone of imperialist tensions in the Middle East and rising tensions in the Far East, the South China Sea, and the broader Pacific. Although it has been speculated that the Indian Ocean might contain 40% of the world’s oil reserves, and there is fresh exploration for oil in the seas of India, Sri Lanka and Burma, the Ocean's importance has increased since the relative decline of US power in the region has left a void that is increasingly being filled by China and India.

China is not the only country enhancing its presence in the Indian Ocean. Japan is eager to participate in the efforts to contain China and has promised Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia $7.18 billion in development aid over the next three years to help build up infrastructure, including high-speed rail, port and water supply projects. But it is above all India, the biggest country on the littoral which has traditionally had a land-oriented strategic outlook, that has been obliged to counter China's penetration into the Indian Ocean. Much is at stake for India: India imports some 70% of its oil and gas, and some two-thirds of this travels through the Indian Ocean. India is the fourth-largest consumer of oil in the world, and it relies on crude shipments from Middle Eastern countries including Saudi Arabia and Iran. It also imports large amounts of coal from Indonesia and Australia. These dependencies and the crucial role of the sea lanes along its shores have made India very vulnerable from the sea. And of course, India's emergence as a new regional player has increased its imperialist appetite.

India – firmly in the grip of militarist cancer

Historically, India was considered the crown jewel of the British empire. When after World War II the British colonial rulers could no longer control India, they divided it. Almost at the same time as Korea and China, the old Raj was divided in two – into a Muslim dominated Pakistan and a multi-religious India with a Hindu majority.1 The two countries have been engaged in a permanent cold war, and four hot wars, ever since.

No sooner was independence declared in 1947 than a military conflict with the rival Pakistan erupted for control of the strategically vital and disputed territory of Kashmir. Pakistan occupied one third of Kashmir while India occupied three fifths (a part of Kashmir is still occupied by China). In the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 India attacked Pakistan on all fronts after attempts by Pakistani troops to infiltrate into Indian-controlled Kashmir. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 was fought over the issue of self rule in East Pakistan; Pakistan was decisively defeated, resulting in the creation of Bangladesh.2

In 1999 Pakistan and India fought an 11-week-long border skirmish in the disputed northern Kashmir province. And during the past years repeated terrorist attacks – supported by Pakistan – have contributed to maintain the hostility between the two nuclear powers.

At the time of India's independence, the Indian ruling class was still able to keep clear of the emerging confrontation between the US-led Western and Russian led Eastern bloc. India took part in setting up the “non-aligned movement”, basically because the main line of confrontation between the two blocs was in Europe and in the Far East (e.g. the Korean war). Since membership of the non-aligned nations3 cut India off from US military support, it was forced to turn to Russia for military equipment and supplies, and even for some industrial investment, though the country was never part of the Russian bloc. However, India's attempt to keep out of the East-West confrontation could not prevent a clash with China, and in 1962 the two countries were engaged in the brief Sino-Indian War over the border in the Himalayas. The war convinced the Indian military to refocus on rearmament and an improvement in relations with the United States.

Thus India faces two arch enemies, Pakistan and China, with China heavily supporting Pakistan. Despite various diplomatic efforts the border disputes between India and China have not disappeared. India claims that China occupies more than 14,000 square miles of Indian territory in the Aksai Chin along its northern border in Kashmir (commonly referred to as the western sector), while China lays claim to more than 34,000 square miles of India’s north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh (commonly referred to as the eastern sector). India also is a long-term host to the Dalai Lama and about 100,000 Tibetan refugees who fled China's annexation of Tibet in 1950. In recent years China has also intensified its military build up along the Indian border, in particular in Tibet. For example the PLA Air Force has established at least four airbases in Tibet and three in southern China capable of mounting operations against India.4

With the exception of the British, India's rulers have historically had a land-based outlook. Since India's independence, all the major conflicts in which it has been involved, or which have broken out in the region (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran) have taken place on land, without any major sea battles. The rapid development of Indian naval power is thus a recent phenomenon and can only be explained by the global confrontation unfolding in Asia. Having focused mostly on the threat from Pakistan and China on its north-eastern flank, India is now faced with an additional challenge – defending its position in the Indian Ocean.5

It is therefore no surprise that India has ordered 350 T-90S tanks (from Russia) as well as some 250-300 fighter planes, and that it has decided to produce some 1000 tanks in India itself.6

To counter China's "string of pearls" strategy the Indian Navy is growing longer sea legs by acquiring aircraft carriers, tankers and troop ships. Over the next decade, India plans to introduce 100 new warships to its naval forces. India now has the world’s fifth-largest navy. Whereas India continues to modernise its territorial forces and needs to keep thousands of troops mobilised at its border with Pakistan, the Chinese military has put even more emphasis on its blue water navies and increasing its out-of-area ballistic capabilities.

Being inferior to China on a military and economic level, Chinese expansion into the Indian Ocean has compelled India to look for an ally whose interests are also opposed to those of China; hence the convergence of interests between the USA and India. It is revealing that India, which in the 1950s could stay out of the major East-West conflict is now being pulled into a power struggle with China and forced to side with the USA. India already holds more joint military exercises annually with the US than any other nation. Despite strong hesitations amongst certain parts of the Indian ruling class, which are suspicious of the USA after so many years of close ties with the Soviet Union, India and the USA are condemned to “partnership”. The USA have no choice but to foster the modernisation and arming of India. In this context they have tacitly or directly supported steps towards developing the Indian nuclear industry – which can only be seen by both Pakistan and China as a direct threat.

Firstly, the geo-strategic rationale for an alliance between the US and India is the encirclement or containment of the People’s Republic of China, India can be the only counter-weight to China in the region. The other rationale or intentions of such cooperation are the neutralization of Russia as a player in Central Asia and the securing of energy resources for both the US and India. The US also has used India in its objective of trying to isolate Iran.”.7

Much like China and the South-East Asian countries, India has intensified its arms build-up. India's defence budget, which was roughly $32 billion in 2011, has increased 151% in the last decade. India's defence spending will rise by 17% in the financial year 2012-13, and the government expects military spending to grow at about 8.33% annually in coming years. India’s import of major weapons increased by 38% between 2002-2006 and 2007-2011. India purchased some $12.7 billion in arms, 80 percent of that from Russia, during 2007-2011, according to the SIPRI.8

India has established listening posts in northern Madagascar, the Seychelles, and Mauritius; in late 2009, it successfully co-opted the Maldives as part of its southern naval command. India has established its first military base on foreign soil at Ayni in Tajikistan. In this context the latest tests of long-range missiles are part of this global strategy of Indian imperialism.

India has started to develop closer economic and above all military ties with other countries that feel threatened by China, notably Japan and Vietnam. India has prioritised strengthening relations with Japan through increasing military contacts, maritime cooperation, and trade and investment ties. Tokyo in turn has pledged $4.5 billion in soft loans for the Delhi-Mumbai railway freight corridor. A joint security declaration with Japan was signed in 2008, calling their partnership “an essential pillar for the future architecture of the region.9 Japan participated repeatedly in the Malabar naval exercises in the Indian Ocean. India feels particularly threatened not only by the Pakistan-China connection, but it is also alarmed by China's major financial and military support to the strategically important Sri Lanka. The attitude of the Myanmar regime, which for years had privileged links with China, is another factor of uncertainty. Thus India is faced on its western, northern, southern and eastern side and all along its shores by increased pressure from China. As we mentioned above, the Indian army is locked down in a permanent defence of its land borders. China makes periodic incursions into the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which borders Tibet and is claimed by Beijing. China has countered US support for Indian nuclear power by the sale of two new nuclear reactors to Pakistan. Furthermore, the PLA has a presence in the Pakistan-administered Kashmir areas of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. With China already controlling one fifth of Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian army is facing the reality of a Chinese presence on both the eastern and western flanks of the volatile Kashmir region.

As we shall see below, the contradicting interests in the Indian Ocean and the strategy of arming and looking for allies contains many unpredictable elements. For example early 2008 India launched an Israeli spy satellite (TechSAR/Polaris) into space. The Israeli satellite seems to be mainly aimed against Iran. Israel is supplying India with the latest electronic technology and there are indications which point to a closer cooperation between the USA-India-Israel.10 In this context of growing tensions in Asia India is an important player in a major naval build-up running from the coastline of East Africa and the Arabian Sea to Oceania. Apart from major presence the fleets of the US and its NATO allies in the Indian Ocean, the naval fleets of Iran, India, China, Japan, and Australia have been expanding, using the real problem of piracy in the region to justify their increased presence.11 An international overview shows that while the old industrial countries, suffocating under the crushing weight of the economic crisis, have been forced to reduce or freeze their armaments expenditure, all the emerging Asian countries are relentlessly increasing their arms spending. According to the latest figures released by the SIPRI, the world's five largest arms importers in 2007-2011 were all Asian states. India was the world's single largest recipient of arms, accounting for 10% of global arms imports, followed by South Korea (6%), Pakistan (5%), China (5%) and Singapore (4%). These five countries accounted for 30% of the volume of international arms imports, according to the SIPRI. This simultaneous build-up of advanced weaponry in the Asia-Pacific and South-East-Asia region is on a scale and at a speed not seen since the Cold War arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union.

While tensions rise in East-Asia and South-East Asia, the recent sharpening of tensions in the Middle East makes it very likely that any escalation of conflicts in the Middle East and its surrounding zone will have strong repercussions on the imperialist constellation in Asia.


1 The partition was one of history's biggest operations of ethnic cleansing, displacing up to 10 million people and leaving up to a million dead.

2 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_wars_and_conflicts

3 The Non-Aligned Movement was founded in 1961 in Belgrade by the leaders of Yugoslavia, Egypt, India, and Indonesia. It attempted to create a space between the two blocs by playing off one against the other. Its room for manoeuvre can be judged by the fact that Castro's Cuba – at the time totally dependent on Russia aid for its survival – was also a member.

7 See www.globalresearch.org, October 17, 2009, Geo-strategic Chessboard: War Between India and China? By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya.

8 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute https://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/rise-in-international-arms-tra...

 

The oldest hotspot and the danger of contagion towards the East

During the past 60 years the Middle East has been the theatre of unending conflicts and wars (Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and now Syria). Until recently East Asia and South-East Asia were never heavily involved in these conflicts. But more and more the rivalries between the biggest Asian powers and the antagonism between the USA and China can also be felt in the different conflicts in the Middle East.

Pakistan is courted by both the USA and China. The USA needs Pakistan to counter the different brands of terrorism which operate in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. Yet, not all factions of the ruling cliques in Pakistan want to submit to the USA. Pakistan's involvement in America's wars is destabilising the country still further (for example the recent air strikes in Pakistan reveal the new strategy to “hit and kill”, targeting “terrorists” but spread the flames to even larger areas within Pakistan), but this works in many ways against China, which wants a strong Pakistan against India.

Concerning Afghanistan, India has been participating at the side of American-led forces in the construction of the “security apparatus” in Afghanistan, while China eyes this with great suspicion. Beijing too has signed major economic contracts with Kabul.

The sharpening of the conflict around Iran has major ramifications for the rivalries in Asia. While Iran until 1978/79 was an important outpost for the US-led bloc against Russia, once the Shah's regime imploded and the Mullahs took over, a strong anti-Americanism developed. The more US hegemony weakened, the more Iran could claim regional power. The Iranian challenge to the USA inevitably had to receive Chinese backing. On an economic level, China has benefited from the space left vacant by sanctions imposed against Iran; China is now Iran’s largest trading partner. While Beijing’s economic engagement with Iran is growing, India’s presence is shrinking. Since 12% of India’s oil is imported from Iran (its second largest supplier after Saudi Arabia), India fears being marginalised in Iran and losing out to China.

Despite Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi-Arabia being fierce enemies, and despite China's support for the Tehran regime, China has signed a civilian nuclear energy cooperation pact with Saudi Arabia, a country which provides China with almost one fifth of its oil. China must avoid antagonising important oil suppliers. This reflects the versatile Chinese diplomatic practice in the region, having an egg in every basket, no matter how much the different sides may oppose each other. And China’s approach to maintain a balance in its ties with Iran and the Arab Gulf States, reduces India's economic and military options, because the Saudis have also developed special links with Pakistan, whose nuclear programme they funded and fostered for years. It is plausible that Pakistan might covertly transfer nuclear technology to Saudi-Arabia – which must be seen as a big threat to Iran and India. However, other additional factors make the constellation more complicated and more contradictory.1

Iran faces many enemies in the region. For example heavily armed Saudi-Arabia (which is planning to buy 600-800 German built tanks and which recently signed a gigantic contract for another 130 modern fighter planes with the USA),2 and Iraq, with whom it waged an 8 year war in the 1980s. Israel feels vulnerable to an Iranian (nuclear?) missile attack and has been pressing the USA hard to strike militarily against alleged Iranian nuclear sites. Thus any escalation around Iran is likely to create great upheavals amongst Iran's rivals and their respective defenders.

Last but not least any conflict in the Middle East draws the former bloc leader Russia onto the stage. Ganging up with China Russia fiercely opposes any military intervention against Iran and does everything it can to undermine US strategy. Both China and Russia must protect Iran against US pressure, because if the regime in Tehran fell, this would strengthen the US position in the Middle East and not only threaten Chinese oil supplies but weaken the Russian and Chinese strategic standing in the region altogether.

The stalemate of the imperialist situation in Syria during the summer of 2012 cannot be understood without the covert and overt weight of China, Russia and Iran in the conflict. Without the support of these three powers, the Western countries – despite their differences and other factors making them hesitate – might be tempted to intervene militarily much faster.

The chaotic and contradictory nexus of imperialist rivalries in the Middle East, where conflicts between the regional power Iran (backed by China and Russia) and the USA (backed by Israel, India, Saudi-Arabia) and increased tensions between local rivals would have unpredictable consequences not only for the rivalries between India and China, but for the whole planet.

While the tensions in the Middle East have been centre-stage in imperialist rivalries for several decades, the tensions in the Far East and in South Asia are rapidly gaining momentum. Although an immediate escalation of the rivalries into an open war in the Far East may not be likely now, because we are only at the beginning of this race, the permanent, irreversible military build-up already forebodes a new level of destruction .


 

The consequences of militarism

In Asia we are not witnessing the clash between secondary powers but between the world's two most populous countries: China and India. At the same time, the world's two biggest economies, the USA and China, who are more dependent on each other on an economic and financial level than ever, are engaged in an arms race. The zone of conflict involves some of the most important sea lanes of the world and contains the long-term risk of spreading a ring of fire from the Far East to the Middle East, with unpredictable repercussions for the entire world economy. Whereas in World War I the main battles took place in Europe and only very marginally in Asia, now one century later, the whole of Asia with its two oceans and its crucial sea-lanes is becoming engulfed in the deadly spiral. The build-up of destructive capacity dwarfs the power of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 60 years later, in addition to the USA, half a dozen countries in the region have nuclear weapons or aim at having them: China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Russia.1

The USA, the world’s only remaining super-power, feels most threatened by the emergence of China. This has compelled it to reorient its military strategy. While so far 40% of the US navy has been operating in the Atlantic Ocean, Washington plans to deploy 60% of the US navy in Asia. President Obama's recent decision to “pivot” US power towards the East has led to a redeployment of 60% of US naval forces to the Pacific. The US must necessarily do everything in its power to contain China, and so must adapt militarily. In a certain sense for the USA this confrontation is a battle for life or death.2

In March 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech, describing Soviet domination of Eastern Europe: the expression entered common parlance for the next 43 years, until the collapse in 1989 of the bloc built around the USSR. Only a month previously (February 1946) George Kennan (based in America's Moscow embassy) set out his proposals for the "containment" of the USSR – proposals that were to lay the foundation of US policy towards Russian imperialism. These two key moments illustrate an important feature of imperialism in capitalism's decadent epoch: the formation of fixed imperialist blocs is to a great extent dependent, not so much on common interests as on a common fear of a threatening rival. The "Allied" bloc that confronted the Germany-Italy-Japan "Axis" only really came into being in 1941 – the year that Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease agreement that guaranteed US arms shipments to Britain, and that Russia entered the war following its invasion by Germany (Operation Barbarossa), and the opening of the war in the Pacific following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

The "Allied" bloc lasted only five years, and ceased to exist with the annihilation of Nazi Germany and the "Axis", to be replaced by a new confrontation between a Russian bloc based on the military occupation of its neighbours (enforced by invasion where necessary: Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968), and a US bloc based essentially on a common fear of the USSR. When the disintegration of the USSR ended the Cold War with a clear American victory, the glue that had held the US bloc together lost its former holding power, and the US bloc in turn broke apart.

The US remains the world's overwhelmingly dominant power, with a total military budget great than that of the ten next-largest powers combined (45.7% of total world military spending). Nonetheless, China's regional rise poses a real potential threat to its neighbours: the "common fear" factor is overcoming old enmities and pushing towards a series of alliances and rapprochements aimed at containing Chinese power.3 Clearly, there are two powerful poles in the region – China and the United States – and other countries tend to gravitate around them.

Some of these alliances are apparently stable: China's alliance with Pakistan and North Korea, and the India-Japan-USA-Australia grouping. Outside these, however, there is a shifting landscape of regional rivalries: Vietnam and the Philippines fear China, but have their own territorial disputes in the SCS; Cambodia has a troubled history of conflict with Vietnam; Indonesia fears Australia's interference since the independence of East Timor; Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have reason to fear an over-mighty India, and so on. Russia's recent alliance with China in its disputes with the US over Syria and Iran, and North Korea, is essentially opportunistic.4

What we have today, therefore, is not the imminent formation of a new system of imperialist blocs, but rather the emergence of some of the same strategic and political tendencies that have led to the formation of the previous military blocs. There is however one major difference. The previous bloc systems were mostly autarchic in relation to each other (trade between COMECON and the OECD countries, or between China under Mao and the outside world, was insignificant). China and the US, and indeed all the countries of SE Asia, are on the contrary bound together by powerful commercial and financial ties and interests.

And of all these dependencies, those between China and the USA are the strongest. China holds more US-bonds than any other country ($1.15 trillion), thanks to which US capital has been able to finance its astronomic deficit budget, helping to stave off the effects of the crisis and of course financing its military machine. At the same time, China needs the USA as an export market for its commodities. And yet the two countries consider each other as their main global rivals, against whom they have to mobilise. The South China Sea littoral countries all depend on China as a market for their products and on Chinese investments in their economy, and China needs these countries as well, as suppliers of raw materials and as markets.

Surely it is absurd to imagine countries so dependent on each other engaging in military confrontation, "cutting off their nose to spite their face" so to speak?

Such ideas are not new, indeed they date back to the beginning of the 20th century when the danger of imperialist confrontation was an immediate and burning issue. In his 1902 study of imperialism, the British economist John Hobson denounced imperialism as the fruit of the economic domination of finance capital, and thought that the development of a true, vigorous democracy could act as an antidote to its dangers. In 1909, the future Nobel Peace prize winner Norman Angell, another British economist, published Europe's optical illusion, in which he demonstrated that the economic interdependence of the European powers made imperialist war a mutually ruinous, indeed an irrational undertaking.

Hobson and Angell in effect posed the possibility of a "peaceful" imperialism, or a capitalism stripped of its imperialist defects. Similar notions found their way into the workers' movement prior to 1914: Kautsky imagined the emergence of a "super-imperialist" general alliance of the great powers, whose premises, he thought, could be seen in the cooperation between the European powers (with Japan and the USA) to put down the Boxer rebellion in China.

Lenin gave short shrift to Kautsky and Hobson in his Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: "in the realities of the capitalist system (...) 'inter-imperialist' or 'ultra-imperialist' alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a 'truce' in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics". Yet in a sense, both Lenin and Angell were correct: Angell showed that war within an advanced capitalist economy could only lead to catastrophe, while Lenin demonstrated (as Luxemburg had before him) that imperialist conflict was notwithstanding inherent to capitalism "in its death throes" (to use Lenin's expression).

The situation in South-East Asia offers a striking illustration of this dual reality. The smaller countries of the region are all dependent on each other and on China economically and yet all perceive their big neighbour China as a major threat and spend prodigious sums of money arming against China! Why does China antagonise all these countries although it is so dependent on on them economically and financially? Why do so many national bourgeoisies turn towards the USA for “help”, knowing that they run the risk of being blackmailed by the USA? This brings up the deeper question of why there is a permanent drive towards militarism? The military question is “imposing” itself – seemingly even against the will of some factions in the ruling classes of these countries.

The root of the problem is that the economic emergence of a country must necessarily be accompanied by military power. A mere stronger economic competitiveness in the long-term is not sufficient. Every country has to have sufficient access to raw materials, energy, has to benefit from the best flow of commodities, i.e. keep its sea lanes and other transport routes free. No country, whether on the decline or “emerging”, whether a former “loser” or “winner” can escape from this inherent tendency of capitalism.

When capitalism was still in its ascendant phase, expanding across the globe, this situation could lead to tension, even conflict (between Britain and France during the American War of Independence or in India, for example), but not to the all-out destruction of 20th century warfare.5 Today the situation is very different: the entire planet is parcelled out among the various imperialist powers, great and small, and the rise of one power can only be at the expense of another – there are no "win-win" situations.

This is not only true on the level of economic wealth and military hardware. Human action is also determined by more intangible factors – which are none the less material for all that. And in international affairs, national prestige is as important as the possession of military power itself, since a nation's prestige makes its threat of force convincing, giving it the power (to use a favourite expression of British diplomacy) to "punch above its weight". The Byzantine Empire survived long after the decline of its military power, in part thanks to the prestige of its wealth and the name of Rome. Nearer to our own time, first the Bolsheviks and then – after the defeat of the Russian revolution – the Stalinist rulers of the USSR, consistently overestimated the power of a British Empire critically weakened by World War I. Even at the end of World War II, the United States thought for a while that they could leave British armies to hold the line against the USSR in Europe, such was the lasting power of the British imperial myth.6

The capacity for vast and extravagant display is crucial to prestige – hence the colossal expenditure of at least $16 billion on the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.7 More important though is the ability to exercise military dominance, especially of one's own immediate area.

Hence, at the beginning of the imperialist age, it was the rising power Germany which set out to challenge the dominant British imperialism by embarking (in 1898) on an ambitious plan of naval expansion aimed explicitly at challenging the power of the Royal Navy. This was, and could only be perceived by Britain as a mortal threat to its own sea lanes and trade, on which the country was and is wholly dependent.

The parallel with today's situation is striking, even down to the imperialist powers' protestations of their peaceful intentions. Here is the German Chancellor von Bülow speaking in 1900: "I explained (...) that I understand by a world policy merely the support and advancement of the tasks that have grown out of the expansion of our industry,our trade, the labour power, activity and intelligence of our people. We had no intentions of conducting an aggressive policy of expansion. We wanted only to protect the vital interests that we had acquired, in the natural course of events, throughout the world".8 And here is Hu Jintao in 2007: "the Chinese government and people will always hold high the banner of peace, development and cooperation, pursue an independent foreign policy of peace, safeguard China's interests in terms of sovereignty, security and development, and uphold its foreign policy purposes of maintaining world peace and promoting common development (...) China opposes terrorism, hegemonism and power politics in any form and does not engage in arms race or pose a military threat to any other country, and will never seek hegemony or engage in expansion".9

As we have demonstrated in this article, China has embarked on a vast programme of rearmament and naval expansion with the aim of dominating its own "inner island chain". All the protestations of China's leadership notwithstanding, this inevitably threatens the whole US position in the Pacific and puts at risk not just its shipping and trade, but its prestige and credibility as an ally, amongst the South-East Asian countries which also feel menaced by China's rise, in particular Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines. That America is aware of this threat is clearly demonstrated by Obama's "pivot" of US military power towards the Pacific. Almost 100 years since World War I, capitalism has not changed its nature: capitalist competition in its decadent phase poses more than ever a mortal threat to humanity's survival. The responsibility of the world working class, the only power capable of stopping imperialist war, has never been greater.10

Dv/Jens, November 2012


2 (see Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2012, Michael Klare).

3 The case of Vietnam illustrates the tendency. Vietnam, which was colonised by France and suffered from carpet bombings of all kinds by the USA for more than a decade, in the face of the new giant China has started to look for support from the USA and has, for instance, opened its harbour at Cam Ranh Bay to foreign navies, pulling in other countries (in particular the USA, India, Japan) to develop more muscle against China. The Myanmar ruling junta's sudden love affair with "democracy" after years under China's wing, could also be seen as an attempt to win US and Western support against an over-might neighbour.

4 The different regroupments around China and the US, unlike the old bloc system, remain for the moment a largely regional affair despite China's interests in African and the Middle East, and the European powers' nervousness confronted with the Russian bear.

5 The Napoleonic Wars which lasted for 20 years, might be thought to contradict this, However, these are probably better seen as a continuation of the French revolution and of the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism in Europe, rather than as a war between capitalist powers, though inevitably they also contained aspects of the latter.

6 We have already raised this point in an article on the Apollo space programme.

7 This is not new: one could take a "history of prestige" at least as far back as the potlatch ceremonies of North American Indian tribes, if not further.

8 Quoted in EJ Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, Cardinal Editions p302.

9 Cited by Xinhua, news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-10/15/content_6884160.htm.

10 An analysis of the class struggle in China is beyond the scope of this article, but we can say that the Chinese capitalist ruling class is aware of the threat from below: China's internal security budget recently overtook its military spending for the first time as Beijing intensified surveillance and repression. In 2012 China will spend $111.4 billion dollars on public security, which includes police and state security forces – an amount that officially exceeds even the defense budget. See https://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/05/us-china-parliament-security-...

 

International Review no.150 - 4th Quarter 2012

June 2012 Euro summit: behind the illusions, another step towards disaster

On the morning of 29th June 2012, as if by magic, a gentle euphoria took hold of the politicians and leaders of the Eurozone. The bourgeois media and the economists soon joined them. Apparently, the Euro summit had taken some “historic decisions” - unlike the numerous decisions taken in the last few years, all of which have failed. But according to many commentators, this time it was different. The bourgeoisie of the Eurozone, for once united and solid, had taken the measures needed to get us through the tunnel of the crisis. For a moment you might have thought you had entered Alice’s Wonderland. But, once the morning mists had dissipated, and you looked a bit closer, the real questions came to light: what was the real content of this summit? What was its significance? Would it really bring a lasting solution to the crisis of the Eurozone and thus of the world economy?

The Euro summit: decisions that deceive the eye

If the June 2012 Euro summit was presented as “historic”, it is because it was supposed to be a turning point in the way that the authorities confront the euro crisis. To begin with, at the level of form, this summit, for the first time, did not, as far as the commentators were concerned, restrict itself to rubberstamping the decisions taken in advance by “Merkozy”, i.e. the Merkel-Sarkozy partnership (in reality the position of Merkel rubberstamped by Sarkozy).1 It now took into account the demands of two other important countries of the zone, Spain and Italy, demands supported by the new French president, François Hollande. Secondly, this summit is supposed to inaugurate a new given in economic and budgetary policy inside the zone: after years in which the only policy followed by the leading authorities of the Eurozone was one of increasingly ruthless austerity, now criticisms of this policy are being taken into account. These criticisms, raised above all by the politicians and economists of the left, argue that without reviving economic activity, hyper-indebted states will be unable to find the fiscal resources to pay off their debts.

This is why the “left” president Hollande, who had come to call for a “pact for employment and growth”, took centre stage in the whole show, proud of his demands and the results obtained. In this satisfaction he was accompanied by two men of the right: Monti the Italian head of government and Rajoy, his Spanish equivalent, who also argued that their calculations had paid off and the financial noose around their country’s necks should be loosened. The real situation was much too serious for these men to assume such a triumphant air, but at least they had a sense of humour: “we could hope to see the beginning of the end of leaving the tunnel of the crisis”. These were the convoluted words of the head of the Italian government.

Before lifting the veil from these optimistic declarations, we need to go back in time a bit. Let’s recall: over the last six months, the Eurozone has twice been in a situation where its banks were in a state of collapse. The first time this gave rise to what was called the LTRO (Long Term Refinancing Operation): the European Central Bank (ECB) accorded them loans of around 1000 billion euros. In reality 500 billion had already been supplied to them to keep them afloat. A few months later the same banks were again appealing for help! Let’s now tell a little story which shows us what is really happening in the world of European finance. At the beginning of 2012 sovereign debts (i.e. debts of states) exploded. The financial markets themselves raised the rates at which they were prepared to lend money to these states. Some of them, notably Spain, could no longer afford to look for loans on the market. It was all too expensive. At this point the Spanish banks gave up the ghost. What could be done? What could be done in Italy, Portugal and elsewhere? A brilliant idea began to germinate in the great minds of the ECB. We are going to make massive loans to the banks, who will themselves finance the sovereign debts of their national states and the “real” economy in the form of loans for investment or consumption. This is what happened last winter. The ECB declared “the bar is open and it’s drinks all round”. The result was that at the beginning of June everyone woke up with cirrhosis of the liver. The banks had not been lending out to the “real economy”. They had put the money in safe places, putting its equivalent away in the Central Bank for a small return of interest. What would they give to the Central Bank in exchange? State bonds which they had bought with the money they had got from the same Central Bank. A real conjuring trick which would soon be revealed as an absurd spectacle!

In June the “economic doctors” again cried loud and strong: the patients are slipping towards death. Radical measures were needed immediately for all the hospitals of the Eurozone. We now come to the June summit. After a whole night of negotiations, a “historic” agreement seemed to have been found. The decisions taken were:

  • the financial stabilisation funds(European Funds for Financial Stability and the European Stability Mechanism) would now be able to flow into the banks, after obtaining the ECB’s agreement, as well as being used to buy up public debts in order to reduce the rates at which states would have to borrow on the financial markets;

  • the Europeans would confer on the ECB the job of supervising the banking system of the Eurozone;

  • an extension of the rules for controlling the public deficits of states in the zone;

  • finally, to the great satisfaction of the economists and politicians of the “left”, a plan of 100 billion euros for reviving economic activity was drawn up.

For several days the same speeches rang out. The Eurozone had finally taken some good decisions. While Germany had succeeded in sticking to its “Golden Rule” in the matter of public expenditure (which demands that states adopt as a fundamental law the necessity to reduce their budget deficits), it at the same time accepted going towards the mutualisation and the monetisation of these debts, i.e. the possibility of reimbursing them by printing money.

As always in this kind of agreement, reality is hidden in the timetable and the way the decisions are put into practice. However, already on this particular morning, there was something very striking. An essential question seems to have been avoided: the financial means and their real sources. There was an unspoken agreement that Germany would end up paying for it all because it’s the only one that seems to have the means to do so. And then during the month of July, surprise surprise, everything was put into question. With the help of some legal manoeuvres, the application of the accords was put off until September at the earliest. There was a little problem. If you add up all of Germany’s commitments in terms of disguised guarantees and lines of credit, the total amount it’s being asked to hand out to its desperate European neighbours amounts to 1500 billion euros. Germany’s GDP is 2650 billion euros and this is without taking into account the contraction in its activity over the last few months. This is a dizzying sum equivalent to half its GDP. The last figures announced for the debt of the Eurozone went up to around 8000 billion, a large part of which is made up of “toxic” debts (i.e. debts where it has been recognised that they will never be repaid). It’s not hard to understand that Germany is incapable of assuring such a level of debt. Neither is it in a position, in the long term, to credibly shore up this wall of debt with its own signature alone on the financial markets. The proof of this can be seen in the paradox confronting an economy in disarray. In the short and middle term Germany is placing its debts at negative rates of interest. The buyers of this debt agree not to notice these ridiculous interests while losing capital through inflation. Germany’s sovereign debt appears to be a mountain refuge capable of withstanding all the storms, but at the same time, the price of insuring this debt is squeezing them at the same level as Greece! In the end this refuge will be shown to be rather vulnerable. The markets know very well that if Germany continues to finance the debt of the Eurozone, it will itself become insolvent and that is why all lenders are trying to get themselves insured as well as they can in case there is a brutal collapse.

There remains the temptation to use the ultimate weapon. That is, to say to the ECB that it should act like in the UK, Japan and the USA: “let’s print more and more bank notes without any regard for their value”. The central banks could indeed become “rotten” banks, that’s not the problem. The problem is to prevent everything coming to a halt. The problem is what happens tomorrow, next month, next year. This is the real advance made at the last European summit. But the ECB wasn’t listening with this ear. It’s true that this central bank doesn’t have the same autonomy as the other central banks of the world. It is linked to the different central banks of each nation in the zone, But is that the basic problem? If the ECB could operate like the central banks of Britain or the US, for example, would this do away with the insolvency of the banks and states of the Eurozone? What was going on at the same time in other countries, for example the USA?

Central banks more fragile than ever

While storm clouds gather over the American economy, why has the USA not yet come up with a third revival plan, a new phase of monetising its debt?

We should recall that the Director of the US central bank, Ben Bernanke, was nicknamed “Mr Helicopter”. In the last four years the USA has already had two plans of massive money creation, the famous “quantitative easing”. Mr Bernanke seemed to be able to fly all over the USA, doling out money wherever he went. A tidal wave of liquidities got everyone drunk. And yet it just didn’t seem to work. For the last few months a new phase of money-printing has become unavoidable. And yet it hasn’t happened. Quantitative Easing 3 is vital, indispensable, and at the same time impossible, as is the mutualisation and monetisation of the overall debt in the Eurozone. Capitalism has come to a dead-end. Even the world’s leading power can’t go on creating money out of nothing. Every debt needs to be paid for at some point or other. Like any other central bank, the US Federal Bank has two sources of finance which are at one moment or another linked and interdependent. The first consists of using up savings, the money which exists inside or outside the country, either through borrowing at tolerable rates, or through an increase in taxation. The second resides in the fabrication of money as a counterpart to the recognition of debts, notably by buying what is known as bonds representing public or state debt. The value of these bonds is in the last instance determined by the evaluation made by the financial markets. A used car is up for sale. Its price is displayed on the window-screen by the seller. Potential buyers verify the state of the vehicle. Offers are made and the seller chooses the least bad one for him. If the vehicle is too decrepit the price becomes derisory and the car is left to rot on the street. This little example shows the danger of a new money-creation in the US and elsewhere. For the last four years, hundreds of billions of dollars have been injected into the American economy without the slightest sign of recovery. Worse: the economic depression has been quietly advancing. Here we are at the heart of the problem. Assessing the real value of sovereign debt is connected to the solidity of the economy. Like the value of our car and its actual state. If a central bank (whether in the US, Japan, or the Eurozone) prints money to buy debts, or the recognition of debts, that can never be repaid (because the borrowers have become insolvent) it does nothing but inundate the market with bits of paper which don’t correspond to any real value because they have no counterpart or guarantees in terms of savings or new wealth. In other words, they are manufacturing fake money.

On the road to generalised recession

Such an assertion might still seem a bit exaggerated. And yet, this is what’s written in the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin for January 2012: “To generate another dollar’s worth of growth, the USA will now have to borrow around 8 dollars. Or, if you prefer it the other way round: each dollar borrowed only generates 0.12. dollars of growth. This illustrates the absurdity of the medium term policies of the US FED and Treasury in the last few years. It’s like a war where you have to kill more and more soldiers to win less and less ground”. The proportion is no doubt not exactly the same for all the countries of the world. But the general tendency is the same. This is why the 100 billion euros set aside by the 29 June summit to finance growth is nothing but sticking plaster on a wooden leg. The profits obtained are increasingly pitiful compared to the growth in the wall of debt.

The well known comedy "Airplane" featured a passenger aircraft left without a pilot. As far as the world economy is concerned, we’d have to add “and the engine doesn’t work either”. That’s a plane and its passengers in a very bad situation.

In the face of this general debacle of the most developed countries, some, hoping to minimise the gravity of capitalism’s situation, point to the example of China and the “emerging” countries. Only a few months ago China was sold to us as the next locomotive of the world economy, with a little help from India and Brazil. What’s the reality here? These “motors” are also having some serious problems. On 13th July China officially announced a growth rate of 7.6%, which is the lowest figure for this country since the beginning of the current phase of the crisis. The times of double-digit growth are over. And even 7% doesn’t convince the specialists. They all know that it’s false. These experts prefer to look at other figures which they feel are more reliable. This is what was said that same day by a radio that specialises in economics (BFM): “by looking at the evolution of electricity consumption, you can deduce that China’s growth is actually around 2 or 3%. Or less than half the official figure”. At the beginning of this summer all the growth figures were at half-mast. Everywhere they are diminishing. The motor is more or less running on empty. The plane is about to sink to the earth, and the world economy with it.

Capitalism is entering period of major storms

Faced with the world recession and the financial state of the banks and states, there is open economic war between different sectors of the bourgeoisie. Boosting the economy with classic Keynesian policies (which require further state debt) can no longer be really effective. In the context of recession, the money collected by the states can only diminish and, despite the generalised austerity, their sovereign debts can only continue to explode, like in Greece or now Spain. The question that is tearing the bourgeoisie apart is this: “Do we risk once again raising the ceiling of debt?” More and more, money is not going towards production, investment or consumption. It’s no longer profitable. But the interest on debt and the need to repay it don’t go away. Capital will have to create more money to put off a generalised cessation of payment. Bernanke, head of the US central bank, and his counterpart Mario Draghi in the Eurozone, like all their cohorts across the planet, are hostages to the capitalist economy. Either they do nothing, in which case depression and bankruptcy will soon take the form of a cataclysm. Or they again inject massive amounts of money and that will very soon destroy the value of money. One thing is for sure: even if it can now see the danger, the bourgeoisie, hopelessly divided over these issues, will only react in situations of absolute emergency, at the last minute, and on an increasingly inadequate level. The crisis of capitalism which we have seen so openly since 2008 is only just beginning.

Tino (30.7.12)


1. We should note that since this article was written, the French government has gone back to cooperating more with the German chancellor. Perhaps it would be better to start talking about “Merkhollande”? In any case in September 2012, the new President Hollande and the leadership of the French Socialist Party waged a campaign to force parliament’s hand and get it to vote for the Stability Pact (the “Golden Rule”) which as a candidate Hollande has promised to renegotiate. As Charles Pasqua, an old Gaullist veteran known for his cynicism, put it: “electoral promises only commit those who believe them”.

 

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Editorial

Mexico between crisis and narcotrafic

The press and television news around the world regularly send images of Mexico in which fighting, corruption and murder resulting from the “war against drug trafficking” are brought to the fore. But all this appears as a phenomenon alien to capitalism or abnormal, whereas in fact all the barbaric reality that goes with it is deeply rooted in the dynamics of the current system of exploitation. It is, in its full extent, the behaviour of the ruling class that is revealed, through competition and heightened political rivalries between its various fractions. Today, such a process of plunging into barbarism and the decomposition of capitalism is effectively dominant in certain regions of Mexico.

At the beginning of the 1990s, we said that “Amongst the major characteristics of capitalist society's decomposition, we should emphasise the bourgeoisie's growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the political situation.”1 This phenomenon appeared more clearly in the last decade of the 20th century when it became a major trend.

It is not only the ruling class that is affected by decomposition; the proletariat and other exploited classes also suffer its most pernicious effects. In Mexico, mafia groups and the actual government enrol, for the war in which they are engaged, elements belonging to the most impoverished sectors of the population. The clashes between these groups, which indiscriminately hit the population, leaving hundreds of victims on the casualty list, the government and mafias call “collateral damage.” The result is a climate of fear that the ruling class has used to prevent and contain social reactions to the continuous attacks on the living conditions of the population.

Drug trafficking and the economy

In capitalism, drugs are nothing more than a commodity whose production and distribution necessarily requires labour, even if it is not always voluntary or waged. Slavery is common in this environment, which not only employs the voluntary and paid labour of a lumpen milieu for criminal activities, but also of labourers and others like carpenters (for example, for the construction of houses and shops) who are forced, in order to survive in the misery offered by capitalism, to serve the capitalist producers of illegal goods.

What is experienced today in Mexico has already existed (and still exists) in other parts of the world: the mafias profit from this misery, and their collusion with the state structures allows them to “protect their investment” and their activities in general. In Colombia, in the 1990s, the investigator H. Tovar-Pinzón gave a number of factors to explain why poor peasants became the first accomplices of the drug trafficking mafias: “A property produced, for example, ten cargoes of corn per year which permitted a gross receipt of 12,000 Colombian pesos. This same property could produce a hundred arrobas of coca, which represented for the owner a gross revenue of 350,000 pesos per year. Why not change the crop when one can gain thirty times more?”.2

What happened in Colombia has expanded across the whole of Latin America, drawing into drug trafficking, not only the peasant proprietors, but also the great mass of landless labourers who sell their labour power to them. This great mass of workers becomes easy prey to the mafia, because of the extremely low wages granted by the legal economy. In Mexico, for example, a labourer employed to cut sugar cane receives little more than two dollars per ton (27 pesos) and will see his wage increased when he produces an illegal commodity. In doing so, a large portion of workers employed in this activity loses its class condition. These workers are increasingly implicated in the world of organised crime and in direct contact with the gunmen and drug carriers with whom they share directly a daily life in a context of the trivialisation of murder and crime. Closely involved in this atmosphere, the contagion leads them progressively towards lumpenisation. This is one of the harmful effects of advanced decomposition directly affecting the working class.

There are estimates that the drug trafficking mafias in Mexico employ 25% more people than McDonald's worldwide.3 It should also be added that beyond the use of farmers, mafia activity involves racketeering and prostitution imposed on hundreds of young people. Today, drugs are an additional branch of the capitalist economy, that is to say that exploitation is present in it as in any other economic activity but, in addition, the conditions of illegality push competition and the war for markets to take much more violent forms.

The violence to gain markets and increase profits is all the fiercer with the importance of the gain. Ramón Martinez Escamilla, member of the Economic Research Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, believes that “the phenomenon of drug trafficking represents between 7 and 8 % of Mexico’s GDP”.4 These figures, compared to the 6% of Mexico’s GDP which represents the fortune of Carlos Slim, the biggest tycoon in the world, give an indication of the growing importance of the drug trade in the economy, permitting us to deduce the barbarity that it engenders. Like any capitalist, the drug trafficker has no other objective than profit. To explain this process, it is enough to recall the words of the trade unionist Thomas Dunning (1799-1873), quoted by Marx:

With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent, positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both.”5

Based on contempt for human life and on exploitation, these vast fortunes certainly find refuge in tax havens but are also used directly by the legal capitalists who are responsible for the task of laundering them. Examples abound to illustrate this, such as the entrepreneur Zhenli Ye Gon, or more recently, the financial institution HSBC. In these two examples, it was revealed that the individual or institution was laundering the vast fortunes of the drug cartels, whether it was for the promotion of political projects (in Mexico and elsewhere) or for “honourable” investments.

Edgar Buscaglia6 states that companies of all kinds have been “designated as dubious by intelligence agencies in Europe and the United States, including the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury Department, but nobody has wanted to undermine Mexico, basically because many of them fund election campaigns.7

There are other marginal processes (but no less significant) that enable the integration of the mafia in the economy, such as the violent depopulation of properties and of vast territories, to the extent that some areas of the country are now “ghost towns”. Some figures suggest the displacement, in recent years, of a million and a half people fleeing “the war between the army and the narcos.”8

It is essential to point out the impossibility, for the plans of the drug mafias, of existing outside the realm of the states. These are the structures that protect and help them move their money towards the financial giants, but are also the seat of the government teams of the bourgeoisie who mix their interests with those of drug cartels. It is obvious that the mafia could hardly have as much business if they did not receive the support of sectors of the bourgeoisie involved in the governments. As we have argued in the “Theses on Decomposition”, “it is more and more difficult to distinguish the government apparatus from gangland.9

Mexico, an example of advanced capitalist decomposition

Since 2006, almost sixty thousand people have been killed, either by the bullets of the mafia units or those of the official army; a majority of those killed were victims of the war between drug cartels, but this does not diminish the responsibility of the state, whatever the government says. It is impossible to blame one or the other, because of the links between the mafia groups and the state itself. If difficulties have been growing at this level, it is precisely because the fractures and divisions within the bourgeoisie are amplified and, at any time, any place, can become a battleground between fractions of the bourgeoisie; of course, the state structure itself is also a place to where these conflicts are expressed. Each mafia group emerges under the leadership of a fraction of the bourgeoisie, and so the economic competition that these political quarrels create makes these conflicts grow and multiply day by day.

In the 19th century, during the ascendant period of capitalism, the drugs trade (opium for example) was already the cause of political difficulties leading to wars, revealing the barbaric essence of this system in the states’ direct involvement in the production and distribution of goods such as drugs. However, such a situation was still inseparable from the strict vigilance and the maintenance of a framework of firm discipline on this business by the state and the dominant class, allowing it to reach political agreements and avoiding anything that that would weaken the cohesion of the bourgeoisie.10 Thus, even if the “Opium War” - declared principally by the British state - illustrated a behavioural trait of capital, we can understand why the drug trade was not, however, a dominant phenomenon of the 19th century.

The importance of drugs and the formation of mafia groups become increasingly important during the decadent phase of capitalism. While the bourgeoisie tried to limit and adjust by laws and regulations the cultivation, preparation and trafficking of certain drugs during the first decades of the 20th century, this was only in order to properly control the trade of this commodity.

The historical evidence shows that “drug industry” is not an activity divorced from the bourgeoisie and its state. Rather, it is this same class that is responsible for expanding its use and profiting from the benefits it provides, and at the same time expanding its devastating effects in humans. States in the 20th century, have massively distributed drugs to armies. The United States gives the best example of such use to “stimulate” the soldiers during the war: Vietnam was a huge laboratory and it is not surprising that it was effectively Uncle Sam who encouraged the demand for drugs in the 1970s, and responded by boosting their production in the countries of the periphery.

At the beginning of the second half of the 20th century in Mexico, the importance of the production and distribution of drugs was still far from being significant and remained under the strict control of government authorities. The market was also tightly controlled by the army and the police. From the 1980s, the American government encouraged the development of the production and consumption of drugs in Mexico and throughout Latin America.

The “Iran-Contra” affair (1986) revealed that the government of Ronald Reagan, to overcome reductions in the budget to support armed bands opposed to the Nicaraguan government (the “contras”), used funds from the sale of arms to Iran and, especially, from drug trafficking via the CIA and the DEA. The government of the United States pushed the Colombian mafias to increase production, even deploying, to this end, military and logistical support to the governments of Panama, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, to facilitate the passage of this coveted commodity. To “expand the market”, the American bourgeoisie began to produce cocaine derivatives much more cheaply and therefore easier to sell massively, despite being more devastating.

These same practices, used by the American ‘godfather’ to raise funds to enable it to carry out its putchist adventures, have also been used in Latin America to fight against the guerrillas. In Mexico, the so-called “dirty war” waged by the state in the 1970s and 80s against the guerrillas was financed by the money coming from drugs. The army and paramilitary groups (such as the White Brigade or the Jaguar Group) then had carte blanche to murder, kidnap and torture. Some military projects like “Operation Condor” (which supposedly targeted drug production), were actually directed against the guerrillas and served at the same time to protect poppy and marijuana crops.

At that time, the discipline and cohesion of the Mexican bourgeoisie permitted it to keep the drug market under control. Recent journalistic enquiries say that there was absolutely no drug shipment that was beyond the control and supervision of the army and federal police.11 The state assured, under a cloak of steel, the unity of all sectors of the bourgeoisie, and when a group or individual capitalist showed disagreements, it was settled peacefully through privileges or power sharing. Thus was unity maintained in the so-called “revolutionary family.”12

With the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc the unity of the opposing bloc led by the United States also disappeared, which in turn provoked a growth of “every man for himself” among the different national fractions of certain countries. In Mexico, this breakdown showed itself in the dispute in broad daylight between fractions of the bourgeoisie at all levels: parties, clergy, regional governments, federal governments... Each fraction was trying to gain a greater share of power, without any of them taking the risk of putting into question the historic discipline behind the United States.

In the context of this general brawl, opposing bourgeois forces have fought over the distribution of power. These internal pressures have led to attempts to replace the ruling party and “decentralise” the responsibilities of law enforcement. Thus local authorities, represented by the state governments and the municipal presidents have declared their regional control. This, in turn, has added to the chaos: the federal government and each municipality or region, in order to reinforce its political and economic control, has associated itself with a particular mafia band. Each ruling fraction protects and strengthens this or that cartel according to its interests, thus ensuring impunity, which explains the violent arrogance of the mafias.

The magnitude of this conflict can be seen in the settling of accounts between political figures. It is estimated for example that in the last five years, twenty-three mayors and eight municipal presidents have been assassinated, and the threats made to secretaries of state and candidates are innumerable. The bourgeois press tries to pass off the people murdered as victims who, in the majority of cases, have been the subjects of a settling of scores between rival gangs or within these bands, for treachery.

By analysing these events we can understand that the drug problem cannot be resolved within capitalism. To limit the excesses of barbarism, the only solution for the bourgeoisie is to unify its interests and to regroup around a single mafia band, thus isolating the other bands to keep them in a marginal existence.

The peaceful resolution of this situation is very unlikely, especially because of the acute division between bourgeois factions in Mexico, making it difficult and unlikely to achieve even a temporary cohesion permitting a pacification. The dominant trend seems to be the advance of barbarism... In an interview dated June 2011, Buscaglia estimated the magnitude of drug trafficking in the life of the bourgeoisie: “Nearly 65% of electoral campaigns in Mexico are contaminated by money from organised crime, mainly drug trafficking”.13

Workers are the direct victims of the advance of capitalist decomposition expressed through phenomena such as “the war against drugs” and they are also the target of the economic attacks imposed by the bourgeoisie faced with the deepening of the crisis; this is undoubtedly a class that suffers from great poverty, but it is not a contemplative class, it is a body capable of reflecting, of becoming conscious of its historical condition and reacting collectively.

Decay and crisis ... capitalism is a system in putrefaction

Drugs and murder are major news items both inside and outside the country, and if the bourgeoisie gives them such importance it is also because this allows it to disguise the effects of the economic crisis.

The crisis of capitalism did not originate in the financial sector, as claimed by the bourgeois “experts”. It is a profound and general crisis of the system that spares no country. The active presence of mafias in Mexico, although it weighs heavily on the exploited, does not erase the effects on them of the crisis; quite the contrary, it makes them worse.

The main cause of the tendencies towards recession affecting global capitalism is widespread insolvency, but it would be a mistake to believe that the weight of sovereign debt is the only indicator to measure the advance of the crisis. In some countries, such as Mexico, the weight of indebtedness does not create major problems yet, though in the last decade, according to the Bank of Mexico, sovereign debt has increased by 60% to reach 36.4% of GDP at the end 2012 according to forecasts. This amount is obviously modest when compared to the level of debt of countries like Greece (where it has reached 170% of GDP), but does this imply that Mexico is not exposed to the deepening crisis? The answer of course is no.

Firstly, the fact that indebtedness is not as important in Mexico than in other countries does not mean that it will not become so.

The difficulties of the Mexican bourgeoisie in reviving capital accumulation are illustrated particularly in the stagnation of economic activity. GDP is not even able to reach its 2006 levels (see Figure 1) and, moreover, the recent fleeting embellishment has concerned the service sector, especially trade (as explained by the state institution in charge of statistics, the INEGI). Furthermore, it must also be taken into consideration that if this sector boosts domestic trade (and permits GDP to grow), this is because consumer credit has increased (at the end of 2011 the use of credit cards increased by 20 % compared to the previous year).

The mechanisms used by the ruling class to confront the crisis are neither new nor unique to Mexico: increasing levels of exploitation and boosting the economy through credit. The application of such measures helped the United States in the 1990s to give the illusion of growth. Anwar Shaikh, a specialist in the American economy, explains: “The main impetus for the boom came the dramatic fall in the rate of interest and the spectacular collapse of real wages in relation to productivity (growth of the rate of exploitation), which together raised significantly the rate of profit of the company. Both variables played different roles in different places...14

Such measures are repeated at the pace of the advance of the crisis, even though their effects are more and more limited, because there is no alternative but to continue to use them, further attacking the living conditions of the workers. Official figures, for what they’re worth, attest to the precariousness of these solutions. It is not surprising that the health of Mexican workers is based on the cheapest available calories in sugar (the country is the second largest consumer of soft drinks after the United States, every Mexican consuming some 150 litres on average per year) or cereals.

It is therefore not surprising that Mexico is a country whose adult population is more prone to problems of obesity which culminate in chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. Degradation of living conditions has reached such extremes that more children between 12 and 17 are forced to work (according to CEPALC, 25% in rural areas and 15% in the city). By compressing wages, the bourgeoisie has managed to claw back financial resources destined for consumption by the workers, seeking to increase the mass of surplus value appropriated by the capital. This situation is even more serious for the living conditions of the working class, as shown in Figure 2, because food prices are rising faster than the general price index used by the state to assert that the problem of inflation is under control.

Spokespersons for Latin American governments start from the principle that if economic conflicts affect the central countries (the United States and Europe), the rest of the world is untouched by this dynamic, especially as the IMF and the ECB are supplied with liquidity by the governments of these regions, including Mexico. But this does not mean at all that these economies are not threatened by the crisis. These same insolvency processes that spread throughout Europe today were the lot of Latin America during the 1980s and, with them, the severe measures arising from draconian austerity plans (which gave rise to what was called the Washington Consensus).

The depth and breadth of the crisis can be manifested differently in different countries, but the bourgeoisie uses the same strategies in all countries, even those who are not strangled by increasing sovereign debt.

The plans to reduce costs that the bourgeoisie applies less and less discreetly, the layoffs and increased exploitation, cannot in any way promote any recovery.

The rates of unemployment and impoverishment achieved by Mexico help us to understand how the crisis extends and deepens elsewhere. Coparmex, the employers' organisation, recognises that in Mexico 48% of the economically active population is in “underemployment”,15 which in more straightforward language means in a precarious situation: low wages, temporary contracts, days getting longer and longer without any medical insurance. This mass of the unemployed and precarious is the product of “labour flexibility” imposed by the bourgeoisie to increase exploitation and to push the main effects of the crisis onto our shoulders.

Poverty and exploitation are the drivers of discontent

Many regions, mainly in rural areas, which are subject to curfew and constant supervision by armed patrols, whether military, police or mafia (if not both), and who murder under the slightest pretext, make life a nightmare for the exploited. To this are added the permanent attacks on the economic level. In early 2012, the Mexican bourgeoisie announced a “labour reform” which, as elsewhere in the world, will bring the cost of the labour force down to a more attractive level for capital, thus reducing production costs and further increasing the rate of exploitation.

The “labour reform” aims to increase the rates and hours of work, but also to lower wages (reduction of direct wages and elimination of substantial parts of the indirect wage), the project also providing for increases in the number of years of service required to qualify for retirement.

This threat began to materialise in the education sector. The state has chosen this area to make an initial attack that will be a warning to others elsewhere. It can afford to do this because although the workers are numerous and have a great tradition of militancy, they are very tightly controlled by the trade union structure, both formal (National Union of Education Workers – SNTE) and “democratic” (National Coordination of Education Workers – CNTE). Thus the government was able to deploy the following strategy: first causing discontent by announcing a “universal assessment”16, and then staging a series of manoeuvres (interminable demonstrations, negotiations separated by region...), relying on the unions to exhaust, isolate and thus defeat the strikers, convincing them of the futility of the “struggle “and so demoralising and intimidating all workers.

Although teachers have been the subject of special treatment, the “reforms” apply nevertheless gradually and unobtrusively to all workers. The miners, for example, are already experiencing these attacks which reduce the cost of the labour force and make their working conditions more precarious. The bourgeoisie considers it normal that, for a pittance (the maximum salary a miner can claim is $455 per month), workers spend in the pits and galleries long and intensive working days which often well exceed eight hours, in unspeakable safety conditions worthy of those that prevailed in the 19th century. It is this that explains, on the one hand, why the profit rate of mining companies in Mexico is among the highest, and on the other, the dramatic increase in “accidents” in the mines, with their growing tally of wounded and dead. Since 2000, in the one state of Coahuila, the most active mining area in the country, more than 207 workers have died as a result of collapsing galleries or firedamp explosions.

This misery, to which is added the criminal activities of the governments and the mafias, provokes a growing discontent among the exploited and oppressed which begins to express itself, even if it is still with great difficulties. In other countries such as Spain, Britain, Chile, Canada, the streets have been overrun with demonstrations expressing the courage to fight against the reality of capitalism, even though this was not yet clearly the force of a class in society, the working class.

In Mexico, the mass protests called by students of the “#yo soy 132” (“I am 132”) movement, although they have been framed from the outset by the electoral campaign of the bourgeoisie for the presidential elections, are nevertheless the product of a social unrest which is smouldering. It is not to console ourselves that we affirm this; we don’t delude ourselves with the illusion of a working class advancing unabated in a process of struggle and clarification, we are just trying to understand reality. We need to take into account that the development of mobilisations throughout the world is not homogeneous and that within them, the working class as such does not assume a dominant position. Because of its difficulty to recognise itself as a class in society with the capacity to constitute a force within it, the working class lacks confidence in itself, is afraid to launch itself in the struggle and to lead that struggle. Such a situation promotes, within these movements, the influence of bourgeois mystifications which put forward reformist “solutions” as possible alternatives to the crisis of the system. This general trend is also present in Mexico.

It is only by recognising the difficulties faced by the working class that we can understand that the movement animating the creation of the group “# yo soy 132” also expresses the disgust with governments and parties of the ruling class. The latter was able to react very quickly to the threat by linking the group to the false hopes raised by the elections and democracy, and converting it into a hollow organ, useless to the struggle of the exploited (who were coming closer to this group believing that it had found a way to fight), but very useful to the bourgeoisie which continues to use “#yo soy 132” to divert the combativity of young workers outraged by the reality of capitalism.

The ruling class knows perfectly well that increasing attacks will inevitably provoke a response from the exploited. José A Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD, expressed this in these terms on February 24: “What can happen when you mix the decline in growth, high unemployment and growing inequality? The result can only be the Arab Spring, the Indignants of Puerta del Sol and those in Wall Street”. That is why, faced with this latent discontent, the Mexican bourgeoisie promotes the campaign protesting the election of Pena Nieto1718 to the presidency of the republic, a unifying slogan that sterilises any combativity, along with the more radical statements of Lopez Obrador181819 and of “# yo soy 132” ensuring that nothing will go further than the defence of democracy and its institutions.

Accentuated by the adverse effects of decomposition, the capitalist crisis has generalised the impoverishment of the proletariat and other oppressed but has thereby shown the naked reality, in all its cruelty: capitalism can offer us nothing but unemployment, poverty, violence and death.

The profound crisis of capitalism and the destructive advance of decomposition announces the dangers that represent the survival of capitalism, affirming the imperative necessity of its destruction by the only class capable of confronting it, the proletariat.

Rojo, March 2012


1 1. See International Review n 62, “Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism” point 9.

2 2. Nueva sociedad no. 130, Columbia, 1994, “The economy of coca in Latin America. The Colombian paradigm” (our translation).

44. La Jornada , 25 June 2010 (our translation).

55. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, “The development of capitalist production”; Section VIII, “Primitive accumulation”, Chapter XXXI, “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm

66. International Programme Coordinator for Justice and Development at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM).

77. La Jornada , 24 March, 2010 (our translation).

88. In the northern states of the country such as Durango, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, some areas are considered “ghost towns” after being abandoned by the population. Villagers who were engaged in agriculture have been obliged to flee, liquidating their property at low prices in the best case or abandoning it altogether The plight of workers is even more serious because their mobility is limited due to lack of means, and when they manage to flee to other areas, they are forced to live in the worst conditions of insecurity, in addition to continuing to repay loans for housing they were forced to abandon.

99. See International Review no. 62, op. cit., point 8.

1010. Even today, for some countries such as the United States, despite being the largest consumers of drugs, the armed clashes and the casualties they cause are mainly concentrated outside their borders.

1111. See Anabel Hernández, Los del narco Señores (“Drug Lords”), Edition Grijalbo, Mexico 2010.

1212. This is the so-called unity that the bourgeoisie had achieved with the creation of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR, 1929), which was consolidated by transforming it into the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that remained in power until 2000.

15 The official institution (INEGI) for its part calculates that the rate of “informal” workers is 29.3%.

16 “The universal assessment” is part of the “Alliance for Education Quality” (ACE). This is not only to impose an evaluation system to make workers compete with each other and reduce the number of positions, but also to increase the workload, compress wages, facilitate rapid redundancy protocols and low-cost pensions...

17. Leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (social democrat).

18. Leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (left social democrat).

 

Geographical: 

Recent and ongoing: 

Rubric: 

Narcotrafic in Latin America

The state in the period of transition from capitalism to communism (ii)

Our response to the group Oposição Operária (Workers’ Opposition) - Brazil

We are publishing below our response to the article “Workers’ councils, proletarian state, dictatorship of the proletariat” by the group Oposição Operária (OPOP)1 in Brazil, which appeared in the International Review n° 148.2

The position developed in the article by OPOP essentially takes up the work of Lenin’s The State and Revolution, and it’s from this point of view that the group rejects a central idea of the ICC’s position. This position, while recognising the fundamental contribution of The State and Revolution to the understanding of the question of the state during the period of transition, uses the experience of the Russian revolution, reflections by Lenin himself during this period, and the fundamental writings of Marx and Engels, in order to draw lessons which lead us to call into question the identity between the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat classically accepted up to now by the marxist currents.

In its article, OPOP also develops another position of its own regarding what it calls the “pre-state”, that’s to say the organisation of the councils before the revolution called upon to overthrow the bourgeoisie and its state. We will return later to this question, because we think that the priority is first of all to make our divergences with the OPOP clear concerning the question of the state and the period of transition.

The main aspects of OPOP's thesis

So as to avoid the reader going backwards and forwards to OPOP’s article in International Review n° 148 we are going to reproduce the passages that we consider the most significant.

For the OPOP, the “paradoxical separation between the system of councils and the post-revolutionary state” “distances itself from the conception of Marx, Engels and Lenin and reflects a certain influence of the anarchist conception of the state” thus amounting to “breaking the unity that should exist and exists under the dictatorship of the proletariat”. In fact, “such a separation places, on the one hand, the state as a complex administrative structure and managed by a body of officials – a nonsense in the simplified design of the state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin – and, on the other, a political structure in which the councils exert pressure on the state as such”.

It is an error which, according to the OPOP, is explained by the following incomprehensions in relation to the Commune-State and its relations with the proletariat:

  • an accommodation to a vision influenced by anarchism that identifies the Commune-State with the bureaucratic (bourgeois) state”. This puts “the proletariat outside of the post-revolutionary state while actually creating a dichotomy that, itself, is the germ of a new caste reproducing itself in the administrative body separated organically from the workers’ councils”;

  • the identification between the state that emerged in post-revolutionary Soviet Union – a necessarily bureaucratic state – with the conception of the Commune-State of Marx, Engels and Lenin himself”;

  • the non-perception that the real simplification of the Commune-State, as described by Lenin in the words reported earlier, implies a minimum of administrative structure and that this structure is so small and in the process of simplification /extinction, that it can be assumed directly by the council system”.

Finally, according to OPOP, another factor intervenes in order to explain the erroneous lessons drawn by the ICC from the Russian revolution as to the nature of the state in the period of transition: it’s a question of our organisation not taking into account the unfavourable conditions with which the revolution was confronted: “a misunderstanding of the ambiguities that resulted from the specific historical and social circumstances that blocked not only the transition but also the beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR. Here, one ceases to understand that the dynamic taken by the Russian Revolution – unless you opt for the easy but very inconsistent interpretation in which deviations in the revolutionary process were the result of the policies of Stalin and his entourage – did not obey the conception of the revolution, the state and of socialism that Lenin had, but resulted from the restrictions of the social and political terrain from which the power of the USSR emerged, characterised among others, to recall, by the impossibility of the revolution in Europe, by civil war and the counter-revolution within the USSR. The resulting dynamic was foreign to the will of Lenin. He himself thought about this problem, but repeatedly came up with the ambiguous formulations present in this later thinking and just before his death.

The inevitability of a transitional period and a state's existence within it

The difference between marxists and anarchists doesn’t reside in the fact that the former conceive of communism with a state and the latter as it being a society without a state. On this point, there is total agreement: communism can only be a society without a state. It was thus rather with the pseudo-marxists of social democracy, the successors of Lassalle, that such a fundamental difference existed, given that for them the state was the motor force of the socialist transformation of society. Engels wrote against them in the following passage of Anti-Duhring: “As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase ‘a free people’s state’,3 both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the state out of hand.4 The real debate with the anarchists is about their total misunderstanding of an inevitable period of transition and on the fact that they see history as an immediate and direct two-footed jump from capitalism into a communist society.

On this question of the necessity of the state during the period of transition, we are thus perfectly in agreement with OPOP. That’s why we are astonished that this organisation reproaches us for “distancing ourselves from the conception of Marx, Engels and Lenin by reflecting a certain influence of the anarchist conception of the state. In what way can our position appear to approach that of the anarchists, according to whom “it is possible to abolish the state out of hand”?

If we base ourselves on what Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution regarding the marxist critique of anarchism on the question of the state, it appears that this is far from confirming OPOP’s point of view: “To prevent the true meaning of his struggle against anarchism from being distorted, Marx expressly emphasised the ‘revolutionary and transient form’ of the state which the proletariat needs. The proletariat needs the state only temporarily. We do not after all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes.5 In a word, the ICC accepts this formulation as its own. It’s a question of Lenin’s qualification of the “revolutionary” transitory nature of the state. Can this difference be connected to a variant of anarchist ideas, as OPOP thinks, or on the contrary does it refer to a much more profound question of the state?

What is the real debate?

On the question of the state, our position effectively differs from that of The State and Revolution and of the Critique of the Gotha Programme according to which, during the period of transition, “the state will be nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat.6 This is the basis of the debate between us: why can’t there be an identity between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition that arises after the revolution? This is the idea, which has struck many marxists, who have asked the question: “Where does the ICC get its position from on the state in the period of transition?” We can respond: “Not from its imagination but rather from history, from the lessons drawn by generations of revolutionaries, from the reflections and theoretical elaborations of the workers’ movement”. In particular:

  • successive improvements in the understanding of the question of the state coming from the workers’ movement up to the Russian revolution, of which Lenin’s The State and Revolution gives a masterly account;

  • taking into account all of the theoretical considerations of Marx and Engels on the question of the state which in fact contradict the idea that the state in the period of transition could constitute the bearer of the socialist transformation of society;

  • the degeneration of the Russian revolution which shows that the state constituted the main carrier of the development of the counter-revolution within the proletarian bastion;

  • within this process, certain critical positions of Lenin in 1920-21 which demonstrated that the proletariat had to be able to defend itself against the state and which, while remaining imprisoned by the limitations of the dynamic of degeneration which led to the counter-revolution, bring an essential illumination on the nature and role of the transitional state.

It’s with this approach that a work of weighing up the world revolutionary wave was made by the Communist Left in Italy.7 According to the latter, if the state subsists after the taking of power by the proletariat given that social classes still exist, the former is fundamentally an instrument of the conservation of the status quo but in no way the instrument of the transformation of relations of production towards communism. In this sense, the organisation of the proletariat as a class, through its workers’ councils, must impose its hegemony on the state but never identify with it. It must be able, if necessary, to oppose the state, as Lenin partially understood in 1920-21. It is exactly because, with the extinction of the life of the soviets (inevitable from the fact of the failure of the world revolution), the proletariat had lost this capacity for acting and imposing itself on the state that the latter was able to develop its own conservative tendencies to the point of becoming the gravedigger of the revolution in Russia at the same time as it absorbed the Bolshevik Party itself, turning it into an instrument of the counter-revolution.

The contribution of history to the understanding of the state in the period of transition

Lenin’s The State and Revolution constituted, in its time, the best synthesis of what the workers’ movement had elaborated concerning the question of the state and the exercise of power by the working class.8 In fact this work offers an excellent illustration of the way that light is thrown on the question of the state through historical experience. By basing ourselves on its content we take up here the successive clarifications of the workers’ movement on these questions:

  • The Communist Manifesto of 1848 shows the necessity for the proletariat to take political power, to constitute itself as the dominant class, and sees this power as being exercised by means of the bourgeois state which will have been conquered by the proletariat: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.9

  • In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851), the formulation was already becoming more “precise” and “concise” (according to Lenin’s own terms) than that in the Communist Manifesto. In fact, for the first time the question arises of the necessity to destroy the state: “All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.10

  • Through the experience of the Paris Commune (1871), Marx saw, as did Lenin, “a real step much more important than a hundred programmes and arguments”,11 which justified, in his eyes and those of Engels, that the programme of the Communist Manifesto, becoming“ antiquated in some details”,12 is modified through a new preface. The Commune has notably demonstrated, they continued, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.13

The 1917 revolution did not leave time for Lenin to write in The State and Revolution chapters dedicated to the contributions of 1905 and February 1917. Lenin limited himself to identifying the soviets as the natural successors of the Paris Commune. One could add that even if these two revolutions did not allow the proletariat to take political power, they did however furnish supplementary lessons in relation to the experience of the Paris Commune concerning the power of the working class: the soviets of workers’ deputies based upon assemblies held in the place of work turned out to be the most apt expression of proletarian class autonomy rather than the territorial units of the Commune.

Beyond constituting a synthesis of the best of what the workers’ movement had written on these questions, State and Revolution contained Lenin’s own developments which, in their turn, constituted advances. In effect, whereas they drew essential lessons from the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels had left an ambiguity as to the possibility that the proletariat would come to power peacefully through the electoral process in certain countries, ie. those that provided the most developed parliamentary institutions and the least important military apparatuses. Lenin wasn’t afraid to correct Marx by using the marxist method and put the question into the new historic context: “Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war, this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. [...]. Today, in Britain and America, too, ‘the precondition for every real people’s revolution’ is the smashing, the destruction of the ‘ready-made state machinery.’”14

Only a dogmatic vision could accommodate itself to the idea that The State and Revolution constituted the last and supreme stage in the clarification of the notion of the state in the workers’ movement. If there’s a work that’s the antithesis of such a vision it’s that of Lenin. OPOP itself is not afraid to distance itself from what Lenin literally said in The State and Revolution by pushing to its conclusion the idea of the preceding quote: “Today, the task of establishing the councils as a form of state organisation is not only situated in the perspective of a single country but at the international level and it’s here that the principal challenge is posed to the working class.15

Written in August/September 1917, at the outbreak of the October revolution, The State and Revolution very quickly served as a theoretical weapon for revolutionary action for the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the setting up of the Commune-State. The lessons drawn from the Paris Commune up to then were thus put to the test of history through events of a much more considerable weight – the Russian revolution and its degeneration.

Can lessons be learnt from the world revolutionary wave of 1917?

OPOP responds negatively to this question when it tells us that the conditions were so unfavourable that they didn’t allow the setting up of a workers’ state such as Lenin described in The State and Revolution. Thus they reproach us for identifying “the state that emerged in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union – a necessarily bureaucratic state – with the conception of the Commune-State of Marx, Engels and Lenin himself” and adds “Here, one ceases to understand that the dynamic taken by the Russian revolution […] did not obey the conception of the revolution, the state and of socialism that Lenin had, but resulted from the restrictions of the social and political terrain from which the power of the USSR emerged.

We are in agreement with OPOP in saying that the first lesson to be drawn from the degeneration of the Russian revolution concerns the effects of the international isolation of the proletarian bastion following the defeat of other revolutionary attempts in Europe; Germany in particular. In fact, not only can there be no transformation of relations of production towards socialism in a single country, but furthermore it is not possible that a proletarian power can maintain itself indefinitely in a capitalist world. But are there other lessons of great importance that can be drawn from this experience?

Yes, of course! And OPOP recognises one of them amongst others, although this explicitly contradicts the following passage in The State and Revolution in relation to the first phase of communism: “the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production - the factories, machines, land, etc.- and make them private property16. In fact what the Russian revolution and above all the Stalinist counter-revolution shows is that the simple transformation of the productive apparatus into state property doesn’t suppress the exploitation of man by man.

In fact, the Russian revolution and its degeneration constitute historic events of such significance that one cannot fail to draw lessons from them. For the first time in history the proletariat of a country took political power as the most advanced expression of a world revolutionary wave, with the appearance of a state that was called proletarian! And then something happened that was equally unknown in the workers’ movement; the defeat of a revolution, not clearly and openly beaten down by the savage repression of the bourgeoisie as was the case of the Paris Commune, but as the consequence of a process of internal degeneration which took on the hideous face of Stalinism.

In the weeks following the October insurrection, the Commune-State is already something other than the “armed workers” described in The State and Revolution.17 Above all, with the growing isolation of the revolution, the new state was more and more infested with the gangrene of the bureaucracy, responding less and less to the organs elected by the proletariat and the poor peasants. Far from beginning to wither away, the new state was about to invade the whole of society. Far from bending to the will of the revolutionary class, it became the central point of a process of degeneration and internal counter-revolution. At the same time, the soviets were emptied of their life. The workers’ soviets were transformed into appendages of the unions in the management of production. Thus the force that made the revolution, and needed to maintain its control over it, lost its political and organised autonomy. The carrier of the counter-revolution was nothing more or less than the state and, the more that the revolution encountered difficulties, the more the power of the working class became weakened and the more the Commune-State manifested its non-proletarian nature, its conservative – even reactionary – side. We will explain this characterisation.

From Marx and Engels to the Russian experience: convergence towards the same characterisation of the state in the period of transition

It would be an error to definitively stop at the formulation of Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme concerning the characterisation of the state in the period of transition, identified as the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact other characterisations of the state were made by Marx and Engels themselves, later by Lenin and then by the Communist Left, which fundamentally contradict the formulae Commune-State=dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to converge towards an idea of a state conservative by nature, including here the Commune-State in the period of transition.

The transitional state is the emanation of society and not of the proletariat

How does one explain the appearance of the state? In this regard Engels left no ambiguity: “The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; just as little is it ‘the reality of the moral idea,’ ‘the image and the reality of reason,’ as Hegel maintains.18 Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state”.19 Lenin took this passage of Engels into account, quoting it in The State and Revolution. Despite all the arrangements put in place by the proletariat for the transitional Commune-State, the latter had in common with the states of all previous past societies the fact of being a conservative organ at the service of the maintenance of the dominant order, that is to say, of the economically dominant classes. This has implications at both the theoretical and practical levels concerning the following questions: Who exercises power during the society of transition, the state or the proletariat organised in workers’ councils? Which is the economically dominant class of the society of transition? What is the motor force for the social transformation of society and of the dying out of the state?

The state cannot by nature express the sole interests of the proletariat

Where the political power of the bourgeoisie has been overturned, relations of production remain capitalist relations even if the bourgeoisie is no longer there to appropriate the surplus value produced by the working class. The point of departure of a communist transformation is based upon the military defeat of the bourgeoisie in a sufficient number of decisive countries to give a political advantage to the working class at a global level. This is the period during which the bases of a new mode of production slowly develop to the detriment of the old, up to the point where they supplant it and constitute the new mode of production.

After the revolution and as long as the world human community has not yet been realised, ie. as long as the immense majority of the world population has not been integrated into free and associated production, the proletariat remains an exploited class. Thus, contrary to revolutionary classes of the past, the proletariat is not destined to become the economically dominant class. For this reason, even if the established order after the revolution is no longer that of the economic and political dominance of the bourgeoisie, the state, which rises up during this period as the guarantor of the new economic order, cannot intrinsically be at the service of the proletariat. On the contrary, it is up to the latter to constrain it in the direction of its own class interests.

The role of the transitional state: the integration of the non-exploited population into the management of society and the struggle against the bourgeoisie

In The State and Revolution, Lenin himself said that the proletariat needed the state to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie, but also to lead the non-exploited population in the socialist direction: “The proletariat needs state power, a centralised organisation of force, an organisation of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population — the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians — in the work of organising a socialist economy.20

We support Lenin’s point of view here, according to which, in order to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the proletariat must be able to bring behind it the immense majority of the poor and the oppressed, among which it can itself be a minority. Any alternative to such a policy doesn’t exist. How was this concretised in the Russian revolution? Two types of soviets emerged: on the one hand, soviets based essentially on the centres of production and regrouping the working class, called workers’ councils; on the other, soviets based on territorial units (territorial soviets) in which all the layers of the non-exploited actively participated in the local management of that society. The workers’ councils organised the whole of the working class, that is to say, the revolutionary class. The territorial soviets,21 meanwhile, based on revocable delegates, were intended to be part of the Commune-State,22 the latter having the function of managing society as a whole. In the revolutionary period, all of the non-exploited layers, while being for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and against the restoration of its domination, have not necessarily accepted the idea of the socialist transformation of society. They could even be hostile to it. In fact, within these layers, the proletariat can be in a small minority. That’s the reason why, in Russia, measures were taken in the means of electing delegates so that the weight of the working class within the Commune-State could be strengthened: 1 delegate for 125,000 peasants, 1 delegate for 25,000 workers of the towns. But this did not take away the necessity to mobilise the largely peasant population against the bourgeoisie and to integrate it into the process of the running of society, giving birth, in Russia, to a state which was made up not only of delegates of workers’ soviets, but also delegates of soldiers and poor peasants.

Marxism warns of the danger from the state during the period of transition

In his 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France, and written on the twentieth anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels wasn’t afraid to put forward common traits of all states, whether classical bourgeois states or the Commune-State of the period of transition: “In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.23 Considering the state as “an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy24 is an idea perfectly logical with the notion that the state is an emanation of society and not of the revolutionary proletariat. And this has heavy implications regarding the necessary relations between the state and the revolutionary class. Even if these were not able to be completely clarified before the Russian revolution, Lenin was inspired by it in his strong insistence, in The State and Revolution, on the need for the workers to submit all the members of the state to constant supervision and control, particularly the elements of the state which most evidently embodied a certain continuity with the old regime, such as technical and military “experts” that the soviets will be forced to use.

Lenin also elaborated a theoretical basis for this necessity for a healthy distrust of the proletariat towards the new state. In the chapter entitled “The economic bases of the extinction of the state”, he explained that given its role of looking after the situation of “bourgeois right”, in certain regards one could define the transitional state as the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”!25 Even if this formulation is more of a call for reflection than a clear definition of the class nature of the transitional state, Lenin hit on the essential: since the task of the state is to protect a state of things which are not yet communist, the Commune-State reveals its fundamentally conservative nature and that is what makes it particularly vulnerable to a counter-revolutionary dynamic.

Lenin in 1920-21: the workers must be able to defend themselves against the state

These theoretical perceptions certainly made it possible for Lenin to demonstrate a certain lucidity about the nature of the state in Russia in the debate on the unions,26 where he particularly opposed Trotsky, then a partisan of the militarisation of labour and for whom the proletariat should identify itself with “the proletarian state” and even subordinate itself to it. Although he himself was caught up by the process of the degeneration of the revolution, Lenin was then arguing in favour of the necessity for the workers to maintain organs defending their interests,27 even against the transitional state, at the same time as he repeated his warnings about the growth of state bureaucracy. At a speech to communist delegates in a meeting at the end of 1920, Lenin posed the question in the following terms:

“[...], Comrade Trotsky [...] seems to say that in a workers’ state it is not the business of the trade unions to stand up for the material and spiritual interests of the working class. That is a mistake. Comrade Trotsky speaks of a ‘workers’ state’. May I say that this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about a workers’ state in 1917; but it is now a patent error to say: ‘Since this is a workers’ state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?’ The whole point is that it is not quite a workers’ state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes. We have got down from general principles to practical discussion and decrees, and here we are being dragged back and prevented from tackling the business at hand. This will not do. For one thing, ours is not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state. And a lot depends on that. (Bukharin: ‘What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?’) Comrade Bukharin back there may well shout ‘What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?’ I shall not stop to answer him. Anyone who has a mind to should recall the recent Congress of Soviets, and that will be answer enough.

But that is not all. Our Party Programme – a document which the author of the ABC of Communism knows very well – shows that ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition. Well, is it right to say that in a state that has taken this shape in practice the trade unions have nothing to protect, or that we can do without them in protecting the material and spiritual interests of the massively organised proletariat? No, this reasoning is theoretically quite wrong […] We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers’ organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state.”28

We consider this reflection luminous and of the greatest importance. Himself caught up in the dynamic of the counter-revolution, Lenin, unfortunately wasn’t up to carrying on with the deepening that he made (on the contrary he went back on his characterisation of the state as a ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’). Moreover this intervention didn’t even give rise (above all from Lenin himself) to reflection or common work with the Workers’ Opposition led by Kollontai and Shliapnikov, which expressed at the time a proletarian reaction both against the bureaucratic theorisations of Trotsky and against the real bureaucratic distortions which were eating away at proletarian power. Nevertheless, this precious reflection has not been lost to the proletariat. If fact as we previously noted, it constituted the point of departure for a more profound reflection on the nature of the state of the period of transition led by the Communist Left of Italy, which was later transmitted to following generations of revolutionaries.

The proletariat and not the state is the force of revolutionary social transformation

One of the fundamental ideas of Marxism is that the class struggle constitutes the motor of history. It is not by chance that this idea is expressed in the first phrase, just after the preamble, of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles29). It is not the state which can play this role of motor when its historical function is precisely “to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’”.30 This characterisation of the state in class societies still applies to the society of transition where it is the working class, which remains the revolutionary force. Already, regarding the Paris Commune, Marx had clearly distinguished the revolutionary force of the proletariat on one hand, and the Commune-State on the other: “the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and therefore of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organised means of action. The Commune does not [do] away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive to [read for] the abolition of all classes and, therefore, of all classes [class rule] [...] but it affords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and humane way.31

The characterisation of the proletariat after the revolution as both the dominant political class and one still exploited on the economic level means that, both on the economic and political levels, the Commune-State and the dictatorship of the proletariat are essentially antagonistic:

  • as an exploited class the proletariat must defend its “material and spiritual interests” (as Lenin said) against the economic logic of the Commune-State representing society as a whole at a given moment;

  • it is as a revolutionary class that the proletariat must defend its political and practical orientations with the aim of transforming society against the social conservatism of the state and its tendency to self-preservation as an organ which, according to Engels “places itself above (society) and becomes more and more alien to it.32

So as to be able to assume its historic mission of transforming society in order to finish with all economic domination of one class or another, the working class must assume its political domination over the whole of society through the international power of the workers’ councils, the monopoly on the control of arms and the fact that it is the sole class of society that is permanently armed. Its political domination is also exercised over the state. The workers’ class power is moreover inseparable from the effective and unlimited participation of the immense mass of the class, from their activity and organisation, and it finishes when their political power becomes superfluous, when classes have disappeared.

Conclusion

We hope that we have responded to the criticisms of the OPOP on our position on the state in the most well argued way possible. We are quite conscious of not having responded specifically to a certain number of concrete and explicit objections (for example, “the organisational and administrative tasks that the revolution puts on the agenda from the beginning are essentially political tasks, whose implementation must be carried out directly by the victorious proletariat”). If we haven’t done so at this time it’s because it seemed a priority for us to present the greater historical and theoretical lines of our framework of analysis and because, very often, this constitutes an implicit response to the objections of OPOP. If necessary, we will return to them in a further article.

Finally, we essentially think that this question of the state in the period of transition is not the only one whose theoretical and practical clarification has been advanced considerably by the experience of the Russian revolution; it’s the same for the role and place of the proletarian party. Is its role to exercise power? Is its place within the state in the name of the working class? No for us, these remain errors that contributed to the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party. We also hope to be able to return to this question in another debate with the OPOP.

Sylvio (9/8/2012)


1. OPOP, Oposição Operária (Workers Opposition) is a group in Brazil. See its publication on revistagerminal.com. For a number of years now the ICC has maintained a fraternal and co-operative relationship which has taken the form of systematic discussions between our two organisations, joint leaflets and declarations (https://en.internationalism.org/wr/299/struggles-in-brazil) or shared public interventions (‘Deux réunions publiques communes au Brésil, OPOP-CCI: à propos des luttes des futures générations de prolétaires’, https://fr.internationalism.org/ri371/opop.html) and reciprocal participation in each other’s congresses.

2. “Debate: the state in the period of transition from capitalism to communism”, International Review n° 148, https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201203/4745/debate-state-period-transition-capitalism-communism-part-1.

3. Note in the cited passage from Anti-Dühring: “The free people’s state, a demand inspired by Lasalle and adopted at the unification congress at Gotha, was subjected to a fundamental critique by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.”

4. Engels, Anti-Dühring. “Third Part: Socialism, Chapter II: Theoretical”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm.

5. Lenin, The State and Revolution, “Chapter IV, Supplementary Explanations by Engels, 2. Controversy with the anarchists.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch04.htm#s2.

6. Marx. Critique of the Gotha Programme, Part IV, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm.

7. Italian communist left. Just as the development of opportunism in the Second International gave rise to a proletarian response in the shape of left wing currents, the mounting opportunism of the Third International was to meet with resistance from the communist left. The communist left was essentially an international current with expressions in a number of countries, from Bulgaria to Britain and from the USA to South Africa. But its most important representatives were found precisely in those countries where the marxist tradition was strongest: Germany, Italy and Russia. In Italy, the communist left – which at the beginning held a majority in the Communist Party of Italy – had a particularly clear position on the question of organisation. This enabled it not only to wage a courageous battle against the opportunism of the degenerating International, but also to give birth to a left fraction which was able to survive the shipwreck of the revolutionary movement and develop marxist theory during the sombre years of the counter-revolution. At the beginning of the 1920s its arguments for abstentionism from bourgeois parliaments, against the fusion of the communist vanguard with the big centrist parties to create the illusion of ‘mass influence’, against the slogans of the United Front and the Workers’ Government were already founded on a profound assimilation of the marxist method. For more information see “The communist left and the continuity of Marxism”, https://en.internationalism.org/the-communist-left.

8. See our article “The State and Revolution, a striking validation of Marxism”, part of the series “Communism is not just a nice idea, it’s on the agenda of history”, International Review n° 91. Many of the themes looked at here in our reply to OPOP are developed at greater length in this article.

9. The Communist Manifesto, “II, Proletarians and Communists”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch0....

10. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter VII, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/.

11. The State and Revolution, Chapter III: “The experience of the Paris Commune. What made the Communards’ attempt heroic?” In fact, the expression used here by Lenin is adapted from the words of Marx in a letter to Bracke on 5 May 1875 regarding the Gotha Programme: “A single step of the real movement is worth more than a dozen programmes” (“Marx to Bracke”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_05_05.htm).

12. Preface to the 1872 German edition of the Communist Manifesto, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/pre....

13. Ibid.

14. The State and Revolution, III, ibid.

15. Cf. “Debate: the state in the period of transition from capitalism to communism” International Review n° 148, https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201203/4745/debate-s....

16. The State and Revolution, Chapter V, 3, “The first phase of communist society: The economic basis of the withering away of the state”.

17. This expression is taken from the following passage: “Once we have overthrown the capitalists, crushed the resistance of these exploiters with the iron hand of the armed workers, and smashed the bureaucratic machinery of the modern state, we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the “parasite”, a mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all ‘state’ officials in general, workmen's wages. Here is a concrete, practical task which can immediately be fulfilled in relation to all trusts, a task whose fulfilment will rid the working people of exploitation, a task which takes account of what the Commune had already begun to practice (particularly in building up the state)The State and Revolution, Chapter III, “The experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx’s analysis, 3. Abolition of parliamentarism”.

18. The note is in the cited passage from The Origin of the Family and is from Hegel, Principles of the Philosophy of Law, Sections 257 and 360.

19. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Chapter IX, “Barbarism and Civilisation”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm.

20. The State and Revolution, Chapter II, “The experience of the years 1848-1851”.

21. Also participating in this State, in ever-increasing numbers, were experts, leaders of the Red Army, Cheka, etc.

22. In our series of five articles in the International Review, “What are workers’ councils?”, we showed the sociological and political differences between workers’ councils and territorial soviets. The workers’ councils are factory councils. Alongside these are also found neighbourhood councils, the latter integrating workers from small enterprises and shops, the unemployed, the young, pensioners, families who are part of the working class as a whole. The factory and neighbourhood councils (workers) played a decisive role at different moments in the revolutionary process (see the articles in IR n°s 141, 142). It was no accident that, with the process of the degeneration of the revolution, the factory councils disappeared at the end of 1918 and the neighbourhood councils at the end of 1919. The trade unions played a decisive role in the destruction of the former (see the article in International Review n° 145).

23. Engels, 1891 Introduction to The Civil War in France, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postsc....

24. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

25. The context for this expression from Lenin’s text is the following: “In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois law’. Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law. It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!, The State and Revolution, Chapter 5, “The higher phase of communist society”.

26. See in particular our article “Understanding the defeat of the Russian revolution” in the series “Communism is not just a nice idea, it’s on the agenda of history” in International Review n° 99, https://en.internationalism.org/node/4040.

27. These are unions which at the time were seen by all concerned as authentic defenders of the interests of the proletariat. This is explained by the backward conditions in Russia, where the bourgeoisie had not developed a sophisticated state apparatus capable of recognising the value of trade unions as instruments of social peace. For this reason not all the unions formed before and even after the 1917 revolution were necessarily organs of the class enemy. There was in particular a strong tendency to form industrial unions which still expressed a certain proletarian content.

28. 30 December 1920. “The trade unions, the present situation and Trotsky’s mistakes”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm.

29. The Communist Manifesto, “I. Bourgeois and Proletarians”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch0....

30. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”.

31. The first draft of The Civil War in France, https://marxengels.public-archive.net/en/ME1511en_d1.html.

32. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

 

People: 

Rubric: 

Polemic

Woman's role in the emergence of human culture

Why write about primitive communism today? The sudden plunge into catastrophic economic crisis and the development of struggles around the world are raising new problems for the working class, dark clouds are gathering over capitalism’s future, and all the while the hope of a better world seems unable to break through. Is this really the time to study our species’ social history in the period from its emergence some 200,000 years ago to the beginning of the Neolithic (about 10,000 years ago)?1 For ourselves, we are convinced that the question is every bit as important for communists today as it was for Marx and Engels in the 19th century, both in general for its scientific interest and as an element in our understanding of humanity and its history, and for our understanding of the perspective and possibility of a future communist society able to replace moribund capitalism.

This is why we can only welcome the publication in 2009 of a book titled Le communisme primitif n’est plus ce qu’il était (“Primitive communism is not what it was”) by Christophe Darmangeat; and indeed it is even more encouraging that the book is already in its second edition, which clearly indicates a public interest in the subject.2 This article will try, through a critical review, to return to the problems posed by the question of the first human societies; we will profit from the opportunity to explore the ideas put forward some twenty years ago by Chris Knight,3 in his book Blood Relations.4

Before we get into the meat of the subject, one thing should be clear: the question of primitive communism, and of humanity’s “species being”, are scientific questions, not political ones. In this sense, it is out of the question for a political organisation to adopt a “position” on human nature, for example. We are convinced that a communist organisation should stimulate debate and a thirst for scientific knowledge amongst its militants, and more generally in the working class, but the aim here is to encourage the development of a materialist and scientific view of the world, based on an awareness of modern scientific theory, at least as far as this is possible for non-scientists, as most of us are. The ideas presented cannot therefore be considered the “positions” of the ICC: they are the responsibility of the author alone.5

Why is the question of our origins important?

Why then is the question of the origin of our species, and of the first human societies, an important one for communists? The terms of the problem have changed considerably since the 19th century when Marx and Engels discovered with enthusiasm the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan. In 1884, when Engels published The origins of the family, private property, and the state, science had barely escaped the clutches of an epoch where the estimates of the age of the planet, or of human society, were based on Bishop Ussher’s biblical calculations.6 As Engels wrote in his 1891 preface: “Before the beginning of the ’sixties, one cannot speak of a history of the family. In this field, the science of history was still completely under the influence of the five books of Moses. The patriarchal form of the family, which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified – minus its polygamy – with the bourgeois family of today, so that the family had really experienced no historical development at all”.7 The same was true of notions of property, and the bourgeoisie could still object to the working class’ communist programme that “private property” was intrinsic to human society itself. The idea of the existence of a social condition of primitive communism was so unknown that in 1847 the Communist Manifesto could open with the words “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (a declaration that Engels thought it necessary to correct with a note in 1884).

Morgan’s book Ancient Society greatly helped in dismantling the ahistorical view of a human society eternally based on private property, even though his contribution was often hidden or passed over in silence by official anthropology, especially in Britain. As Engels notes, again in his Preface: “Morgan filled the measure to overflowing by not merely criticizing civilization, the society of commodity production, the basic form of present-day society, in a manner reminiscent of Fourier, but also by speaking of a future transformation of this society in words which Karl Marx might have used.

Today, in 2012, the situation is very different. A succession of discoveries have pushed man’s origins further and further back in time, so that today we know not only that private property is not society’s eternal foundation, but on the contrary that it is a relatively recent invention, since agriculture and so private property and the division of society into classes only date back some 10,000 years. Certainly, as Alain Testart has shown in his work Les chasseurs-cueilleurs ou l'origine des inégalités, the formation of wealth and classes did not take place overnight; a long period must have elapsed before the emergence of fully fledged agriculture, during which the development of storage techniques encouraged the emergence of an unequal distribution of accumulated wealth. Nonetheless, it is clear today that by far the longest period of human history is not that of class struggle, but of a society without classes: a society that we are justified in calling primitive communism.

The objection to the idea of a communist society that we hear most today is no longer that it violates the eternal principles of private property, but that it is supposedly contrary to “human nature”. “You can’t change human nature”, we are told, and by that is meant the supposedly violent, competitive and egocentric nature of man. Capitalist order is thus no longer eternal, but merely the logical and inevitable result of unchanging nature. Nor is this argument limited to right-wing ideologues. Humanist scientists, following as they believe the same logic of a genetically determined human nature, reach similar conclusions. The New York Review of Books (a left leaning intellectual journal) gives us an example of this reasoning in its October 2011 edition: “Humans compete for resources, living space, mates, social status, and almost everything else. Each living human is at the apex of a lineage of successful competitors that extends back to the origin of life. We are nothing if not fine-tuned competitors. The compulsion to compete enters into nearly everything we do, whether we recognize it or not. And the best competitors among us are often the best rewarded. One needs to look no further than Wall Street for a flagrant example [...] The human predicament of overpopulation and overexploitation of resources is fundamentally driven by the primordial impulses that drove our ancestors to achieve above-average reproductive success.8

This argument appears unanswerable at first sight: one hardly need look far to find endless examples of cupidity, violence, cruelty and egoism in today’s society, and in history. But does it follow that these defects are determined – as we would say today – genetically? Nothing could be more uncertain. If we can risk an analogy, a tree growing on a windswept cliff will grow twisted and stunted. Yet this is not wholly inscribed in its genes: under better conditions the tree would grow straight and tall.

Could we say the same of human beings?

It is a truism that features often enough in our articles, to say that the world proletariat’s resistance to capitalism’s crisis does not correspond to the violence of the attacks to which it is subjected. Communist revolution has perhaps never seemed so necessary, and yet at the same time so difficult. One of the reasons for this is certainly – in our view – because the workers not only lack confidence in their own strength but in the very possibility of communism. “It’s a nice idea”, people say to us, “but you know, human nature...”.

To regain its self-confidence, the proletariat must not only confront the immediate problems of the struggle; it must also confront the greater historical problems posed by its potential revolutionary confrontation with the ruling class. Amongst these problems there is precisely that of “human nature”, and this problem can only be investigated in the spirit of science. we have no interest in “proving” that man is “good”. We hope to arrive at a better understanding of precisely what man is, in order to integrate this knowledge into communist political project. The communist goal does not depend on man’s “natural goodness”: the need for communism is set in the given of capitalist society as the only solution to the social logjam which will undoubtedly lead us to a catastrophic future if capitalism does not give way before a communist revolution.

Scientific method

Before continuing, we want to turn aside briefly to consider the question of scientific method, especially as it applies to the study of human history and behaviour. A passage at the beginning of Knight’s book seems to us to pose the problem of anthropology’s place among the sciences very well: “More than any other field of knowledge, anthropology taken as a whole spans the chasm which has traditionally divided the natural from the human sciences. Potentially if not always in practice, it therefore occupies a central position among the sciences as a whole. The crucial threads which – if joined – might bind the natural sciences to the humanities would have to run through anthropology more than through any other field. It is here that the ends join – here that the study of nature ends and that of culture begins. At which point on the scale of evolution did biological principles cease to predominate while other, more complex, principles began prevailing in their place? Where exactly is the dividing line between animal and human social life? Is the distinction here one of kind, or merely one of degree? And, in the light of this question, is it really possible to study human phenomena scientifically – with the same detached objectivity as an astronomer can show towards galaxies or a physicist towards subatomic particles?

If this area of relationships between the sciences seems to many to be confused, it is only in part because of the real difficulties involved. Science may be rooted at one end in objective reality, but at the other end it is rooted in society and ourselves. It is for ultimately social and ideological reasons that modern science, fragmented and distorted under immense yet largely unacknowledged political pressures, has stumbled upon its greatest problem and its greatest theoretical challenge – to incorporate the humanities and the natural sciences into a single unified science on the basis of an understanding of humanity’s evolution and place within the rest of the universe.9

The question of the “dividing line” between the animal world, whose behaviour is determined above all by its genetic heritage, and the human world where behaviour depends to a far greater extent both on genes and on our cultural evolution, does indeed seem to us crucial to an understanding of “human nature”. Other primates are capable of learning, and up to a point of inventing and transmitting new behaviour, but this does not mean that they possess a “culture” in the human sense. These learned behaviours remain “marginal to the maintenance of social-structural continuity”.10 What made it possible for culture to gain the upper hand, in a “creative explosion”,11 is the development of communication amongst human groups, the development of symbolic culture based on language and ritual. Knight indeed makes the comparison between symbolic culture and language, which allowed human beings to communicate and so transmit ideas, and therefore culture, universally, and science, which is also founded on a common symbolism based on a planet-wide accord between all scientists, and potentially at least between all human beings. The practice of science is inseparable from debate, and the ability of each to verify the conclusions at which science arrives: it is therefore the sworn enemy of any form of esotericism which lives through secret knowledge, closed to non initiates.

Because it is a universal form of knowledge, and because since the industrial revolution it has been a productive force in its own right dependent on the associated labour, in both time and space, of scientists,12 science is internationalist by nature, and in this sense the proletariat and science are natural allies.13 This absolutely does not mean that there can be such a thing as “proletarian science”. In his article on “Marxism and science”, Knight quotes these words of Engels: “.... the more ruthlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds, the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests of the workers.14 Knight continues: “Science, as humanity's only universal, international, species-unifying form of knowledge, had to come first. If it had to be rooted in the interests of the working class, this was only in the sense that all science has to be rooted in the interests of the human species as a whole, the international working class embodying these interests in the modern epoch just as the requirements of production have always embodied these interests in previous periods.”.

There are two other aspects of scientific thought, highlighted in Carlo Rovelli’s book on the Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletos,15 which we want to take up here because they seem to us fundamental: respect for one’s predecessors, and doubt.

Rovelli shows that Anaximander’s attitude towards his master Thales broke with the attitudes that characterised his epoch: either a total rejection in order to establish oneself as the new master, or a slavish devotion to the words of the “master” whose thought is maintained in a state of mummification. The scientific attitude on the contrary, consists in basing ourselves on the work of the “masters” who have gone before, while at the same time criticising their mistakes and trying to take knowledge further. This the attitude we find in Knight’s book with regard to Lévi-Strauss, and in Darmangeat with regard to Morgan.

Doubt is fundamental to science, the very opposite of religion which always seeks certainty and consolation in the invariance of eternally established truth. As Rovelli says, “Science offers the best answers precisely because it does not consider its answers to be absolute truths; this is why it is always able to learn, and to take in new ideas”.16 This is especially true of anthropology and paleo-anthropology, whose data is often scattered and uncertain, and whose best theories can be upended overnight by new discoveries.

Is it even possible to have a scientific vision of history? Karl Popper,17 who is a reference for most scientists, thought not. He considered history as a “unique event” which is therefore non-reproducible, and since the verification of a scientific hypothesis depends on reproducible experiment, historical theory cannot be considered scientific. For the same reasons, Popper rejected the theory of evolution as non-scientific, and yet it is obvious today that the scientific method has proved itself capable of laying bare the fundamental mechanisms of the evolutionary process to the point where humanity can now manipulate evolution through genetic engineering. Without going as far as Popper, it is nonetheless clear that to apply the scientific method to the study of history, to the point we can make predictions about its evolution, is an extremely hazardous exercise. On the one hand human history – like meteorology for example – incorporates an incalculable number of independent variables, on the other, and above all, because – as Marx said – “men make their own history”; history is therefore determined by laws, but also by the ability or otherwise of human beings to base their acts on conscious thought and on the knowledge of these laws. Historical evolution is always subject to constraints: at any given moment, certain developments are possible, others are not. But the manner in which a given situation will evolve is also determined by men’s ability to become conscious of these constraints and to act on the basis of this awareness.

It is thus particularly bold on Knight’s part to accept the full rigour of the scientific method and to subject his theory to experimental test. Obviously, it is impossible to “reproduce” history experimentally. Knight therefore makes predictions on the basis of his hypotheses (in 1991, the date when Blood Relations was published) as to future archaeological discoveries: in particular, that the earliest traces of human symbolic culture would reveal an extensive use of red ochre. In 2006, 15 years later, it would seem that these predictions have been confirmed by the discoveries in the Blombos caves (South Africa) of the first known vestiges of human culture;18 these include engraved red ochre, pierced sea-shells apparently used for body decoration, and even the world’s first paint-pot, all of which fits into the evolutionary model that Knight proposes (to which we will return later). Obviously, this is not a “proof” of his theory, but it seems to us undeniable that it strengthens the hypothesis.

This scientific method is very different from that followed by Darmangeat who remains, or so it seems to us, restricted to the inductivist method which brings together known facts to try to extract from these some common factors. This method is not without value in scientific historical study: after all, any theory must conform to known reality. But Darmangeat seems to be very reticent about any attempt to go further and this seems to us an empirical rather than a scientific approach: science does not advance through induction from observed fact, but through hypothesis, which must certainly be in conformity with observation but must also propose an approach (experimental if possible), which would make it possible to go further towards new discoveries and new observations. String theory in quantum mechanics gives us a striking example of this method: although it is in accord, as far as possible, with observed fact, it cannot today be verified experimentally, since the particles (or “strings”) whose existence it postulates are too small to be measured with existing technology. String theory thus remains a speculative hypothesis – but without this kind of bold speculation, science would be unable to advance.

Another problem with the inductivist method is that it must, inevitably, pre-select its observations from the immensity of known reality. This is how Darmangeat proceeds, when he bases himself solely on ethnographic observation and leaves aside any consideration of the role of evolution and genetics – which seems to us an impossibility in a work which aims to lay bare “the origin of the oppression of women” (as Darmangeat’s book is sub-titled).

Morgan, Engels, and the scientific method

After these very modest considerations on the question of methodology, let us now return to Darmangeat’s book, which is this article’s starting-point.

The book is divided into two parts: the first examines the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan on which Engels based his Origins of the family, private property and the state, while the second takes up Engels’ question as to the origins of the oppression of women. In this second part, Darmangeat concentrates on attacking the idea that there once existed a primitive communism based on matriarchy.

The first part seems to us especially interesting,19 and we can only agree wholeheartedly with Darmangeat when he rounds on a supposedly “marxist” position which raises the work of Morgan (and a fortiori Engels) to the status of untouchable religious texts. Nothing could be further from the scientific spirit of marxism. While we should expect marxists to have a historical view of the emergence and development of materialist social theory, and so to take account of previous theories, it is absolutely obvious that we cannot take 19th century texts as the last word, and ignore the immense accumulation of ethnographic knowledge since then. Certainly, it is necessary to maintain a critical view in this respect: Darmangeat, like Knight, rightly insists on the fact that the struggle against Morgan’s theories was far from being waged on the basis of “pure”, “disinterested” science. When Morgan’s contemporary and later adversaries pointed out his mistakes, or when they highlighted discoveries that did not fit his theory, their aim was not in general neutral. By attacking Morgan, they attacked the evolutionary view of human society, and tried to re-establish bourgeois society’s patriarchal family and private property as the “eternal” categories of all human society, past present and future. This was perfectly explicit for Malinowski, one of the early 20th century’s greatest ethnographers, who said in a 1931 radio interview: “I believe that the most disruptive element in the modern revolutionary tendencies is the idea that parenthood can be made collective. If once we come to the point of doing away with the individual family as the pivotal element of our society, we should be faced with a social catastrophe compared with which the political upheaval of the French revolution and the economic changes of Bolshevism are insignificant. The question, therefore, as to whether group motherhood is an institution which ever existed, whether it is an arrangement which is compatible with human nature and social order, is of considerable practical interest”.18 We are a long way, here, from scientific objectivity...

Let us move on to Darmangeat’s critique of Morgan. This is of great interest in our view, if only because it begins with a fairly detailed summary of Morgan’s theories, making them readily accessible for the non expert reader. We especially appreciate the table which aligns the different stages of social evolution used by Morgan and the anthropology of his epoch (“savagery”, “barbarism”, etc.) and those in use today (Palaeolithic, Neolithic, etc.), which makes it easier to place oneself in historical time, and the explanatory diagrams of different kinship systems. The whole section abounds in clear, didactic explanations.

The foundation of Morgan’s theory is to bring together the type of family, kinship systems, and technical development, in a series of evolutionary steps which lead from “the state of savagery” (the first stage of human social evolution, which corresponds to the Palaeolithic), to “barbarism” (the Neolithic and the age of metals), and finally to civilisation. This evolution is supposedly determined by technical development, and the apparent contradictions that Morgan noted among many peoples (the Iroquois in particular) between the systems of family and kinship, represented for him the intermediary stages between a more primitive and a more advanced economy and technology. Sadly for the theory, when we look more closely this turns out not to be the case. To take only one of Darmangeat’s many examples, according to Morgan the “punaluan” kinship system is supposed to represent one of the most primitive technical and social stages, and yet it is to be found in Hawaii, in a society which contains wealth, social inequality, an aristocratic social stratum, and which is on the point of evolving into a full-blown state and class society. Family and kinship systems are thus determined by social needs, but not in a straight line from the most primitive to the most modern.

Does this mean that the marxist view of social evolution should be thrown into the bin? Not in the least, says Darmangeat. However, we need to dissociate what Morgan, and Marx and Engels after him, tried to bring together: the evolution of technology (and therefore of productivity) and family systems. “... Although modes of production are all qualitatively different, they all possess a common quantity, productivity, which makes it possible to order them in a rising series, which moreover roughly corresponds to their chronological order [...] [For the family] there is no common quantity which could be used to establish a rising series of different forms”.20 It is obvious that the economy is the determining factor “in the last instance”, to use Engels term: if there were no economy (ie the reproduction of everything necessary to human life), then there would be no social life either. But this “last instance” leaves a great deal of space for other influences, be they geographical, historical, cultural, or other. Ideas, culture – in its broadest sense – are also determining factors in society. At the end of his life, Engels himself regretted that the pressing need, for Marx and himself, to set historical materialism on a sure footing, and to fight for its defence, left them too little time to analyse other historically determining factors.21

The critique of anthropology

In the second part of his book, Darmangeat puts forward his own thoughts. We find here two basic themes, so to speak: on the one hand a historical critique of anthropological theory on the position of women in primitive societies, on the other we have the exposition of his own conclusions on the subject. This historical critique is focused on the evolution of what, for Darmangeat, is the marxist – or at least marxist-influenced – vision of primitive communism from the standpoint of women’s place in primitive society, and is a vigorous denunciation of “feminist” attempts to defend the idea of a primeval matriarchy in the first human societies.

This choice is not unreasonable, nonetheless in our view it is not always a happy one, leading the author to ignore some marxist theoreticians who belong in such a study, and to include others who have no business there at all. To take just a few examples, Darmangeat criticises Alexandra Kollontai22 over several pages, yet says almost nothing about Rosa Luxemburg. Now, whatever Kollontai’s role in the Russian revolution and in the resistance to its degeneration (she played a leading role in the “Workers’ Opposition”), Kollontai never played a great part in the development of marxist theory, and still less in that of anthropology. Luxemburg on the other hand, was not only a leading marxist theoretician, she was also the author of an Introduction to political economy, which devotes an important part to the question of primitive communism, on the basis of the most up to date research of the day. The only justification for this imbalance is that Kollontai played an important part, first in the socialist movement, then in early Soviet Russia, in the struggle for women’s rights, whereas Luxemburg never took a close interest in feminism. Two other marxist authors who have written on the theme of primitive communism are not even mentioned: Karl Kautsky (Ethics and the materialist conception of history) and Anton Pannekoek (Anthropogenesis).

Amongst the unfortunate “inclusions” we find, for example, Evelyn Reed: this member of the American Socialist Workers’ Party (a Trotskyist organisation which gave its “critical” support to participation in World War II), is included for having written in 1975 Feminism and anthropology, a work which enjoyed a certain success in left-wing circles at the time. But as Darmangeat says, the book was almost completely ignored by anthropologists largely because of the poverty of its arguments, which were pointed out even by sympathetic critics.

We find the same absences amongst the anthropologists: Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the most important figures in 20th century anthropology and whose theory of the passage from nature to culture is founded on the idea of the exchange of women between men, only gets a walk-on part, while Bronislaw Malinowski does not appear at all.

Perhaps the most surprising absence is that of Chris Knight. Darmangeat’s book is focused especially on the situation of women in primitive communist societies, and on the critique of theories which belong to a certain marxist, or marxist-influenced tradition. In 1991, the British anthropologist Chris Knight, who considers his work to lie explicitly within the marxist tradition, published a work – Blood Relations – which deals with precisely the issue that concerns Darmangeat. One would expect that Darmangeat would pay it the closest attention, all the more so since he himself recognises the work’s “great erudition”. Yet nothing of the sort is to be found in Darmangeat’s book, quite the reverse. He devotes barely a page (p321) to Knight’s thesis, where he tells us that it “reiterates the serious methodological errors of Reed and Briffault (Knight says nothing about the former, but quotes the latter abundantly)”, which could leave the francophone reader with no access to a book available only in English, with the impression that Knight does no more than follow behind people who Darmangeat has already demonstrated are not to be taken seriously.23 Yet a mere glance at Knight’s bibliography is enough to show that while he does indeed cite Briffault, he gives a good deal more space to Marx, Engels, Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins... and many more. And if one takes the trouble to consult his references to Briffault, one finds immediately that Knight considers the latter’s work (published in 1927), whatever its merits, to be “outdated in its sources and methodology24

In short, our feeling is that Darmangeat leaves us rather “sitting on the fence”: we end up with a critical narrative which is neither a real critique of the positions defended by marxists, nor a real critique of anthropological theory, and this sometimes gives us the impression of witnessing Don Quixote’s joust with the windmills. This choice of structure seems to us to obscure more than anything else, an argument which in other respects is of considerable interest.

Jens (to be continued)


1. A social history which, for some human populations, has continued to the present day.

2. Editions Smolny, Toulouse, 2009. We became aware of the publication of the second edition of Darmangeat’s book (Smolny, Toulouse, 2012) just as this article was about to go to press, and we obviously wondered whether we would have to rewrite this review. After reading through the second edition, it seems to us that we can leave this article essentially in its original state. The author himself points out in a new preface that he has not “modified the text’s essential ideas, nor the arguments on which it is based”, and our reading of this new edition confirms this. We have therefore limited ourselves to elaborating some arguments on the basis of the 2nd edition. Unless otherwise noted, the quotes and page references are taken from the first edition.

3. Chris Knight is an English anthropologist and member of the “Radical Anthropology Group”. He has taken part in the debates on science at the 19th ICC Congress, and we have published his article on “Marxism and Science” on our web site (https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2011/07/marxism-and-science-chris-knight)

4. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991.

5. That said, the author is deeply indebted to the discussions within the organisation, without which it would certainly have been impossible to develop these ideas.

6. Bishop Ussher was a prolific 17th scholar who calculated the age of the Earth on the basis of biblical genealogies: he gave a date for the planet’s creation in 4004 BC.

9 Knight, op.cit. p.56-7

10. Ibid, p11. We can draw an analogy here with commodity production and capitalist society. Commodity production and trade have existed since the dawn of civilisation, and perhaps even before, but they become determining factors only in capitalism.

11. Ibid, p.12

12. See our article "Reading notes on science and marxism", https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201203/4739/reading-notes-science-and-marxism

13. This is true of science as it is of other productive forces under capitalism: “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?[...] The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property” (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, Part I “Bourgeois and Proletarians”).

14. Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy”. In K Marx and F Engels, On Religion. Moscow 1957, p. 266.

15. The first scientist : Anaximander and his legacy, Westholme Publishing, 2011

16. Our translation from the French, cited in an article published on our French site.

17. Karl Popper (1902-1994) was born in Vienna, Austria. He became one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers of science, and an unavoidable reference for any scientist interested in questions of methodology. He insists in particular on the idea of “refutability”, which states that any hypothesis, if it is to be considered scientific, must be able to propose experiments which would allow it to be refuted: should such experiments be impossible, then a hypothesis could not claim to be scientific. On this basis, Popper held that marxism, psychoanalysis, and – at least at first – Darwinism, could not claim to be scientific disciplines.

18. See the work of the Stellenbosch conference published in The cradle of language, OUP, 2009, and the article published in the November 2011 issue of La Recherche (www.larecherche.fr/content/recherche/article?id=30891).

19. Ironically, in the second edition Darmangeat has moved the book’s first part to an Appendix, apparently for fear of discouraging the non-specialist reader with its “aridity”, to use the author’s own term.

20. p136 of the first edition. The translation from the French is ours’ throughout.

21. “Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too...” (Engels, letter to J Bloch, 21st September 1890: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm)

22. In the second edition, Kollontai even has her own sub-section.

23. The critique of Knight’s work is no more extensive in the second edition, with the exception of a reference to a critical review by Joan M Gero, a feminist anthropologist and author of Engendering archaeology. This review seems to us somewhat superficial and politically partisan. Here is a typical example: “What Knight puts forward as an ‘engendered’ perspective on the origins of culture is a paranoid and distorting view of  “female solidarity,” featuring (all) women as sexually exploiting and manipulating (all) men. Male-female relations are characterized forever and everywhere as between victims and manipulators; exploitative women are assumed always to have wanted to trap men by one means or another, and indeed their conspiring to do so serves as the very basis of our species’ development. Readers may similarly be offended by the assumption that men have always been promiscuous and that only good sex, coyly metered out by calculating women, can keep them at home and interested in their offspring. Not only is the scenario unlikely and undemonstrated, repugnant to feminists and non-feminists alike, but the sociobiological reasoning dismisses all the nuanced versions of social construction of gender relations, ideologies, and activities that have become so central and fascinating in gender studies today”. In short, we are invited to reject a scientific thesis not because it is wrong – Gero has nothing to say about this and takes no trouble to demonstrate it – but because it is “repugnant” to certain feminists.

24 Darmangeat, op.cit, p. 328.

 

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Primitive communism

The revolutionary syndicalist movement in the German revolution, 1918-19

The previous article1 provided an overview of the efforts of the revolutionary syndicalist current in Germany to defend an internationalist position against the war of 1914-18. The Free Union of German Trade Unions (Freie Vereinigung Deutscher Gewerkschaften - FVDG) had survived the war with only a few hundred members in hiding who, under conditions of brutal repression, were, like other revolutionaries, most of the time condemned to silence. But late in 1918 events came to a head in Germany. When the struggles broke out in November 1918, the spark from the Russian revolution of October 1917 ignited the mass action of the proletariat in Germany.

The reorganisation of the FVDG in 1918

During the first week of November 1918, the revolt of the sailors of the Kiel fleet brought German militarism to its knees. On November 11th Germany signed the armistice. The FVDG wrote: “The imperial government has been overthrown, not by parliamentary or legal means, but through direct action, not by the ballot box, but by force of arms by striking workers and mutinying soldiers. Without waiting on orders of leaders, workers and soldiers councils have been formed spontaneously and have immediately begun to dismiss the old authorities. All power to the workers and soldiers councils! This is now the watchword.”2

With the outbreak of the revolutionary wave, a turbulent era with a rapid influx of militants opened up for the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany. Membership increased from about 60,000 at the time of the revolution of November 1918 until mid-1919 to over 111,000 by the end of 1919. The political radicalisation of the working class at the end of the war drove many workers who had left the main social democratic unions because of the open support of the latter for the war policy, into the revolutionary syndicalist movement. The revolutionary syndicalist movement was clearly a place for honest and militant workers to come together.

With the publication of its new newspaper, Der Syndikalist, from December 14th 1918, the FVDG again made its voice heard: “From early August [1914], our press has been banned, our most prominent comrades taken into “custody”, any attempt by anyone, or any local unions to engage in political agitation has been outlawed. Yet the weapons of revolutionary syndicalism are in use today in every corner of the German Empire, and the masses instinctively feel the time has passed for formulating demands and that we now have to start to take action.”3 On December 26th and 27th Fritz Kater organised a conference in Berlin attended by 43 local unions of the FVDG and so it restarted its organised activity following the clandestinity of the war.

It was in the industrial and mining towns of the Ruhr that the FVDG experienced its most significant numerical growth. The influence of revolutionary syndicalists was particularly strong in Mülheim and forced the social democratic unions to withdraw from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils on December 13th 1918; it clearly opposed them as representatives of the workers and took this role into its own hands. Massive strikes of miners from the Hamborn region led by the revolutionary syndicalist movement took place from November 1918 to February 1919.4

Workers’ councils or unions?

Faced with the war of 1914, the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany had passed the historic test of defending internationalism against the war, and had not, like the vast majority of unions, rallied behind the war aims of the ruling class. The outbreak of the revolution of 1918 posed a huge new challenge: how is the working class going to organise to overthrow the bourgeoisie and make the revolution?

As was the case in Russia in 1905, then in 1917, in Germany in November 1918 the working class created workers’ councils that marked the emergence of a revolutionary situation. The whole period since the establishment of the “Localists” in 1892 and the formal foundation of the FVDG in 1901 had not given rise to any revolutionary upheaval. Unlike Russia, where, in 1905, the first workers’ councils appeared, reflection on the councils remained very abstract in Germany until 1918. During the brief but exciting “Winter of the Councils” from 1918 to 1919 in Germany, the FVDG still clearly saw its form of organisation as a union and it was as a union that it reappeared on the scene. The FVDG responded to the unique situation of the emergence of workers’ councils with great enthusiasm. The core of the revolutionary majority of the FVDG supported workers’ councils, so that Der Syndikalist n°2 of December 21st 1918 clearly proclaimed: “All power to the revolutionary workers and soldiers’ councils.”

However, theoretical consciousness often follows proletarian intuition. Despite the emergence of workers’ councils, and as if nothing new had happened, Der Syndikalist n°4 wrote that the FVDG was the only workers’ organisation “whose representatives and organs don’t need changing”, an expression that sums up the arrogance of the Reorganisation Conference of the FVDG in December 1918 and which became the motto of the revolutionary syndicalist current in Germany. But for the workers’ movement an era of great upheaval had opened up, where precisely a great deal had to change, particularly as regards the forms of organisation!

To explain the shameful policies of support for the war and opposition to the workers’ councils of the main unions, the FVDG tended to settle for a half-truth, and to ignore the other half. Only “social democratic education” was challenged. The question of the fundamental differences between the union form and that of the workers’ councils was completely neglected.

Undoubtedly the FVDG, and the organisation that came after, the FAUD, were revolutionary organisations. But they did not see that their organisation came from the same seeds as the workers’ councils: spontaneity, the desire to extend the movement and the revolutionary spirit – all characteristics that went well beyond union practices.

In the FVDG’s publications in 1919, it is almost impossible to find an attempt to address the fundamental contradiction between union practices and those of the workers’ councils, instruments of the revolution. Quite the contrary, it saw the “revolutionary unions” as the basis for the councils’ movement. “The revolutionary unions must expropriate the expropriators.... The workers’ councils and factory councils should direct production along socialist lines. The power to the workers’ councils; the means of production and goods produced to satisfy social needs. Such is the goal of proletarian revolution: the revolutionary syndicalist movement is the means to achieve it.” But did the revolutionary councils’ movement in Germany actually arise from the union movement? “It was the workers inside the ‘factory committees’ who had acted just like they had in the factory committees of the large enterprises in Petrograd in 1905, without knowing about this activity. In July 1916, the political struggle could not be conducted with support of the political parties and unions. The leaders of these organisations were the opponents of such a struggle; after the struggle, they also helped to deliver the leaders of this political strike to the scourge of repression of the military authorities. These ‘factory committees’, the term is not quite accurate, can be considered the precursors of the revolutionary workers’ councils in Germany today. ...These struggles were not supported and led by the existing parties and unions. This was the beginnings of a third type of organisation, the workers’ councils.5 This was how Richard Müller, member of Revolutionäre Obleute (Revolutionary “men of confidence”) described the “way it was achieved”.

The unionists of the FVDG were not the only ones not to question the union form of organisation. At that time, it was extremely difficult for the working class to draw out fully and clearly what was implied by the emergence of the “period of wars and revolutions”. The illusions in the union form of organisation, the bankruptcy of the latter faced with the revolution, had still to be subjected, inevitably, painfully and concretely, to practical experience. Richard Müller quoted above, wrote just a few weeks later when the workers’ councils were losing their power: “But if we recognise the necessity of the daily struggle for demands - and nobody can deny it - then we must also recognise the need to preserve the organisations that have the function of conducting this struggle, and these are the unions. (...) If we recognise the need for existing unions... then we must examine further ahead whether unions can find a place inside the council system. During the period when the council system was being established, it was necessary to unconditionally answer this question in the affirmative.6

The social democratic unions had lost credit in the eyes of the broad masses of workers and doubts grew increasingly about whether these organisations could still represent the interests of the working class. In the logic of the FVDG, the dilemma of capitulation and the historic bankruptcy of the old form of union organisation was resolved by the prospect of “revolutionary syndicalism”.

At the beginning of the era of the decadence of capitalism, the impossibility of the struggle for reforms put forward the following alternative for the permanent mass organisations of the working class: either they were integrated by state capitalism into the state (as had usually been the case with the social democratic organisations – but also for some revolutionary syndicalist unions like the CGT in France); or it destroyed them (which was ultimately the fate of the revolutionary syndicalist FAUD). This raises the question of whether the proletarian revolution requires other forms of organisation. With the experience we have today, we know that it is not possible to put new content into old forms, such as the trade unions. The revolution is not only about content but also about form. This is the view stated quite correctly by the theoretician of the FAUD, Rudolf Rocker, in December 1919 in his critique of false visions of the “revolutionary state”: “We can’t agree with the expression the revolutionary state. The state is always reactionary and to not understand that is to not understand the depth of the revolutionary principle. Every tool is shaped in accordance with its proposed use; and this is also the case for institutions. The pincers of the farrier are not suitable for pulling teeth and the grippers used by the dentist cannot shape a horseshoe…”7 This, unfortunately, is exactly what the revolutionary syndicalist movement has failed to apply consistently to the question of the form of organisation.

Against the trap of “works councils”

So as to politically emasculate the spirit of the system of workers’ councils, the Social Democrats and their unions in the service of the bourgeoisie began to skilfully undermine from within the principles of self-organisation of the working class in the councils. This was only possible because the workers’ councils emerged from the struggles of November 1918, and these struggles had lost their strength and vitality with the first ebb of the revolution. The first Congress of the Councils from 16th to 20th December 1918, under the subtle influence of the SPD and the continued weight of illusions of the working class in democracy, had abandoned its power and proposed the election of a National Assembly, completely disarming itself.

In the spring of 1919, after the wave of strikes in the Ruhr, the SPD government took the initiative of proposing the establishment of “works councils” in the factories – representatives of the de facto workforce actually fulfilling the same function of negotiation and collaboration with the capital as the traditional unions. Under the auspices of the Social Democratic Party and trade union officials, Gustav Bauer and Alexander Schlicke, the works councils were permanently enshrined in the bourgeois Constitution of the German State in February 1920.

It was necessary to develop the illusion inside the working class that the fighting spirit expressed inside the workers’ councils would find its incarnation in this new form of direct representation of workers’ interests. “The works councils are designed to address all issues related to work and pay. It is their responsibility to ensure the continuation and increase of production in the company and seek to eliminate any obstacles that may arise... District committees in collaboration with the management regulate and supervise the standard of the work in the district, as well as the distribution of raw materials.8 After the bloody repression of the working class, democratic integration into the state would definitely seal the work of the counter-revolution. Having even more authority in the workplace than the unions, and working hand in hand with the companies, the establishment of these councils led to a total collaboration with capital.

In the spring of 1919 the press of the FVDG took a clear and courageous position against this strategy of works councils: “Capital and the state only recognise the workers’ committees that are now called works councils. The works council does not only claim to represent the interests of workers, but also those of the company. And since these companies are owned by private capital or by the state, the workers’ interests must be subordinated to the interests of their exploiters. It follows that the works council defends the exploitation of workers and encourages them to continue working as docile wage slaves. [...] The methods of struggle of the revolutionary syndicalists are incompatible with the functions of the works council.”9

This attitude was widely shared among the revolutionary syndicalists because, on the one hand the works councils seemed so obviously a tool of social democracy and, on the other hand, the combativity of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany had not yet been broken. The illusion of having “obtained something” and “of having taken a concrete step” had very little effect in 1919 in the most determined fractions of the proletariat – the working class had not yet been defeated.10

Later, after the evident decline of the revolutionary movement from 1921, it was not surprising that heated debates broke out within the revolutionary syndicalist FAUD lasting a year about participation in elections to the works councils. A minority developed the orientation that it would be necessary, through the legalised works councils, to establish “a link with the labouring masses to launch massive struggles when the situation was ripe.”11 The FVDG as an organisation refused to engage in “the sterile works councils dedicated to neutralising the revolutionary view of the councils”, according to the comments of the militant August Beil. That at least was the position prevailing until November 1922, when, as a result of impotence produced by the defeat of the revolution, the 14th Congress of the FAUD modified its stand, granting the right to its members to participate in the elections to works councils.

The dynamic of the revolution brings together the revolutionary syndicalists and the Spartacus League

Just as in Russia in October 1917, the uprising of the working class in Germany had immediately aroused a sense of solidarity within the working class. For the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany, solidarity with the struggle of the working class in Russia had, until the end of 1919, undoubtedly constituted an important reference point shared internationally with other revolutionaries. The Russian revolution, because of revolutionary uprisings in other countries, still provided a perspective in 1918-1919 and had not yet begun to degenerate internally. To defend their class brothers in Russia and in direct opposition to the policy of the SPD and the social democratic unions, in the second issue of its paper Der Syndikalist the FVDG made this denunciation: “...no means was too disgusting for them, no weapon too vile to slander the Russian Revolution and to rail against Soviet Russia and its workers and soldiers’ councils”.12 Despite their many reservations with regard to the views of the Bolsheviks – not all of which were unfounded – the revolutionary syndicalists remained in solidarity with the Russian revolution. Even Rudolf Rocker, influential theorist of the FVDG and outspoken critic of the Bolsheviks, appealed, two years after the October revolution, in his famous speech introducing the FAUD Declaration of Principles in December 1919, for a show of solidarity: “We unanimously take sides with Soviet Russia in its heroic defence against the Allied powers and against the counter-revolutionaries, and this, not because we are Bolsheviks, but because we are revolutionaries”.

Although the revolutionary syndicalists in Germany had their traditional reservations towards “marxism” that “wanted to seize political power”, what they believed they had in common with the Spartacus League was that it clearly defended common action with all other revolutionary organisations: “Revolutionary syndicalism therefore considered the division of the workers’ movement unnecessary, it wants its forces concentrated. Right now, we recommend our members to support, on matters economic and political, the general lines of the most left-wing groups of the workers’ movement: the Independents, the Spartacus League. We do caution, however, against any participation in the circus of elections to the National Assembly.13

The revolution of November 1918 was not the work of a specific political organisation such as the Spartacus League and the Revolutionnäre Obleute (revolutionary syndicalist delegates), even though they did adopt the clearest position and were the most eager for action during the November days. It was an uprising of the whole working class when for a short period the potential unity of this class was demonstrated. One expression of this trend towards unity has been the widespread phenomenon of double affiliation to the Spartacus League and FVDG. “In Wuppertal, the militants of the FVDG were active for the first time within the Communist Party. A list established in April 1919 by the police of Wuppertal communists contains the names of all the future key members of the FAUD.14 In Mülheim, from December 1st 1918 there appeared the paper “Die Freiheit, the organ defending the interests of all working people, the Newspaper of the workers and soldiers’ councils”, published jointly by revolutionary syndicalists and members of the Spartacus League.

In early 1919, inside the revolutionary syndicalist movement there was a clear aspiration to unite with other organisations of the working class. “They are still not united, they are still divided, they still do not think and behave in an honest manner like true socialists and they are not always individually and inextricably connected through the marvellous chain of proletarian solidarity. They are still divided between right-wing socialists, left socialists, Spartacists, and others. The working class must finally end the gross absurdity of political particularism.15 This attitude of great openness reflected the great political heterogeneity, even confusion, within the FVDG which had experienced rapid growth. Its internal cohesion relied less on programmatic clarification or demarcation vis-à-vis other proletarian organisations than on the link of workers’ solidarity, as shown in its undiscriminating characterisation of all “socialists”.

The attitude of solidarity with the Spartacus League was developed in the ranks of the revolutionary syndicalists following the repression against Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg during the war and continued until the autumn of 1919. But on the other hand, it failed to establish any common history with the Spartacus League. Until the time of the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, it was much more a case of mutual distrust between the two. The main cause of their reconciliation was the political clarification that matured within the entire working class and its revolutionary organisations during the November revolution: the rejection of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism. The revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany, which had long rejected the parliamentary system, saw this position as part of its own heritage. The Spartacus League, which had a clear position against any illusions of democracy, regarded the FVDG, which followed the same path, as the organisation closest to it in Germany.

However, from the outset, Rudolf Rocker, who was to take charge of the political orientation of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany after December 1919, “did not have great sympathy with appeals to comrades to support the left wing of the socialist movement, the Independents and the Spartacists or intervention of the newspaper supporting the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’...16 In March 1919, on his return from internment in England during the war, Rocker, anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary, strongly influenced by the ideas of Kropotkin, joined the FVDG.

Despite the differences of opinion on the Spartacus League, between Rocker and the tendency gathered around Fritz Kater, Carl Windhoff and Karl Roche, which was the most influential in the FVDG in the first months of the revolution of 1918-19, it would be wrong at this time to speak of the struggles of tendencies inside the FVDG, such as would occur later in 1920 as a symptom of the defeat of the German revolution. There was no significant tendency at the time among the revolutionary syndicalists wanting a priori to set itself apart from the KPD. Instead, the search for unity of action with the Spartacists was the product of the momentum towards the unity of workers’ struggles and the “pressure from below” on these two currents in the weeks and months where the revolution seemed to be within reach. It was the painful defeat of the premature uprising of January 1919 in Berlin, and the subsequent crushing of the strike waves in the Ruhr in April, that were supported by the revolutionary syndicalists, the KPD and the USPD, which, due to the disappointment they aroused, provoked mutual and emotional recriminations that expressed a lack of maturity on both sides.

From the summer of 1919 the “informal alliance” with Spartacus and the Communist Party would hence break apart. The responsibility for this lay less with the FVDG than the aggressive attitude the KPD had begun to adopt towards the revolutionary syndicalists.

The “provisional programme” of the revolutionary syndicalists in spring 1919

In spring 1919, the FVDG published a pamphlet written by Roche, “What do the revolutionary syndicalists want?” This was intended as a programme and orientation text for the organisation up to December 1919. It is difficult to judge the revolutionary syndicalist movement on the basis of a single text, given the coexistence within its ranks of different ideas. However, this programme constitutes a milestone, and, from several points of view, is one of the most finished positions of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany. Despite the painful past experiences of their own history with the social democrats and the permanent demonisation of politics17 that resulted from it, it concludes: “The working class must make itself master of the economy and of politics.18

The strength of the positions spread by the FVDG through this programme within the working class in Germany at this time lies elsewhere: in its attitude towards the state, bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism. It specifically refers to the description Friedrich Engels made of the state as a product of a society divided into classes: “The state is a product of society at a certain stage of its development”; it is “the admission that this society is entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is divided into irreconcilable antagonisms” and is not “a force imposed on society from outside” or an instrument of the ruling class created in a purely arbitrary manner by it. The FVDG consistently called for the destruction of the bourgeois state.

With this position, in a period when social democracy was without doubt the most insidious weapon of the counter-revolution, the FVDG put its finger on a key point. Against the farce of the SPD seeking to subdue the workers’ councils by integrating them into the bourgeois parliament, its programme argued: “Social democratic ‘socialism’ definitely needs a state. And a state that would use exactly the same methods against the working class as the capitalist state. ... It will be the result of a proletarian half-revolution and the target of the total proletarian revolution. It is because we recognise the nature of the state and we know the political domination of the propertied classes is rooted in their economic power, that we have to fight not for the conquest of the state, but its elimination.

Karl Roche also tried to formulate in the FVDG programme the basic lessons of November and December 1918, going far beyond the rebellious or individualistic rejection of the state that was wrongly attributed to the revolutionary syndicalists, and clearly unmasked in its essence the system of bourgeois democracy. “Democracy is not equality, but the demagogic use of a comedy of equality. ... The property owners always have, for as long as they confront the workers, the same interests. The workers have no common interest with any of them, and none with the bourgeoisie. Here, democracy is a general absurdity.... Democracy is one of the most dangerous slogans in the mouth of the demagogues who rely on the laziness and ignorance of the workforce. ... Modern democracies in Switzerland, France, America are nothing but a capitalist democratic hypocrisy in the most repulsive form.” Faced with the traps of democracy this precise formulation is more relevant than ever.

We can make numerous criticisms of the FVDG’s spring 1919 programme, notably a certain number of classic revolutionary syndicalist ideas that we do not share such as “complete self-determination” and “federalism”. But on the crucial points of that time, such as the rejection of parliamentarism, the program written by Roche, remained adamant. “For parliamentarism as much as social democracy: if the working class wants to fight for socialism, it must reject the bourgeoisie as a class. It should neither grant it the right to power, nor vote with it or deal with it. Workers’ councils are the parliaments of the working class. [...] It is not bourgeois parliaments, but the dictatorship of the proletariat which implements socialism.” At this time, the Communist Party was going back on its original clear positions against parliamentarism and work within the social democratic unions, and began to regress dramatically from the positions of its founding congress.

A few months later, in December 1919, the Declaration of Principles of the FAUD focused on different points. Karl Roche who, in the early days after the war had influenced the FVDG in a decisive way on the programmatic level, rejoined the AAU in December 1919.

The break with the Communist Party

During the revolution of November 1918, many common points brought together the revolutionaries of the revolutionary syndicalist FVDG with those of the Spartacus League: the reference to the uprising of the working class in Russia in 1917; the taking of all power by the workers’ councils; the rejection of democracy and of parliamentarism, as well as a clear rejection of social democracy and its unions. So how can we explain why during the summer of 1919 relations began to harden between the two currents that had previously shared so many things?

There are various factors which cause a revolution to fail: the weakness of the working class and the weight of its illusions or the isolation of the revolution. In Germany in 1918-19, it was above all its experience that allowed the German bourgeoisie, through social democracy, to sabotage the movement from within, to foment democratic illusions, to push the working class into the trap of isolated and premature uprisings in January 1919 and to deprive it, through murder, of its clearest revolutionaries and of thousands of militant workers.

The polemics between the KPD and the revolutionary syndicalists following the crushing of the strike in the Ruhr in April 1919 show on both sides the same attempt to find the reasons for the failure of the revolution in other revolutionaries. Roche had already been swept up in this trend in April at the conclusion of the FVDG programme, saying “(...) do not let the Spartacists divide the working class”, in a confused way putting them in the same bag as the “right-wing socialists.” From the summer of 1919 it became fashionable in the FVDG to talk about the “three social democratic parties”, that is to say, the SPD, USPD and KPD – a polemical attack which in the atmosphere of frustration at the failures of the class struggle no longer made any distinction between counter-revolutionary organisations and proletarian organisations.

In August the Communist Party (KPD) published a pamphlet on the revolutionary syndicalists with an equally unfortunate line of argument. It now considered the presence of revolutionary syndicalists in its ranks as a threat to the revolution: “The inveterate revolutionary syndicalists must finally realise that they do not have a common interest with us. We must no longer allow our party to provide a playground for people who spread all kinds of ideas foreign to the party.19

The Communist Party’s critique of the revolutionary syndicalists focused on three points: the question of the state and economic organisation after the revolution, tactics and organisational forms – in fact the classic debates with the revolutionary syndicalist current Although the Communist Party was right to conclude that: “In the revolution, the importance of unions to the class struggle more and more recedes. Workers’ councils and political parties become the exclusive protagonists and leaders of the struggle”, the polemic against the revolutionary syndicalists revealed above all the weaknesses of the Communist Party under Levi’s leadership: a fixation on the conquest of the state. “We believe that we will necessarily use the state after the revolution. Revolution in the first place means precisely to take power within the state”; the mistaken belief that coercion within the proletariat could be a means for conducting the revolution: “Let us say with the Bible and the Russians: those who do not work do not eat. Those who do not work receive only what those active can spare”; flirting with the resumption of parliamentary activity: “Our attitude towards parliamentarism shows that for us the question is posed differently to the tactics of the revolutionary syndicalists. [...] And as the entire life of the people is something living, changing, a process that is constantly taking new forms, all of our strategy must also constantly adapt to new conditions”; and finally the tendency to consider continual political debate, especially on basic issues, as something that is not positive: “We must take action against people who make it difficult for us to plan the life of the party. The party is a community of united struggle and not a discussion club. We cannot continually have discussions on organisational forms and other things.

The Communist Party thus tried to rid itself of the revolutionary syndicalists who were also members of the Communist Party. In June 1919, in its appeal To revolutionary syndicalists of the Communist Party!, it certainly presented these as “filled with honest revolutionary aspirations.” But the KPD nevertheless defined their combativity as a tendential risk of putschism and posed the following ultimatum to them: either to organise themselves in a strictly centralised party, or “The Communist Party of Germany cannot tolerate in its ranks members who, in their propaganda by speech, writing and action, violate these principles. It will be forced to exclude them.” Given the onset of confusions and the dilution of the positions of the Founding Congress of the Communist Party, this sectarian ultimatum against the revolutionary syndicalists was rather an expression of helplessness faced with the reflux of the revolutionary wave in Germany. It deprived the Communist Party of living contact with the most combative parts of the proletariat. The exchange of blows between the KPD and the revolutionary syndicalists during the summer of 1919 shows equally that the atmosphere of defeat accompanied by growing tendencies towards activism formed a combination unfavourable to political clarification.

A brief journey together with the Unions

During the summer of 1919, the atmosphere in Germany was characterised in part by a major disappointment after consecutive defeats and, secondly, by a radicalisation of certain parts of the working class. There were mass defections in the social democratic unions, and a massive influx into the FVDG, which doubled the number of its members.

In addition to the revolutionary syndicalists, a second current began to develop against the traditional trade unions, also strengthened by a large influx. In the Ruhr region the Allgemeine Arbeiter Union-Essen (AAU-E: General Union of Workers - Essen) and the Allgemeine Bergarbeiter Union (General Union of Miners) appeared under the influence of fractions of the radical left in the Communist Party of Hamburg, and supported by the active propaganda of groups close to the American International Workers of the World (IWW) around Karl Dannenberg in Brunswick. Unlike the FVDG revolutionary syndicalists, the Unions wanted to abandon the principle of trade union organisation by branches of industry to regroup the working class by entire enterprises in “combat organisations.” From their point of view, it was now the enterprises that were exercising their strength and possessed power in society and it was here, therefore, that the working class drew its strength – where it organised itself in accordance with this reality. Thus, the Unions sought a greater unity and considered the trade unions as a historically obsolete form of organisation of the working class. We can say that the Unions were in some way a response of the working class to the question it was posed concerning new forms of organisation, the very question that the revolutionary syndicalist current in Germany had sought to avoid until now.20

We cannot in this article develop our analysis on the nature of the Unions, which are neither workers’ councils, trade unions or political parties. That would require the writing of a text specifically on the subject.

It is often difficult in this period to distinguish precisely the Unionist and the revolutionary syndicalist currents. Within both currents there was scant support for “political parties”, even if the Unions were eventually more sympathetic to the Communist Party. Both tendencies were direct expressions of the most militant fractions of the working class in Germany, were opposed to social democracy and advocated, at least until the end of 1919, in favour of workers’ councils.

In an initial period up until the winter of 1919-1920, the Unionist current in the Ruhr region became a part of the revolutionary syndicalist movement, which was the stronger, at the so-called “fusion” Conference of September 15th -16th 1919 in Düsseldorf. The Unionists had taken part in the founding of the Freie Arbeiter Union (FAU) of North Rhine-Westphalia. This Conference was the first step towards the creation of the FAUD, which was to take place three months later. The FAU-North Rhine-Westphalia expressed a compromise between revolutionary syndicalism and Unionism in its positions. The guidelines adopted said that “... the economic and political struggle must be conducted consistently and steadfastly by the workers....” and that “as an economic organisation, the Freie Arbeiter Union cannot tolerate any party politics in its meetings, but leaves it to the discretion of each member to support left-wing parties and to participate in any activity that it considers necessary.21 The Allgemeine Arbeiter Union-Essen and the Allgemeine Bergarbeiter Union would largely withdraw from the Alliance with the revolutionary syndicalists before the foundation of the FAUD in December.

The foundation of the FAUD and its Declaration of Principles

The rapid numerical growth of the FVDG during the summer and autumn of 1919, the spread of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Thuringia, Saxony, Silesia, in southern Germany, in the coastal regions of the North and Baltic Seas, required there to be a national structure to the movement. The 12th Congress of the FVDG of December 27th to 30th in Berlin, turned into the founding congress of the FAUD, with 109 delegates present.

The Congress is often described as the “turning point” from German revolutionary syndicalism to anarcho-syndicalism or as the beginning of the era of Rudolf Rocker – a label used above all by the staunch opponents of revolutionary syndicalism believing it a “negative move”. Most of the time, they claimed that the FAUD at its foundation stood for a defence of federalism, a farewell to politics, a rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a return to pacifism. However, this analysis does not do justice to the FAUD of December 1919. “Germany is the Eldorado of political slogans. Words are uttered and people are intoxicated by the rhythmic chanting, but they don’t really understand what’s being said”, says Rocker (who we quote from below) in his speech on the Statement of Principles regarding allegations against the revolutionary syndicalists.

There is no doubt that the views of Rocker, an anarchist who remained an internationalist during the war and the editor of the new Declaration of Principles, acquired a significant influence in the FAUD, which was enhanced by his physical presence within the organisation. But the foundation of the FAUD reflected first and foremost the popularity of revolutionary syndicalist ideas within the working class in Germany and showed a clear demarcation between the Communist Party and the budding Unionism. Since the end of the war the positions of the FVDG had been very influential inside the working class: the expression of solidarity with the Russian revolution, the explicit rejection of bourgeois democracy and any form of parliamentary activity, the challenging of all “arbitrarily drawn political and national borders”, were reaffirmed in the Declaration of Principles of December 1919. The FAUD clearly defended revolutionary positions.

In comparison with the programme of the FVDG in the spring of 1919, the Congress had considerably reduced its enthusiasm for the perspective of workers’ councils. The signs that the workers’ councils in Russia were losing influence demonstrated to the Congress the scale of the inherent risk that “political parties” posed, and were proof that the Union form of organisation was the more resistant and better able to defend the idea of the councils.22 The disarming of the workers’ councils in Russia at that time was indeed a reality that the Bolsheviks had tragically contributed towards. But what the FAUD was not able to understand was the affect of the international isolation of the Russian revolution and that it would inevitably suffocate the life out of the working class.

They fight against us, the revolutionary syndicalists, mainly because we openly advocate federalism. Federalists, we are told, divide up the workers’ struggles”, said Rocker. The aversion of the FAUD to centralism and its commitment to federalism were not based on a vision of the fragmentation of the struggle of the classes. The reality of life for the revolutionary syndicalist movement after the war provided sufficient proof of its commitment to the unity and coordination of the struggle. The excessive rejection of centralisation was rooted in the trauma of the capitulation by social democracy: “The central committees dictated from on high, the masses obeyed. Then came the war; the party and the unions were given a fait accompli: we must support the war to save the country. However, the defence of the country became a socialist duty, and the same masses who, the previous week protested against the war, were now for the war, but on the orders of their central committees. This shows the moral consequences of the system of centralisation. Centralisation is the eradication of the consciousness from the human brain, and nothing else. It is the death of a sense of independence. For many militants of the FAUD centralism was in principle just a method inherited from the bourgeoisie in “...organising society from top to bottom so that it serves the ruling class’s interests.” We agree absolutely with the FAUD of 1919 that it’s the political life and the initiative of the working class “from below” that is the well-spring of the proletarian revolution. The struggle of the working class must be based on solidarity, and in this sense, it always generates a spontaneous dynamic unifying the movement, which leads to centralisation through elected and revocable delegates. In “the Eldorado of political slogans”, the majority of the revolutionary syndicalists of the FAUD was led in December 1919 to adopt the slogan of federalism, a standpoint that was not really associated with the FAUD at its foundation.

Did the founding congress of the FAUD actually reject the idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”? “If by the term the dictatorship of the proletariat is meant a party taking control of the State machine, if this only means the establishment of a new state, then the revolutionary syndicalists are sworn enemies of such a dictatorship. If, on the other hand, it means that the proletariat compels the propertied classes to renounce their privileges, if it is not a dictatorship top to bottom, but that the revolutionary impact is from the bottom up, then the revolutionary syndicalists are the supporters and representatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat.23 Absolutely right! The crucial reflection on the dictatorship of the proletariat, which at that time was associated with the dramatic situation in Russia, was a legitimate question regarding the risk of internal degeneration of the Russian Revolution. It was not possible to make a balance sheet of the Russian revolution in December 1919. Rocker’s assertions were more a barometer of the already visible contradictions, and the beginning of a debate that would last for years in the workers’ movement on the reasons for the failure of the revolutionary wave after the war. These doubts didn’t emerge by chance in an organisation like FAUD, but reflected the highs and lows in the life of the “rank and file” working class.

Even the traditional cataloguing of the Founding Congress of the FAUD as a “move towards pacifism” which undoubtedly sabotaged the determination of the working class, does not correspond to the reality. Like the discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the debates on violence in the struggle between the classes were rather the sign of a real problem facing the working class internationally. How would it be possible to maintain the momentum of the stalled revolutionary wave and break the isolation of the working class in Russia? In Russia, as in Germany, it was inevitable that the working class would use arms to defend itself against the attacks of the ruling class. But the extension of the revolution by military means, even “revolutionary war”, was impossible, if not absurd. In Germany especially, the bourgeoisie constantly attempted to underhandedly provoke the proletariat militarily. “The essence of the revolution does not lie in the use of violence, but in the transformation of the economic and political institutions. Violence in itself is absolutely not revolutionary, but, on the contrary, is reactionary to the highest degree.... Revolutions are the result of a great spiritual transformation in the opinions of men. They cannot be achieved arbitrarily by force of arms... But I also recognise violence as a means of defence, when the conditions themselves leave us no other choice”, argued Rocker against Krohn, a supporter of the Communist Party. The tragic events of Kronstadt in 1921 confirmed that this critical standpoint towards the false hope that the resort to arms could save the revolution had nothing to do with pacifism. The FAUD in the aftermath of its Founding Congress, didn’t adopt a pacifist position. A large part of the Red Army of the Ruhr that responded to the Kapp Putsch in the spring of 1920 was composed of revolutionary syndicalists.

In this article, over and above our criticisms, we have also intentionally highlighted the strengths of the positions of revolutionary syndicalists in Germany during 1918-19. The next part of this article will deal with the period from the late 1920s up to the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the destruction of FAUD.

Mario 16/6/12


1. International Review n°147 “The revolutionary syndicalist FVDG during the First World War”

2. Der Syndikalist n1, “Was wollen die Syndikalisten? Der Syndikalismus lebt!” 14th December 1918.

3. Ibid.

4. See Ulrich Klan & Dieter Nelles, Es lebt noch eine Flamme, Ed. Trotzdem Verlag.

5. Richard Müller, 1918: Räte in Deutschland, p.3.

6. Richard Müller, Hie Gewerkschaft, hie Betriebsorganisation!, 1919.

7. The FAUD’s Declaration of Principles in a spoken presentation by R. Rocker.

8. Protokoll der Ersten Generalversammlung des Deutschen Eisenbahnerverbandes in Jena, Mai 25-31 1919, p.244.

9. Der Syndikalist n°36, “Betriebsräte und Syndikalismus”, 1919.

10. At a broader level, in addition to the illusion of the works councils as “negotiating partners” with Capital, there existed another, emanating from Essen in the Ruhr – but also present in the ranks of the revolutionary syndicalists – in the possibility of immediate “socialisation”, that is to say, the nationalisation of mines and businesses. This weakness, present throughout the working class in Germany, was above all an expression of impatience. On December 4th 1918 the Ebert government created a national socialisation commission comprising representatives of Capital and renowned social democrats such as Kautsky and Hilferding. The declared aim of the nationalisations was to maintain production.

11. See the debates of the 15th Congress of the FAUD in 1925.

12. Der Syndikalist n°2, “Verschandelung der Revolution”, 21st December 1918.

13. Der Syndikalist n°1, “Was wollen die Syndikalisten? Der Syndikalismus lebt!”, 14th December 1918.

14. Ulrich Klan & Dieter Nelles, Es lebt noch eine Flamme, Ed. Trotzdem Verlag, p.70.

15. Karl Roche in Der Syndikalist n°13, “Syndikalismus und Revolution”, 29th March 1919.

16. Rudolf Rocker, Aus den Memoiren eines deutschen Anarchisten, Ed. Suhrkamp, p.287

17. Roche wrote: “Party politics is the bourgeois method of monopolising the product of labour extorted from the workers. (…) Political parties and bourgeois parliaments are complementary, they both obstruct the proletarian class struggle and cause confusion”, as if to say the possibility of revolutionary parties of the working class did not exist. What about its collaborator in the struggle, the Spartacus League, which was a political party?

18. Was wollen die Syndikalisten? Programm, Ziele und Wege der ‘Freien Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften’, March 1919.

19. Syndikalismus und Kommunismus, F. Brandt, KPD-Spartakusbund, August 1919.

20. In reality, many sections of the FAU in Germany, as they exist today, for decades have played more the role of a political group than a union, by expressing themselves on numerous political questions and not limiting themselves in any way to the “economic struggle” – this, whether we agree with them or not, we find positive.

21. Der Syndicalist, n°42, 1919.

22. Despite his distrust of the existing political parties, Rocker clearly stated that: “...the struggle is not just economic, but must also be political. We are saying the same thing. We are only opposed to parliamentary activity , but not at all the political struggle in general. [...] Even the general strike is a political tool, just like the anti-militarist propaganda of the revolutionary syndicalists, etc.” The theorised rejection of the political struggle wasn’t predominant in the FAUD at this time, although its form of organisation was clearly designed for the economic struggle.

23. Rocker, Der Syndicalist, n°2, 1920.

 

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History of the workers' movement

2013 - 151-152

Prehistory: a contribution to the discussion

The two texts of Jens published on the ICC website have to be welcomed as an expression of and stimulant to a debate that has a long and noble history in the tradition of the workers' movement, the tradition of being "radical" and going to the root of our very existence, our very beginnings. This is not, or shouldn't be, an academic exercise but one that reinforces proletarian political and historical views against those of the bourgeoisie, and strengthens our perspective of communism. There are no "class lines" in this debate but the way we see "revolutions" in the past obviously weighs on whatever analysis we might have for the revolution of the future.

My contribution is a long text, not too boring I hope, and I want to look at several distinct areas, all of which I think tend to underline my opinion in this discussion in favour of the "long view" of prehistory, the antiquity of the beginnings of culture and solidarity before the existence of homo sapiens, indeed developing in embryonic form from the ape/homo transition. In order of sequence these areas are the book Blood Relations by Chris Knight; second, some scientific observations and discoveries; third, structuralism, shamanism and prehistoric art, and fourthly Lewis Henry Morgan and his contribution to the workers' movement. I apologise if I repeat myself from previous scribblings and the first issue I want to comment on is the analysis expressed in the book Blood Relations.

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Blood Relations

In his text Jens says that "There's a tendency to think of culture solely in material terms (stone tools, etc.)". Jens then goes on to say that culture is much more than this and I agree with his inclusion of other elements in that definition and possibly more besides. Engels called his pamphlet The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man, and in it he said "labour begins with the making of tools". Even with the very limited contemporary knowledge of timescales, Engels surmised that this transitional period took place over many thousands of years. "... the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of joint activity to each individual". Engels here, and Pannekoek who followed this line of thought through the development of tools and the brain in his 1953 work, Anthropogenesis, is not talking about sixtythousand years ago, nor the descent of anatomically modern humans (AMH), nor ancient Homo Sapiens - because there was a transition within the Sapiens species here - but the earliest homo, the earliest of our species, and both relate the development of tools and production to the development of society from very early on. As the Harvard anthropologist Terrence Deacon put it more recently: "The introduction of stone tools and the ecological adaptation they indicate also mark the presence of a socio-ecological predicament that demands a symbolic solution; stone tools and symbols must both, then, be the architects of the Australopithecus-Homo transition and not its consequences. The large brain, stone tools, reduction in dentition, better opposability of thumbs and fingers and more complex bipedality found in post-australopithecine hominids are the physical echoes of a threshold already crossed" (T. Deacon, 1997, 348). And Pannekoek in Anthropogenesis: the "skill of handling tools is not congenital (but) acquired from older to younger generations... (the) development of the use of tools is only possible in a community".

Chris Knight doesn't like talking about tools deep in prehistory. Or rather, he doesn't like talking about them in any positive sense. When I raised this question with him in a meeting he acted as though his analysis was being sullied by such basic and ignorant questions. In relation to the earliest tools, one of the questions posed by Knight in his book is that "every male simply 'had' to be the owner of a hand-axe or other weapon, as much for reasons of personal and sexual security as to facilitate hunting or foraging?". The general gist of his argument here is that in early man there is no great advance from apes or chimpanzees regarding the earliest tools - which is a fair point regarding the very first percussion-like instruments lost in the mists of time. He does see the Acheulean hand-axe - the oldest now dated to 1.65 million (possibly 1.8) years ago in West Turkana, northern Kenya - as an advance and he does point to the survival of hominids over the period of this technology as "no small achievement". But, as well as seeing these tools as the coveted property of individuals, he calls them "monotonous" and "unimaginative" and strongly suggests that they were individual weapons (amongst other things); "fighting axes" for "settling scores". My position is that they were much more than this. I draw no conclusions from the persistence and widespread existence of these particular tools in relation to language and "home bases" - that's for another discussion. But these tools were not only very effective methods of production, they changed and practically developed, and also developed into things of beauty. Some razor sharp, too big for practical use, cubist designed, delicate with a central "feature", so-called "hand-axes" suggest that these did develop into fully symbolic pieces that, in my opinion, could well have been used in rituals. This would of course contradict Knight's view that "rituals and myths (of human symbolic behaviour were) signals for thwarting exploitation by males". Rather than being tools or weapons carried and coveted by individual males, the fact is that heaps of them, hundreds at a time, have been found in different parts of Africa (Melka Kunture in Ethiopia, Olorgesailie in Kenya, Isimila in Tanzania and Kalambo Falls in Zambia) and Swanscombe in England, crowded close together with no obvious sign of use. There's certainly no danger here, if there are hundreds of these tools lying around in great heaps on the top of the ground, in the open air, that anyone is worrying that these "valuable tools will be appropriated by some competitor or rival" as Blood Relations suggests with its social Darwinist theme of rivalry and competition in early man, "settling scores" and the like, from the males of the species. Against Knight's idea of the "monotony" of these implements there is a development of these tools. Early and late Acheulean tools do differ in very important respects (R.J. Mason, 1962). Later tools (up to around 600,000 years ago) are thinner and the flaking more shallow and while early tools are struck with hard (stone) hammers, later ones are struck with "soft" hammers of wood, bone, or antler (Chris Scarre, 2005), showing a major advance in technology. Also these more refined expressions of the Acheulean, where the core is prepared (in different ways by different individuals) in order to produce a predetermined size and shaped flake (especially the case with "soft" hammers), foreshadow the technological developments of the Middle Stone Age and eventually the Levallois technique (Thomas Volman, 1984), which takes us up to 250-500,000 years ago. It may be "slow" but there's a definite development and continuity here from the first Acheulean "hand-axes", and not the discontinuity implied in the book. And just as the "Levallois" technique grew out of the Acheulean, so did the latter grow out of the early Oldowan period, where, even at this early stage, percussion tools weren't just tools in themselves but were used to produce flakes and included hammerstones, unifacial choppers, bifacial choppers, polyhedrons, heavy-duty and light-duty scrapers, awls, discoids and flakes (Scarre, 2005). Though relatively crude, they were made out of various materials, quartz, chert, lava, quartzite, etc., (Isaac G. and Isaac B., 1997) across Africa, and some had been retouched, i.e., re-adapted. These developed from earlier, more fundamental forms that have been dated to between 2.5 to 1.5 million years ago where there were possibly around 8 species of hominin in Africa at the same time.

Blood Relations approvingly uses the archaeologist Lewis Binfords' views about the animal-like behaviour of early man - scavenger, beastly and so on. Chris Scarre (2005), editor of the Cambridge Archaeological Review, calls Binfords' views "impoverished". And this idea of early man as a "bonehead" is contested by many archaeologists: H.T. Bunn and E.M. Kroll, 1986, M. Dominguez-Rodrigo, 2002, Dominguez-Rodrigo, 2003, who all suggest from looking at hunting in this period or early access to animal carcasses and the ability to fight off or hold off other predators, that is an organised society not relying on the "hit and run" grabbing of meat.. As new sites are located this will become clearer. Binford (1984) takes an equally negative and restrictive view of hunting in the later Middle Stone Age. In his book he concludes that meat produced from the Klasies River Mouth, in South Africa in the Middle Stone Age (about 130,000 years ago), came from scavenging rather than hunting: But "his analysis ignored however, many remains that were probably removed from the site by carnivores, and many scholars would now see the remains as reflecting hunted meat that, like the shellfish at the site, was shared. There are other indications from Klasies River that suggest that hunting was probably practiced" (Scarre, 2005). Other criticisms of Binford's work is that carnivore gnaw marks are rare on the remains at Klasies and patterns of human-induced damage is very suggestive of hunting. At any rate, Binford's views of early (and later) man seem to chime with those of Blood Relations in that early man was little better than a beast (or worse in some cases)1. Another point to insist on against the book (which Jens seems to support in his text) is the large difference in male and female size, i.e., sexual dimorphism. But the evidence I've seen is that from 1.9 to 1.4 million years ago to now, sexual dimorphism, the size of early male against early female in the time scale specified, the Acheulean, has hardly changed. As Jens says, this "is generally indicative of a greater equality between the sexes". Stanford. edu puts the respective male and female height of Erectus at 1.8 and 1.55 - not much different from today. According to Christopher Ruff, 2002, 211-232, making the comparison in body mass in fossil hominins, reveals that general levels of dimorphism have likely remained more or less the same for most of the evolution of Homo over the last 2 million years to the present. Homo Erectus, who emerged 1.8 to 1.7 million years ago, achieved essentially - with significant anatomical differences - modern form and proportions; and evidence suggests the species also achieved "a social organisation that featured economic co-operation between male and female and perhaps between semi-permanent male and female units" (Scarre, 2005). This would be fully in line with the position of Engels and marxism on the general development of production going along with the general development of society. L. Hager (1989) suggests the reduction in sexual dimorphism in Homo Erectus came from the growth of females as an adaption for childbirth. As Jens says, reduced sexual dimorphism generally indicates "a greater equality between the sexes". But I think that he's wrong when he says that it's a "good deal less" in Sapiens than Erectus. The evidence seems to at least point to an equalisation that began with erectus and is virtually unchanged today. More finds as always will reveal more evidence.

The book creates puzzles where there are none and reinforces my view that it is a source of confusion rather than clarification. For example, the "monotonous uniformity" that it puts forward in relation to the Acheulean hand-axe just doesn't exist (see above) and to say that this tool is "replicated unimaginatively all over the world - from southern Africa to northern England, from Spain to India" is not entirely true either. Knight says that it might be expected that localised conditions would have given rise to specialised tool kits for foraging whereas, in Knight's view, the Acheulean axe was also used as a digging tool (both he and Binford can't accept that there would have been hunting in this period because that would imply society). Firstly I think that tools made for the digging aspect of foraging would have generally been made of wood, bone or antler (possibly shaped by stone tools). Digging hard ground with a stone tool would only result in torn and cut hands, and antler picks, plus a stout, sharpened stick, must have been the tools of choice for digging (the male megalocerus, the giant prehistoric deer, also known as the Irish Elk, had antlers that could measure 3.5 metres from tip to tip). Discarded, shed antlers would have been plentiful and they are a very sensuous and effective tool - much better than cutting your hands to pieces trying to dig up tubers with a lump of stone! And secondly, the Acheulean hand-axe wasn't an "axe" at all and can't be reduced to a digging instrument or weapon, but was rather the prehistoric equivalent of the Swiss Army Penknife, with all-purpose, different-sized adaptable blades struck from the core. And surely the widespread use of this tool is evidence of it being fit for purpose within a community of interests over a large part of the world. The Acheulean "hand-axe" is a very effective tool-kit in itself. It's certainly a lot more than an individually-owned and closely-guarded weapon related to 'male behaviour' as Knight suggests. Even in its very beginnings the Acheulean hand-axe wasn't a single expression but variable, and has been classified into "axe", cleaver, and bifacial, i.e., several types of tools. The other point to make is that, contrary to the book, there were regional variations away from the Acheulean as long ago as 1.7 million years ago. This regional delineation goes along the "Movious Line” (H. L. Movious, 1948) which has stood up to the test of new finds since. There's a strong non-Acheulean tradition in eastern and south-eastern Asia (and some parts of Europe around modern day Germany and Romania, Greece and Turkey and parts of the now ex-Russian republics). There are no perishable artefacts, scarce by definition, but bamboo makes edges that rival or exceed those of stone for sharpness and durability. There is also evidence in east China for entirely different types of stone tools from the Acheulean tradition, "choppers", flakes and various others going back possibly 1.3 million years ago (Jianfeng Zhu et al, 2004), some two-hundred-thousand or more years after an out of Africa move. The "Zhoukoudian" (east Asia) tool kit is quite distinct from the Acheulean and includes a whole variety of tools made from sandstone, quartz and other materials. So this idea of the "boring uniformity" of Acheulean stone tools is a red herring that was contradicted well before Blood Relations was written. What we see, and what is confirmed clearly on the basis of a plethora of evidence, in variable respects throughout the global Lower Palaeolithic (the African Early Stone Age), is the development of tools and a diversity of tools that are excellent for butchery on small and large beasts and the extraction of the most nutritious parts. That's the least we can say for sure. The animal protein extraction accomplished through the use of adapted tools must provide for the evolutionary expansion of the brain. Chemical evidence supports the idea that a significant amount of animal protein in hominin diets, accomplished through the use of tools, may have provided a critical impulse to the rapid evolutionary expansion of brain size in the hominin lineage (Scarre, 2005). I think that there was hunting here (see below) but also scavenging (a tradition which continues today even in the countryside of the UK), but amounts of food were processed way in excess of the ratio of sizes to prey in relation to chimps and baboons for example. Homo erectus, 1.8/1.7 million years ago, before moving out of Africa to Asia over 1.5 million years ago, had a small braincase compared to today but it was large enough to motivate and subsequently increase it and this fed into the variation and development of new tools. From this period we move to the evidence from Boxgrove in the UK, around 400,000 years ago, showing apparently modern attributes in sophisticated hunting and butchery techniques for large mammals as well as the organisation of society that presupposes such attributes. These are confirmed with the skilful butchery at Schoningen in Germany where wooden spears have also been found and the site dated to 350,000 to 400,000 years ago (in fact recent evidence has put back the use of hafted, stone spears back to half-a-million years ago - see below). Similar spears dated to around the same time have been found elsewhere in Germany and Clacton in the UK. Apart from these two areas, wooden tools have been found in two others; Kalambo Falls (Zambia) and Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (Israel) all of them dated between 300,000 and 790,000 years ago.

I don't think that I'm courting controversy when I say that Jens is something of an admirer of Chris Knight's work. But Jens has to point out the obvious. If the first signs of symbolic culture according to Blood Relations are expressed 60,000 years ago, what about the previous 140,000 years ago of Homo Sapiens history? And, if we're going to be radical in looking at the development of humanity's history, if we are going to the root of things, what about the previous nearly two-million years of clear hominin development?

But just sticking with sapiens for the moment, who themselves went through a transition from archaic to modern forms, archaeologists Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks are firmly against the various ideas around the 50/60,000 year-old "cultural revolutions". Even if these models are transferred back to Africa, there's a certain danger of them being "Eurocentric", i.e., that this "revolution" enabled the exit from Africa leaving the latter a backwater. I'm not saying that anyone is suggesting this idea here, but it's a danger. Much more important than this is their analysis that in such models of this or that "revolution", and there are a variety of them, there's an underestimation of the depth and breadth of the advances of the African Middle Stone Age, about a 100,000 to 200,000 years before these supposed "revolutions" occurred McBrearty and Brooks see "modern" advanced technologies already present during the period in Africa 200,000 years ago: advances in lithics, increased geographical range, specialised hunting and developing hunting strategies, fishing and shell-fishing, long-distance trade and the symbolic use of pigments (Chris Stringer, 2011, 124/5). And I think that from the bits of evidence above, these technological and cultural advances were themselves linked to previous species of homo, though obviously developed from them. I'm not proposing a simple linear, "upward" development of humanity; clearly species have come to a dead-end, died out, gone backwards or moved forward at a snail's pace only. Just in homo sapien's own development there have bright sparks of sudden, dramatic technological advances that have disappeared just as quickly: Omo Kibish and Herto in Ethiopia for example 160,000 years ago; Pinnacle Point in South Africa around the same time . But that lines of human - and that for me includes homo - progress are discernible from early on is evidential. In relation to ideas around the "60,000 year-old revolution" McBrearty has said that this "quest for the 'eureka' moment... obscures rather than illuminates events in the past".

I don't find the idea of a cultural revolution from a 60,000 year old sex-strike at all credible and the only scientific validation that Jens can give to it is the earlier expression at Blombus, around 80,000 years ago, of the use of red ochre. This evidence seems to me to contradict Knight's idea especially given the much earlier antiquity of the use of pigments and this even earlier use of them also contradicts Blood Relations. At Terra Amata in the south of France, pigments were being prepared and rounded for what could likely be body decoration for a whole range of colours, including purple (purple!) 300,000 years ago. Similar finds of the use of prepared ochre among Neanderthals around a similar time scale have been found in Becov in the Czech Republic and Ambrona in Spain. Ochre can be used for many things such as an adhesive, a tanning agent, insect repellent and it even has a medical use. But the preparations of it above suggest a symbolic value a good while prior to the appearance of Sapiens. This is the case in Terra Amata particularly where it was found in a shelter that had been cut, shaped and fitted, along with a hearth. Apart from no scientific evidence for it, the tale of Blood Relation is as good or as bad a story as any other that's made up. But for me it's a source of confusion. There's obviously a lot of interesting things in the book and Jens brings many of these out. But, along with its social Darwinist leanings, I also think that the conclusion that a "cultural revolution", a real leap forward for humanity, can come about on the basis of lies, deceit, division and the woman staying at home plotting and scheming against the absent males is a repugnant one. As Joan M. Gero says, quoted by Jens: "... exploitative women are assumed always to have wanted to trap men by one means or another, and indeed their conspiring to do so serves as the very basis for our species' development" and that for men "... only good sex, coyly metered out by calculating women, can keep them at home and interested in their offspring". Jens says in his first text that Knight's work "is precisely this effort to bring together genetic, archaeological and anthropological data in a 'theory of everything' for human evolution...". My opinion of his work is different from that.


1 I'm sure that Binford wrote a lot of good stuff, but his "impoverished" and negative views of early hominins extends to Neanderthals who he said were just scavengers. Chris Stringer's own work in Gibraltar (2011), shows that this species was perfectly aware of the nutritional value of shellfish, marine mammals, rabbits, nuts and seeds. The old and tired "that wasn't known at the time" defence can't be applied here. Binford takes clear, dogmatic positions many times on the basis of what appears to be very restricted research. Binford’s (and Kent Flannery's) idea of a human "broad spectrum revolution" was similarly based upon the restricted idea that a "revolution" began around 20,000 years ago in the Middle East due to climate change and increasing population density. and he backs this up with research into an increase in diet. But C.J. Stiner and Steven L. Kuhn studies, covering a much wider space and time, have compared site data and concluded that all the main elements of a varied diet existed back to earlier sapiens and Neanderthals. See below on Neanderthal diet.

 

A few new old developments

I want to look at a number of recent archaeological and anthropological developments over the last dozen, 15 years or so in relation to the pre-Sapiens period and its cultural tendencies. And bear in mind, from an archaeological point of view, that the finest quality steel produced today, exposed to the atmosphere, will be dust in around twenty thousand years time.

- in Acheulean sites, as well as the functionally evolving, decidedly unmonotonous, artistically impressive "hand-axes", there have been the first finds of human introduced mineral pigment associated with Acheulean artefacts and animal bones at Kapthurin (Kenya) (Tryon and McBreaty, 2002) and at Duinefontein (South Africa) (Kathryn Cruze-Uribe et al. 2003). These are respectively dated by argon-argon dating and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) as before 285,000 and 270,000 years ago. In the German lakeside site at Bilzingsleben, where there's no Acheulean tradition, a number of artefacts have been found. The site has been dated by electron spin resonance and uranium dating as sometime between 350,000 and 420,000 years ago. An elephant's tibia has been found at this site with deliberate carvings on it. Where these markings are and the form that they take do not suggest butchery and there's a "fan-like" design here. The lines are evenly spaced and replicate each other in length and it looks like they were made at a single sitting by a single tool (Scarre, 2005). There's no suggestion from the researchers, but to me this "design" of carved lines looks very similar to the carvings on the famous Blombos piece of 80,000 years ago. Just a speculative observation. But in its turn the carvings on the Blombus piece are, I think, repeated in abbreviated form in some of the ubiquitous "signs" of Upper Palaeolithic cave art (more on this below in relation to "Structualism"). At the Acheulean site of Berekhat Ram (Golan Heights) is what looks like a female figurine which has been incised with a sharp tool to produce grooves and lines. There's a deep incision which encircles the narrower, more rounded end, making out the head and neck. And two curved incisions that could delineate arms and these are readily distinguishable from natural lines (Francesco d'Errico and April Nowell, 2000). With the site dated to around 250,000 years ago, this, if it's been deliberately modified, would be the oldest known expression of representational art.

- Following on from the above regarding Neanderthals: research work led by Dolores Piperno at the archaeobiology laboratory at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington has shown traces of cooked food on the fossilised teeth of the samples of this extinct species that they studied. There were the remains of date palms, seeds and legumes, including peas and beans in teeth from three different sites from Iraq and Belgium. These are all foods associated with modern human diet and Neanderthals must have cooked these grains in order to increase their digestibility and nutritional value. The evidence is strong as the starch grains have been gelatinised and that only comes from being cooked in water. Similar tests revealed similar results with traces of cooked starch, some traced to water lilies that store carbohydrates and others from sorghum, a kind of grass. The full research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal. These samples were from about forty thousand years ago but separate research two years ago in South Africa by scientists at the University of Toronto and Hebrew University (2.4.12) have dated evidence of controlled fire for the use of cooking to one million years ago. There's a "live" discussion over the dating but the University of Boston has supported these views as well as other academic research.

Sticking with Homo Neanderthalis, Dr. Penny Spikins, an archaeologist at the University of York has published a book along with others (Spikins, Rutherford and Needham, 2010) that shows this species caring for the old, infirm and vulnerable. There's the example of the Shanidar Cave (Iraq) where a man with a withered arm, deformities on both legs and a crushed skull, probably blind in one eye, which all happened at an early age, living for 20 to 35 years old with his injuries. He must have been looked after by a group of people (and remains of medicinal plants are close by). Similarly, at Simos de los Huesos (Spain) a child of the species of Homo Heidelbergensis (an ancestor of both Sapiens. and Neanderthalis.n.) was found who suffered from lamboid single suture craniosynostosis, where parts of the skull fuse together, This child would have had a strange appearance, would have been weak and a probable reduced mental capacity. This child was looked after for at least five years of its life and possibly eight. It's very difficult to find evidence like this, but these cases show the pre-Sapiens existence of the desire to care for the sick and the weak.

- Research undertaken, in part by Jayne Wilkins of the University of Toronto with her "The Function of 500,000 Stone Points", pushes back the use of stone-tipped spears two-hundred-thousand years to half-a-million years ago (Science, 16/11/12). These spears were used by Homo Heidelbergenesis. The stone points were hafted to the wooden shafts and this is a composite technology that is a multi-step process requiring different raw materials and the skill of course to put them together. The stones were found at the Kathu Pan 1 site in the Northern Cape of South Africa towards the tail-end of the Acheulean. This suggests advanced hunting strategies and a cohesive society that has been in place for a long time. A "blogger", Robert H. Garrett, has criticised these finds and their dating in a bit of a rant. But there's no doubt that stone-tipped spears existed 300,000 years ago and I'm inclined to believe the evidence of Wilkins and the separate dating teams. Garrett the blogger also thinks that modern humans "exploded out of Africa 40 to 50 thousand years ago". There is clear evidence of wooden spears being used in hunting by Homo Heidelbergensis at Boxgrove in England and sites in Germany around 400,000 years ago and these peoples were certainly experts in stone.

- Work done by a team of archaeologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig recently discovered bones butchered by stone tools from riverbed sediments in Dikika in the Afar region of Ethiopia. This butchery was undertaken by the ancestors of early humans and puts the date of the use of stone tools right back into the Australopithicus-human transition of 3.4 million years ago, one million earlier than previously known. The marks on the bones show the tools were used to slice and scrape meat from the carcasses and where the bones were crushed to extract the nutritional marrow inside. This find is contemporary in time and place with the pre-human ancestor known as "Lucy". Until this, the oldest evidence of stone tools was a haul of more than 2,600 stone flakes estimated to be 2.5 million years old discovered in another part of Ethiopia. These latter were shaped, probably by the first human species Homo Habilis, into sharp cutting edges whereas the Dikika stones were probably used as they were found, and then discarded. Detailed analyses of the Dikada cut marks show substantial differences with tooth or claw marks made by predators with one of them embedded with a small piece of stone (Nature, 12.8.10).

 

- Perhaps the most remarkable and potentially most profound analysis has been that of anthropologist Professor Henry Bunn of Wisconsin University based upon fieldwork in Tanzania. Addressing the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE), late last year, Bunn argued that our puny ancestors, Homo Habilis, two million years ago, were capable of ambushing herds of large animals after selecting individuals for the slaughter. We know that humans were omnivores and ate meat around 1.8 million years ago. Examining the animals that had been taken to the butchery site in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and "by studying the teeth in the skulls that were left, we could get a very precise indication of what type of meat these early humans were consuming. Were they bringing back creatures that were in their prime or were old or young? Then we compared our results with the kind of animals killed by lions and leopards". Bunn's analysis showed that humans preferred only adult animals in their prime, for example. Lions and leopards killed old, young and adults indiscriminately: "For the animals we looked at, we found a completely different pattern of meat preference between ancient humans and other carnivores, indicating that we were not just scavenging from lions and leopards and taking their leftovers. We were picking what we wanted and were killing it ourselves" (Bunn in The Guardian, 23.12.12). These energy-rich resources were used, along with other foodstuffs, to fuel our growing brains. Against ideas of "scavengers" and numbskull males, this research has major ramifications for the existence of society, specialised tools and the role of the male and female of the species at earlier and earlier dates.

All these finds and research are obviously open to questions, debates and criticisms but the general indication, the general tendency of the lines of research, is of much more complex and advanced archaic behaviours.

Max Raphael, structuralism, shamanism and Upper Palaeolithic art

Hopping about through millennia in this rather schematic text, I want to take a brief look at the question of "structuralism" raised by Jens in his text and particularly in relation to the Upper Palaeolithic art of Europe. Jens makes a brief mention of structuralism and a couple of mentions of Claude Levi-Strauss, his work on myths in the Americas and how the name "structuralism" is given to his work. I can't comment on anything written by Christophe Darmangeat because I haven't read any of his stuff. But I do want to comment on structuralism, its basis, the much-ignored Max Raphael and prehistoric art.

I've read some stuff by Levi-Strauss and didn't find it easy to understand what he was saying. That could be due to my limitations but the anthropologist, David Lewis-Williams writes of him (2002) as being similar to Verlaine's dictum "pas de couleur, rien que la nuance" ("no colour, nothing but nuance"), and describes his America's opus on myths as "intimidating". Edmund Leach, the social anthropologist, wrote that Levi-Strauss was "difficult to understand... combin(ing) baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition" and suggested that his work was something of a confidence trick. Levi-Strauss is called a marxist in a way that a lot of people are called "marxist", that is, they are not marxist at all. After the war he was appointed the French cultural attaché to the US and returned to France in 1948. I don't think that there's any doubt that he made a contribution to the history of structuralism and while we owe a debt to his great works, it does seem that one can conclude whatever one wants from them.

Structuralism looks to be based on the works of the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) who put forward the radical idea that the world is shaped by and in the shape of the mind and therefore there must be a universal language of the mind. During the period of rapid European expansion, Vico challenged the idea that the peoples met were "primitive" or had different minds from Europeans and insisted that their myths and stories of the past were "poetic" and metaphorical. He was roundly ignored of course and the idea of "primitive" minds, "primitive" art, etc., continues to this day (I briefly used the term myself during my "primitive period" - but I'm alright now). The notion of structure (with a small "s") was further developed by the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) who, amazingly, didn't write a book but whose ideas are known from the notes amassed and kept by his students! Saussure dealt with language and its construction and, in line with the ideas of Vico, we can see how these eventually affected "explanations" around prehistoric art. Structualism thus examines phenomena, language, art, etc., at a given time. Levi-Strauss's structuralism is played out mainly on myths and is based on binary oppositions and mediation that make up a unifying thread, a hidden logic that runs through all human thought: up/down; male/female; culture/nature; life/death, etc., and the relations between them. For Levi-Strauss "the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (impossible if the contradiction is real)" and because myth ultimately fails "Thus the myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse that produced it is exhausted" (Levi-Strauss, 1963). I think that this is quite profound and the Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, Eugene d'Aquili, put a twist on his work and argued that myths are structured in major binary oppositions, one polarity being humankind, the other some supernatural force (David Lewis-Williams, 2002). But Vico, and in line with him, Levi-Strauss, defended the attempts of the global consciousness of the human mind against ideas of "primitivism" and the "savage mind". And Max Raphael also did so and took it further still.

Max Raphael is a long-forgotten and largely ignored structuralist who predates Levi-Strauss. Raphael was also called a "marxist". I don't know what his marxism was but he was a World War One deserter and before World War Two he was incarcerated by the French security forces and on release had to keep one step ahead of the Nazis, finally fleeing to America where he died soon after. Prior to his imprisonment in France he met with Rodin, Matisse and Picasso in Paris. Just like in the west, Raphael's work was ignored in the "socialist countries". I think that Raphael was greatly affected by the conflict of World War Two and this was a weight that bore on his analysis of prehistoric art a bit too much, in that he saw all the elements of capitalism and class struggle in Upper Palaeolithic society. However, I think that his analyses were going in the right direction and I agree with his description of the Upper Palaeolithic peoples, which he called "history-making people par excellence" (David Lewis-Williams, 2002). For Raphael, their art tells us nothing about the methods of production, tools, hunting techniques, etc., but it does tell of a social struggle through a structured code. He wrote one book, Prehistoric Cave Paintings, (1945), in which he insisted on the unity and structure of the various compositions from the caves that he had visited and studied in the Dordogne region of France. This was a revolutionary analysis against previous "specialists" who insisted that this art could only be addressed each in isolation from the other and which progressed from a crude to a higher form. It was, the experts said, the first primitive attempts to paint, it was "art for art's sake", "totemism", "hunting magic" - all of which it was not (in the main). Raphael made binary oppositions between whole "compositions" that underlay the construction of this art: bison/horses for example and saw order when others only remarked on the disorder of the art. These could be male/female contradictions, conflicts or oppositions, life against death, universal human meanings. Others took his work up and did some good stuff; Annette Laming-Emperaire (who didn't mention him) and Andre Leroi-Gourhan (who, despite good work, eventually applied his analyses schematically, applying it to one painting at a time for example, which failed miserably). But Laming-Emperaire particularly followed him in important areas, with the following taken from Lewis-Williams above:

  • "questions the value of ethnographic parallels;
  • argues that the difficulty of access to many subterranean images pointed to 'sacred' intentions;
  • rejects any form of totemism;
  • proposes that the mentality of Palaeolithic man was far more complex than is generally supposed; and
  • argues that the images should be studied as planned compositions not as scatters of individual pictures painted 'one at a time according to the needs of the hunt'.

She took up his shift into symbolic meanings and argued his position that juxtapositions and superimpositions were part of deliberately planned compositions. The recurrence of themes, the predomination of certain species (they're not generally the diet, and "hunting magic" is not the issue here), the position in the caves all have to be taken into account. Raphael rejected ethnographic analogies and puts forward the idea that these paintings and engravings of beasts were not seen as animals but images with a pre-existing shared value and suggested that the images of parietal (cave wall) and portable art (carved objects) were representative of an already existing experience and vocabulary. One that McBreaty and Brooks above say was put together in Africa some time before; this was a "gradual assemblage of the modern human adaption". Expressed in this cave art there is a repertoire of certain animals and figures, an inherent meaning to these structures before the images were made; felines are an important part, as are animal "spirit-helpers" who accomplished different and difficult tasks and also "composite", altered beasts. This is not a sudden "creative explosion" but a flowering of part of a process of clarification. Portable objects and fragments of the animals, teeth, ivory, bone as well as quartz for example, possessed these supernatural powers; and these fragments, which later were pushed into cracks in and around the pictures and engravings on the cave wall, brought these spirits back to life. The entry into the "other world" of the cave and being "pulled" along by the panels of compositions is nowhere better illustrated than Lascaux where one is gradually sucked into an intense vortex of swirling beasts and designs. This is more than religious belief and ritual but a universal envelopment into the tiered cosmos and a consciousness that is fundamental to developing human society. I think that it's important to see these paintings as expressions of pre-existing ideas and this is strengthened by the fact that, in general, portable art, small carvings of animals and anthropomorphic figures, appear at least contemporary with or some time before the cave wall art - one would think that it would be the other way around. These small carved animal figures embodied the ideas of "spirituality" that existed within the peoples and was exemplified within the shamanisms. But I'm moving away from Raphael.

For him, there's no one single imposed structure to this art but an area of struggle is strongly suggested. One can only be stunned by the obvious beauty of these carvings, engravings and paintings. But these are not the expressions of idyllic contentment and the caves are the living theatres par excellence for the unfolding dramas that they depict. There are chains being rattled here, there is some sort of an unsatisfactory situation being expressed that has to be clarified to some extent by society. The comforting chains of primitive communism were a hindrance that, as Marx said, had to be broken. This cave art is quite possibly the visual expression that had developed over time of the breaking of these chains. I think that primitive communism was a struggle and not an ideal.

Raphael also studied the much underestimated geometric motifs, the "signs" or designs that, while being culturally specific in different areas of the world, contain many similarities. These geometric signs have also been interpreted mechanically in the "primitive mind" framework, which shows, as Vico also suggests, how ethnology can do as much harm as good. In the 1920's, psychologist and neurologist Heinrich Kluver, studied these precepts on subjects under laboratory conditions (Kluver, 1942). Incidentally, in studying the minds of subjects under conditions of altered states of consciousness, Kluver preceded the work of the US military and probably contributed to it. His work determined that these subjects described "motifs" or "signs", similar to those expressed in the Upper Palaeolithic caves and his findings were validated in later works: Horowitz, 1964; Richards, 1971 and Siegal, 1977 (see chapter 9 of Shamanism and the Ancient Mind , by James L. Pearson, 2002). These concepts, or "precepts", studied by Kluver et al, are common in dreams, hypnosis, from the effects of various drugs, some mental conditions, sensory deprivation, "near-death" experiences, and so on. In an effort to tie these signs to "hunting magic" the lined and pointed "signs" have been called "spears" and the occasional red ochre painted expulsions coming from the beast's heads or snouts are supposed to show a wounded or killed animal. But the majority of these animals look very alert, in the best of health in fact, strikingly vibrant or emotive, and the blood-like expulsions from around their snouts is completely reminiscent of the bleeding noses that occur in the shamanistic "trance-dance" first noted in the 1830's by French missionaries on their visit to South Africa (Daumas and Arbosset, 1846, 246/7). Similar nasal haemorrhages have also been noted in shamans dancing themselves into altered states of consciousness (with no drugs involved) among the San groups in Africa. The shaman use their blood as a spirit of potency but everyone, men, women and children, are involved in the dance around the fire and into altered states. American anthropologist Megan Biesele, who spent a lifetime with the Ju'hoansi San and speaks their language fluently, says in Lewis Williams above: "Though dreams may happen at any time, the central religious experience of the Ju'hoan life are consciously, and as a matter of course, approached through the avenue of trance. This trance dance involves everyone in society, those who enter trance and experience the power of the other world directly, and those to whom the benefits of the other world - healing and insight - are brought by the trancers". There are expressions in Upper Palaeolithic cave art of creatures being obviously speared - I've seen them myself in the caves of Cougnac and Peche-Merle in southern France. But these are strange, human-like creatures, once again suggesting expressions of shamanism and altered states of consciousness. Piercing is an element of shaman initiation as well as its expression of being "speared" to die and be re-born. This element was also taken up by Christianity.

Humans hunted. Humans also painted - so it's quite possible that "hunting magic" was something of a factor here or there, particularly with the ties that humanity has forged with animals. Even very recently the Mundari hunters of the White Nile region of Africa drew their intended prey on the ground before going on the hunt. On their return they poured the blood and hair of the kill on the image of the animal (J. L. Pearson, 2002). But this is not the diet being shown on the cave art of the Upper Palaeolithic where "The types of animal depicted respond to a logic quite different from a culinary one" (Clottes and Lewis-Williams, 1998, 78/79). Nor does it appear to be the case in North American rock art where the diet only appears in a minority of the depictions. In the shaman "trance-dance" the animal spirit is conjured up through an altered state of consciousness, where the dancers become the animal. On the cave walls of France and Spain the animals appear as living spirits of the tiered cosmos. The danger of seeing only "hunting magic" is that it could tie in with the idea that these peoples were merely adaptive, mechanical and primitive creatures1.

Back to the signs, which are much more than primitive expressions of everyday hunter-gatherer life, and which are sometimes superimposed on various beasts: they appear to connect compositions one to the other or form "panels" on their own account, as with dots, spirals and hand-prints. Raphael assigned male/female associations to them: males, lines, phallus, killing, death and feminine, sex, woman, life-giving, which he called "a tragic dualism". These signs are not just confined to the cave walls but to portable art as well where lines, dots, chevrons, etc., are carved on these figures and, again they are mechanically interpreted as being "primitive" expressions of fur or hair. This element of signs also applies to the parietal and portable therio-anthropic creatures. Raphael demonstrated, or tried to demonstrate, the relationship of one to the other of these expressions. My opinion is that these "signs" are the first development of a written language that was generally understood and it would be interesting if it was gender-based. We don't know what was being said here and maybe will never know but the whole complexity of Upper Palaeolithic art in the caves around France and Spain shows an important expression of a social movement and points to some of the contradictions that existed therein.

We talk of "validation", of "scientific validation" and it seems to me that this means different things to different people. But in the field of structuralism and related anthropology and, one must add here the question of belief systems and shamanism (which is not quite the same thing), validation doesn't come much better than the discoveries of Chauvet Cave2, made forty years after Raphael's book, with its compositions, signs, panels, etc., which though found decades after Lascaux (which Raphael studied in depth), pre-dated it by over sixteen thousand years. Chauvet confirmed and validated in spades much of his analysis. Max Raphael deserves more of our attention and Jens must be thanked for raising the issue of structuralism. Along with Lewis Binford's "impoverished" views, there's a certain amount of snobbish mockery from some quarters of palaeontology regarding the length of the Acheulean period and its slow development- over a million years. But the conflict expressed by Upper Palaeolithic cave art itself lasted around 25 millennia, from around 35 to around ten thousand years ago and into the complexities of the Neolithic. In fact this cave art, with, in part, its universal but independently expressed symbolism, persisted long after that as a global phenomenon, particularly with the rock art of the peoples of north America, Australia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Society survived, consolidated and advanced over this period and then moved forward at an accelerated pace. From a million years, hundreds of thousands of years, tens of millennia to an even faster development.

Looking back, for a section on structuralism I haven't structured this very well. There are many differences within shamanist and structuralist expressions, but I also think that there's a profound overlap.


1 This mechanical, adaptive "idea" is supported by Lewis Binford (see above). Binford's once again restrictive approach essentially rules out a human agency of intervention and innovation but sees rather human victims of passive forces beyond their control. He has no time for the early expression of religious activity, beliefs, ritual, aesthetics, etc. As much as Raphael's were validated by them, Binford's views were soundly contradicted by the discoveries of Chauvet and Cosquer in the 1990's, but also, effectively, by the cave art in Altamira in (Spain) 1897, Le Mas D'Azil, La Madelaine, and others in the Dordogne in the 1880's. These all show, in objects and depictions, in discoveries made 50 years before Binford was born, so much more than simple, mindless adaption.

2Recent discoveries at the Abri Castanet site, close to Chauvet in the Ardeche, show zoomorphic figures, but a preponderance of painted and engraved geometric signs. especially female sexual organs. This art is thought to be older than Chauvet, with the US Proceedings of the National Academy for Sciences suggesting they are 37,000 years old. Older paintings, it is suggested, have been found in the Nerja cave of Spain, with further suggestions that these may be painted by Neanderthals. I'm not at all sure about that and much more research is needed into this but the economic crisis means that there's no more cash available for this particular project - among many others.

 

Lewis Henry Morgan, the punaluan family, the gentes and the defence of materialism

My approach here is a bit cack-handed (again) given the first question is a couple of stages removed, but bear with me because there are important questions here of a defence of materialism as well as the mechanics of the transition from barbarian society to class society and the state. But first a slight diversion: Jens agrees with Christophe Darmangeat when he says that no text in the workers' movement has the "status of untouchable religious texts". I also agree with that but that doesn't at all preclude the defence of positions in the workers' movement. Jens goes on: "it is absolutely obvious that we cannot take 19th century texts as the last word and ignore the immense accumulation of ethnographic knowledge since then". Well, I would back Morgan's 19th century work as a whole, and in specifics in this case, against any ethnographic knowledge since then. Ethnographic observations can be very important but like the examination of sub-atomic particles, they affect the position of what's being looked at. By its very enquiry one alters the other - as it must do. Ethnographic evidence of the 19th century will tell you what the peoples observed were saying, thinking and doing in the 19th century, and ethnographic evidence of the 21st century will tell you what the peoples observed were doing, thinking and saying in the 21st century - and, in both cases, it will also tell you what the observers were thinking, doing and saying in the relative timescales. Later ethnographic "evidence" applied further back is not necessarily more accurate - in fact it's just as likely that it will be less so. Ethnographic evidence can bring important clarifications, but it has to be approached with extreme caution. Morgan turned ethnographic quantity into the greatest quality. And as Engels said, he made conclusions from his studies using terms that Marx himself might have used.

I've seen this specific criticism of Morgan's work that Jens relays from Darmangeat, a year or so ago, from an SWP member of the Radical Anthropology Group. I rather lazily moved on to something else when he describes Morgan in terms of a "capitalist speculator" (from memory, something like that). This is the specific "contradiction" of Morgan described by Darmangeat and, not having read him myself, I'll let Jens describe it: "according to Morgan the ‘punaluan’ system is supposed to represent one of the most primitive and social stages, and yet it is to be found in Hawaii, in as society which contains wealth, social inequality, an aristocratic social stratum, and which is on the point of evolving into a full-blown state and class society". My first reaction to this "contradiction" was so what? Where do you expect a ruling class to come from if not from the society that it grew up in? Of course the development towards the state came from existing society. There's nowhere else for it to come from. Let's look at the question in more detail from the point of view of the materialist Morgan.

The punaluan family (punalua, "intimate companion") is indeed extremely ancient and, with Morgan, I wouldn't like to attempt to put a date on it. It was world-wide, existing in Europe, Australia, Hawaii, Polynesia, South America and, possibly, Mongolia and China. Morgan could only hint at its beginnings: "It may be impossible to recover the event that led to its deliverance"... "it remained an experiment through an immense amount of time" until it became universal and the origins of which "belong to a remote antiquity... a very ancient condition of society" (Ancient Society OR Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilisation, Lewis Henry Morgan). It's not an invariable, monolithic system but has adaptations, variations and so on. Morgan details, over pages, the relationships of the punaluan, where peoples would address each other by their family relations rather than by name. Its greatest achievement, in laying the ground for the development of the gentes, was to be instrumental in helping to eliminate incestuous family relations, particularly between own brother and sister but also parents and their children and even first or second cousins: "the evils of which could not forever escape human observation" (LHM). As Marx put it in his Ethnographic Notes: "The larger the group recognising the marriage relations, the less the evil of close interbreeding ...". And Morgan again, "the gradual exclusion of own brothers and sisters... spreading slowly and then universal in the advancing tribes still in savagery... illustrates the principle of natural selection." There's no state here in the essence of this system, no ruling class to enforce it, its laws are organic. The change towards and into the punaluan is conflictual but radical, part of an "upward movement" as Morgan says. In punaluan relations there's a sisterhood of wives, marriage between groups of brothers and groups of sisters, which are not always taken up, while eliminating sexual relations between own brothers and sisters. Partners were held in common in the plural marriage and mother-right was strengthened. But most importantly, the punaluan laid the basis for what, in my opinion, is one of the most remarkable achievements, if not the most remarkable achievement of mankind up until then: the barbarian gentes. Morgan again: "Advancing to the civilised nations, there seems to have been an equal necessity for the ancient existence of the punaluan group among the remote ancestors of all such as possessed the gentile organisation - Greeks, Romans, German, Celts, Hebrew..." And "Such a remarkable institution of the gens would not be expected to spring into existence complete or to grow out of nothing". Just as the punaluan grew out of an even earlier form of relations, so the gentes grew out of the punaluan. And both of these forms of social organisation show an organic, collective memory and the further development of kinship ties.

The materialism of Morgan above, whatever ethnological observations have been made since, has to be defended here. And Morgan is absolutely specific on the question of the Hawaiian punaluan where he talks about the Hawaiian system containing the same elements for the germ of the gentes confined to the female branch of the custom, but: "The Hawaiians, although this group existed among them, did not rise to the conception of a gens" (my emphasis, Chapter III). So let's be clear here: the criticism of Morgan, made by Darmangeat, an SWP member of the Radical Anthropology Group and tacitly approved by Jens, is that, with Morgan's analysis, elements of the ruling class in Hawaii came from the punaluan system and this is a contradiction. But, as we see elsewhere, the superior form of the gentes, which was in turn a higher form of barbarian organisation than the punaluan, was transformed - not everywhere - into ruling elites, castes and classes. The Hawaiian punaluan did not transform into gentes, so where did the ruling class in Hawaii come from? There are only two possible explanations: either it came from the punaluan system, or it came from outer space.

In some cases elements of the punaluan persisted in the gentes that, themselves, weren't all incorporated into class society. As you would expect from an ancient and world-wide phenomenon, punaluan customs remained long into parts of civilisation in Europe, South America, Australia and Asia. Caesar notes their expression amongst some tribes of Britons, and Herodotus mentions them in the Massagetae, an Iranian nomadic confederation. Morgan is rightly wary of both witnesses here.

I don't believe that we should treat the "Old Masters" of the workers' movement with religious awe or, on the other hand, see them as "primitive" stumbling attempts to look at the development of humanity. But we should incorporate them, be very careful about the "what they didn't know at the time" type arguments and defend their materialism. I can't see any contradiction in ancient systems persisting into class society. Marx noted it in the system of the gentes persisting through the mighty Persian Empire. In civilisations all over the world ancient pre-civilised customs and forms of organisation persisted, attesting to their original scope and strength. The development into civilisation, class society and the state didn't happen through complete breaks and compartmentalised incremental steps signposted all the way. It's much more complex than that - as we can see with the gentes.

The punaluan groups contained the germs of and laid the basis for the development of the gentes, the two basic rules of which in the archaic form were:

  1. Prohibition of intermarriage between brothers and sisters;
  2. Descent in the female line (and descent from the same common ancestor).

The gentes "improved mental and moral qualities" (Morgan above) of humanity. Under the firmer establishment of mother-right, I would guess sometime in the period of the epipalaeolithic (sedentism), this organisation laid the basis for cultivation (agriculture proper), the development of the means of production (tools, ceramics, metallurgy, architecture, etc.), and contributed to the development of written language (barbarian art, in all its various forms from Europe to China, unsurpassed in beauty in my opinion, carried some of the "motifs" and "signs" of the Upper Palaeolithic parietal and portable art). It also laid the basis for private property, patriarchy, class society and the state and for Morgan's marxist conclusion that for society to survive, it must recreate the egalitarianism, the common households, the communistic tendencies and the democracy of the old gentes at a higher level: "It (a higher plane of society) will be the revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes".

In relation to the transformation of the gentes into class society, Marx summed up in three simple words the profound change in the Athenian gentes: "gentilis became civis". And Shakespeare, in Titus Andronicus, his disturbing tale around the decomposition of imperial Rome, specifically pointed to the corruption of the mores of the old Roman gentes. Just like the "comforting chains" of primitive communism, the chains of the egalitarian gentes, had to be broken and from this came class society, written laws, government, human slavery, the "war of the rich against the poor", capitalism and the modern proletariat.

There was no one "civilisation" but many civilisations that, again, were universal but independent in time and space and culturally specific. And here there's no linear development either. Some forms of the barbarian gentes persisted a long way into civilisation, ironically even helping to save the Roman metropolis from the collapse of Roman imperialism. Different, changing forms of the gentes, with the absence of a state, were expressed throughout Europe and the Americas. I agree with Jens that one can't automatically tie in Morgan's social developments with those of production and I think that it's missing the point to try to do so. Morgan's 3 stages of Savagery, 3 stages of Barbarism and one of civilisation are all over the place, wildly inaccurate, out by over a three-quarters-of-million years in some places. That's not what is important about Morgan's book and Engels summary and additions to it in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. Both of which, whatever punctual errors they contain (and there's no error over the Hawaiian punaluan and the class of appropriators that arose from it), should be defended as materialist explanations of our past, of where we are today and the road to take.

Morgan's seven stages, however far out in time, do, as Jens says, provide a fundamental framework for the major stages of the development of society, even if they don't all tie into and agree with all other aspects of society. I don't think that discrepancies in time matter one bit. We, with our more up to date knowledge, can fill in the details that weren't known, while defending his overall analysis and materialism (the same applies to Engels). But with the relatively recent gentes and onwards, Morgan does tie in the developments in the means of production and the family systems. Obviously from here the development of the patriarchal family and civilisation, the growth of property isclosely connected to inventions, discoveries and to developments in social institutions, etc. There are a lot of silly criticisms aimed at Engels/Morgan's work particularly from the politically-correct police: they are wrong on brain sizes (archaeologists today, with all the technical equipment available to them, fight among themselves about brain sizes all the time); there's a contradiction here or there in this or that detail; they suggest "progress"; the question of the origins of human society is "unprovable"; they are anti-women, they don't appreciate 'battered women" and so on. I don't believe in the idea of determinism of fate, but it's patently clear that humanity has progressed, be it by fits and starts and setbacks and not in the "circumstances that would have been chosen". Our ancestors railed against the chains of primitive communism however comforting they were. And they broke the relatively secure chains of the gentes, , though the circumstances were far from determined or ideal. There's a whole wealth of detail, complexity and analysis that needs to be uncovered and made just about the transition from hunter-gatherers to a sedentary existence, let alone agriculture and the rise of the ruling appropriating class and the state. There's a lot that need to be clarified and deepened. But for me, Morgan and Engels will do for a good start and I embrace and defend the materialism of these "Old Masters". As far as their perspectives go we have gone from independent but universal developments of the family, civilisations and the state to a confrontation between the two major classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat. While there's been a complexity in this transition from the barbarian gentes into class society, there's also been a clarification in the eventual confrontation of the two major classes. Can we revive at another level all that was positive about the antecedents of the working class - the barbarian gentes. Is it possible to revive the sexual and political egalitarianism and the warrior spirit that so marked this society; there's a lot of doubt around, a certain lack of confidence. I think that historically, when we look at the fight put up by the working class, the sacrifices and solidarity that it has expressed, to keep fighting after getting knocked down again and again, there's no question of its capacity to take on this decaying system. Even looking at some struggles going on in the last few years and going on today, we see a will and capacity to fight, sometimes in the most unfavourable circumstances, repression and worse. More and more, against the sexual division imposed by capitalism, we see that the solidarity of the sexes, that was evidenced in the gentes, needs to be revived at a higher level with the spirit of unity rather than duplicity being a way forward.

Finally, first of all...

In The Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State, Engels, talking about the "childhood of man", nearly hits the nail on the head, but misses it completely; he says (Chapter 1, stage 1): "Man still lived in his original habitat, in tropical or subtropical forests and was partially at least a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among huge beast of prey cannot be explained.". But there came a point, a definite point, where our ancestors could not climb back up into the trees, or if they could they could only do so clumsily, totally exposed to the faster, bigger, more ferocious big cats who were perfectly capable of leaping and clawing their way up a tree. These puny hominins would have been lucky to lose a leg; infants would have had no chance. The point came when we couldn't go back up the trees, so, in the face of the "huge beasts of prey" there must be another explanation for our survival. What could possibly have saved this puny, defenceless species stuck on the ground for any amount of millennia before the use of controlled fire and in the face of ferocious predators and the extremes of the elements? In my opinion the answer can only be a stronger society, a society of unprecedented solidarity and cooperation between the male and female of the species, particularly in the protection, care and raising of infants. The ape/ homo transition was a move to a completely new social organisation way above and beyond anything remotely achieved in the animal kingdom.

Engels fully appreciated this and if he overlooks it in The Origin..., he outlines it in The Part Played By Labour In The Transition From Ape To Man. Again, we don't have to dump the Old Masters here at a whim. In fact as far as the anatomical details are concerned we can fill in some elements of Engel's ape/homo transition to a fully bipedal species: apart from the great advantage of the better opposability of the fingers and thumbs , the foot with 22 bones in it had to rearrange itself. The pelvis, spine, shoulder, arms, ribcage, neck and chest also had to be modified. Even here at this early stage - especially here at this early stage - there is more than simple adaptations to environment and circumstances. These too are "history-making" humans. There's no other way to describe their survival and persistence against all the odds. Chris Knight's stone head-bangers - Homo Numbskullensis - would have rapidly bit the dust leaving behind only a few bone fragments and nothing else. The peoples of Jen's description, the females showing their own solidarity over here, and the males likewise over there, would have rapidly followed them into oblivion. There were probably many unsuitable and unsuited lines that died out. Only those that practiced cooperation, that had the basis for morality and the solidarity of the species could have possibly overcome the enormous obstacles to survival. This was, in my opinion, the hallmark of a successful transition carrying with it the conscious and unconscious instincts of the animal kingdom. As far as I can see genetics has done nothing to contradict this but seems to reinforce the idea of a fundamental cooperation.

The real missed opportunity of Engels and Marx, was not to see the revolutionary developments of the works of Alfred Russel Wallace (The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection') and Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex). Both of which explain the fundamental morality and solidarity of society and, through these means, the overturning, the reverse effect of natural selection at an early stage. But again, this is another area where we are in a position to join the dots. If Patrick Tort ( see the ICC’s review of The Darwin Effect1,) doesn't take into account the inestimable contribution of Wallace, who writes specifically of how humanity "escapes" from the influence of natural selection, then the ICC has done a great service in tying Tort's analysis of Darwin's work into the marxist framework in order to strengthen it. And within this framework, from the animal kingdom, came the development of maternal instincts and the defence of infants which could only have been effected through the solidarity of the male and female of the species. This was a "history-making" society in which controlled fire, and thus protection and the basis for further advances, would have been an outcome. Sexual selection, with the female choosing the male on the basis of the care and protection of infants - however long the association lasted, as Darwin said - would have further reinforced society. Against the view of Chris Knight and others I think that the elements of the beginnings of culture, society and morality are here from the outset.

A word on controlled fire because this innovation itself is quite obviously beyond simple adaptation and is rather the work of "history-makers". I think that this is the case for three reasons:

  1. Protection and security.
  2. Cooking.
  3. Social.

The most accepted oldest use of controlled fire by Homo Erectus is at Bnot Ya'akove Bridge in Israel 800,000 years ago, and Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, one million years ago, where stone artefacts also show evidence of having been heated up. There is inconclusive evidence of the use of controlled fire at several East Africa sites even earlier. The protection afforded by fire against both predators and the elements can't be overestimated. This gave the hominins that used it an almost guaranteed security for the longer term. As Darwin said in Descent of Man..., "The art of making fire... is probably the greatest discovery, excepting language, ever made by man". It doesn't get much more history-making than that. And as Darwin went on to note, the discovery of the "art of making fire, by which hard and stringy roots can be rendered digestible and poisonous roots or herbs innocuous" further reinforces the major advance made at this early stage. As well as limiting the effects of harmful pathogens and toxins - many of the parasites, bacteria and viruses in tubers and raw meat would have been destroyed by fire - the time and energy to chew and digest was also reduced, as well as providing a wider diet and fuel for the growing brain. The third aspect from controlled fire is the reinforcement and development of society. Fire brings the community together by cooking for each other and visitors perhaps and possibly promoting or accelerating the use of language and communication through the easily imaginable social gatherings around the fire. The social aspect of the communal fire could fit in with the "Grandmother hypothesis" of Prof. Kristen Hawkes, though her models have been questioned by F. Kachel of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Anthropology. Also, looking at the low life expectancy of early Homo Erectus, one can wonder just how long grandmothers would have been actively involved rathr than needing looking after themselves by other members of society. However, it does seem intuitively reasonable that the grandmother could be a positive force and it doesn't take much of a leap of the imagination to take this further with wider members of the group extending care towards the infants (and towards the grandmothers) and thus building up greater empathy in both the short and longer (genetic) term. Of course, nothing in this precludes other females and males of different ages in the sharing of child care. For me this is very likely.

A point reached, a name, a being, a signpost from whence we came and where we were to go in the development of our species is Nariokotome Boy; one of the Homo Erectus species, he was found by Lake Turkana by Kamoya Kimeu, a member of the Leakey team, in Kenya in 1984. The nearly complete skeleton is about 1.6 to 1.8 million years old andhad the 8 to 13 year old male of the genus Homo:grown to his full height, he would have reached over six foot tall. There are differences with the skeletons of modern humans but the Smithsonian Institute sees him growing at a similar rate to modern humans with an adolescent growth spurt. His brain size indicates that it would have needed calories and protein to sustain it and, as an infant, he would have needed extended care. Close relatives of Nariokotome Boy rapidly spread finding their way from Africa to Dmanisi in Georgia some 1.8 million years ago2. Within the Acheulean stone tool-making tradition it would have taken this young lad some time to take in and develop the appropriate lithic technology, including knapping skills. The production of bifaces in particular implies analogical reasoning with long-term and working memory, i.e., these tools were conceptualised, a "mental template" was needed (Sophie A de Beaume, 2009). Even the preceding Oldowan tools required a number of steps for their production that's more complex than picking up a stone. There's a whole cognitive development within and from the Acheulean. This deliberate practice could only have been based on a level of conscious awareness and a society that is non-existent in the animal kingdom.

Nearly two million years on from Nariokotome Boy (and what preceded him), over a million years of really slow development, a step at a time (but a few steps a decade would take Erectus and his technology out of Africa and well into Asia and Europe); then hundreds of thousands of years of developments at many levels; Homo Sapiens, probably descended from the Homo species Heidelbergensis, left Africa between a hundred thousand and sixty thousand years ago and made a near global expansion; then tens of millennia through the Upper Palaeolithic and its visible depictions; then sedentism with mankind's remarkable achievement of the barbarian gentes into the Neolithic and the accelerated and complex movement into civilisation and class society. Many of the specifics of the Old Masters, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Wallace, Morgan, are wildly out of time and some just plain wrong. But I think we can say, in general, that all the major archaeological discoveries and all the positive anthropological research since, as well as those of genetics, have reinforced their positions and definitely their perspectives, as well as demonstrating the great antiquity of the beginnings of "culture" from the transition of ape to man.

Baboon. 1.3.13


2 Whatever the details of the Homo Erectus "out of Africa" move, the move itself shows an incredible journey that took place earlier and quicker than previously thought. Without controlled fire (or possibly with it) this expansion, even considering the enormous distances that could be covered by just a few miles a year in the Acheulean timescale, shows the emancipatory nature of these hominins as well as their adaptability and the efficacy of their tool-kit. This was also, literally, a social movement involving the males, females and infants of the species. If it was made without controlled fire, or the sporadic use of fire, it makes the journey even more incredible.

 

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Evolution and primitive communism - a reply

Baboon’s text is very wide-ranging and I cannot hope to do it justice in a brief reply. Moreover, he covers areas of which I myself am largely ignorant, and makes a number of points with which I agree, so I don’t want to run the risk of provoking a false debate.

That said, there are a number of aspects to his text which are open to criticism, and these are what I want to try to deal with here.

Baboon’s text falls roughly into three parts. In the first, he concentrates on homo erectus, and erectus’ place in the "emergence of the human": his argument is strongly critical of Chris Knight's notion of a "human revolution" some time over the last 1,000,000 years or so, adopting instead a much more gradualist approach. The second part deals with the relationship between prehistoric art, shamanism, and religious belief. It is a good deal more speculative, but this does not make it any less stimulating: speculation is itself a vital part of the scientific endeavour. The third part is the least successful in my view, and constitutes a defence not just of the method of Engels and Henry Lewis Morgan (with which I would agree), but also of their conclusions.

Baboon calls me "something of an admirer of Knight's work". He is quite right and there are two reasons for this: first, I have a great respect for the vast erudition evident in his book Blood Relations; second, and more importantly, he is trying to grapple with what to my mind is the key question of human evolution: what are the evolutionary processes driving the passage of homo from nature to culture, and how do these processes mark us today? One of the most interesting aspects of the book, in my view, is the use of myth in archaic society to try to delve into humanity's deep past. The immense importance of female menstruation and taboos related to blood and fire, and the way that Knight tries to tie this to a selfish-gene analysis of the behavioural adaptations leading to the emergence of modern man is really key to what Knight is trying to get at, and it's a shame that Baboon doesn't really deal with the questions of myth at all (in the original articles, Darmangeat's dismissal out of hand of the importance of myth as a historical source was one of the main objects of my critical assessment of his book).

In this sense, Knight's work is indeed an attempt to build a "theory of everything" and he himself is very explicit about this (you can hear the point mentioned in the podcasted interview with Knight on this website). In these days of academic over-specialisation and the general fragmentation of knowledge, this is no mean achievement.

That said, I can sympathise with Baboon's irritation at Knight's reaction to criticism. I think that he does in fact have some difficulty in integrating not just criticism but even plain questions which do not fit readily into his theoretical schema. To do Knight justice, this is probably a common, and very human failing amongst those who have spent their lives developing and defending a coherent theoretical framework (it's a critique which has been levelled more than once at the ICC, not always unjustly). The difficulty of thinking "outside the box" is by no means limited to Knight.

Baboon takes Knight to task for being a "Social Darwinist", but I think that this is both wrong and misses the point. Knight is certainly a Darwinist, and adheres to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, sometimes known as "selfish gene theory", which is today's general scientific consensus on the process of evolution, but this by no means makes him a social Darwinist. This is a vital distinction. Darwinism describes the process of evolution, driven by natural selection and the competition between genes, and therefore between individuals, to reproduce; social Darwinism is an attempt (largely and rightly discredited today), to transpose Darwinian principles into human society and thereby to justify the exploitation inherent in capitalism as a form of "the survival of the fittest". Hence Joan Gero's critique of Knight for seeing women as "manipulative" - which Baboon cites approvingly from my original article - is simply meaningless since, to be brief, it attributes intentionality to the evolutionary process, which has none. To say that, in every species, males and females compete for reproductive success, has no moral implications: it is merely a statement of fact, and in different species it leads to different behavioural types ranging from extreme female domination (the female praying mantis eats her partner) to extreme male domination (lions for example) with every possible nuance in between. Taking our closest cousins on the evolutionary tree as a starting point, Knight asks how evolution led us from the ultra-competitive male-dominated society of the apes, to human society based on cooperation and solidarity: it is precisely within this process that human consciousness emerges and that human intentionality replaces the blind movement of evolution. Moreover, the cultural phenomenon of what Knight calls the "sex strike" is by no means a matter of "manipulation" by women, since it is something in which all society participates. The fact that Gero transposes the prejudices of a 20th century feminist onto archaic humanity, and better still onto prehuman apes, merely demonstrates her own superficiality.

I think there is also a danger in Baboon's statement at the beginning of his text that the investigation of man's origins "shouldn't be an academic exercise but one that reinforces proletarian political and historical views against those of the bourgeoisie and strengthens our perspective of communism". This implies that what can only be the result of a scientific investigation should be determined by our political goals as communists. To accept such an idea runs counter to Engels' insistence on the "ruthless disinterestedness" of science, and undermines scientific endeavour as such.

Nonetheless, Baboon's objections to Knight's timescale are perfectly valid, and I confess to having my doubts as to the appropriateness of the term "revolution" for an evolutionary process which must have lasted several hundreds of thousands of years. The question of when, how and why human symbolic reasoning and consciousness emerged is enormously complex, still more because unequivocal evidence is so hard to come by. Baboon makes some convincing points about the emergence of culture in homo erectus, but is there any reason why Knight's model should not have its timescale extended by a million years or so?

The existence of apparently altruistic behaviour in animals has always been one of the great problems that selfish gene theory has had to confront. In general, it can be explained by genetic proximity: the more closely related animals are, the more likely they are to display altruism towards each other. Otherwise, the law of nature is competition, for both resources and the chance to reproduce. The question posed by the appearance of humanity is how this process of competition reversed itself so to speak, so that out of selfish-gene competition there emerged a species for which solidarity and cooperation are not just necessary for survival, but an inbuilt psychological need. Baboon in my view does not really try to answer this key question, and towards the end of his text he seems to want to solve the problem by making human evolution a conscious choice. Otherwise, how are we to construe this statement: "as far as the anatomical details are concerned we can fill in some elements of Engel's ape/homo transition to a fully bipedal species: apart from the great advantage of the better opposability of the fingers and thumbs , the foot with 22 bones in it had to rearrange itself. The pelvis, spine, shoulder, arms, ribcage, neck and chest also had to be modified. Even here at this early stage - especially here at this early stage - there is more than simple adaptations to environment and circumstances. These too are "history-making" humans. There's no other way to describe their survival and persistence against all the odds." Quite apart from the fact that adaptation driven by natural selection is anything but simple (we need only look at the bewildering diversity of its results in nature!), is Baboon really trying to suggest here that human beings "make history" by directing their own evolution from the apes?

To conclude, much as I value Baboon's text - from which I have learnt a good deal - I continue to think that Knight's approach is fundamentally valid: his model may or may not be correct, but he is asking the right questions in the right way, and that is the crucial thing.

Jens, 30/06/2013


 

International Review no.151 - 2013

Editorial: Scientific advances and the decomposition of capitalism

Scientific advances and the decomposition of capitalism

The system's contradictions threaten the future of humanity

What does the present hold for the future of humanity? And is it still possible to talk of progress? What future is being prepared for our children and future generations? To answer these questions that everyone is asking today in such an anguished way, we must contrast two legacies of capitalism on which future society depends: on the one hand, the development of the productive forces which are in themselves promises for the future, notably the scientific discoveries and technological advances that the system is still capable of making; and on the other, the decomposition of the system, which threatens to destroy any progress and compromises the future of humanity itself, and which results inevitably from the contradictions of capitalism. The first decade of the 21st century shows that the phenomena resulting from the decomposition of the system, the putrefaction of a sick society[1] are growing in magnitude, opening the doors to the most irrational actions, to disasters of all kinds, generating a kind of “doomsday” atmosphere that is cynically exploited by states to create a reign of terror and thus maintain their grip on the increasingly discontented exploited.

There is a complete contrast, a permanent contradiction, between these two realities of today’s world which fully justifies the alternative posed a century ago by the revolutionary movement, notably by Rosa Luxemburg repeating the formula of Engels: either transition to socialism or a plunge into barbarism.

As for the positive potentialities that capitalism carries, this is classically, from the point of view of the labour movement, the development of productive forces, which constitutes the foundation for the building of a future human community. These forces principally consist of three elements, which are closely related and combined in the efficient transformation of nature by human labour: discoveries and scientific progress; the production of tools and increasingly sophisticated technological knowledge; and the workforce provided by the proletarians. All the knowledge accumulated in these productive forces will be usable in the construction of a new society; similarly, the workforce would be increased tenfold if the whole world population was integrated into production on the basis of human activity and creativity, instead of being increasingly rejected by capitalism. Under capitalism, the transformation, the mastery as the understanding of nature is not a goal in the service of humanity, the majority of which is excluded from the benefits of the development of these productive forces, but a blind dynamic in the service of profit. In this way, in capitalism, the majority of humanity is excluded from the benefits of the development of the productive forces.[2]

The scientific discoveries within capitalism have been numerous – not least just in the year 2012. The same real technological prowess has been paralleled in all areas, demonstrating the extent of human genius and knowledge.

Scientific advances: a hope for the future of humanity

We will illustrate our discussion with a just a few examples[3] and voluntarily leave aside many recent technological discoveries or achievements. In fact, our objective is not to be exhaustive but to illustrate how man has a growing set of opportunities concerning theoretical knowledge and technological advances, which would allow him to control nature of which he is a part, as much as his own body. The three examples of scientific discoveries that we will give touch on what is most fundamental in knowledge and which have been at the heart of the concerns of humanity since its origins:

  • what is the matter that composes the universe and what is its origin;
  • where does our species, the human species come from;
  • how to cure disease.

A better understanding of elementary particles and the origins of the universe

Basic research, while not generally contributing to discoveries with an immediate application, is nevertheless an essential component of man’s knowledge of nature and, therefore, of his ability to penetrate its laws and properties. It is from this perspective that we must appreciate the recent demonstration of the existence of a new particle, very similar in many respects to what is called the Higgs Boson, after a relentless hunt via the experiments made at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, which mobilised 10,000 people to work on the LHC particle accelerator. The new particle has this unique property of giving elementary particles their mass, through their interaction with them. In fact, without it, all elements in the universe would weigh nothing. It also allows a more refined approach to understanding the birth and development of the universe. The existence of this new particle had been theoretically predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs (along with two Belgian physicists, Englert and Brout). Since then, the Higgs theory has been the subject of debates and developments in the scientific community that have led to the identification of the actual existence, not just theoretical, of the particle in question.

A potential ancestor of vertebrates that lived 500 million years ago

Illustrating the Darwinian and materialistic theory of evolution, two British and Canadian researchers have found evidence that, a hundred years after its discovery, one of the oldest animals that populated the planet, Pikaia gracilens was an ancestor of vertebrates. They examined fossils of the animal produced by different imaging techniques that allowed them to accurately describe its external and internal anatomy. With the help of a particular type of scanning microscope, they have carried out an elementary mapping of the chemical composition of fossils in carbon, sulphur, iron and phosphate. Referring to the chemical composition of present animals, they have then deduced the whereabouts of the various organs in Pikaia. Where is Pikaia on the tree of evolution? Taking into account other comparative factors with other related species found in other regions of the world, they conclude: “somewhere at the base of the chordate tree”, chordates being animals that possess a structure that prefigures the spine. Thus, this discovery allows the reconstruction one of the “missing links” in the chain of living species that have inhabited our planet for billions of years and which are our ancestors.

Towards a total cure for AIDS

Since the early 1980s, AIDS has become the leading epidemic scourge of the planet. Nearly 30 million people have already died, and despite the enormous resources deployed to fight it and the use of therapies, it still kills 1.8 million people a year,[4] far more than other particularly deadly infectious diseases such as malaria or measles. One of the most sinister aspects of this disease lies in the fact that a person who is the victim, even if they are not now condemned to a certain death as was the case at the beginning of the epidemic, remains infected throughout their life, which submits them, in addition to ostracism by part of the population, to extremely restrictive medications. And indeed, a major step in healing people infected with the AIDS virus (HIV) was taken this year by a team from the University of North Carolina. The drug which it tested on eight HIV positives has nothing to do with current antiretroviral treatments. By blocking HIV replication, these reduce the concentration of HIV in the body, to make it almost undetectable. But they do not eradicate it or heal the sick. Indeed, early in the infection, copies of the virus are hidden in some long-living white blood cells, thus escaping the action of the antiretrovirals. Hence, the idea of destroying once and for all these “reservoirs” of HIV through the action of a drug which would make the white blood cells in question recognisable by the immune system, which can then destroy them. The tested drug promisingly permits the detection of these “reservoirs”. It remains to ensure their destruction by the immune system, and even stimulate it for this purpose.

It should be immediately noted that current scientific discoveries and technological developments would occur in another type of society, especially in a communist society, where they would have already been surpassed. The capitalist mode of production based on profit, profitability, competition but also marked by chaos, irrationality, deterioration and alienation, and often the destruction of social relations, constitutes a serious obstacle to the development of the productive forces. Nevertheless, it remains a positive aspect of today's society that is still capable of producing such things, even if it significantly impedes their realisation. By contrast, decomposition as it stands today is specific to capitalism. The longer this continues, the more this decomposition will be an increasingly onerous burden on the future, the more it will obliterate it.

The morbid projection of capitalism threatens to engulf humanity

The reality of the everyday world is that the crisis of capitalism, which has reappeared and has been getting worse for decades, is the cause of the increasing difficulty of living; and it is because neither the bourgeoisie nor the working class have been able to open up a vision for society that social structures, social and political institutions, the ideological framework that allowed the bourgeoisie to maintain the cohesion of society, can only disintegrate further. Decomposition, in all its dimensions and current symptoms, shows all the morbid potential of this system that threatens to engulf humanity. Time does not favour the proletariat. In its fight against the bourgeoisie the proletariat is engaged in a “race against time”. The future of the human species depends on the outcome of the struggle between the two decisive classes in today’s society; on the proletariat's capacity to strike the decisive blows against its enemy before it is too late.

Behind the senseless killings lies the irrationality of capitalism that condemns us to live in a world that no longer makes sense

One of the most striking and dramatic signs of this decomposition recently has been the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown (Connecticut), in the United States on December 14, 2012. As in previous tragedies, the horror of this massacre of 27 children and adults by a single person has something that chills the blood. However, this is the thirteenth event of its kind in this country just in the year 2012.

The massacre of innocent lives at school is a horrible reminder of the need for a complete revolutionary transformation of society. The spread and depth of the decomposition of capitalism can only lead to further acts as barbaric, senseless and violent. There is absolutely nothing in the capitalist system that can provide a rational explanation for such an act and still less reassure us about the future of such a society.

In the aftermath of the massacre at the Connecticut school, and as was also the case for other violent acts, all parts of the ruling class have raised questions: how is it possible that in Newtown, known as the “safest town in America,” a deranged individual found a way to unleash such horror and terror? Whatever the answers suggested, the first concern of the media is to protect the ruling class and to conceal its own murderous lifestyle. Bourgeois justice reduces the massacre to a strictly individual problem, suggesting indeed that the act of Adam Lanza, the killer, is explained by his choices, his personal desire to do evil, an inclination which is inherent in human nature. Denying all the progress made for many decades by scientific studies on human behaviour which allow us to better understand the complex interaction between the individual and society, Justice claims there is no explanation for the shooter’s action and advances as a solution the renewal of religious faith and collective prayer!

This is also how it justifies its proposal to imprison all those who display deviant behaviour, reducing their crimes to immoral acts. The nature of the violence cannot be understood if one dissociates the social and historical context in which it expresses itself precisely because it is based on relations of exploitation and oppression by the ruling class on the whole of society. Mental illnesses have long existed, but it appears that their expression has peaked in a society in a state of siege, dominated by “every man for himself,” by the disappearance of social solidarity and empathy. People think they need to protect themselves against ... what exactly? Everyone is considered a potential enemy and this is an image, a belief reinforced by the nationalism, militarism and imperialism of capitalist society.

Yet the ruling class presents itself as the guarantor of “rationality” and carefully avoids the question of its own responsibility in the propagation of antisocial behaviour. This is even more flagrant in the judgments by an American army court martial of soldiers who committed atrocious acts, as in the case of Robert Bales who slaughtered 16 Afghan civilians, including 9 children. Not a word, of course, about his consumption of alcohol, steroids and sleeping pills to calm his physical and emotional pain, or the fact that he had been sent to the one of the deadliest battlefields of Afghanistan for the fourth time!

And the United States is not the only country with such abominations: in China, for example, on the day of the massacre at Newtown, a man with a knife wounded 22 children in a school. Over the last 30 years, many similar acts have been committed. Among other countries, Germany for example, another country at the heart of capitalism, has also experienced such tragedies, like the massacre in Erfurt in 2007 and especially the shooting, which took place on March 11 2009 at the Albertville-Realschule college in Winnenden, Baden-Württemberg, which caused sixteen deaths including the perpetrator. This event shows many similarities with the drama of Newtown.

The international scope of the phenomenon shows that attributing the killings to the right to the possession of weapons is primarily media propaganda. In fact, there are more individuals who feel so overwhelmed, isolated, misunderstood, rejected, that the killings perpetrated by isolated individuals or attempted suicides among young people are growing more and more numerous; and the same fact of the development of this trend shows that faced with the difficulty they have to live, they see no perspective of change that would allow them to hope for a positive evolution in their conditions of life. Many paths can lead to such extremes: in children, the insufficient presence of parents because they are overworked and morally weakened or corroded by anxiety brought about by unemployment and insufficient income or, in adults, a feeling of hatred and accumulated frustrations faced with the feeling of the “failure” of their existence.

This causes such suffering and such disorders in some people that they hold the whole of society responsible and in particular the school, one of the key institutions through which the integration of youth in society is supposed to be accomplished, which previously normally opened up the possibility of finding a job but which now often only leads to unemployment. This institution, which has in fact become the place where many frustrations are created and as many open wounds, has also become a prime target, as a symbol of the blocked future, of personality and dreams destroyed. Blind murder in the school environment – followed by the suicide of the killers – appears as the only means to show their suffering and to affirm their existence.

Behind the campaign on posting police at school doors, the idea instilled is that of distrusting everyone, which aims to prevent or destroy any sense of solidarity within the working class. All this is the origin of Adam Lanza’s mother’s obsession with firearms and her habit of taking her children, including her son, to the shooting range. Nancy Lanza is a “survivalist”. The ideology of “survivalism” is based on “every man for himself” in a pre-and post-apocalyptic world. It promotes individual survival, making arms a means of protection in order to get hold of the few remaining resources. In anticipation of the collapse of the US economy, which for the survivalists is on the brink of happening, they store weapons, ammunition, food, and teach ways to survive in the wild. Is it so strange that Adam Lanza was invaded by a feeling of “no future”? On the other hand, this means that we can only have confidence in the state and in the repression it metes out as the guardian of the capitalist system, which is the cause of the violence and horrors that we live through. It is natural to feel horror and great emotion faced with the massacre of innocent victims. It is natural to seek explanations for completely irrational behaviour. This reflects a deep need to be reassured, to have control of one’s own destiny and to lead humanity out of an endless spiral of extreme violence. But the ruling class takes advantage of the population’s emotions and uses its need for confidence to get it to accept an ideology that only the state is capable of solving the problems of society.

In the United States, this is not only on the fundamentalist margins of the Republican camp, but in a whole series of religious ideologies, creationists and others who all exert their weight on the functioning of the bourgeoisie and on the consciences of the rest of the population.

It should be clear that it is the maintenance of a society divided into classes and the exploitation of capitalism, which are solely responsible for the development of irrational behaviour, which they are incapable of eliminating or even controlling.

Wherever you look, capitalism is automatically directed towards the pursuit of profit. The left may think that contemporary capitalism remains on a rational basis, but the present experience of contemporary society reveals a worsening decomposition, one part of this society expressed in a growing irrationality where material interests are no longer the only guide to its behaviour. The experiences of Columbine, Virginia Tech and all the other massacres perpetrated by isolated individuals show that it does not need a political motive to start randomly killing any of our fellow human beings.

The generalisation of violence: delinquency, organised crime, drug trafficking and the gangster morals of the bourgeoisie

A wave of delinquency and crime shook certain cities in Brazil during the months of October and November 2012. Greater São Paulo was particularly affected, with 260 people killed during this period, but other cities, where crime is generally much lower, were also the scene of violence.

The extent of the violence is hard to doubt, as well as its impact on the population: “The police kill as well as the criminals. It is a war that we saw every day on TV”, said the director of the NGO Conectas Direitos Humanos. This new calamity only adds to the general poverty of a large part of the population.

Among the explanations for this situation, some point to the prison system, which creates criminals instead of helping their rehabilitation. But the prison system is itself a product of society and in its image. In fact, no reform of the system, the prison system or any other, can stop the phenomenon of organised crime and police repression, and therefore of terror in all its forms. And the major problem is that it will only get worse with the global crisis of this system. This is readily observable in Brazil itself. Thirty years ago, São Paulo, which today appears as the capital of crime, was a quiet town.

In the case of Mexico, we see mafia groups and the government itself enrol elements belonging to the most impoverished sectors of the population for the war they are engaged in. Clashes between these groups, which hit the population indiscriminately, leave hundreds of victims on the list of what the government and mafias call “collateral damage.” The mafias profit from the misery caused by their activities related to the production and trade of drugs, in particular by converting the poor peasants, as was the case in Colombia in the 1990s, to drug production. In Mexico since 2006, almost 60,000 people have been killed, either by the bullets of the cartels or the official army; a majority of those killed were victims of the war between the drug cartels, but this does not diminish the responsibility of the state, whatever the government says. In fact, each mafia group emerged under the protection of a fraction of the bourgeoisie. The collusion of the mafias with the state structures allows them to “protect their investment” and their activities in general.[5]

The human disasters that cause the war of the drug traffickers are present throughout Latin America, but the violence exemplified in Brazil and Mexico is a global phenomenon that is far from alien to North America or Europe.

Large-scale industrial disasters

No region of the world is spared by these and their first victims are usually the workers. Their cause is not industrial development per se, but industrial development in the hands of capitalism in crisis, where everything must be sacrificed to the objectives of profitability faced with the global trade war.

The most typical case is the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, whose gravity is only surpassed by Chernobyl (one million “recognised” deaths between 1986 and 2004). On March 11, 2011, a massive tsunami flooded the east coast of Japan. More than 20,000 people were killed, thousands are today still missing. Countless people have lost their homes. The bourgeoisie is, in fact, directly responsible for the deadly magnitude of Fukushima. For the purposes of production, capitalism has concentrated populations and industries in an insane way. Faced with this nuclear disaster, the ruling class has once again shown its negligence. The evacuation of the population started too late and the safety zone was insufficient. The government mostly avoided a large-scale evacuation because it wanted to absolutely minimise the perception of the real risks involved.

In and around the nuclear plant, recorded radiation levels reached a fatal intensity. Shortly after the disaster, the Prime Minister launched a suicide-commando of workers, many of whom were unemployed or homeless people who had to undertake the task of reducing the level of radioactivity in the plant. More than 25 years earlier, at the time of Chernobyl, the Stalinist regime in the USSR, on the verge of collapse, found nothing else to do than to send a huge army force of recruits to fight the disaster. According to WHO, about 600,000 to 800,000 “liquidators” were sent in, and hundreds of thousands have died or fallen ill due to radiation. The government has never published reliable official figures.

In a country of high technology and overcrowding like Japan, the effects are even more dramatic for the population. The irreversible contamination of the air, land and oceans, clustering and storage of radioactive waste, the permanent sacrifice of protection and security on the altar of profitability cast a harsh light on the irrational dynamic of the system at the global level.

“Natural” disasters and their consequences

Certainly, we cannot blame capitalism for being the origin of an earthquake, cyclone or drought. On the other hand, we can blame it for the fact that all these cataclysms related to natural phenomena are transformed into huge social disasters, into massive human tragedies. Thus, capitalism has the technological means to make it capable of sending men to the moon, producing monstrous weapons capable of destroying the planet dozens of times over, but at the same time it can’t afford to protect people in countries exposed to natural disasters, which it could do by building dams, diverting rivers, building houses that can withstand earthquakes or hurricanes. This does not fit into the capitalist logic of profit, profitability and cost savings.

But the most dramatic threat hanging over humanity, which we cannot develop here, is ecological catastrophe.[6]

Ideological decomposition of capitalism

This decomposition is not limited solely to the fact that capitalism, despite all the development of science and technology, finds itself increasingly subject to the laws of nature, and unable to control the means it has put in place for its own development. It also reaches the economic foundations of the system but is reflected in all aspects of social life through an ideological decomposition of the values of the ruling class, which brings with it a collapse of all values making social life possible, particularly through a number of phenomena:

  • the development of nihilistic ideologies, expressions of a society that is more and more being sucked into the void;
  • the profusion of sects, the revival of religious obscurantism, even in some advanced countries, the rejection of coherent, constructed, rational thought, including in some parts of the “scientific” milieu, and which through the media takes a prominent place in stultifying advertisements, mindless shows;
  • the development of racism and xenophobia, of fear and therefore of hate for the other, the neighbour;
  • “every man for himself”, marginalisation, the atomisation of individuals, destruction of family relationships, exclusion of the elderly.

The decomposition of capitalism reflects the image of a world without a future, a world on the brink, which it tends to impose on society as a whole. It is the reign of violence, of the “resourceful individual,” of “every man for himself”, the exclusion that plagues the whole of society, especially its most disadvantaged, with their daily lot of despair and destruction: the unemployed who commit suicide to escape their misery, children being raped and killed, the elderly tortured and murdered for a few dollars ...

Only the proletariat can get society out of this impasse

Regarding the Copenhagen summit in late 2009,[7] it was said that it was dead, that the future had been sacrificed for the present. This system has as its only horizon profit (not always in the short term), but this is more and more restricted (as illustrated by speculation). It is going straight into the wall but it cannot do otherwise! Was the former Democratic candidate for United States president, Al Gore, sincere when, in 2005, he presented his documentary An Inconvenient Truth showing the dramatic effects of global warming on the planet? In any case, he was able to do so because he was no longer “in business” after eight years’ vice-presidency of the US. This means that these people who run the world can sometimes understand the dangers involved, but whatever their moral conscience, they continue in the same direction because they are prisoners of a system that goes towards catastrophe. There is a mechanism that exceeds human will and whose logic is stronger than the will of the most powerful politics. Today the bourgeoisie themselves have children who are concerned about the future ... The looming disasters will hit the poorest first, but the bourgeoisie will also be increasingly affected. The working class not only bears the future for itself, but for all of humanity, including the descendants of the current bourgeoisie.

After a period of prosperity when it was able to achieve a quantum leap in the productive forces and wealth of society, creating and unifying the global market, this system has since the beginning of the last century reached its own historical limits, marking its entry into its period of decadence. Balance sheet: two world wars, the crisis of 1929 and the new open crisis in the late 1960s, which does not cease to plunge the world into poverty.

Decadent capitalism is the permanent, insoluble, crisis of the system itself, which is a huge disaster for all humanity, as revealed in particular in the phenomenon of increasing impoverishment of millions of human beings reduced to indigence, to abject poverty.

By prolonging itself, the agony of capitalism gives a new quality to the extreme manifestations of decadence, giving rise to the phenomenon of the decomposition of the latter, a phenomenon visible in the last three decades.

Whereas in pre-capitalist societies the relations of production of a new society in the making could hatch within the old society in the process of collapsing (as was the case for capitalism which could develop within declining feudal society), this is no longer the case today.

The only possible alternative can be the building, on the ruins of the capitalist system, of another society – communist society – which, by ridding humanity of the blind laws of capitalism, can bring full satisfaction of human needs through a development and control of the productive forces that the laws of capitalism make impossible.

Just as it is the evolution of capitalism which is responsible for the current collapse into barbarism, this means that within it, the class that produces most of the wealth, which not only has no material interest in the perpetuation of this system but, on the contrary, is the main exploited class, alone is capable by its revolutionary struggle of drawing behind it the whole non-exploiting population, of reversing the present social order to pave the way for a truly human society: communism.

So far, the class struggles which, for forty years, have developed on all continents, have been able to prevent decadent capitalism from making its own response to the impasse of its economy: unleashing the ultimate form of its barbarism, a new world war. However, the working class is not yet able to affirm, through revolutionary struggles, its own perspective or to present to the rest of society the future it carries. It is precisely this momentary impasse, where, at present, neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian alternative can affirm themselves openly, which is the origin of this phenomenon of capitalist society rotting on its feet, which explains the particular degree now reached by the extreme barbarism of the decadence of this system. And this decomposition is set to grow further with the inexorable worsening of the economic crisis.

Against the distrust of all spread by the bourgeoisie, must be explicitly opposed the need for solidarity, which means trust between workers; against the lie of the state as “protector” must be opposed the denunciation of this organ which is the custodian of the system that causes social disintegration. Faced with the seriousness of the issues posed by this situation, the proletariat must be aware of the risk of annihilation that threatens it today The working class must take from all this decay that it suffers daily, in addition to the economic attacks against all its living conditions, an additional reason, a greater determination to develop its struggles and forge its class unity.

The current struggles of the world proletariat for its unity and class solidarity constitute the only glimmer of hope in the midst of this world in total putrefaction. They alone are able to prefigure an embryonic human community. It is the international generalisation of these struggles that will finally hatch the seeds of a new world, from which will emerge new social values.

Wim / Sílvio (February 2013)

 

 

[1]. “Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism”, International Review n°62, 3rd quarter 1990.

[2]. It may be noted that in the early development of computers, the most powerful computers were used exclusively in the service of the military. This is much less true today for all leading areas, although military research continues to absorb and direct most advances in technology.

[3]. Information relating to these examples is mostly extracted from articles in the review Research on discoveries made in 2012.

[4]. UNAIDS figures for 2011.

[5]. See “Mexico between the crisis and narcotrafic” in International Review n° 150, 4th Quarter 2012.

[6]. Read about it Chris Harman, A People's History of humanity  From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (2002), especially pp.653-654 of the French edition, La Découverte, 2011

[7]. See our article “Save the planet? No they can’t!” in International Review n°140, 1st Quarter 2010

 

 

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Marxism & Science

The Russian revolution echoes in Brazil, 1918-21

This article is a continuation of the series on the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23 that we began in International Review no.139.1

Our aim, “in continuity with the many contributions we have already made, is an attempt to reconstruct this period using the testimonies and the stories of the protagonists themselves. We have devoted many pages to the revolutions in Russia and in Germany. Therefore, we are publishing this work on lesser-known experiences in various countries with the aim of giving a global perspective. Studying this period a little, one is astonished by the number of struggles that took place, by the magnitude of the echo from the revolution of 1917.”

Between 1914 and 1923, the world experienced the first demonstration that the capitalist system was decadent - a world war that involved the whole of Europe, had repercussions all over the world and caused about 20 million deaths. This blind slaughter was brought to end, not because the various governments willed it so but because of a revolutionary wave of the international proletariat which was joined by a huge number of exploited and repressed people throughout the world and whose spearhead was the Russian revolution of 1917.

Today we are experiencing another demonstration of capitalist decadence. This time it is taking the form of a cataclysmic worsening of the economic crisis (aggravated by an enormous environmental crisis, the multiplication of local imperialist wars and an alarming moral decline). In quite a few countries,2 we see early and still very limited attempts on the part of the proletariat and the oppressed to oppose its effects. Learning the lessons of the first revolutionary wave (1917-23), understanding the similarities with and the differences from the present situation, is indispensable. The future struggles will be much more powerful if they assimilate the lessons of this experience.

The revolutionary uprising that shook Brazil between 1917 and 1919, together with the movement in Argentina in 1919, is the most important expression in South America of the international revolutionary wave.

This uprising was the fruit of the situation in Brazil, as well as of the international situation, the war and especially of the solidarity with the Russian workers and the attempt to follow their example. It did not come out of nowhere; the objective and subjective conditions had matured in Brazil too during the previous twenty years. The aim of this article is to analyse this maturation and the unfolding of events between 1917 and 1919 in the Brazilian sub-continent. We do not pretend to be able to draw definitive conclusions and are open to debate that can elucidate questions, facts and analyses, aware as we are that there are really very few documents concerning the period. In the notes we will give references for those that we have been able to use.

1905-1917: episodic explosions of struggle in Brazil

The development of the international situation during the first ten years of the 20th century is marked by three factors:

  • the long period of capitalism’s zenith draws to a close. In the words of Rosa Luxemburg, we are already “over the summit, which is on the other side of the culminating point of capitalist society”;3

  • the appearance of imperialism as an expression of the growing confrontation between the various capitalist powers, whose ambitions come up against a world market completely and unequally divided up between them. The only possible outcome of this, according to capitalist logic, is generalised war;

  • the explosion of workers’ struggles with new forms and tendencies, which express the need to respond to this new situation; this is the period in which the mass strike appears, its most important expression being the Russian revolution of 1905.

What was Brazil’s position within this context? We cannot here develop an analysis of the formation of capitalism in this country. From the 16th century, under Portuguese domination, extensive export agriculture developed, based in the first place on the Brazilian “palo”,4 and then on sugar cane from the beginning of the 17th century. It was based on slave production and as the exploitation of the Indians soon failed, from the 17th century onwards, millions of Africans were brought in. Following Independence (1821), during the last third of the 19th century, sugar was replaced by coffee and rubber, which accelerated the development of capitalism and gave rise to the mass immigration of workers coming from Italy, Spain, Germany, etc. These provided the workforce that industry needed as it began to take off and they were also sent off to colonise this vast and largely unexplored territory.

One of the first demonstrations of the urban proletariat took place in 1798, with the famous “Conjura Bahiana”;5 it was led by the cutters in particular and the rebellion demanded the abolition of slavery and Brazilian independence, as well as making its corporate demands. Throughout the 19th century, small proletarian nuclei animated the struggle for a Republic6 and for the abolition of slavery. Of course, these demands were within the capitalist framework, tending to encourage its development and also prepare the conditions for the future proletarian revolution.

The wave of immigration at the end of the century made considerable changes to the composition of the Brazilian proletariat.7 Reacting against unbearable working conditions – 12 to 14 hour days, starvation wages, inhuman living conditions,8 disciplinary measures that included corporal punishment – strikes began to take place from 1903 onwards, the most important of which were those in Rio (1903) and de Santos (the port in São Paulo) in 1905, which spread spontaneously and turned into a general strike.

The Russian revolution of 1905 made a great impression: the First of May 1906 devoted a large number of meetings to it. In São Paulo a huge meeting was held in a theatre, in Rio there was a demonstration in a public square, in Santos there was a meeting in solidarity with the Russian revolutionaries.

At the same time revolutionary minorities, mainly immigrants, began to meet together. In 1908 these meetings gave birth to the Confederação Operaria Brasileira (COB - Brazilian Workers’ Federation), which regrouped the organisations of Rio and São Paulo and was strongly influenced by anarcho-syndicalism, taking its inspiration from the French CGT.9 The COB called for the First of May celebration, carried out an important work promoting popular culture (mainly on art, education and literature) and organised an energetic campaign against alcoholism, which was a devastating problem amongst the workers.

In 1907, the COB mobilised workers for the eight hour day. From May onwards the strikes grew in number in the São Paulo region. The mobilisation was a success: the stone cutters and joiners won a reduction in the working day. But this wave of struggles quickly receded because of the defeat of the dockers in Santos (who were demanding a 10 hour day), because the economy went into recession at the end of 1907 and due to an ever-present police repression, which literally filled the prisons with striking workers and expelled militant immigrants.

The retreat of the workers’ struggles did not bring about a retreat on the part of the most conscious minorities, who devoted themselves to debating the most important questions being discussed in Europe: the general strike, revolutionary syndicalism, the reasons behind reformism... The COB organised them and gave an internationalist orientation. It campaigned against the war between Brazil and Argentina and mobilised its members against the death sentence handed out to Ferrer Guardia by the Spanish government.10

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 actively mobilised the COB, with the anarchists to the fore. In March 1915 the Workers’ Federation of Rio de Janeiro created a People’s Agitation Commission against the war, and at the same time in São Paulo an International Commission against the war was formed. On First May 1915 anti-war demonstrations were organised in the two cities, in the midst of which the workers’ International was declared.

Brazilian anarchists tried to send delegates to a Congress against the war, to be held in Spain11 and, when the attempt failed, they organised an International Congress for Peace in Rio de Janeiro in October 1915.

Anarchists, socialists, syndicalists and militants from Argentina, Uruguay and Chile attended the Congress. A manifesto addressed to the proletariat of Europe and America was drawn up, calling for them to “bring down the bands of potentates and assassins who keep the people enslaved and suffering.” Only the proletariat could realise this appeal, because it alone “is able to act decisively against the war, because it provides the elements necessary for any conflict by forging the instruments of death and destruction and by providing the human element which serves as cannon fodder.12 The Congress decided to carry out systematic propaganda against nationalism, militarism and capitalism.

These efforts were stifled by the patriotic agitation that broke out in favour of Brazil’s engagement in the war. Many young people from every social class joined the army voluntarily in a general climate of national defence, which made international – or simply critical – positions very difficult as they came up against the energetic repression of voluntary groups of patriots who did not hesitate to use violence. The year 1916 was very hard for the proletariat and for internationalists, who were isolated and persecuted.

July 1917, the São Paulo Commune

This situation was not to last long however. Industry was developing particularly in the São Paulo region, thanks to the lucrative trade supplying all kinds of goods to the belligerents. But this prosperity had hardly any repercussions for the working masses. It was very clear that there were two São Paulos; that of the minority, full of luxury houses and streets boasting all kinds of ‘Belle Epoch’ inventions imported from Europe and that of the majority, consisting of insalubrious districts oozing misery.

As it was necessary to act quickly in order to get the maximum profit from the situation, the bosses brutally increased the pressure on the workers: “In Brazil, discontent grew due to the atrocious working conditions in the factories, comparable to those in Great Britain at the beginning of the industrial revolution: 14 hour days with no paid rest day, workers ate next to the machines; wages were inadequate and were not paid regularly; there was no social assistance or health care; workers’ meetings and organisations were prohibited; workers had no rights and there was no indemnity for work accidents’”.13 On top of this, a high level of inflation made itself felt, especially on basic necessities. All this was conducive to the development of indignation and discontent and was further encouraged by news of the February revolution in Russia that began to arrive from Europe. In May several strikes occurred in Rio, in particular one in the textile factory of Corcovado. On 11th May, 2,500 people managed to gather in the street, intending to march towards the factory and show their solidarity in spite of the fact that a few days earlier the chief of police had expressly banned workers’ meetings. The police tried to stop the demonstration and violent confrontations ensued.

At the beginning of July a mass strike broke out in the São Paulo region, which became known as “the São Paulo Commune”. It was a reaction against the intolerable cost of living and especially against the war. In several factories the bosses had imposed a “patriotic contribution”, a tax on wages to support Italy. This tax was rejected by the workers of the Cotonificio Crespi textile factory who demanded a 25% wage increase. The strike spread like wildfire in the industrial districts of São Paulo: Mooca, Bras, Ipiranga, Cambuci... More than 20,000 workers were on strike. A group of women produced a leaflet that they distributed among the soldiers, which said: “You should not persecute your brothers in misery. You too are part of the mass of the people. Hunger reigns in our homes and our children cry for bread. The bosses rely on the weapons they’ve given you to stifle our demands”.

At the beginning of July, a breach in the workers’ ranks seemed to have opened up: the workers of Nami Jaffet agreed to return to work with a 20% rise. But there were incidents in the following days that favoured the continuation of the strike: on 8th July a crowd of workers gathered in front of the gates of Cotonificio Crespi to help two miners who were about to be arrested by an army patrol. The police went to the aid of the latter and a fixed battle ensued. On the following day there were more confrontations, this time at the gates of the Antartica beer factory. After they had got the better of the police, the workers marched towards the Mariangela textile factory and succeeded in getting its employees to stop work. More incidents occurred over the following days as well as stoppages that swelled the strikers’ ranks.

On 11th July the news circulated that a worker had been beaten to death by the police. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back: “... news of the death of a worker killed near a textile factory in Bras was felt as a challenge to the dignity of the proletariat. It acted as a violent emotional discharge which stirred up energy. The burial of the victim gave rise to one of the most impressive popular demonstrations in São Paulo.14 A huge mourning procession took place that gathered more than fifty thousand people. After the burial the crowd divided into two, one procession moving towards the house of the murdered worker in Bras, where a meeting was held. At the end of it the crowd looted a bakery. The news spread like wildfire and many food shops were plundered in several districts.

The other procession marched towards Praca da Se, where several speakers called for the struggle to continue. Those present decided to organise themselves into several processions marching towards the industrial districts, where they approached numerous workplaces and managed to convince the workers of Nami Jaffet to come out on strike again.

The workers’ determination and unity grew spectacularly: on the night from the 11th to 12th and throughout the following day, assemblies were held in the workers’ districts with the very determined participation of the anarchists; they decided to create workers’ leagues. On the 12th the gas plant went on strike and the trams stopped running. In spite of the military occupation, the city was in the hands of the strikers.

The strikers were in control in “the other São Paulo”; the police and army were unable to get in due to being harassed by the crowd that manned the barricades at all strategic points, where violent confrontations occurred. Transport and supplies were paralysed, the strikers organised food distribution giving priority to hospitals and workers’ families. Workers’ patrols were organised to prevent theft and looting and to warn the inhabitants of police or army incursions.

The workers’ leagues of the districts, whose delegates were elected by numerous factories in struggle and by members of the COB sections, held meetings to unify the demands. This resulted, on the 14th, in the formation of a committee for proletarian defence which put forward eleven demands, of which the main ones were the freeing of all those who had been jailed and an increase of 35% for the low waged and 25% for the rest. An influential section of the bosses understood that repression was not enough and that some concessions had to be made. A group of journalists offered to act as mediators for the government. The same day a general assembly was held with more than 50,000 participants who entered the old hippodrome of Mooca in massive processions. It decided for a return to work if the demands were accepted. On 15th and 16th numerous meetings took place between the journalists and the government, as well as with a committee made up of the main employers. The latter accepted a general increase of 20% and the governor ordered the immediate release of all prisoners. On the 16th several assemblies voted for a return to work. An enormous demonstration of 80,000 people celebrated what was felt to be a great victory. Some isolated strikes broke out here and there in July-August to force recalcitrant bosses to enforce the agreement.

The São Paulo strike immediately gave rise to solidarity in the state industry of Rio Grande do Sul and in the town of Curitiba, where there were massive demonstrations. The shock wave of solidarity was late arriving in Rio. But a furniture factory was paralysed by a strike on 18th July – when the struggle in São Paulo had already finished – and it gradually spread to other companies, so that on 23rd July there were 70,000 strikers from various sectors. In panic the bourgeoisie unleashed a violent repression; police charges against the demonstrators, arrests, closure of workers’ centres. However they were forced to make some concessions, which ended the strike on 2nd August.

Although it did not manage to spread, the São Paulo Commune had an important echo throughout Brazil. The first thing to note is that it took on all of the characteristics that Rosa Luxemburg identified in the 1905 Russian revolution as defining the new form taken by the workers’ struggle in capitalist decadence. It had not been previously prepared by any organisation but was the product of a maturation of consciousness, solidarity, indignation, combativity within the workers’ ranks. The development of the movement had created its own direct mass organisations and, without losing its economic aspect, it had quickly developed a political character, affirming that the proletariat is a class that openly confronts the state. “There is nothing to show that the July 1917 general strike was prepared, organised according to the classic schemas of union and workers’ federation delegates. It was directly produced by the despair into which the São Paulo proletariat had fallen, with starvation wages and exhausting labour. There was a permanent state of siege, workers’ associations were banned by the police, their meeting places closed and the surveillance of elements considered to be ‘agitators dangerous to the public peace’ was strict and permanent.15

As we will see later, the Brazilian proletariat, encouraged by the triumph of the October revolution, threw itself into new struggles; however the São Paulo Commune was the high point of its participation in the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23. It did not so much rise up under the direct impulse of the October revolution, as contribute to creating the international conditions that prepared it. Between July and September 1917, not only was there the São Paulo Commune but also the August general strike in Spain, mass strikes and soldiers’ mutinies in Germany in September; all of which led Lenin to insist on the need for the proletariat to take power in Russia because “The end of September undoubtedly marked a great turning-point in the history of the Russian revolution and, to all appearances, of the world revolution as well.16

The “appeal” of the Russian revolution

To return to the situation in Brazil, the bourgeoisie seems to have been determined to participate in the world war in spite of the social turbulence, not because it had direct economic or strategic interests but rather to count for something on the world imperialist stage, to give the impression that it was powerful and to win the respect of the other national players. It took the part of what it thought would be the winning side - that of the Entente (France and Great Britain), that had managed to get the decisive support of the United States – and took advantage of the bombing of a Brazilian ship by a German vessel to declare war on Germany.

War requires the brutalisation of the population, its transformation into a people acting irrationally. With this aim in view, patriotic committees were created in every district. The President of the Republic, Venceslau Bras, intervened personally to end a strike in a textile factory in Rio. Some unions collaborated by organising “patriotic battalions” that mobilised for the war. The church declared the war to be a “Holy Crusade” and its bishops made fiery sermons full of patriotic fervour. All workers’ organisations were declared illegal, their centres closed; they were subjected to ferocious and constant press campaigns that accused them of being “heartless foreigners”, “fanatics of German internationalism” and other niceties.

The impact of this violent nationalist campaign was limited because it quickly came up against the outbreak of the Russian revolution, which electrified numerous Brazilian workers, especially the anarchist groups which defended the Russian revolution and the Bolsheviks with great enthusiasm. One of them, Astrogildo Reeira, published a collection of his writings in pamphlet form in February 1918 – A Revolucao Russa e a Imprensa – in which he defended the idea that “the Russian maximalists17 have not taken over in Russia. They are the immense majority of the Russian people, the only real and natural master of Russia. It is Kerenski and his gang who have really taken over the country abusively”. This author also defended the idea that the Russian revolution “is a libertarian revolution which opens the way to anarchism.18

The 1917 Russian revolution had an enormous impact as an “appeal”, more at the level of the maturation of consciousness than an explosion of new struggles. The inevitable retreat after the São Paulo Commune, the realisation that gains won had been meagre even though the energy expended was great and, added to this, the pressure of patriotic ideology, which went hand in hand with the mobilisation for the war, had produced a degree of disorientation and reflection that was stimulated and accelerated by news of the Russian revolution.

The process of “subterranean maturation the workers appear to be passive while they are really assailed by a sea of doubts, questions and answers – gave rise to a movement of struggle. In August 1918 the strike at Cantareira (the company managing navigation between Rio and Niteroi) broke out. In July the company had given a wage increase only to those working on dry land. Feeling discriminated against, the sea-going personnel went on strike. Solidarity demonstrations took place immediately, mainly in Niteroi. On the night of 6th August, mounted police dispersed the crowd. On the 7th, soldiers of the 58th battalion of the army infantry, who had been sent to Niteroi, fraternised with the demonstrators and joined forces with them to confront the police and other army divisions. There were serious confrontations which ended in two deaths: a soldier of the 58th battalion and one civilian. Niteroi was flooded with other troops who managed to establish order. The dead were buried on the 8th, a huge crowd processed peacefully. The strike ended on the 9th.

Was the enthusiasm aroused by the Russian revolution, the development of demand struggles, the mutiny of an army battalion, a sufficient basis for initiating an insurrectionary revolutionary struggle? A group of revolutionaries in Rio answered this question affirmatively and began preparing the insurrection. Let’s examine the facts.

In November 1918, an almost total general strike took place in Rio de Janeiro, demanding an 8 hour day. The government dramatised the situation by claiming that this movement was an “attempt at insurrection”. Certainly the dynamic provided by the Russian revolution, and the joy and relief at the ending of the world war, gave an impulsion to the movement. Without doubt, in the last analysis any proletarian movement tends to unite the fight for immediate demands and for a revolutionary aspect. However the struggle in Rio did not spread to the whole country, it did not organise itself or show evidence of a revolutionary consciousness. But some groups in Rio believed that the moment had come for a revolutionary assault. Another factor raised spirits: one of the most serious sequels to the world war was a terrible epidemic of Spanish flu,19 which eventually reached Brazil. Rodriguez Aloes, the president of the Republic, succumbed to it before his investiture and had to be replaced by the vice-president.

A council claiming to organise the insurrection was formed in Rio de Janeiro, without even co-ordinating with the other large industrialised centres. The anarchists participated in it, as well as workers’ leaders from the textile industry, journalists, lawyers and a few military men. One of these, Jorge Elias Ajus, was no more than a spy who informed the authorities about the Council’s activities.

The Council held several meetings, which distributed tasks among the workers of the factories and the districts: to take over the presidential palace, to occupy the arms and ammunitions depots of the Commissariat of War, an assault on the ammunitions factory of Raelengo, an attack on the police station, occupation of the electricity plant and the telephone exchange. Twenty thousand workers were expected to carry out these actions, which were planned for the 18th.

On 17th November, Ajus made a dramatic gesture: “He stated that, as he was not on duty on the 18th, he could not participate in the movement and asked that the date of the insurrection be postponed to the 20th.”20 The organisers were shaken but, after a great deal of hesitation, they decided to stick to what they had decided. But during the last meeting, that was held on the 18th in the early afternoon, the police raided the premises and arrested most of the leaders.

On the 18th a strike broke out in the textile and metal industries but did not extend to other sectors and the leaflets circulating in the barracks calling for the soldiers to mutiny had little effect. The call to form “workers’ and soldiers’ committees” was a failure in the factories as well as in the barracks.

A large assembly was planned at Campo de San Cristobal, from where columns were to leave to occupy governmental and strategic buildings. There were no more than a thousand participants and they were rapidly surrounded by army and police troops. The other actions planned were not even engaged and the attempt to dynamite two electricity towers failed on the 19th.

The government imprisoned hundreds of workers, closed union offices and banned all demonstrations and meetings. The strike began to retreat on the 19th and the police and army went systematically to all striking factories to force the workers to return to work at bayonet point. The few attempts at resistance resulted in the death of three workers. On 25th November order reigned in the region.

1919-21 – Decline of the social unrest

In spite of this fiasco, the flame of workers’ combativity and consciousness burned still. The proletarian revolution in Hungary and the triumph of the revolutionary commune in Bavaria inspired great enthusiasm. Enormous demonstrations took place in lots of cities on 1st May. In Rio, São Paulo and Salvador da Bahia, resolutions were voted in support of the revolutionary struggle in Hungary, Bavaria and Russia.

In April 1919, the constant price increases gave rise to enormous discontent among the workers of many factories in and around São Paulo, in San Bernardo do Campo, Campinas and Santos. Some partial strikes took place here and there which formulated lists of demands but the most important occurrence was that general assemblies were held and that they decided to elect delegates to set up a co-ordination. This resulted in the constitution of a general workers’ council that organised the 1st May demonstration and drew up a series of demands; eight hour day, wage increases linked to inflation, abolition of the employment of children under 14 and of night work for women, reduction in the price of basic necessities and in rents. On 4th May the strike generalised.

The government and capitalists acted on two levels; on the one hand savage repression to prevent demonstrations or any possibility of workers getting together. They persecuted those thought to be the leaders, who were imprisoned without trial and deported to the distant reaches of Brazil. On the other hand the bosses and government showed that they were prepared to make concessions and, little by little, sowed all possible divisions; by increasing wages here, reducing the working day there, etc.

This tactic was successful. At the Santa Catalina pottery works the strike ended on 6th May on the promise of an eight hour day, the abolition of child labour and a wage increase. The Santos port workers went back to work on the 7th. On the 17th it was the turn of the national textile factory. The need to act in unison was never considered (to return to work only if the demands were granted to all), nor was the possibility of spreading the movement to Rio, although numerous strikes had broken out in the city since mid-May and they had adopted the same platform of demands. Once calm had been restored in the region of São Paulo, the strikes in the states of Rio, Bahia and the town of Recife, although massive, were eventually suffocated by the same tactic combining limited concessions and selective repression. A mass strike at Porto Allegre in September 1919 which began at the Light and Power Electricity Company with the demand for a salary increase and a reduction in working hours, won the solidarity of the bakers, the conductors, the telephone workers, etc. The bourgeoisie had recourse to provocation – bombs were placed to blow up some installations of the electricity company and the house of a strike-breaker – in order to prevent demonstrations and assemblies. On 7th September, a mass demonstration in Montevideo Square was attacked by the police and army, resulting in the death of a demonstrator. The next day numerous strikers were arrested by the police and union offices were closed down. The strike ended on 11th without any of its demands having been met.

Exhaustion, the absence of a clear revolutionary perspective and concessions granted in many sectors, brought about a general retreat. The government then intensified the repression; they unleashed a new wave of arrests and deportations, closed down the workers’ centres and facilitated disciplinary sackings. Parliament passed new repressive laws; any provocation sufficed – a bomb set off in the vicinity of known militants or in a place that they frequented – for these repressive laws to be applied. An attempt at a general strike in São Paulo in November 1919 failed miserably and the government took advantage of it to further ensnare the workers; it imprisoned all those who could be considered the leaders; they were then brutally tortured in Santos and São Paulo before being deported.

However the workers’ combativity and the general discontent had its swan song in March 1920; the strike at the Leopoldina Railways in Rio and that of Mogiana in the region of São Paulo.

The first took place on 7th March with a platform of demands to which the company responded by using public sector employees as “scabs”. The workers appealed for solidarity by going out onto the streets every day. On the 24th the first wave of strikes in support of them began: metal workers, taxi drivers, bakers, tailors, building workers... A general assembly was held which called for “all the working class to present its complaints and demands”. On the 25th the workers in the textile industry joined it. There was also a solidarity strike in the transport sector in Salvador and in towns of the Minas Gerais state.

The government responded with brutal repression and on 26th March threw more than 3,000 strikers in gaol. The latter were so full that they had to use the port warehouses to imprison the workers.

The movement began to retreat on 28th with the return to work of the workers in the textile industry. The reformist unionists acted as “mediators’’ for businesses to rehire “good workers” who had “at least five years’ experience”. The workers’ ranks were routed and on the 30th the struggle ended without having won any of its demands at all.

The second, which began on the railway line north of São Paulo, lasted from 20th March to 5th April and received the solidarity of the Workers’ Federation of São Paulo, which called for a general strike that was followed in part in the textile industry. The strikers occupied the stations and tried to explain their struggle to those travelling but the regional government was intractable. The occupied stations were attacked by troops which resulted in a number of violent confrontations, especially in Casa Branca where four workers were killed. A savage press campaign was orchestrated against the strikers together with a brutal repression which made numerous arrests and deportations not only of the workers but also of their wives and children. Men, women and children were imprisoned in barracks, where vicious corporal punishment was inflicted on them.

Some elements towards an assessment

The movements in Brazil between 1917 and 1920 were undeniably part of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and can only be understood in the light of its lessons. The reader can consult two articles in which we have tried to make an assessment.21 Here we will restrict ourselves to putting forward a few lessons which come directly out of the experience in Brazil.

The fragmentation of the proletariat

The working class in Brazil was very fragmented. Most of the workers had immigrated recently and had very few ties with the native proletariat, who were very much bound to artisan production or were day labourers in the huge and totally isolated agricultural plantations.22 The immigrant workers were themselves divided into “language ghettos”, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, etc: “In São Paulo more Italian, with its various picturesque dialects, was spoken than Portuguese. The influence of the language and culture of the peninsula influenced all aspects of life in São Paulo.23

The enormous dispersion of the industrial centres must also be considered. Rio and São Paulo never managed to synchronise their struggles. The São Paulo Commune spread to Rio only when the struggle was over. The attempt at insurrection in November 1918 remained limited to Rio without the possibility of common action being raised either with São Paulo or Santos.

To the dispersion of the proletariat must be added the weak echo that the workers’ agitation had within the peasant masses – who constituted the majority of the population – not only in far flung regions (Mato Grosso, Amazon, etc.) but also in those which endured conditions close to slavery in the coffee and cocoa plantations.24

The fragmentation of the proletariat and its isolation from the rest of the non-exploiting population gave an enormous margin of manoeuvre to the bourgeoisie which, after making some concessions, was able to unleash a brutal repression.

Illusions about capitalist development

The world war revealed the fact that capitalism, by creating the world market and so imposing its laws on every country in the world, had reached its historic limits. The Russian revolution showed that the destruction of capitalism was not only necessary but also possible.

However there were illusions about capitalism’s ability to go on developing.25 In Brazil there was an enormous area to colonise. As in other countries on the American continent, including the United States, the workers were very vulnerable to the “pioneer” mentality, to the illusion of “trying to make their fortune” and of making their way through agricultural colonisation or by discovering mineral deposits. Many immigrants saw their status as workers as a “transitory period” which would enable them to realise their dreams and turn them into wealthy colonialists. The defeat of the revolution in Germany and other countries, the growing isolation of Russia, the serious mistakes made by the Communist International on the possibility of capitalist development in the colonial or semi-colonial countries, encouraged this illusion.

The difficulty in developing an internationalist momentum

The Commune of São Paulo was a contribution of the Brazilian proletariat to the international maturation of the conditions that made the October revolution possible, at the same time as it was inspired by the latter. As in other countries, there existed the seeds of an internationalist attitude, which is the indispensable departure point for the working class revolution.

It is by placing itself on an internationalist terrain that the proletariat creates the basis for overthrowing the state in every country, but to do so it must fulfil three conditions: the unification of revolutionary minorities into a world party; the formation of workers’ councils, and their growing co-ordination on a world scale. Not all of these three conditions were present in Brazil:

1) contact with the Communist International was made very late, in 1921, when the revolutionary wave was receding and the CI was already in the process of degeneration;

2) the workers’ councils were never formed, except for some embryonic attempts by the São Paulo Commune in 1917 and during the mass strike of 1919;

3) links with the proletariat in other countries were practically non-existent.

The lack of theoretical reflection and the activism of the revolutionary minorities

The majority of the proletarian vanguard in Brazil was formed by militants of the internationalist anarchist tendency.26 To their credit they defended anti-war positions and they supported the Russian revolution and Bolshevism. They were the ones who, in 1919, on their own initiative and without having any contact with Moscow, created a Communist Party in Rio de Janeiro, which encouraged the COB to join the CI.

But they did not have an historic, theoretical and international stance: they based everything on “action” that was to bring the workers into struggle. Consequently, all their efforts were focused on the creation of unions and on calling for demonstrations and protest actions. Theoretical work to identify the aims of the struggle, the means to achieve them, the obstacles in its way and the conditions necessary for its development was completely neglected. In other words, they neglected all the elements that are indispensable for the movement to develop a clear consciousness, for it to see the direction it should take, to avoid the traps so as not to become the plaything of events and of the manoeuvres of an enemy – the bourgeoisie – that is politically the most intelligent exploiting class in history. This activism proved fatal. An important indication of this, as we have seen, was the failure of the insurrection in Rio in 1918, from which no lesson was drawn, as far as we know.

C.Mir, 24 November 2012.

 

1. International Review nº 139, 1914-23: Ten years that shook the world

2. See the contribution to an evaluation of these experiences “2011, from indignation to hope”.

4.This is a large tree (Caesalpinia echinata) whose trunk contains a highly valued red dye; the intense exploitation of it has led to its almost complete disappearance.

6. Up until the coup d’etat in 1889, Brazil was an empire with an Emperor descended from the Portuguese dynasty.

7. Between 1871 and 1920, 3,900,000 immigrants from southern Europe are estimated to have arrived.

8. The introduction to the article “Trabalho e vida do aperairiado brasileiro nos seculos XIX e XX, by Rodrigo Janoni Carvalho, published in the review Arma da Critica, An.2, nº.2, March 2010, contains a horrific description of the São Paulo proletariat’s lodgings at the beginning of the 20th century. There could be up to twenty people sharing a lavatory.

9. At the time, the French CGT was a reference point for workers disgusted by the growing opportunism of the Social Democratic parties and the increasingly conciliatory attitude of the unions. See International Review nº 120, Anarcho-syndicalism faces a change in epoch: the CGT up to 1914

10. “Francisco Ferrer Guardia (Alella, 1859-Barcelona, 1909) was a famous Spanish libertarian teacher. In June 1909 he was arrested in Barcelona, accused of having instigated the revolt known as ‘the week of tragedy’. Ferrar was found guilty by a military tribunal and, on 13th October 1909 at 9 o’clock in the morning, he was shot by firing squad in the Montjuic prison. It is generally acknowledged that Ferrer had nothing to do with the events and that the tribunal condemned him without having any proof against him” (wikipedia in Spanish, translated by us).

12. Pereira, “Formacao do PCB”, quoted by John Foster Dulles, Anarquistas e comunistas no Brasil, p.37.

13. Cecilia Prada, “The 1917 barricades; the death of an anarchist cobbler provokes the first general strike in the country”.

14. Quoted in the article “Tracos biograficos de um homem extraordinario”, Dealbar, São Paulo, 1968, an 2, nº 17, about the anarchist militant, Edgard Leuenroth, who was an active participant in the São Paulo strike.

15. Everardo Dias, Historia das lutas sociais no Brasil, p.224.

16. Lenin, “The crisis has matured”.

17. This is what the Bolsheviks were called in the press.

18. John Foster Dulles, Anarquistas e comunistas no Brasil p.63.

19. “The Spanish flu (also known as The Great Flu Epidemic, the Flu Epidemic of 1918 or The Great Flu) was a flu epidemic of a dimension previously unknown (…). It is considered the worst epidemic in the history of humanity, causing between fifty and a hundred million deaths throughout the world between 1918 and 1920. (…). The Allies in the First World War called it the ‘Spanish flu’ because the epidemic drew the attention of the press in Spain whereas it was kept secret in the countries engaged in war as they censored information concerning the weakening of the troops affected by the illness.

20. Anarquistas e comunistas no Brasil p.68.

21. See International Review nº 75,  “The Russian Revolution, Part III”, , and International Review nº 80, “The First Revolutionary Wave of the World Proletariat”.

22. Ever since the 1903 strikes, in which native day labourers and peasants had been used as “scabs”, there had been mistrust and rancour between immigrant workers and native workers. See the essay, in English, by Colin Everett, Organised Labour in Brazil, 1900-1937.

23. Barricadas de 1917, Cecilia Prada, doctoral thesis.

24. According to our information, the most important peasant movement took place in 1913 and gathered more than 15,000 strikers, settlers and day workers.

25. These illusions also affected the Communist International, which envisaged the possibility of national liberation in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. See the "Theses on Fundamental Tasks" from Second Congress of the Communist International.

26. To our knowledge, there were very few marxist groups. It was only in about 1916 (after an abortive attempt in 1906) that a Socialist Party was formed, which rapidly divided into two equally bourgeois tendencies, one for Brazil’s participation in the world war and the other defending its neutrality.

 

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Ten years that shook the world

The choice is imperialist war or class war

The North African and Middle Eastern countries, hard-hit by the effects of the world economic crisis, were also shaken throughout 2011 by social unrest. The social events that followed the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi have still not been fully extinguished even today. Following these events, the governments and even the regimes of many Southern Mediterranean countries were compelled to change or step down.

These movements which went into history as the ‘Arab Spring’ are changing the entire political structure of North Africa and the Middle East. The global or regional bourgeoisies are trying to reestablish the political balance.

Evaluating the situation in Egypt and Syria, two countries where the social unrest and clashes aren't at an end yet, is important because there is a need for a correct analysis, especially given  the recent exacerbation of the Egyptian streets following the football provocation in the town of Port Said and the protests against the Muslim Brotherhood regime, and the increasing importance of the war in Syria with the escalating regional imperialist conflict in the background. This will necessarily mean we will have to also deal with other conflicts in this region of ever-heated  imperialist tensions, which rivals the economic crisis in the US and the EU for the spotlight of the world's attention. Thus in order to explain the meaning of what is going on in the Middle East, we will try to explain the aggressive foreign policy of Iran in the region, as well as Turkey's efforts to become a regional actor and the side it took in the Syrian war by supporting the opposition, as well as the attitudes of other countries.

We think it is necessary to be careful regarding certain points while evaluating the events. The most basic point is obviously to situate the events in world politics by looking at them from an internationalist perspective and determining more accurate and coherent positions on the basis of the class struggle. Another point is to define a general framework to show that the events taking place in the region were not revolutions, by determining the role of the working class in the events and its significance for the development of class struggle on an international level. We hope to resolve certain confusions about the events while doing this. Since the question of the revolution requires further clarification than can be attempted this article, however, we will not go into this topic in detail.

To begin with, it would be beneficial to state this: when the events erupting in Tunisia expanded to Egypt, we can say the workers took part in the events, as limited as this participation was. The ICC’s Turkish section published an article in the period the events were taking place.[1] In this article we evaluated how much and to what extent the workers took part in this movement. As we all know, the working class hasn't been able to gather these events around its own axis and develop a total struggle with its own demands.

On the other hand, en-Nahda (the Renaissance Party) led by Rashid al-Ghannushi won the National Constituent Assembly elections held on October 23rd 2011 in Tunisia. This party has roots in the same tradition as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Following the events which started in January 2011, all that really changed for the working class of Tunisia ended up being the party in government, and the exploitation of wage-labor continues for the workers. We can now see a similar process taking place in Egypt under the Morsi government..

To be able to look at the events closer and understand their background, it is necessary to analyze the positions of the more powerful imperialist states as well as the regional ones.  Countries such as Iran, Turkey and Israel can be characterized as the main regional powers; the stronger imperialist states that need to be considered, aside from the US obviously, are China and Russia, especially with regard to their relationship with Syria and the events in Egypt.

The Imperialist Tendencies of Iran and Turkey

Iran

Iran is asserting itself as a regional power in the Middle East and shapes its foreign policy accordingly. The most basic reason for this is its concern to be the strongest opponent of Israel in the region. For Israel is, without a doubt, the leading military power  of the region.  Iran builds all the relationships it develops on this basis. In order to strengthen its claims, it makes efforts to create a political, economic, and even  military unity based on Shiite identity. One of the most important developments regarding this Shiite unity is the fact that the Shiite Maliki is the Prime Minister in Iraq, and the largest power faction in post-Saddam Iraq is made up of the Shia. The others are the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Nosairi[2]-dominated Baath Party[3] which has been ruling Syria since 1963. Iran intends to use this sectarian unity led by itself against Israel as well as the US.

The Iranian economy is based on petrol and natural gas, and the state owns 80% of the economic investments. Iran owns 10% of the world’s oil  reserves, and 17% of the world’s natural gas reserves. Having such large oil reserves gives Iran the capability of maneuvering more easily compared to other developing economies of the region.

The internal contradictions inside the Iranian regime remain unresolved and no solution appears to be on the horizon. The most fundamental reason for this is the increased economic and political pressures the Iranian bourgeoisie has imposed on the working class in the pursuit of its imperialist aims. The movement taking place following the 2009 Iranian elections can well be described as the beginning of the social events making up the so-called Arab Spring. While there was an effort to portray those who took to the streets and filled Valiasr Square as the followers of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, it was the workers and unemployed youth who clashed with the bourgeoisie's forces of repression (the Revolutionary Guard) in the streets of Tehran. The events taking place following the 10th Presidential Elections might have started because of the claims that Ahmedinejad had rigged the elections, but the discontent was based on different issues and ran much deeper, and soon started developing an antagonistic, class quality. Afterwards, when Moussavi, a bourgeois reformist, made a call to stay away from the streets, his efforts weren't taken seriously by the masses and was even answered with slogans such as “Death to compromisers!”. The greatest weakness of this spontaneous movement was that it lacked class demands and that the workers participated in the movement mostly as individuals. The workers filling the streets as such didn't have the organs which would shape their class identity and enable them to express themselves politically. There was only a single strike, which was limited to a single factory[4]. This movement still has an important potential in Iran nevertheless, and can reappear in a period of instability or harsher economic conditions. The experience of the workers’ councils in 1979 in Iran when the Shah was overthrown still carries important lessons for the Iranian working class.

It is also necessary to go into Iran's relationship to world capitalism, and the role it assumes within it. We can say that Iran's closest partner is Russia. A strategic partnership, based primarily on arms and nuclear energy, exists between the two countries. Unlike China, Russia is an energy producer and would benefit, up to a point, from tension in the Middle East that caused oil prices to rise. The construction of nuclear plants in Iran brought to the minds of many the possibility of the regime making nuclear weapons rather than merely producing energy. While this has meant that Russia has had to take a certain distance from Iran on the issue of nuclear energy, Iran remains the most important arms customer and strategic partner for Russia. Iran has signed a twenty-year energy agreement with its other partner, China. The relationship between these two countries has an entirely economic basis. China buys 22% of Iranian oil.[5] Buying Iranian oil for cheaper prices compared to the world market, China supplies its economy with strategic energy products. This situation has a very significant role to play in the Chinese economy which is based on cheap production costs.

The nuclear investments, the efforts to create its own arms technology and recent military drills in the Straits of Hormuz all show that Iran wants to couple its economic strength in the region with military power. This means being ready for a regional or an international war and having a say in the Middle East thanks to its military strength. The drill in the Straits of Hormuz can be regarded as an exercise in self-assertion against the US, Israel and other Arab countries, demonstrating Iran's military might in the strategically important Straits of Hormuz through which passes 40% of the world’s oil. Despite the sanctions of the US and the EU against Iranian petroleum, Iran further roused inter-imperialist tensions by threatening to close down the Straits altogether. The oil that passes through the Straits is an alternative to Iranian and Russian petroleum, in other words a rival. Such a tactic also increases the strategic importance of the Russian oil pipelines north of the Black Sea. This race for power built on oil transfer plays a key role in developments in the Middle East.

The fact that Iran has significant oil reserves and the potential to dominate the Strait of Hormuz enables it to find partners internationally. That said, while it appears to be a state which is strengthening its influence, Iran’s internal class dynamics are giving its ruling class sleepless nights and will continue to do so.

Turkey

Turkey said nothing when these social movements first appeared in the Arab world. However, it is necessary to point out from the start that it was Turkey that managed to make most profit out of the period of instability created by the North African events.

An examination of the relationship between Turkey and Syria and the phases it went through will help us see the background of the position it is adopting today. With its policy of zero conflict in foreign policy initiated in 2005, Turkey aimed to increase its political and economic influence in the region and in this framework it tried to improve its relations with Syria, which traditionally had been poor. These two bourgeois states which had chronic problems previously took steps to resolve them during the last ten years. The issues of the past began with the question of Hatay[6], continued with the water problems of Syria due to the dams built on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and the fact that the PKK[7] had its military camps in Syria for a long time.

The US occupation of first Afghanistan and then Iraq changed all the politics of the region. As the US  wantedTurkey to be more active in the region, a series of steps were taken to improve relations with Syria. State visits were organised, one of which occurred immediately after the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, an opponent of Syria. The Turkish bourgeoisie was to be the first to give international support to the Baath regime, which was isolated and in trouble regionally following the assassination. Evaluating the situation as an opportunity to increase its influence in the region, the Turkish bourgeoisie aided the Assad regime[8] in its days of hardship. Afterwards, relations were further improved with a series of diplomatic visits and gestures. This period was to witness the highest amount of diplomatic traffic between the two countries. Afterwards the “High Level Strategic Cooperation Council”, founded in 2009, included a series of economic, political and military joint investments and agreements. This council,  which saw the abolition of visa requirements between the two countries, joint military exercises, the application of a customs union and free trade, constituted a historic peak in the relations between Syria and Turkey. These agreements, creating the possibility of opening up into the Arab world, also gave Syria the possibility of opening up into Europe. Syria, an old enemy for Turkey, was a now a friend. This rapprochement was supposed to be based on a “Common history, common religion and common destiny”. This relationship lasted till the rebellion against Assad started. It was at this point that the Turkish bourgeoisie suddenly turned its back on Assad.

As the events in the Arab world spread to Syria, the Sunni Arab union against Assad came into being. Supporting this movement directly, Turkey left behind the happy days when the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and Assad spent their family holidays together. The formation of the Syrian National Council in Istanbul and the military officers that formed the Free Syrian Army taking refuge in Turkey were both developments which clearly showed that Assad’s opponents were being openly supported by Turkey. The reason for the new policy was Turkey’s intention to maintain its position as a power with a say in the region by supporting the dissidents, who it seemed would certainly come to power, in order to maintain the level of relations achieved in the Assad era. Yet it soon turned out that with Russia and China openly defending the Syrian regime, Assad wasn't going to be removed easily. Turkey therefore changed course and started trying to increase international pressure rather than making statements directly targeting the Assad regime. In order to pave the way for a possible NATO operation, Turkey became an active participant of the Friends of Syria Conference[9] and acted together with the Arab League. All these developments demonstrate that while Turkey generally tends to pursue a foreign policy suiting an ally of the United States in the Middle East, it is capable of acting on its own from time to time and having a say in regional power politics.

Besides, we can say that by strengthening its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood[10], which makes up a large part of the opposition to Assad, as part of its plans regarding the future of Syria, Turkey also intends to strengthen its hand with the parties with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Tunisia, which are certainly part of the same web.

As for the relationship between Turkey and Egypt: following Mubarak's fall from power, Turkey has made efforts to improve its relations with Egypt. We can say these relations have two aspects. The first one involves the imperialist tendencies of the Turkish bourgeoisie. The second is its effort to fill a role in the shaping of the new regime. Wanting to export its regime as well as its capital, the Turkish bourgeoisie is attempting to build ties to the Justice and Freedom Party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt through the ruling Justice and Development Party[11] in Turkey. When the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan took up an anti-Israel attitude over the “One Minute” crisis[12] and the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship which was part of a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza, he gained a certain popularity in the Arab world. After these populist policies, Erdogan toured Egypt, Tunisia and Libya with seven ministers and three hundred businessmen. These visits were built on the basis of the Justice and Development Party's secular Islamic model and Tayyip Erdogan's most prominent message both in Egypt and in Tunisia was that of secular Islam, or a Muslim but secular state. And the world press following this visit served up Erdogan's model as an alternative to Saudi Wahhabism and the Iranian Shiite regime. This of course was no coincidence. Tayyip Erdogan had stressed secular Islam in his speech in Tunisia, saying “A person isn't secular, a state is”. And the US had specifically stated that a Muslim country such as Turkey had a regime which was both secular and also parliamentarian. We have evaluated this phenomenon in the past.[13] It is necessary to stress again though that Turkey is indeed trying to strengthen its hand in the Middle East and in Egypt by exporting its own regime against Saudi Wahhabism and the Iranian Shiite regime.

At the same time, Western imperialist powers want the region to gain stability as soon as possible and they want the formation of regimes fully coherent with liberal capitalism which would keep the regions markets open to them, and the most appropriate example at hand is the Turkish model.

Syria on the Road to Civil War

Commentators thought that when the social events in Tunisia spread to Egypt, it was going to be difficult for Baath-type regimes to stand against such movements. Syria was included in the countries to be hit next. Assad was expected to stand down faced with the opposition. This did not happen however. Assad attempted to suppress the demonstrations which erupted in the town of Dera and expanded to cities such as Hama and Humus, shed a river of blood and still keeps doing so. The events which begun on March 15th, 2011 are still going on and no matter how long Assad is expected to last, how and when these events will end remains uncertain.

In order to understand the events in Syria more clearly, we need a better understanding of the ethnic and religious groups in the country, since those who defend the Assad regime as well as those who oppose it define themselves by their ethnic or religious identities. 55% of the Syrian population is made up of Sunni Muslim Arabs, while the Alawi Shiite Arabs make up 15% of the population and Christian Arabs make up another 15%. 10% of the population is made up of Sunni Kurds and the remaining 5% is made up of Druze, Circassians and Yezidi. There are also over two million Palestinian and Iraqi refuges living in Syria.[14]

The greater part of the opposition to the Assad regime is made up of Sunni Arabs. As for the Kurds who are in a key position with regards to the political balance in Syria, some of them support Assad while some are part of the anti-Assad Syrian National Council. The other ethnic groups support the current regime because they fear for their future under a different regime. The Nosairi Arabs, another important stratum, is the ethnic group which has dominated the Baath regime in Syria for years.

The first initiative against the Baath regime gathered under the name of the Syrian National Council. This organization, formed in Istanbul on August 23rd 2011, contains all the opponents of the Assad regime aside from a fraction of the Kurds.[15] Following the split among the Kurds who are in the most strategic region of Syria in regard to Turkey, Iran and Southern Kurdistan, some of the Kurds have joined this council. The main body of the council is made up of Sunni Arabs, who as we said make up the largest portion of the opposition to Assad. If we remember the fact that Syria is the country where the Muslim Brotherhood is strongest after Egypt, we can say that it is they who are leading the movement at the moment. Actually, this is not the first Sunni Arab uprising against the regime. In 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood rose up against Hafez el-Assad (Bashar el-Assad’s father) in a rebellion which was bloodily suppressed: between seventeen and forty thousand people were killed.[16] It is highly probable that this organization, which forms the crux of opposition to the Baath regime, will come to power following Assad’s overthrow. What makes this the strongest possibility is the fact that parties formed by the same organization in Tunisia and Egypt won the elections.

The General Secretary of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Mohammad Riad al-Shafka, stated in an interview that they could cooperate with global and regional forces in the framework of mutual interests, explaining the opinion of his organization about what they might do following the fall of Assad. In the same interview, al-Shafka states that they can't compromise with Assad under any conditions and there is a need to overthrow the regime, demonstrating that the war will continue to become more and more violent.

The Baath regime is supported by a non-negligible degree of ethnic and religious groups compared to the opposition groups. The largest of these is the Nosairi. The Assad regime is socially made up of this sect. The entire elite stratum, military structure and bureaucracy of the regime consists of Nosairi Arabs. In this sense, the Nosairi are in a privileged position in Syria. This privilege is both political and economic. An end to the Baath regime will put the Nosairi in a difficult situation: since members of this sect have had political power for so long and have maintained it using totalitarian methods, this has created deep enmities and will result in a hunt for revenge. For this reason, they will want to prevent Assad from standing down, even if he wants to do so himself. As for the Christians, the Druze, the Circassians and the Yezidi, they supported the Baath regime out of fear of the Islamic fundamentalism of the most likely candidates to replace Assad. However this situation could change overnight.

The Kurds are in a different position, and this position is a trump card of the Assad regime in the current reality. Until last May, the Syrian Kurds were forced to live in such conditions that they did not even have official medical clinics and their political representatives were imprisoned by the Baath regime. Although they had rebelled against the regime from time to time, these movements had either been suppressed or died down. An example of this was the events in the Kurdish town of Qamislo in 2004.[17] At the same time, different imperialist powers tried to use the Kurds against the Baath regime from time to time. Following the beginning of the events, Assad changed his attitude towards the Kurds and released Kurdish political prisoners. He even declared that an autonomous Kurdish government was to be founded in the North. There are two reasons why Assad became so important for the Kurds. The first is that eleven Kurdish parties formed the Kurdish National Assembly of Syria with the support of Massoud Barzani.[18] This pushed Assad to reaching an agreement with the Kurds, but also pushed some Kurds towards integrating into the Sunni Arab opposition. In response to this, Assad gave an amnesty to the leader of the Kurdish nationalist Democratic Unity Party (PYD) [19], Salih Muslim, enabling him to organize and speak at pro-government demonstrations. In short, Assad attempted to gain an influence over the Kurds and divide the opposition, and he partially succeeded.

However, the Democratic Unity Party (PYD) decided to boycott the elections on February 26th and announced that there was nothing for the Kurds in the new constitution. It can be said that through the direct or indirect representatives of the Syrian Kurdish bourgeoisie outside Syria, the KDP and the PKK are pushing to gain ground in the Kurdish region of Syria which is in a key location. Barzani wants to dominate the Syrian Kurds through the Syrian Kurdish National Assembly. And the PKK is  determining the politics of the Syrian Kurds through its relationship with the PYD, and is at the same time gaining strategic ground both against the Turkish bourgeoisie and its own Kurdish rivals, in particular Barzani.. It seems like the Kurds who had been oppressed by the Baath regime for years and years will have a role in determining its eventual future.

It is also necessary to mention Syria-Israel relations. The first point is regarding the Golan Heights[20]. The second is regarding the military presence and the political influence of Syria in Lebanon. These two bourgeois states have been at war over these two issues for years. Yet the beginning of the events in Syria complicated the relationship between Israel and Syria, since it is now said that the Israelis are negotiating with the Baath regime they were fighting against before, out of fear of the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power. Israel is extremely uncomfortable with Islamic regimes gaining power in the Middle East, and its attitude to the Assad regime has been significantly affected by this situation.

It is also necessary to look at how and to what extent the working class participated in the events in Syria. Of course, the working class did make up a significant portion of the masses in the streets. Yet the problem is that the Syrian workers did not even manage to put forward a reaction such as the one expressed by the workers in Tunisia or Egypt. Tragically, the Syrian workers expressed themselves through their ethnic or sectarian identities within the events. This puts in perspective what the events in Syria were based on. On the day the observers of the Arab League were to arrive in Syria, the opposition made a call for a general strike and later, aside from this call which was largely ignored, there actually was a one day general strike, yet again under the influence of the opposition. This was described as an act of civil disobedience: those who wanted the Assad regime gone did not have any class based demands. Other than that, pointing out that the participation of the employers and the shopkeepers in the strike was as great as that of the workers, if not more, should demonstrate clearly enough the nature of this strike. Aside from this the Syrian workers lacked any collective presence in the events whatsoever and sided either with Assad or with the opposition as individuals.

Although Bashar el-Assad declared there were to be reforms and elections, the new constitutional referendum was boycotted by the opposition, which shows that either the Baath regime will go down or the opposition will be suppressed following a bloody war. For there seems to be no room for reconciliation between the two bourgeois fractions. On the other hand, the Russian and Chinese support which Assad enjoys seems to have blocked a possible UN intervention. The fact that Russia, with its military base and arms market, and China with its energy investments, protect Syria on the international level is obviously related to the interests of these two states. Taking these relationships into consideration, we can say that Assad's departure won't be like that of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Although it was thought that with similar regimes going down one by one faced with mass demonstrations, Assad's regime would soon be torn into pieces, now it seems clear that in line with the desires of the Nosairi elite, Assad won't go down easily and the intensity of the civil war will escalate.

Egypt: A Market for Cheap Labor

Following the departure of Mubarak, it was announced that a new era had begun for Egypt. Yet Egypt, home to one of the most populous working classes of North Africa and the Middle East, remains unstable. The identity crisis of the bourgeoisie remains unresolved in Egypt and has heated up following the Port Said provocation and the more recent protests against Morsi.

The most important reason the North African events spread to Egypt was that the unemployment rate and the numbers of the population living under the poverty line were very high, as they were in Tunisia. 20% of Egypt's population lives in poverty, more than 10% of the population is unemployed according to the official figures, and more than 90% of the unemployed are young people. The official figures do not exactly reflect the truth, and the real rates are higher given wide-spread unofficial employment in countries like Egypt. The Egyptian economy already had some basic accumulation problems and has been further weakened by the deepening of the world economic crisis, so that growing unemployment and poverty rates paved the way for the downfall of Mubarak. The Egyptian bourgeoisie had tried to solve these structural problems previously with the Open Door Policy it adopted in 1974. By doing this, it took the road of closing the deficits created by its own capital with foreign investments. Yet due to political instability, it has not been able to improve matters much. Today, foreign capital investments remain as low as 6% of Egypt's GNP. By worsening unemployment and poverty, the Egyptian economy has further increased the burdens on the back of the working class and this resulted in the revolt of 2011. Nevertheless this situation didn't result in a generalized class movement.

The working class of Egypt is the most massive in the region. The existence of this mass of workers with such an important potential for struggle created an exceptional situation when they entered the movement, but the workers didn't take to the streets saying we will overthrow the bourgeoisie. This movement was limited to strikes of about fifty thousand workers and did not manage to decisively mark the Tahrir demonstrations with the seal of  the working class. Nor did they manage to escape from the axis of limited economic demands coupled with pro-democratic bourgeois demands. Of course there was no communist political intervention in the events. Obviously, even if there had been it is hard to say the result would be different; however it could have made a contribution towards the generalization of demonstrations  and strikes.

What will the economic policies of the post-Mubarak era be based on? Without a doubt the Egyptian bourgeoisie promises the working class another paradise of exploitation. As we have stated above, the Egyptian economy suffers from structural problems in the accumulation of capital. For a full integration into the world economy, only one thing is necessary: the extraction of surplus value. The process of shifting from agricultural to industrial production which begun in the Mubarak era will without a doubt continue when the new balance of forces within the bourgeoisie is established. Thanks to its cheap labor potential, the bourgeoisie will base the Egyptian economy on the intense exploitation of labour. The chances of the Egyptian economy to attract investments will increase if it offers cheap labor to the world labour market.

Another point which needs to be covered is the political competition among the bourgeois forces in Egypt. When the opponents of the Mubarak regime took over Tahrir Square, most of the bourgeois movements of today did not exist. These elements started appearing only after Mubarak's position was weakened. The greatest political structure in post-Mubarak Egypt is undoubtedly the Muslim Brotherhood. Another significant force is the radical Islamist Salafi movement with its increasing influence. It has to be said that the army still remains a major power in Egypt’s political life. In the first elections after Mubarak’s downfall, the Justice and Freedom Party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood got one third of the votes,,followed by the Salafiyyah who managed to get 25%. The Salafi are the more radical of the two Islamist organizations and a great majority of their votes came from the countryside. The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, is more moderate and pragmatic politically and economically. They even formed alliances with some secular parties in the elections. This shows that a bourgeois political force ready to serve untamed capitalism in foreign policy and internally alike in every way imaginable will be determining the lives of the Egyptian workers.

Workers ambiguously and irregularly raise their heads in the tides of Egyptian politics. One such incident was the recent events in Port Said. The provocation made during a football game resulted in the deaths of seventy four people. Pitting the fans of the two teams against each other -  even letting men armed with sticks and knives into the stadium and then locking the gates -  the police wanted to take revenge on the fan group Ultras Ahlawy[21]. Many scenarios were talked about in the wake of the provocation, and all the bourgeois forces tried to make use of the situation for their own interests. Voices saying the army should give power to the civilians were raised following the events. Yet it would be naïve to miss the fact that the real motive behind the provocation was the fight for power. Although the slogan of the Ultras Ahlawy who led the clashes against what happened  -  “A crime has been committed against the revolution and the revolutionaries. This crime will neither stop nor intimidate the revolutionaries!” -  sounds very much anti-system, the demands of the movement were limited and did not meet with a full-fledged echo in other parts of the working class.[22] There were calls for a general strike against the brutal repression of the demonstration at the hands of the army and among the demands raised in this call for a strike were “the Military Council to step down and justice for the martyrs of Egypt”. This situation, also reflected in the slogans in the streets, showed that nothing had changed for the working class.

In the aftermath of the demonstrations against Morsi’s assumption of special powers, we can say that this movement seems to have ended in a similarly confused way. The initial protests against Morsi, centred in Cairo in late 2012, certainly reflected very widespread social discontent as well as deepening distrust in the solutions offered by the new Muslim Brotherhood government. But the protest movement seems to have been dominated by the secular opposition, raising the spectre of the working class being caught up in a clash between rival bourgeois factions. The situation was further complicated by reports of strikes in the textile centre of Mahalla and of a mass meeting which declared the ‘independence’ of Mahalla from the Muslim Brotherhood regime. Some reports even talked about the “Mahalla Soviet”. But here again the influence of the bourgeois democratic opposition could be seen in the singing of the national anthem at the end of the meeting, while the call for a symbolic ‘independence’ reflects a lack of perspective: workers who are fighting for their own demands need above all to generalize their struggle to workers across the rest of the country, not cut themselves off behind the walls of localism.     Nevertheless, the working class in Egypt retains a huge potential for struggle and has not suffered any major defeat at the hands of its class enemy. It is very far from having spoken its last words in the situation.

To Conclude...

Although we said at the beginning that we won't go into this question in depth, we nonetheless feel it necessary to make a few comments on the question of the revolution. The social transformation we call the revolution is not merely a change of current governments or regimes; the revolution means the entire economic structure, the means of production tied to the relations of production and the form of property completely changing in every respect; it means the working class declaring its power in the form of the workers’ councils. Yet such a transformation has not taken place following the events in North Africa. Thus, referring to these movements as revolutions means either that there is no understanding of what the struggle of the proletariat is, or it betrays an ideologically bourgeois approach to the matter.

This is not to say that these movements were without value for the proletarian struggle. The events in North Africa inspired hundreds of thousands of proletarians in all parts of the world, from Spain to the United States, from Israel to Russia and from China to France. Besides, despite all its shortcomings, the experience of the struggle has been immensely important for the working classes of Tunisia and Egypt.

One of the most significant developments of the last year has been the development of social conflicts inside Israel and Palestine. The massive street demonstrations in Israel in the summer of 2011 were provoked by social questions such as housing, as the demands of both the war economy and the economic crisis are making daily life increasingly difficult for the majority of the Israeli population. The protests explicitly identified themselves with the movements in the Arab world, raising slogans like “Mubarak, Assad, Netanyahu are all the same” and calling for affordable housing for both Jews and Arabs. Despite difficulties in posing the thorny questions of the war and the occupation, this movement clearly contained the embryo of internationalism[23]. And it has been echoed more recently by the demonstrations and strikes against the rising cost of living on the West Bank, where Palestinian workers, unemployed, pupils and students ruthlessly criticised the Palestinian authorities and clashed with the Palestinian police. For all their weaknesses, these movements have reaffirmed that struggling around social and class issues is the premise for the unification of the proletariat across and against national, imperialist conflicts[24].

But this is more a promise for the future: the weight of nationalism remains extremely strong and will have been reinforced among both Israeli and Palestinian populations by the recent military attacks on Gaza. So while the inspiration and the experience coming from these struggles are in themselves victories of sorts , the practical and the immediate situation for the proletariat of North Africa and the Middle East can be described as nothing less than grim.

On both sides of the conflict between the regime and the opposition in Syria are the local bourgeois powers, but also the regional and global bourgeois powers with their political relations and interests. The current reality pushes the US, EU, Israel and Turkey into one camp while Russia and China seem to be taking positions with Iran and Shiite Iraq. And while this is the general perspective, all the forces aside from Iran and Israel might change attitudes if their interests demand it. Besides, Israel's overtures towards the Syrian government show that even these states are flexible to an extent.

This picture shows that the regional and global powers are preparing for a ruthless imperialist conflict. In Syria today, proletarians are tearing each others’ guts out by their division into sects and ethnicities. There is no doubt that this is the characteristic that all wars in this region will assume. On the other hand, the formation of a regime with strong Islamic tendencies is highly possible in Egypt and this can further inflame the situation in the region and yet another shift of the conflicting bourgeois forces might happen again. Nevertheless, while all these conflicts taking place or to take place in the future represent destruction for the working class, the potential for the destruction of this parasitic system feeding on the exploitation of wage-labor remains intact. The working class needs international struggle. And this is precisely where we've tried to express ourselves and attempted to contribute to the class struggle.

Ekrem


[2]    Also known as Alawites, Alawi Shiites and Ansaris, a somewhat unorthodox sect deriving from Shia Islam. Shia or Shiites refers to the Arabic followers of Ali, the prophet Mohamed's cousin and son-in-law and the Fourth Caliph of Islam. The main division in Islam is between the followers of Ali (the Shia) and the Muslim majority following Muawiyah (the Sunni), the first Caliph of the Ummayad Dynasty.

[3]    The Arab Socialist Baath Party, the ruling party of Syria, has numerous sections in different regions of the Arab world and has its roots in the 1966 split in the Baath movement which was divided in two, one faction being led by Syria and the other being led by Iraq.

[5]     As of 2011 Iranian oil accounts for about 11% of Chinese energy needs – not an insignificant amount (moreover, it also accounts for 9% of Japan's energy needs; South Korea and Europe are, or were, also major importers). See https://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-01-19/sanctioning-iranian-oi...

[6]    Turkey annexed the Hatay province including the cities of Antakya (Antioch) and Iskenderun (Alexandretta) in 1938-39 from Syria as a result of a series of manouvers.

[7]    Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan or the Kurdistan Workers Party, a former-Stalinist Kurdish nationalist organization mainly active in Turkey but also operating in Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan.

[8]    The dynastic rulers of the Syrian Baath regime, the Assad family, have been ruling Syria since 1970. Hafez Assad remained in power until  his death in 2000, when he was succeeded by his son Bashar Assad who is still the ruler of Syria.

[9]    A pro-Syrian opposition gathering held in Tunisia.

[10]  One of the world's oldest and largest Sunni Islamist political movements, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 as a fascist party. Today, the Muslim Brotherhood is on the moderate and liberal side of the Islamic movement and is banned neither in the United States nor in the United Kingdom. The organization has been very popular with its mixture of charity with political activism, and exists in the entire Arab world as well as several other African and Western countries.

[11]  A center-right populist “Muslim-democratic” party comparable to the Christian Democratic parties of Europe

[12]  Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan left the Davos summit in 2009 after interrupting the moderator by repeatedly saying “One Minute” in order to speak against the Israeli Shimon Peres.

[17]  In March 2004, during a chaotic soccer match, a riot started when some people started raising separatist Kurdish flags, hailing Barzani and Talabani, turning the match into a political conflict. The riot expanded out of the stadium and weapons were used against police and civilians of non-Kurdish background. In the aftermath, at least 30 Kurds were killed as the security services re-took the city.

[18]  The President of the Kurdistan Region Government in Iraq, Massoud Barzani, is the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the son of the leader of the Kurdish nationalist peshmerga guerillas and previous chairman of the KDP, Mullah Mistefa Barzani.

[19]  Partiya Yekitîya Demokrat, or the Democratic Unity Party, is a Syrian Kurdish political party affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK.

[20]  While internationally recognized as Syrian territory, the Golan Heights have been occupied and administered by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

[21]  Ultras Ahalwy are a fan group of the Cairo football team Al Ahly who have been very active in the movement leading up to the downfall of Mubarak and afterwards.

 

Geographical: 

People: 

Recent and ongoing: 

Rubric: 

Middle East and North Africa

Women's role in the emergence of human solidarity

In the first part of this article, published in the International Review n°150, we considered the role of women in the emergence of culture among our species Homo sapiens, on the basis of a critique of Christophe Darmangeat’s book Le communisme primitif n’est plus ce qu’il était.[1] In this second, and final, part we propose to examine what we feel to be one of the most fundamental problems posed by primitive communist society: how did the evolution of the genus Homo produce a species whose very survival is based on mutual confidence and solidarity, and more particularly what was woman’s role in this process. In doing so, we are basing ourselves substantially on the work of the British anthropologist Chris Knight.

Women’s role in primitive society

What then, according to Christophe Darmangeat, is women’s role and situation in primitive society? We cannot here repeat the entire argument contained in his book illustrated by a solid knowledge of the ethnography and striking examples. We will limit ourselves to a summary of its conclusions.

A first observation, which might seem to be obvious but in reality is not, is that the sexual division of labour is a universal constant of human society until the appearance of capitalism. Capitalism remains a fundamentally patriarchal society, based on exploitation (which includes sexual exploitation, the sex industry being one of the most profitable in modern times). Nonetheless, by directly exploiting the labour of women workers, and by developing machinery to a point where physical strength no longer plays a significant part in the labour process, capitalism has destroyed the division between “masculine” and “feminine” roles in social labour; in doing so, it has laid the foundations for a true liberation of women in communist society.[2]

The situation of women varies enormously among the different primitive societies which anthropologists have been able to study: in some cases, women suffer from an oppression which can bear more than a passing resemblance to class oppression, while in others they benefit not only from social esteem, but, hold a real social power. Where such power exists, it is based on the possession of rights over production, amplified by society’s religious and ritual life: to take just one example, Bronislav Malinowski (in Argonauts of the Western Pacific) tells us that the women of the Trobriand Islands not only have a monopoly on the work of horticulture (of great importance in the islands’ economy), but also over certain forms of magic, including those considered to be the most dangerous.[3]

However, while the sexual division of labour can cover very different situations from one people and mode of existence to another, there is one rule which is applied almost without exception: everywhere, it is men alone who have the right to bear arms and who therefore have a monopoly of warfare. As a result, they also have a monopoly over what one might call “foreign relations”. As social inequality began to develop, first with food storage then from the Neolithic onwards with full-blown agriculture and the emergence of private property and social classes, this specific situation of men allowed them little by little to dominate the whole of social life. In this sense, Engels was doubtless right to say in Origins of the family that “The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male”.[4] Nonetheless, one needs to avoid a too schematic view here, since even the first civilisations are far from being homogeneous in this respect. A comparative study of several early civilisations[5] shows us a broad spectrum: while the situation of women in meso-American and Inca societies was an unenviable one, amongst the Yoruba in Africa for example, women not only owned property and exercised a monopoly over certain industries, they also carried out large-scale trade on their own account and could even command diplomatic and military expeditions.

The question of mythology

Up to now we have remained, with Darmangeat, in the domain of the studies of “historically known” primitive societies (in the sense that they have been described by literate societies, from the ancient world to modern anthropology). This can teach us about the situation since the invention of writing in about the 4th millenium BCE, at best. But what are we to say of the 200,000 years of anatomically modern Man’s existence that precede it? How are we to understand the crucial moment when nature gave way to culture as the main determining factor in human behaviour, and how are genetic and cultural elements combined in human society? To answer this question, a purely empirical view of known societies is clearly inadequate.

One of the striking aspects of the study of early civilisations cited above, is that however varied the image they present of women’s condition, they all have legends which refer to women as chiefs, sometimes identified with goddesses. All of them have also seen a decline in women’s situation over time. One is tempted to see a general rule here: the further we go back in time, the more social authority women possess.

This impression is confirmed if we consider more primitive societies. On every continent, we find similar or even identical myths: once, women held power but since then men have stolen it, and now it is they who rule. Everywhere, women’s power is associated with the most powerful magic of all: the magic based on women’s monthly cycle and their menstrual blood, even to the point where we often encounter male rituals where men imitate menstruation.[6]

What can we deduce from this ubiquitous reality? Can we conclude that it represents a historical reality, and that there once existed a first society where women had a leading, if not necessarily a ruling role?

For Darmangeat, the answer is unequivocal and negative: “the idea that when myths speak of the past, they necessarily speak of a real past, however deformed, is an extremely bold, not to say untenable hypothesis” (p167). Myths “tell stories, which have meaning only in relation to the present situation which they have the function of justifying. The past of which they speak is invented solely in order to fulfil this objective” (p173).

This argument poses two problems.

The first, is that Darmangeat claims to be a marxist who remains faithful to Engels’ method while updating his conclusions. Yet while Engels’ Origins of the family is based extensively on Lewis Morgan, it also attributes considerable importance to the work of the Swiss jurist Johann Bachofen, who was the first to use mythology as a basis for understanding the relations between the sexes in the distant past. According to Darmangeat, Engels “is clearly cautious in his adoption of Bachofen’s theory of matriarchy (...) although he abstains from criticising the Swiss jurist’s theory, Engels only gives it a very qualified support. There is nothing surprising here: given his own analysis of the reasons for one sex’s domination of the other, Engels could hardly accept that before the development of private property, men’s domination over women was preceded by women’s domination over men; he envisaged the prehistoric relation between the sexes much more as a certain form of equality” (pp150-151).

Engels may well have remained prudent as to Bachofen’s conclusions, but he has no hesitation as to Bachofen’s method, which uses mythological analysis to uncover historical reality: in his Preface to the 4th edition of Origins of the family (in other words, having had plenty of time to restructure his work and include any corrections he thought necessary), Engels takes up Bachofen’s analysis of the Orestes myth (in particular the version of the Greek tragedian Aescylus), and concludes with this comment: “This new but undoubtedly correct interpretation of the Oresteia is one of the best and finest passages in the whole book (...) [Bachofen] was the first to replace the vague phrases about some unknown primitive state of sexual promiscuity by proofs of the following facts: that abundant traces survive in old classical literature of a state prior to monogamy among the Greeks and Asiatics when not only did a man have sexual intercourse with several women, but a woman with several men, without offending against morality (...) Bachofen did not put these statements as clearly as this, for he was hindered by his mysticism. But he proved them; and in 1861 that was a real revolution”.

This brings us to the second issue: how are myths to be explained? Myths are part of material reality just as much as any other phenomenon: they are therefore themselves determined by that reality. Darmangeat proposes two possible determinants: either they are simply “stories” invented by men to justify their domination over women, or they are irrational: “During prehistory, and for a long time afterwards, natural or social phenomena were universally and inevitably interpreted through a magico-religious prism. This does not mean that rational thought did not exist; it means that, even when it was present, it was always combined to a certain extent with an irrational discourse: the two were not perceived as different, still less as incompatible” (p319). What more need be said? All these myths built around the mysterious powers conferred by menstrual blood and the moon, not to mention women’s original power, are merely “irrational” and so outside the field of scientific explanation. At best, Darmangeat is ready to accept that myths must satisfy the human mind’s requirement of coherence;[7] but if that is the case, then unless we accept a purely idealist explanation in the original sense of the term, we must answer another question: where does this “demand” come from? For Lévi-Strauss, the source of the remarkable unity of primitive societies’ myths throughout the Americas was to be found in the innate structure of the human mind, hence the name “structuralism” given to his work and theory;[8] Darmangeat’s “requirement of coherence” looks like a pale reflection of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism.

This leaves us without an any explanation on two crucial points: why do myths take the form they do, and how are we to explain their universality?

If they are no more than “stories” invented to justify male domination, then why invent such unlikely ones? If we take the Bible, the Book of Genesis gives us a perfectly logical explanation for male domination: God created men first! Logical that is, as long as we are prepared to accept the unlikely notion, which anyone can see contradicted year in year out, that woman came out of the body of man. Why then invent a myth which not only claims that women once held power, but which is accompanied by the demand that men continue to carry out the rites associated with this power, to the point of imagining male menstruation? This practice, attested throughout the world amongst hunter-gatherers where male domination is powerful, consists of men making their own blood flow in certain important rituals, by lacerating their members and in particular the penis, in a conscious imitation of menstrual bleeding.

Were this kind of ritual limited to one people, or one group of peoples, one might accept that this was nothing but an accidental and “irrational” invention. But when we find it spread throughout the world, on every continent, then if we are to remain true to historical materialism we must seek its social determinants.

At all events, it seems to us necessary from the materialist standpoint to take the myths and rituals which structure society seriously as sources of knowledge about it, something that Darmangeat fails to do.

The origin of women’s oppression

We can summarise Darmangeat’s thinking as follows: at the origins of women’s oppression lies the sexual division of labour, which systematically reserves to men big game hunting and the use of arms. However interesting his work, this seems to us to leave two questions unanswered.

It seems obvious enough that with the emergence of class society, based necessarily on exploitation and so on oppression, the monopoly of weapons is almost a self-sufficient explanation for male domination in it (at least in the long term; the overall process is doubtless more complex than that). Similarly, it seems a priori reasonable to suppose that the monopoly of weapons played a part in the emergence of male domination contemporaneous with the emergence of social inequalities prior to the appearance of class society properly so-called.

By contrast, and this is our first question, Darmangeat is much less clear why the sexual division of labour should reserve this role to men, since he himself tells us that “physiological reasons (...) have difficulty explaining why women were excluded from the hunt” (p314-315). Nor is it clear why the hunt, and the food which is its product, should be more prestigious than the product of gathering or of gardening, especially when the latter is the major source of social resources.

More fundamentally still, where does the first division of labour come from, and why should it be sexually based? Here we find Darmangeat losing himself in his own imagination: “We can imagine that even an embryonic specialisation allowed the human species to acquire a greater effectiveness than if its members had continued to exercise every activity without distinction (...) We can also imagine that this specialisation operated in the same direction, by strengthening social ties in general, and ties within the family group in particular”.[9] Well of course, “we can imagine”... but is this not rather what was supposed to be demonstrated?

As for the question “why the division of labour came about on the basis of sex”, for Darmangeat this “does not seem very difficult. It seems obvious enough that for the members of prehistoric society, this was the most immediately obvious difference”.[10] We can object here that while sexual differences must certainly have seemed “immediately obvious” to the first human beings, this is not a self-sufficient explanation for the emergence of a sexual division of labour. Primitive societies abound in classifications, notably those based on totems. Why should the division of labour not be based on totemism? This is obviously a mere flight of fancy – but no more so than Darmangeat’s hypothesis. More seriously, Darmangeat makes no mention of another extremely obvious difference, and one which is everywhere important in archaic societies: that of age.

When it comes down to it, Darmangeat’s book – despite its rather ostentatious title – does not enlighten us much. Women’s oppression is based on the sexual division of labour. So be it. But when we ask where this division comes from, we are “reduced to mere hypotheses, we can imagine that certain biological constraints, probably linked to pregnancy and breast-feeding, provided the physiological substrate for the sexual division of labour and the exclusion of women from the hunt” (p322).[11]

From genes to culture

At the end of his argument, Darmangeat leaves us with the following conclusion: at the origin of women’s oppression lies the sexual division of labour and despite everything, this division was itself a formidable step forward in labour productivity, even if its origins lie hidden in a far-off and inaccessible past.

Darmangeat seeks here to remain faithful to the marxist “model”. But what if the problem has been posed back to front? If we consider the behaviour of those primates that are closest to man, chimpanzees in particular, we find that it is only the males that hunt – the females are too busy feeding and looking after their young (and protecting them from the males: we should not forget that male primates often practice infanticide of other males’ children in order to gain access to the mother for their own reproductive needs). There is thus nothing specifically human about the “division of labour” between males who hunt and females who do not. The problem – what demands explanation – is not why the hunt is reserved to the male of Homo sapiens, but why it is the male sapiens, and only the male sapiens, that shares the produce of his hunt. What is striking, when we compare Homo sapiens to its primate cousins, is the range of often very strict rules and taboos, to be found from the burning deserts of Australia to the Arctic ice, which require the collective consumption of the product of the hunt. The hunter does not have the right to consume his own product, he must bring it back to camp for distribution to others. The rules that govern this distribution vary considerably from one people to another, but their existence is universal.

It is also worth pointing out that Homo sapiens’ sexual dimorphism is a good deal less than that of Homo erectus, which in the animal world is generally indicative of more equal relations between the sexes.

Everywhere, sharing food and collective meals are at the foundations of the first societies. Indeed, the shared meal has survived to modern times: even today it is impossible to imagine any great moment in life (birth, marriage, or burial) without a collective meal. When people come together in simple friendship, as often as not it is around a common meal, whether it be round the barbecue in Australia or around the restaurant table in France.

This sharing of food, which seems to come down to us from time immemorial is an aspect of human collective and social life very different from that of our far-off ancestors. We are confronted here with what the Darwinologist Patrick Tort has called the “reverse effect” of evolution, or what Chris Knight has described as a “priceless expression of the ‘selfishness’ of our genes”: the mechanisms described by Darwin and Mendel, and confirmed by modern genetics, have generated a social life where solidarity plays a central part, whereas these same mechanisms work through competition.[12]

This question of sharing seems fundamental to us, but it is only a part of a much broader scientific problem: how are we to explain the process which transformed a species whose changes in behaviour were determined by the slow rhythm of genetic evolution, into our own, whose behaviour – although of course it is still founded on our genetic heritage – changes thanks to the much more rapid evolution of culture? And how are we to explain that a mechanism based on competition has created a species which can only survive through solidarity: the mutual solidarity of women in childbirth and childrearing, the solidarity of men in the hunt, the solidarity of the hunters towards society as a whole when they contribute the product of the chase, the hale in solidarity with the old or injured no longer able to hunt or to find their own food, the solidarity of the old towards the young, in whom they inculcate not only the knowledge of nature and the world vital for survival, but the social, historical, ritual and mythical knowledge which make possible the survival of a structured society. This seems to us the fundamental problem posed by the question of “human nature”.

This passage from one world to another took place during a crucial period of several hundred thousand years, a period which we could indeed describe as “revolutionary”.[13] It is closely linked to the evolution of the human brain in size (and presumably in structure, though this is obviously much more difficult to detect in the archaeological record). The increase in brain size poses a whole series of problems for our evolving species, not the least of which is its sheer energy consumption: about 20% of an individual’s total energy intake, an enormous proportion.

Although the species undoubtedly gained from the process of encephalisation, it posed a real problem for the females. The size of the head means that birth must occur earlier, otherwise the baby could not pass through the mother’s pelvis. This in turn implies a much longer period of dependence in the infant born “prematurely” compared to other primates; the growth of the brain demands more nourishment, both structural and energetic (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates). We seem to be confronted with an insoluble enigma, or rather an enigma which nature solved only after a long period during which Homo erectus lived, and spread out of Africa, but apparently did not change very much either in behaviour or in morphology. And then comes a period of rapid evolution which sees an increase in brain size and the appearance of all the specifically human forms of behaviour: language, symbolic culture, art, the intensive use of tools and their great variety, etc.

There is another enigma to go with this one. We have noted the radical changes in the behaviour of the male Homo sapiens, but the physiological and behavioural changes in the female are no less remarkable, especially from the standpoint of reproduction.

There is a striking difference in this respect between the female Homo sapiens and other primates. Amongst the latter (and especially those that are the closest to us), the female generally signals to males in the clearest possible way her period of ovulation (and hence of greatest fecundity): genital organs highly visible, a “hot” behaviour especially towards the dominant male, a characteristic odour. Amongst humans, quite the opposite holds true: the sexual organs are hidden and do not change appearance during ovulation, while the human female is not even aware of being “on heat”.

At the other end of the ovulation cycle, the difference between Homo sapiens and other primates is equally striking: an abundant and visible menstrual flow, the contrary to chimpanzees for example. Since loss of blood implies a loss of energy, natural selection should in principle operate against abundant blood flow; it could be explained by some selected advantage – but what?

Another remarkable characteristic of human menstrual flow is its periodicity and synchronicity. Many studies have shown the ease with which groups of women synchronise their periods, and Knight reproduces a table of ovulation periods among primates which shows that only the human female has a period that perfectly matches the lunar cycle: why? Or is it just a coincidence?

One might be tempted to put all this to one side as irrelevant in explaining the appearance of language, and human specificity in general. Such a reaction, moreover, would be in perfect conformity with current ideology, which sees women’s periods as something, if not exactly taboo, at least somewhat negative: think of all those advertisements for “feminine hygiene” products which boast their ability to render the period invisible. To discover, in reading Knight’s book, the immense importance of menstrual blood and everything associated with it in primitive human society, is thus all the more startling for us as members of modern society. And the belief in the enormous power – for good and evil – of women’s periods, seems to be a universal phenomenon. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that menstrual flows “regulate” everything, up to and including the harmony of the universe.[14] Even among peoples where there is strong male domination, and where everything is done to devalue women, their periods inspire fear in men. Menstrual blood is considered “polluting” to a point which seems barely sane – and this is precisely a sign of its power. One is even tempted to conclude that men’s violence towards women is directly in proportion to the fear that women inspire in men.[15]

The universality of this belief is significant and demands explanation. We can imagine three possible ones:

  • It might be the result of structures set in the human mind, as Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism suggested. Today, we would say rather that it is set in the human genetic heritage – but this seems to contradict everything that is known about genetics.
  • It might be put down to the principle of “same cause, same effects”. Societies that are similar from the point of view of their relations of production and their technique produce similar myths.
  • The similarity of myths might, finally, be put down to a common historical origin. If this were the case, given that the different societies where menstrual myths are expressed are widely separated geographically, the common origin must belong to a far distant past.

Knight favours the third explanation: he does indeed see the universal mythology around menstruation as something that is very old, going right back to the very origins of humanity.

The emergence of culture

How are these different questions linked together? What can be the link between women’s menstruation and collective hunting? And between the two and other emergent phenomena: language, symbolic culture, a society based on shared rules? These questions seem to us fundamental because all these “evolutions” are not isolated phenomena, but elements in a single process leading from Homo erectus to ourselves. The hyper-specialisation of modern science has the great disadvantage (largely recognised by scientists themselves) of making it very difficult to understand an entire process which cannot be encompassed by any single specialisation.

What we find most remarkable in Knight’s work is precisely this effort to bring together genetic, archaeological, paleontological and anthropological data in a “theory of everything” for human evolution, analogous to the efforts of the theoretical physicists who have given us super-string or quantum loop gravity theory.[16]

Let us therefore attempt to summarise this theory, known today as “sex strike theory”. To simplify and schematise, Knight hypothesises a modification in the behaviour, first of Homo females confronted by the difficulties of childbirth and childrearing: the females turn away from the dominant male to give their attention to secondary males in a sort of mutual help pact. The males accept to leave the females for the hunt, and to bring back the product of the chase; in return, they have an access to females, and therefore a chance to reproduce, that was denied to them by the dominant male.

This modification in the behaviour of the males – which at the outset, let us remember, is subject to the laws of evolution – is only possible under certain conditions, and two in particular: on the one hand, it is not possible for the males to find an access to females elsewhere; on the other, the males must be confident that they will not be supplanted in their absence. These are therefore collective behaviours. The females – who are the motive force in this evolutionary process – must maintain a collective refusal of sex to the males. This collective refusal is signalled visibly to the males, and other females by the menstrual flow, synchronised on a “universal” and visible event: the lunar cycle and the tides which accompany it in the semi-aquatic environment of the Rift valley where mankind first appeared.

Solidarity is born: amongst the females first of all, then also amongst the males. Collectively excluded from access to the females, they can put into practice an increasingly organised collective hunt of large game, which demands a capacity for planning and solidarity in the face of danger.

Mutual confidence is born from the collective solidarity within each sex, but also between the sexes: the females confident in male participation in childrearing, the males confident that they will not be excluded from the chance to reproduce.

This theoretical model allows us to resolve the enigma that Darmangeat leaves unanswered: why are women absolutely excluded from the hunt? According to Knight’s model, this exclusion can only be absolute, since if some females – and in particular those unencumbered by any young – were to join the hunt with the males, then the latter would have access to fertile females and would no longer be forced to share the product of the hunt with nursing females and their young. For the model to function, the females are obliged to maintain a total solidarity amongst themselves. From this starting point, it is possible to understand the taboo which maintains an absolute separation between women and the hunt, and which is the foundation for all the other taboos that revolve around menstruation and the blood of the hunt, and which forbid women from handling any cutting tool. The fact that this taboo, from being a source of women’s strength and solidarity, should in other circumstances become a source of social weakness and oppression, may seem paradoxical at first sight: in reality, it is a striking example of a dialectical reversal, one more illustration of the deeply dialectical logic of all evolutionary and historical change. [17]

The females who are most successful in imposing this new behaviour amongst themselves, and on the males, leave more descendants. The process of encephalisation can continue. The way is open toward the development of the human.

Mutual solidarity and confidence are thus born, not from a sort of beatific mysticism but on the contrary from the pitiless laws of evolution.

This mutual confidence is a precondition for the emergence of a true capacity for language, which depends on the mutual acceptance of common rules (rules as basic as the idea that a single word has the same meaning for me as it does for you, for example), and of a human society based on culture and law, no longer subjected to the slow rhythm of genetic evolution, but able to adapt much more rapidly to new environments. Logically, one of the first elements of the new culture is the transfer from the genetic into the cultural domain (if we can put it like this) of everything that made the emergence of this new social form possible: the most ancient myths and rituals thus turn around women’s menstruation (and the moon which guarantees their synchronisation), and its role in the regulation not only of the social but also the natural order.

A few difficulties, and a possible continuation

As Knight says himself, his theory is a sort of “origins myth” which remains a hypothesis. This obviously is not a problem in itself: without hypothesis and speculation, there would be no scientific advance; it is religion, not science, which tries to establish certain truths.

For ourselves, we would like to raise two objections to the narrative that Knight proposes.

The first concerns elapsed time. When Blood Relations was published in 1991, the first signs of artistic expression and therefore of the existence of a symbolic culture capable of supporting the myths and rituals which are at the heart of his hypothesis, dated back a mere 60,000 years. The first remains of modern humans dated back about 200,000 years: so what happened during the 140,000 “missing” years? And what could we envisage might be the precursor of a full-blown symbolic culture, for example among our immediate ancestors?

This does not so much put the theory into question, as pose a problem which calls for further research. Since the 1990s, excavations in South Africa (Blombos Caves, Klasies River, Kelders) seem to have pushed back the use of art and abstract symbolism to 80,000 or even 140,000 BCE;[18] as far as Homo erectus is concerned, the remains discovered at Dmanisi in Georgia in the early 2000s and dated back to about 1.8 million years, seem already to indicate a certain level of solidarity: one individual lived for several years without teeth, which suggests that others helped him to eat.[19] At the same time, their tools were still primitive and according to the specialists they did not yet practice big game hunting. This should not surprise us: Darwin in his day had already established that human characteristics such as empathy, the appreciation of beauty, and friendship, all exist in the animal realm, even if at a rudimentary level when compared to mankind.

Our second objection is more important and concerns the “motive force” pushing towards the increase in human brain size. Knight is more concerned with determining how this increase was possible, and so this question is not a central one for him: according to his interview at our congress, he has basically adopted the “increasing social complexity” theory, of human beings having to adapt to life in ever larger groups (this is the theory put forward by Robin Dunbar,[20] and also taken up by J-L Dessalles in his book Why we speak, whose arguments he presented at our previous congress). We cannot go into the details here, but this theory seems to us not without its difficulties. After all, the size of primate groups may vary from a dozen in the case of gorillas, to several hundred for Hamadryas baboons: it would therefore be necessary both to show why the hominins had social needs over and above those of baboons (this is far from being achieved), and to demonstrate that hominins lived in ever larger groups, up to the “Dunbar number” for example.[21]

On the whole, we prefer to tie the process of encephalisation and the development of language to the growing importance of “culture” (in the broadest sense) in human ability to adapt to the environment. There is often a tendency to think of culture solely in material terms (stone tools, etc.). But when we study the lives of hunter-gatherers in our own epoch, we are more than anything impressed by their profound knowledge of their natural surroundings: animal behaviour, the properties of plants, etc. Any hunting animal “knows” the behaviour of its prey, and can adapt to it up to a certain point. With human beings, however, this knowledge is not genetic but cultural, and must be transmitted from generation to generation. While mimicry may allow the transmission of a certain limited degree of “culture” (monkeys using a stick to fish for termites for example), it seems obvious that the transmission of human (or indeed proto-human) knowledge demands something more than mimicry.

One may also suggest that the more culture replaces genetics in determining our behaviour, the transmission of what we might call “spiritual” culture (myth, ritual, the knowledge of sacred places, etc.) takes on ever greater importance in maintaining group cohesion. This in turn leads us to link the development of language to another external sign, anchored in our biology: women’s “early” menopause followed by a long period where they are not reproductively active, which is another characteristic that human females do not share with their primate cousins.[22] How then could an “early” menopause have been favoured by natural selection, despite apparently limiting female reproductive potential? The most likely hypothesis seems to be that the menopausal female helps her daughter to better ensure the survival of her own grand-children, and therefore of her own genetic heritage.[23]

The problems we have just discussed concern the period covered by Blood Relations. But there is another difficulty which concerns the period of known history. It is obvious that the primitive societies of which we have knowledge (and which Darmangeat describes) are very different from Knight’s hypothetical first human societies. Just to take the example of Australia, whose aboriginal society is one of the most primitive known on the technical level, the persistence of myths and ritual practices which attribute great importance to menstruation goes side by side with complete male domination over women. If we suppose that Knight’s hypothesis is broadly correct, then how are we to explain what appears to be a veritable “male counter-revolution”? In his Chapter 13 (p449), Knight proposes a hypothesis to explain this: he suggests that it is the disappearance of the megafauna – species such as the giant Wombat – and a period of dry weather at the end of the Pleistocene, which disturbed hunting patterns and put an end to the abundance which he considers to be the material condition for primitive communism’s survival. In 1991, Knight himself wrote that this hypothesis remains to be tested in the archaeological record, and his own investigation is limited to Australia. At all events, it seems to us that this problem opens up a wide field of investigation which would allow us to envisage a real history of the longest period of humanity’s existence: from our origins to the invention of agriculture.[24]

The communist future

How can the study of human origins clarify our view of a future communist society? Darmangeat tells us that capitalism is the first human society which makes it possible to imagine an end to the sexual division of labour, and equality for women – an equality which is today set in law in a few countries, but which is nowhere an equality in fact: “while capitalism has neither improved nor worsened women’s lot as such, it is by contrast the first system which has made it possible to pose the question of their equality with men; and although it has proved unable to make this equality a reality, it has nonetheless brought together the elements which will bring it into being”.[25]

Two criticisms seem to us in order here: the first is that it ignores the immense importance of women’s integration into the world of wage labour. Despite itself, capitalism has given working-class women, for the first time in the history of class society, a real material independence from men, and hence the possibility of taking part on an equal footing with men in the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat, and so of humanity as a whole.

The second concerns the very notion of equality. This notion is stamped with the mark of the democratic ideology inherited from capitalism, and it is not the goal of a communist society which will, on the contrary, recognise the differences between individuals and – to use Marx’s expression – “inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”.[26] Now, outside the domain of science fiction, women have both an ability and a need that men will never have: to give birth.[27] This capacity has to be exercised, or human society has no future, but it is also a physical function and therefore a need for women.[28] A communist society must therefore offer every woman who desires it the possibility of giving birth with joy, in confidence that her child will be welcomed into the human community.

Here perhaps we can draw a parallel with the evolutionist vision that Knight proposes. Proto-women launched the process of evolution towards Homo sapiens and symbolic culture, because they could no longer raise their children alone: they had to oblige the males to provide material aid to childbearing and the education of the young. In doing so, they introduced into human society the principle of solidarity among women occupied by their children, among men occupied by the hunt, and between men and women sharing their joint social responsibilities.

Today, we are confronting a situation where capitalism reduces us more and more to the status of atomised individuals, and childbearing women suffer most as a result. Not only does the “rule” of capitalist society reduce the family to its smallest expression (mother, father, children), the general disintegration of social life means that more and more women find themselves bringing up even their very young children alone, and the need to find work often distances them from their own mothers, sisters, or aunts who once used to be the natural support network for any woman with small children. The “world of work” is pitiless for women with children, obliged to wean their infants after a few months at best (depending on the maternity holidays available, if any) and to leave them with a nurse, or – if they are unemployed – to find themselves cut off from social life and forced to look after their babies alone on the most limited resources.

In a sense, working class women today find themselves in a situation analogous to their distant ancestors – and only a revolution can improve their situation. Just as the “revolution” that Knight hypothesises allowed women to surround themselves with the social support first of other women, then of men, for the bearing and education of their children, so the communist revolution to come must put at its heart the support for women’s childbearing, and the collective education of children. Only a society which gives a privileged place to its children and youth can claim to offer a hope for the future: from this standpoint, capitalism stands condemned by the very fact that a growing proportion of its youth is considered “surplus to requirements”.

Jens


[1]     Éditions Smolny, Toulouse 2009 et 2012. Unless otherwise stated, quotes and page references are taken from the first edition.

[2]    Darmangeat puts forward some interesting ideas on the increased importance of physical strength in determining sex roles following the invention of agriculture (ploughing for example).

[3]    Darmangeat insists, no doubt rightly, that involvement in social production is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for ensuring women a favourable situation in society.

[4]    In the section on “The monogamous family”.

[5]    Bruce Trigger, Understanding early civilizations.

[6]    Knight’s book devotes a section to "male menstruation" (p428). Also available in PDF on Chris Knight’s website.

[7]    “The human mind has its requirements, one of which is coherence” (p319). We will not here go into the question of where these “requirements” come from, nor why they take their particular forms – questions which Darmangeat leaves unanswered.

[8]    For a glowing, but critical account of Lévi-Strauss’ thinking, the reader can refer to Knight’s chapter on “Levi-Strauss and ‘The Mind’”.

[9]    C. Darmangeat, 2nd edition, pp214-215

[10]  Idem.

[11]  Oddly enough, Darmangeat himself only a few pages previously points out that in certain North American Indian societies, under special conditions, “women could do everything; they mastered the whole range of both feminine and masculine activity” (p314).

[13] Cf. “The great leaps forward” by Anthony Stigliani

[14]  It is interesting to note that in French (and Spanish) the word for a woman’s period is “les règles” (or, “la regla”), which also means “the rules”.

[15]  This is a theme which recurs throughout Darmangeat’s book. See amongst others the example of the Huli in New Guinea (p222, 2nd edition).

[16]  And better still, to have rendered this theory readable and accessible to the non expert reader.

[17]  Hence, when Darmangeat tells us that Knight’s thesis “says not a word about the reasons why women have been systematically and completely forbidden to hunt and to handle weapons”, we cannot help wondering whether he has read the book to its conclusion.

[19]  See the article published in La Recherche: "Etonnants primitifs de Dmanisi"

[20]  See for example Dunbar’s The human story. Robin Dunbar explains the evolution of language through the increase in the size of human groups; language appeared as a less costly form of grooming, through which our primate cousins maintain their friendships and alliances. “Dunbar’s number” has entered anthropological theory as the greatest number of close relationships that the human brain is capable of retaining (about 150); Dunbar considers that this would have been the maximum size of the first human groups.

[21] The Hominins (the branch of the evolutionary tree to which modern humans belong) diverged from the Panins (the branch containing chimpanzees and bonobos) some 6-9 million years ago).

[22] cf. “Menopause in non-human primates” (US National Library of Medecine).

[24]  Some work has already been done in this direction, in a country at the antipodes of Australia, by the anthropologist Lionel Sims, in an article titled “The ‘Solarization’ of the moon: manipulated knowledge at Stonehenge” published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal 16:2.

[25]    Darmangeat, op.cit., p426.

[26]  It is not for nothing that Marx wrote, in his Critique of the Gotha programme, “Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored”.

[27]  One of today’s very rare original science fiction writers, Iain M Banks, has created a pan-galactic society (“The Culture”) which is communist in all but name, where humans have reached such a degree of control over their hormonal functions that they are able to change sex at will, and therefore to give birth also.

[28]  Which does not of course mean that all women would want, still less should be obliged, to give birth.

 

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Primitive communism

Communism is not a 'nice idea', Vol. 3 Part 10, Bilan, the Dutch left, and the transition to communism

After a delay which has been much longer than we originally intended, we are resuming the third volume of the series on communism. Let’s recall briefly that the first volume, which has also appeared in English and French in book form, began by looking at the development of the concept of communism from pre-capitalist societies to the first utopian socialists, and then focused on the work of Marx and Engels and the efforts of their successors in the Second International to understand communism not as an abstract ideal but as a material necessity made possible by the evolution of capitalist society itself.[1] The second volume examined the period in which the marxist prediction of proletarian revolution, first formulated in the period of capitalism’s ascendancy, was concretised by the dawn of the “epoch of wars and revolutions” acknowledged by the Communist International in 1919.[2] The third volume has so far concentrated on the sustained attempt by the Italian communist left during the 1930s to draw the lessons from the defeat of the first international wave of revolutions, but above all of the Russian revolution, and the implications of these lessons for a future period of transition towards communism.[3]

As we have often stressed, the communist left was first and foremost the product of an international reaction against the degeneration of the Communist International and its parties. The left groups in Italy, Germany, Russia, Britain and elsewhere converged towards the same criticisms of the CI’s regression towards parliamentarism, trade unionism, and compromise with the parties of social democracy.  There were intense debates among the various left currents and some concrete attempts at coordination and regroupment, such as the formation of the Communist Workers’ International in 1922, essentially by groups aligned with the German communist left. But at the same time the rapid failure of this new formation provided evidence that the tide of revolution was in reflux and that the time was not right for the founding of a new world party. Furthermore, this hasty initiative led by elements within the German movement highlighted what was perhaps the most serious division in the ranks of the communist left – the separation between its two most important expressions, those in Germany and Italy. This division was never absolute: in the early days of the Communist Party of Italy, there were attempts to understand and debate with other left currents; and elsewhere we have pointed to the debate between Bordiga and Korsch later on in the 1920s.[4] However, these contacts diminished as the revolution retreated and as the two currents reacted in different ways to the new challenges they faced. The Italian left was, quite correctly, convinced of the necessity to stay in the CI as long as it had a proletarian life and to avoid premature splits or the proclamation of new and artificial parties – precisely the course followed by the majority of the German left. Moreover, the emergence of openly anti-party tendencies in the German left, notably the group around Rühle, could only fuel the conviction of Bordiga and others that this current was dominated by anarchist ideology and practices. Meanwhile the German left groups, tending towards defining the whole experience of Bolshevism and October 1917 as expressions of a belated bourgeois revolution, were less and less able to distinguish the Italian left from the mainstream of the Communist International, not least because it continued to argue that the place of communists was inside the International fighting against its opportunist course. 

Today’s “Bordigist” groups have theorised this tragic and costly parting of the ways with their insistence that they alone constitute the historic communist left and that the German KAPD and its offshoots really were nothing but a petty bourgeois anarchist deviation. Groups like the International Communist Party (Il Partito) take this as far as publishing a defence of Lenin’s Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, praising it as a warning to “future renegades”.[5] This attitude reveals a rather tragic failure to recognise that the left communists should have been fighting together as comrades against the increasingly renegade leadership of the CI.

However, this was far from being the attitude of the Italian left during its most theoretically fruitful period: the one which followed the formation, in exile from fascist Italy, of the Left Fraction at the end of the 20s and the publication of the review Bilan between 1933 and 1938.  In a “Draft resolution on international links” in Bilan n° 22, they wrote that the “internationalist communists of Holland (the Gorter tendency) and elements of the KAPD represent the first reaction to the difficulties of the Russian state, the first experience of proletarian management, in linking up with the world proletariat through a system of principles elaborated by the International”. They concluded that the exclusion of these comrades from the International “did not bring any solution to these problems”. 

This approach laid down the basic foundations of proletarian solidarity upon which debate could take place, despite the very considerable divergences between the two currents; divergences that had widened considerably by the mid-30s, as the Dutch-German left evolved towards the positions of council communism, defining not only Bolshevism but the party form itself as bourgeois in nature. There were further difficulties posed by language and a lack of knowledge about each others’ respective positions, with the result being, as we note in our book The Italian Communist Left, that relations between the two currents were largely indirect.

The main point of connection between the two currents was the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes in Belgium, which was in touch with the Groep van Internationale Communisten and other groups in Holland. It is perhaps significant that the main fruit of these contacts to appear in the pages of Bilan was the summary, written by Hennaut of the LCI, of the GIC’s book Grundprinzipien Kommunistischer Produktion und Verteilung – Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution[6]), and the fraternal but critical remarks about the book contained within Mitchell’s series “Problems of the Period of Transition”. To the best of our knowledge, the GIC did not respond to any of these articles, but it is still important to remind ourselves that the premises for a debate were laid down at the time the Grundprinzipien was published, not least because there have been very few subsequent attempts to take the discussion forward.[7] We should make it clear that the present article will not attempt to carry out an in-depth or detailed analysis of the Grundprinzipien. It has the more modest aim of studying the criticisms of the book published in Bilan and thus indicating some possible areas for future discussion.

The GIC examines the lessons of defeat

At the 1974 Paris conference of recently formed left communist groups, Jan Appel, the KAPD and GIC veteran who was one of the principal authors of the Grundprinzipien, explained that the text had been written as a part of the effort to understand what had gone wrong with the experience of state capitalism or “state communism as we sometimes used to call it” in the Russian revolution, and to lay down some guidelines that would make it possible to avoid similar errors in the future. Despite their differences about the nature of the Russian revolution, this was precisely what motivated the comrades of the Italian left to undertake a study of the problems of the period of transition, in spite of the fact that they understood only too well that they were passing through the depths of the counter-revolution. 

For Mitchell, as for the rest of the Italian left, the GIC were the “Dutch internationalists”, comrades who were animated by a profound commitment to overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a communist society. Both currents understood that a serious study of the problems of the transition period was far more than an intellectual exercise for its own sake. They were militants for whom the proletarian revolution was a reality which they had seen before their eyes; despite its terrible defeat they retained every confidence that it would rise again, and were convinced that it had to be armed with a clear communist programme if it was to be triumphant the next time around.

At the beginning of his summary of the Grundprinzipien, Hennaut poses precisely this question: “doesn’t it seem a waste of time to torture ourselves about the social rules the workers will have to establish once the revolution has been accomplished, at a time when the workers are in no way marching towards the final battle, but are in fact ceding the ground they have won to the triumphant reaction? What’s more, hasn’t everything on this matter already been said by the congresses of the CI? ... Certainly for those for whom the whole science of the revolution boils down to uncovering the gamut of manoeuvres that the masses have to follow, the enterprise must appear particularly pointless. But for those who consider that making precise the goals of the struggle is one of the functions of any movement of emancipation, and that the forms of this struggle, its mechanisms and the laws which regulate it can only be completely brought to light to the extent that the final goals to be attained have been made clear, in other words that the laws of the revolution come out more and more clearly as the consciousness of the working class grows – for them the theoretical effort to define exactly what the dictatorship of the proletariat will be is a task of primordial necessity[8]

As we have mentioned, Hennaut was not a member of the GIC but of the Belgian LCI. In a sense he was well placed to act as an “intermediary” between the Dutch-German and Italian left as he had agreements and differences with both. In a previous contribution to Bilan,[9] he criticised the Italian comrades’ notion of the “dictatorship of the party” and put the emphasis on the working class exercising control over the political and economic spheres through its own general organs such as the councils. At the same time he rejected Bilan’s view of the USSR as a degenerated proletarian state and defined both the political regime and the economy in Russia as capitalist. But it should be added that he had also embarked on a process of rejecting the proletarian character of the revolution in Russia, emphasising the lack of maturity of the objective conditions, so that “the revolution was made by the proletariat, but it was not a proletarian revolution.”[10] This analysis was quite close to that of the council communists, but Hennaut also demarcated himself from the latter on a number of key points: at the very beginning of his summary, he makes it clear that he does not agree with their rejection of the party. For Hennaut, the party would be all the more necessary after the revolution in order to fight against the ideological vestiges of the old world, although he did not feel that the GIC’s weakness on this point was the main issue with the Grundprinzipien; and at the end of his summary, in Bilan n° 22, he points to the weakness of the GIC’s conception of the state and their somewhat rose-tinted view of the conditions in which a revolution takes place. However he is convinced of the importance of the GIC’s contribution and makes a very serious effort to summarise them accurately over four articles. Evidently, it was not possible within the scope of such a summary to convey all the richness – and some of the apparent contradictions – in the Grundprinzipien, but he does make a good job of outlining the book’s essential points.

Hennaut’s summary brings out the significant fact that the Grundprinzipien does not at all locate itself outside the previous traditions and experiences of the working class, but bases itself on a historical critique of erroneous conceptions that had arisen within the workers’ movement, and on practical revolutionary experiences – notably the Russian and Hungarian revolutions – which had left mainly negative lessons. The Grundprinzipien thus contains criticisms of the views of Kautsky, Varga, the anarcho-syndicalist Leichter and others, while seeking to reconnect with the work of Marx and Engels, in particular The Critique of the Gotha Programme and Anti-Dühring.  It begins from the simple insistence that the exploitation of the workers in capitalist society is completely bound up with their separation from the means of production via the capitalist social relation of wage labour. Since the period of the Second International, the workers’ movement had deviated towards the idea that the simple abolition of private property signifies the end of exploitation, and the Bolsheviks had to a large extent applied this (mis)understanding after the October revolution.

For the Grundprinzipien the nationalisation or collectivisation of the means of production can perfectly well co-exist with wage labour and the alienation of the workers from their own product. What is key, therefore, is that the workers themselves, through their own organisations rooted in the workplace, dispose not only of the physical means of production but of the entire social product. But in order to ensure that the social product remained in the hands of the producers from the beginning to the end of the labour process (decisions on what to produce and in what quantities, distribution of the product including the remuneration of the individual producer) a general economic law was needed which could be subject to rigorous accounting: the calculation of the social product on the basis of the average socially necessary labour time. Although it is precisely the socially necessary labour time which is at the basis of the “value” of products in capitalist society, this would no longer be value production, because although the individual enterprises would play a considerable role in determining their own contribution to the labour time contained in their products, the enterprises would not be then selling their products on the market (and the Grundprinzipien criticises the anarcho-syndicalists precisely for envisaging the future economy as a network of independent enterprises linked by exchange relations). In the GIC’s vision, products would be simply distributed in accord with the overall needs of society, which would be determined by a congress of councils together with a central office of statistics and a network of consumer cooperatives. The Grundprinzipien is at pains to insist that neither the congress of councils nor the office of statistics are “centralised” or “state” organs. Their task is not to command labour but to use the criterion of socially necessary labour time, largely calculated at base level, to oversee the planning and distribution of the social product on a global scale. A consistent application of these principles would ensure that in the next revolution there would be no repetition of a situation where “the machine is escaping our hands” (Lenin’s famous words on the trajectory of the Soviet state, quoted by the Grundprinzipien). In sum, the key to the victory of the revolution lies in the capacity of the workers to maintain direct control of the economy, and the most reliable tool for achieving this is the regulation of production and distribution through the accounting of labour time.

Criticisms by the Italian left

The Italian left,[11] as we have said, welcomed the contribution of the GIC but did not spare their criticisms of the text. Broadly speaking these criticisms can be placed under four headings, although they all lead onto other issues and are all tightly interdependent.

  1. A national vision of the revolution.
  2. An idealist view of the real conditions of the proletarian revolution.
  3. Failure to understand the problem of the state and centralism, and a focus on the economy at the expense of political issues.
  4. More theoretical differences regarding the economics of the transition period: the overcoming of the law of value and the content of communism; egalitarianism and the remuneration of labour.

1. A national vision of the revolution

In his series “Parti-État-Internationale”[12] Vercesi had already criticised Hennaut and the Dutch comrades for approaching the problem of the revolution in Russia from a narrowly national standpoint. He insisted that no real progress could be made towards a communist society as long as the bourgeoisie held power on a world scale – whatever advances were made in one area under proletarian “management”, they could not be definitive:

The error which in our opinion the Dutch left communists and with them comrade Hennaut make is that they have taken a basically sterile direction, because it is basic to marxism that the foundations of a communist economy only present themselves on the world terrain and can never be realised inside the frontiers of a proletarian state. The latter can intervene in the economic domain to change the process of production, but in no way can it place this process definitively on communist foundations, because the conditions for realising such an economy only exist on the world scale… We will not move towards the realisation of the supreme goal by making the workers believe that after their victory over the bourgeoisie they could directly manage the economy in a single country. Until the victory of the world revolution the conditions for this don’t exist, and to take things in the direction which will allow the maturation of these conditions, you have to begin by recognising that it is impossible to obtain definitive results in a single country.”[13]

In his series Mitchell further elaborated this theme:

While it is undeniable that a national proletariat can only undertake certain economic tasks after installing its own rule, the construction of socialism can only get going after the destruction of the most powerful capitalist states, even though the victory of a ‘poor’ proletariat can take on a huge significance if it is integrated into the process of development of the world revolution. In other words, the tasks of a victorious proletariat with regard to its own economy are subordinated to the necessities of the international class struggle.

It is noteworthy that while all genuine marxists have rejected the theory of ‘socialism in one country’, most of the criticisms of the Russian revolution have focused essentially on the modalities of the construction of socialism, looking at economic and cultural criteria rather than political ones, and forgetting to go to the logical conclusions imposed by the impossibility of any kind of national socialism.[14]

Mitchell also devoted a large part of the series to arguing against the Menshevik idea, to a large extent taken up by the council communists, that the Russian revolution could not have been truly proletarian because Russia was not ripe for socialism. Against this approach, Mitchell affirms that the conditions for the communist revolution could only be posed on a world scale and that the revolution in Russia had simply been the first step in a world wide revolution, made necessary by the fact that capitalism as a world system had entered its period of decline. Thus any understanding of what had gone wrong in Russia had to be situated in the context of the world revolution: the degeneration of the Soviet state was first and foremost not a result of the economic measures taken by the Bolsheviks but of the isolation of the revolution.  In his view, the Dutch comrades had adopted “a false judgment of the Russian revolution, and above all to severely curtail the scope of their research into the underlying causes of the reactionary evolution of the USSR. They don’t seek the explanation for the latter in the subsoil of the national and international class struggle (one of the negative characteristics of their study is that they more or less remove any consideration of political problems), but in the economic mechanism.”[15]

In short: there are limits to what inferences we can draw from the economic measures taken during the Russian revolution. Even the most perfect measures, in the absence of the extension of the world revolution, would not have preserved the proletarian character of the regime in the USSR, and the same would apply to any country, “advanced” or “backward”, which found itself isolated in a world dominated by capital. 

2. The real conditions after the proletarian revolution

We have noted that Hennaut himself pointed to the Dutch comrades’ tendency to simplify conditions in the wake of a proletarian revolution: “it might appear to many readers that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The revolution is marching ahead, it cannot fail to come and it’s enough to leave things to themselves for socialism to become a reality.”[16] Vercesi had also argued that they tended to vastly underestimate the heterogeneity in class consciousness even after the revolution – an error directly linked to the council communists’ failure to understand the need for a political organisation of the more advanced elements of the working class. Furthermore, this was also connected to the Dutch comrades’ underestimation of the difficulties posed to the workers in taking direct charge of the management of production. For his part Mitchell argues that the Dutch comrades begin from an ideal, abstract schema which already excludes the stigmata of the capitalist past as the basis for advancing towards communism.

We have already made it clear that the Dutch internationalists, in their attempt to analyse the problems of the period of transition, are inspired much more by their desires than by historical reality. Their abstract schema, in which as people who are perfectly consistent with their principles, they exclude the law of value, the market and money, must logically entail an ‘ideal’ distribution of products as well. This is because for them ‘The proletarian revolution collectivises the means of production and thus opens the way to communist life; the dynamic laws of individual consumption must absolutely and necessarily be linked together because they are indissolubly linked to the laws of production. This link is made ‘by itself' though the passage to communist production’ (p.72 of their work).”[17]

Later on, Mitchell focuses on the obstacles facing the institution of equal remuneration of labour during the transition period (we will come back to this in a second article). In sum, for the Dutch comrades the lower stage and the higher stage of communism are completely mixed up:

At the same time, by repudiating the dialectical analysis and leaping over the problem of centralism, they have ended up changing the meaning of words, since what they are looking at is not the transitional period, which is the only one of interest to marxists from the point of view of solving practical problems, but the higher stage of communism. It is then easy to talk about ‘a general social accounting based on an economic centre to which all the currents of economic life flow, but which has no right of directing production or deciding on the distribution of the social product’. And they add that ‘in the association of free and equal producers, the control of economic life does not emanate from personalities or offices but results from the public registration of the real course of economic life. This means that production is controlled by reproduction’. In other words, ‘economic life is controlled by itself through average social labour time’ With such formulations, the solutions to the problems of proletarian management cannot advance at all, since the burning question posed to the proletariat is not to work out the mechanisms that regulate communist society, but to find the way that leads towards it.[18]

It’s true that there are a number of passages in the Grundprinzipien where the Dutch comrades cite Marx’s distinction between the lower and higher stages of the transition period; and they do recognise that there is a process, a movement towards integral communism in which the necessity for labour time accounting, for example, will gradually diminish in importance with regard to individual consumption:

We have seen that one of the most characteristic features of the GSU establishments (Note: public services such as healthcare and education) lay in the fact that in their case the principle ‘to each according to his needs’ is realised. Here the measure of labour-time plays no role in distribution. With the further growth of communism towards its higher stage, the incidence of this type of economic establishment becomes more and more widespread, so that it comes to include such sectors as food supply, passenger transport, housing, etc., in short: the satisfaction of consumption in general comes to stand on this economic foundation. This development is a process - a process which, at least as far as the technical side of the task is concerned, can be completed relatively rapidly. The more society develops in this direction and the greater the extent to which products are distributed according to this principle, the less does individual labour-time continue to act as the measure determining individual consumption.”[19]

And yet at the same time, as Mitchell notes above, they talk about the “free and equal producers” deciding on this or that precisely in the lower stage, a time when true freedom and equality are being fought for by the organised proletariat, but have not yet been definitively conquered. The term “free and equal producers” can only really be applied to a society where there is no longer a working class.

An example of this tendency to simplify is their treatment of the agrarian question. According to this section of the Grundprinzipien, the “peasant question”, which was such a major burden for the Russian revolution, would pose no great problems for the revolution of the future because the development of capitalist industry has already integrated the majority of the peasantry into the proletariat. This is an example of a certain Eurocentric vision (and even in Europe this was far from being the case in the 1930s) which does not take into account the vast numbers of non-exploiting, but also non-proletarian masses existing on a world scale and which the proletarian revolution will have to integrate into truly socialised production.

3. The state, centralism, and economism

To talk about the existence of classes other than the proletariat in the transition period immediately poses the question of a semi-state organisation which would, among other things, have the task of politically representing these masses. Thus a further consequence of the Dutch comrades’ abstract schema is their avoidance of the problem of the state. Again, as we have noted, Hennaut sees that “the state occupies, in the Dutch comrades’ system, a place that is to say the least equivocal.[20] Mitchell notes that as long as classes exist, the working class will have to put up with the scourge of a state, and that this is bound up with the problem of centralism:

The analysis of the Dutch internationalists undoubtedly moves away from marxism because it never puts forward the fundamental reality that the proletariat is forced to put up with the ‘scourge’ of the state until classes have disappeared, that is, until the disappearance of world capitalism. But to underline such a historic necessity is to admit that state functions are still temporarily mixed up with centralisation, even though this takes place after the destruction of the capitalist apparatus of oppression and is not necessarily opposed to the development of the cultural level of the working masses and their capacity to take charge. Instead of looking for the solution to this development in the real context of historical and political conditions, the Dutch internationalists have tried to find it in a formula for appropriation which is both utopian and retrograde and which is not as clearly distinct from ‘bourgeois right’ as they imagine”.[21]

In the light of the Russian experience, the Dutch comrades were certainly justified in being wary that any central organising body could assume dictatorial powers over the workers. At the same time, the Grundprinzipien do not reject the need for some form of central coordination. They talk about a central office of statistics and an “economic congress of workers’ councils”, but these are presented as economic bodies charged with simple tasks of coordination: they appear to have no political or state functions. But by simply decreeing in advance that such central or coordinating bodies will not take on or be connected to any state functions, they actually weaken the workers’ capacity to defend themselves from a real danger that will exist throughout the transition period: the danger of the state, even a “semi-state” rigidly directed by the workers’ unitary organs, increasingly forming itself into a power autonomous from society and re-imposing direct forms of economic exploitation.

The notion of the post-revolutionary state does appear briefly in the book (in fact, in the very last chapter). But in the words of the GIC it “exists simply as the apparatus of power pure and simple of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its task is to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie... but as far as the administration of the economy is concerned, it has no role whatever to fulfil.[22]

Mitchell does not refer to this passage but it would not contradict his misgivings about the GIC’s tendency to see the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the same thing, an identification which in his view disarms the workers in favour of the state: “The active presence of proletarian organisms is the condition for keeping the proletarian state in the service of the workers and for preventing it from turning against them. To deny the contradictory dualism of the proletarian state is to falsify the historic significance of the period of transition.

Certain comrades consider, by contrast, that during this period there has to be an identification between the workers' organisations and the state. (cf. comrade Hennault's ‘Nature and Evolution of the Russian State’, Bilan p.1121). The Dutch internationalists go even further when they say that since ‘labour time is the measure of the distribution of the social product and the whole of distribution remains outside any ‘politics', the trade unions have no function in communism and the struggle for the amelioration of living conditions will have come to an end’ (p.115 of their work).

Centrism also starts off from the conception that since the soviet state is a workers’ state, any demands raised by the workers become an act of hostility towards ‘their’ state, therefore justifying the total subordination of the trade unions and the factory committees to the state mechanism”.[23]

The Dutch-German left was, of course, much quicker to recognise that the trade unions had already ceased to be proletarian organs under capitalism, let alone in the period of transition to communism where the working class would have created its own unitary organs (factory committees, workers’ councils etc). But Mitchell’s basic point remains perfectly valid. By confusing the journey with the destination, by eliminating from the equation other non-proletarian classes and the whole complex social heterogeneity of the post insurrectional situation, and above all by envisaging an almost immediate abolition of the condition of the proletariat as an exploited class, the Dutch comrades, for all their antipathy to the state, leave the door open to the idea that during the transitional period the need for the working class to defend its immediate interests will have become superfluous. For the Italian left, the need to preserve the independence of trade unions and/or factory committees from the general organisation of society – in short, from the transitional state – was a fundamental lesson of the Russian revolution where the “workers’ state” ended up repressing the workers.

This evasion or simplification of the issue of the state, like the GIC’s failure to grasp the necessity for the international extension of the revolution, is part of a wider underestimation of the political dimension of the revolution. The GIC’s obsession is the search for a method of calculating, distributing and remunerating social labour so that central control can be kept to a minimum and the transitional economy can advance in a semi-automatic way towards integral communism. But for Mitchell, the existence of such laws is no substitute for the growing political maturity of the working masses, of their actual capacity to impose their own direction over social life.

The Dutch comrades have, it’s true, proposed an immediate solution: no economic or political centralism, which can only take on an oppressive form, but the transfer of management to enterprise organisms which would coordinate production through a ‘general economic law’ (?). For them, the abolition of exploitation (and thus of classes) does not take place through a long historic process involving the ceaseless growth of participation by the masses in social administration, but in the collectivisation of the means of production, provided that this involves the right of the enterprise councils to dispose of the means of production and the social product. But apart from the fact this is a formulation which contains its own contradiction - since it boils down to opposing integral collectivisation (property of all, and of no one in particular) with a kind of restricted, dispersed collectivisation between social groups (the shareholders’ society is also a partial form of collectivisation) - it simply tends to substitute a juridical solution (the right to dispose of the enterprises) for another juridical solution, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. But as we have already seen, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is simply the initial condition for the social transformation (even though full collectivisation is not immediately realisable), and the class struggle will continue as before the revolution, but on political bases which will allow the proletariat to impose the decisive direction.”[24]

Behind this rejection of the political dimension of the class struggle we can see a fundamental difference between the two branches of the communist left in their understanding of the transition towards communism. The Dutch comrades do recognise the need for vigilance faced with the remainder of “powerful tendencies inherited from the capitalist mode of production making for the concentration of powers of control in a central authority.[25] But this illuminating paragraph appears in the middle of an inquiry into accounting methods in the transition period, and within the book as a whole there is little sense of the immense struggle that will be needed to overcome the habits of the past as well as their material and social personification in classes, strata and individuals more or less hostile to communism. In the GIC’s outlook there seems to be little need for a political battle, a confrontation between conflicting class viewpoints, inside the organs of the working class, whether in the workplace or at a wider social level. This is also consistent with their repudiation of the need for communist political organisations, for the class party. 

We will look at some of the more theoretical problems of the economic dimension of the communist transformation in the second part of this article

CD Ward


Appendix

Extract from The Dutch and German Communist Left

From chapter 7, part 4: An “economist” vision of the revolution: the Grundprinzipien

 

b) The period of transition from capitalism to communism

The question of the period of transition towards communism after the seizure of power by the workers’ councils was always approached by the German, then the Dutch council communists, from a strictly economic angle. According to the GIC, the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the evolution of Soviet Russia towards state capitalism proved the failure of “politics”, in which the dictatorship of the proletariat was seen first and foremost as a political dictatorship over the whole of society and which pushed the proletariat’s economic tasks into the background. This idea was expressed with particular emphasis by Pannekoek: “The traditional view is the domination of politics over the economy... what the workers have to aim for is the domination over politics by the economy[26]

This view was exactly the reverse of the one held by other revolutionary groups in the 30s, such as the Italian communist left, which had opened a whole theoretical discussion about the period of transition.[27]

Unlike the German and Italian communist lefts,[28] the GIC did not show much interest in the political questions of the proletarian revolution, in theoretical reflections about the state in the period of transition. The relationship between the new state of the period of transition, the revolutionary parties, and the workers’ councils was never dealt with, despite the Russian experience. Neither is there anything on the relationship between the revolutionary International and the state, or states, in countries where the proletariat has taken political power. Likewise, the complex questions of proletarian violence[29] and the civil war in a revolutionary period were never posed. For the GIC it seems that there was no problem of the existence of a state - or a semi-state - in the period of transition towards communism. The question of whether it would exist, and of what would be its nature (“proletarian” state or a “scourge” inherited by the proletariat) was never posed. These problems were more or less evaded.

The GIC’s main text[30] on the period of transition, The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution (Grundprinzipien Kommunischer Produktion und Verteilung) only dealt with the economic problems of this period.

The GIC’s starting point was that the failure of the Russian revolution and the evolution towards state capitalism could only be explained through its ignorance of, or even its denial of the necessity for, an economic transformation of society - this problem being common to the whole workers’ movement. But paradoxically, the GIC recognised the fundamental role of the Russian experience, the only one that made it possible to take marxist theory forward:

“… at least as far as industrial production was concerned… Russia has attempted to order economic life according to the principles of communism… and in this has failed completely! [...] Above all else, it has been the school of practice embodied in the Russian Revolution which we must thank for this knowledge, because it is this which has shown us in unmistakable terms exactly what the consequences are of permitting a central authority to establish itself as a social power which then proceeds to concentrate in its exclusive hands all power over the productive apparatus.[31]

For the Dutch council communists, the dictatorship of the proletariat immediately meant “the association of free and equal producers”. The workers, organised in councils in the factories, had to take hold of the whole productive apparatus and make it work for their own needs as consumers, without resort to any central state-type body, since that could only mean perpetuating a society of inequality and exploitation. In this way it would be possible to avoid a situation where the kind of “state communism” set up during the phase of war communism in 1918-20 inevitably transforms itself into a form of state capitalism whose production needs dominate those of the workers as producers and consumers. In the new society, dominated by the councils and not by a state led by a centralised party, wage labour – the source of all inequality and all exploitation of labour power – would be abolished.

In the final analysis, for the GIC, the problems of the period of transition were very simple: the main thing was that the producers should control and distribute the social product in an egalitarian manner and by exercising authority “from the bottom upwards”. The essential problem of the period of transition as revealed by 1917 was not political – the question of the world-wide extension of the proletarian revolution – but economic. What counted was the immediate, egalitarian increase in workers’ consumption, organised by the factory councils. The only real problem of the period of transition for the GIC was the relationship between the producers and their products: “It is the proletariat itself which lays in place the foundation-stone cementing the basic relationship between producers and the product of their labour. This and this alone is the key question of the proletarian revolution.[32]

But how was the “egalitarian” distribution of the social product to be achieved? Obviously not through simple juridical measures: nationalisation, “socialisation”, the various forms of the takeover of private property by the state. According to the GIC the solution lay in calculating the cost of production in terms of the labour time in the enterprises, in relation to the quantity of social goods created. Of course depending on the respective productivity of the different enterprises, for the same product the quantity of labour required would be unequal. To resolve this problem, it would suffice to calculate the average social labour time for each product. The quantity of labour carried out in the most productive enterprises, those who were above the social average, would be put toward a common fund. This would bring the less productive enterprises up to the general level. At the same time it would serve to introduce the technological progress necessary for the development of productivity in the enterprises of a given sector, so as to reduce average production time.

The organisation of consumption was to be based on the same principles. A general system of social accounting, based on statistical documentation and established by the producer-consumers organised in councils and co-operatives, would be used to calculate the factors of consumption. After various deductions – replacing outworn machinery, technical improvements, a social security fund for those unable to work, for natural disasters etc– there would be equal distribution of the social reserve for each consumer. Egalitarian conditions of production, assured by the calculation of average social labour time, would be matched by generally equal conditions for all individual consumers. Thanks to this system of social accounting, the law of value would be done away with: products would no longer circulate on the basis of their exchange value with money as the universal measure. Furthermore, with the edification of a “neutral” accounting and statistical centre, not detached from the councils, independent of any group of persons or of any central body, the new society would escape the danger of the formation of a parasitic bureaucracy that appropriated part of the social product.

The Fundamental Principles have the merit of underlining the importance of economic problems in the period of transition between capitalism and communism, all the more so because this had been approached very rarely in the revolutionary movement. Without a real and continuous increase in workers’ consumption, the dictatorship of the proletariat has no meaning, and the realisation of communism would be a pious wish.

But the GIC’s text suffered from a certain number of weaknesses, which did not go unnoticed by other revolutionary groups.[33]

The Fundamental Principles actually only deals with the evolved phase of communism, where the government of men had been replaced the “administration of things”, according to the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” enunciated by Marx. The GIC believed that it would be immediately possible, as soon as the workers’ councils had taken power in a given country, to proceed to an evolved form of communism. It started off from an ideal situation, in which the victorious proletariat has taken over the productive apparatus of the highly developed countries and has been spared all the costs of the civil war (destruction, a large part of production going towards military needs); moreover, it assumes that there will be no peasant problem standing in the way of the socialisation of production since, according to the GIC, agricultural production was already completely industrial and socialised.[34] Finally, neither the isolation of one or several proletarian revolutions, nor the archaisms of small-scale agricultural production, constituted a major obstacle to the establishment of communism: “Neither the absence of the world revolution, nor the unsuitability of the individual agricultural enterprises in the countryside to state management can be held responsible for the failure of the Russian revolution ... at the economic level.[35]

Thus, the GIC distanced itself from the marxist vision of the period of transition, which distinguished two phases: a lower stage, sometimes described as socialism, in which the “government of men” determined a proletarian economic policy in a society still dominated by scarcity; and a higher phase, that of communism proper, a society without classes, without the law of value, where the productive forces develop freely, on a world scale, unencumbered by national boundaries. But even for the lower stage of the period of transition, still dominated by the law of value and the existence of backward-pulling classes, marxism emphasised that the condition for any economic transformation in a socialist direction is the triumph of the world revolution. The beginning of any real economic transformation of the new society, still divided into classes, depends in the first place on the proletariat affirming itself politically in the face of other classes.

The GIC’s “economist” vision is connected to its inability to grasp the problem of the existence of a state – a “semi-state” – in the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, at the beginning of the transitional stage. This semi-state constitutes a danger for the proletarian power, since it is a force for social conservation, “a force emerging from society, but rising above it and becoming more and more autonomous from it.[36]

The GIC’s theory of the period of transition seems close to the anarchist theory, denying the existence of a state and thus of a political struggle for the domination of the new society. The basically “technical” role that the GIC gives the workers, who are charged with keeping account of the average social labour time in production, was an implicit negation of their political role.

As with the anarchists, the GIC saw the building of a communist society as a more or less natural and automatic process. Not the culmination of a long, contradictory process of class struggle for the domination of the semi-state, against all the conservative forces, but the fruit of a linear, harmonious, almost mathematical development. This view has a certain resemblance to the ideas of the 19th century utopian socialists, particularly Fourier’s Universal Harmony .[37]

The final weakness of the Grundprinzipien lies in the very question of the accounting of labour time, even in an advanced communist society which has gone beyond scarcity. Economically, this system could reintroduce the law of value, by giving the labour time needed for production an accounted value rather than a social one. Here the GIC goes against Marx, for whom the standard measure in communist society is no longer labour time but free time, leisure time.[38]

In the second place, the existence of a “neutral”, supposedly technical accounting centre does not offer a sufficient guarantee for the construction of communism. This “centre” could end up becoming an end in itself, accumulating hours of social labour to the detriment of the consumption needs and free time of the producer-consumers, and becoming increasingly autonomous from society. If the producers “at the base” became less and less concerned with controlling the “centre” and with social organisation in general, there would inevitably be a transfer of the functions that should be carried out by the organs of the producers to “technical” bodies that more and more take on a life of their own. The GIC’s denial of these potential dangers was not without its consequences. The Dutch internationalists ended up rejecting any possibility that, even under communism, there could be a struggle by the producers to improve their conditions of work and of existence: the GIC refused to envisage the possibility of a society in which the struggle “for better living conditions never finished” and where “the struggle for the distribution of products goes on.[39] Does this not reintroduce the idea that the producer-consumers cannot struggle against themselves, including their “accounting centre”?

For the GIC, communism appears as an absolute equality between producers, which is to be realised right at the beginning of the transition period.[40] It is as though, under communism, there is no longer any natural (physical or psychological) inequality in production and consumption. But in fact communism can be defined as “real equality in a natural inequality.[41]     


[1]. A summary of the first volume can be found here: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_communism

[3]. See the articles in this series in International Review n°s 127-132

[4]. See the article from volume two of the series, “Unravelling the Russian enigma” in International Review n° 105

[6]. Bilan n°s 19,20,21,22, 23

[7].  Among studies of the Grundprinzipien, we can mention Paul Mattick’s 1970 introduction to the German re-edition of the book, available at libcom.org/library/introduction-paul-mattick. The 1990 edition of the book, published by Movement for Workers’ Councils, contains a long commentary by Mike Baker, written shortly before his death, which also resulted in the disappearance of the group. Our own book, The Dutch and German Communist Left, 2001, contains a section on the Grundprinzipien which we are publishing as an annex to this article. This section demonstrates the continuity of our views with the criticisms of the text first raised by Mitchell’s articles. The text of the Grundprinzipien itself can be found both on libcom or at https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/index.htm

[8]. Bilan n°19. “Les fondements de la production et de la distribution communistes”

[9]. Bilan n°s 33 and 34, “Nature et evolution de la révolution russe”

[10]. Bilan nº 34, p.1124

[11]. We should be more precise here: Mitchell, himself a former member of the LCI, was actually part of the Belgian Fraction which split from the LCI over the question of the war in Spain. In one of his series of articles on the period of transition (Bilan n° 38), he expressed some criticisms “of the comrades of Bilan”, feeling that they had not paid enough attention to the economic aspect of the transition period

[13]. Bilan n° 21, quoted in “The 1930s: debate on the period of transition”, International Review n° 127

[14]. Bilan  n° 37, republished in International Review n° 132

[15]. Bilan n°35, republished in International Review n° 131

[16]. Bilan n° 22, “Les internationalistes hollandais sur le programme de la révolution prolétarienne”

[17]. Bilan n° 35

[18]. Bilan n° 37

[19]. Grundprinzipien, chapter 6, “The socialisation of distribution”

[20]. Bilan n°22

[21]. Bilan n° 37

[22]. Grundprinzipien, chapter 19, “Alleged utopianism”

[23]. Bilan n°37

[24]. Bilan n° 37

[25]. Grundprinzipien, chapter 10, “Objective methods of control”

[26]. “De Arbeidersklasses en de Revolutie”, in Radencommunisme n° 4, March-April 1940

[27]. Some of Bilan’s texts on the period of transition have been translated into Italian: Rivoluzione e reazione (lo stato tardo-capitalistico nell'analisi delle Sinistra Communista), Universita degli studi de Massina, Milan, Dotl A2. Giuffre editore, 1983, introduced by Dino Erba and Arturo Peregalli

[28]. The question of the state in the period of transition was raised above all by the Essen tendency of the KAPD in 1927. The workers’ councils were identified with the “proletarian” state (see KAZ, Essen. P.1-11, 1927). The only contribution by the Berlin tendency was a text by Appel (Max Hempel) criticising “Lenin’s state communism” in Proletarier n° 4-6, May 1927: “Marx-Engels und Lenin über die Rolle des staates in der proletarischen Revolution”

[29]. Only Pannekoek studied the question of violence in the revolution, opposing both the anarchist principle of “non-violence” and emphasising the fundamental role of consciousness in the revolution: “...non-violence cannot be a conception of the proletariat. The proletariat will use violence when the time comes as long as it is useful and necessary. At certain moments workers’ violence can play a decisive role, but the main strength of the proletariat lies in the mastery over production... The working class must use all methods of struggle that are useful and effective, according to circumstances. And in all these forms of struggle its internal, moral strength is primary” (Pannekoek, anonymous, PIC, n°2, Feb 1936, “Geweld en geweldloosheid”)

[30]. The Grundprinzipien were republished with an introduction by Paul Mattick in 1970 in Berlin, by Rudger Blankertz Verlag, The Dutch edition, which contains many additions, was republished in 1972 by Uitgevery De Vlam, with an introduction by the Spartacusbond. A full French translation is due to be published by Cahiers Spartacus. An English edition was published in London by the “Movement for Workers’ Councils”, 1990

[31]. Fundamental Principles of Communist Production, 1930

[32]. Fundamental Principles, p30, emphasis by the GIC

[33]. A critique of the GIC’s text was published in Bilan from n° 11 to n° 38, written by Mitchell, a member of the Belgian LCI (his real name was Jehan van den Hoven). Hennaut, for the LCI, made a resume of the Grundprinzipien in Bilan n° 19, 20, 21.22 and 23

[34]. This thesis had been put forward in 1933 by the GIC, in the pamphlet Ontwikkelingsljnen in de landbouw p1-48

[35]. Grundprinzipien, as reprinted by De Vlam, 1970, p10

[36]. Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. A résumé and study of the different positions on the period of transition adopted by the lefts in the Third International can be found in the theses by J. Sie Sur la période de transition au socialisme: les positions des gauches de la 3ème Internationale, published by Cosmopolis, Leiden, 1986

[37]. This return to utopia can be found in Rühle, who in 1939 made a study of utopian movements; Mut zur Utopie! It was published in 1971 by Rohwohlt, Hamburg: Otto Rühle, Bauplane fur enie neue Geselschaft

[38]. “...on the one hand, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour” (Marx, Grundrisse, chapter on capital, notebook VII)

[39]. Grundprinzipien, p.40

[40]. Most of the communist lefts insisted, by contrast, that equality in the distribution of consumer products was impossible right at the beginning of the period of transition. Above all in a period of civil war, where the new power of the councils would have to rely on the existence of specialists

[41]. Bilan n° 35, Sept to Oct 1936, “Problèmes de la période de transition”, by Mitchell

 

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International Review no.152 - October 2013

Indignation at the heart of the proletarian dynamic

Around the world, the feeling is growing that the present order of things cannot continue as before. Following the revolts of the ‘Arab Spring’, the movements of the Indignados in Spain and then of Occupy in the United States in 2011, the summer of 2013 has seen huge crowds come out into the streets almost simultaneously in Turkey and Brazil.

Hundreds of thousands, even millions, have protested against all kinds of evils: in Turkey it was the destruction of the environment by a senseless urban “development”, the authoritarian intrusion of religion into private life and the corruption of politicians; in Brazil it was the increased cost of public transport, the diversion of wealth towards spending on prestige sports activities while health, transport, education and housing are falling apart – and again, the widespread corruption of politicians. In both cases, the initial protests were met with brutal police repression which only broadened and deepened the revolt. And in both cases, the spearhead of the movement was not the “middle class” (that is to say, in media language, anyone who still has a job), but the new generation of the working class who, although educated, have only a meagre prospect of finding a stable job and for whom living in an “emerging” economy means above all observing the development of social inequality and the repugnant wealth of a tiny elite of exploiters.

That is why, today, a ‘spectre is haunting the world’: the spectre of INDIGNATION. Just over two years after the ‘Arab Spring’ which shook and surprised the countries of North Africa, and whose effects are still being felt; two years after the movement of the Indignados in Spain and Occupy in the USA; and at exactly the same time as the movement in Turkey, the wave of demonstrations in Brazil has mobilised millions of people in over a hundred cities and shown characteristics which are unprecedented for this country.

These movements, which appear in very different and very geographically distant countries, nevertheless share common characteristics: their spontaneity, their origins in reaction against brutal state repression, their massiveness, participation mostly by young people, particularly through social networks. But the common denominator that characterizes them is a great INDIGNATION faced with the deteriorating living conditions for the world’s population, provoked by the depth of a crisis that is shaking the foundations of the capitalist system and has experienced a significant acceleration since 2007. This deterioration is expressed by the accelerated precariousness of the living standards of the working masses and a great uncertainty about the future among young people, either proletarianised or facing proletarianisation. It is not by chance that the movement in Spain took the name “Indignados”, and that in this wave of massive social movements, it was the one that went furthest in both its questioning of the capitalist system and its organisational forms through massive general assemblies.1

The revolts in Turkey and Brazil in 2013 prove that the momentum created by these movements is not exhausted. Although the media evade the fact that these rebellions arose in countries which have been in a phase of “growth” in recent years, they could not avoid showing the same “outrage” of the masses of the population against the way this system works: growing social inequality, the greed and corruption of the ruling class, the brutality of state repression, weakness of the infrastructure, environmental destruction. Above all, the system’s inability to provide a future for the younger generation.

One hundred years ago, faced with the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg solemnly reminded the working class that the choice offered by the capitalist order in decay was between socialism or barbarism. The inability of the working class to carry through the revolutions that were its response to the war of 1914-1918 resulted in a century of real capitalist barbarism. Today, the stakes are even higher, because capitalism has the means to destroy all life on earth. The revolt of the exploited and oppressed, the massive struggle to defend human dignity and a real future; that is the promise of the social revolts in Turkey and Brazil.

A particularly significant aspect of the revolt in Turkey is its proximity to the bloody war in Syria. The war in Syria also began with popular protests against the regime there, but the weakness of the proletariat in this country, and the existence of deep ethnic and religious divisions within the population, allowed the regime to respond with most brutal violence. Divisions within the bourgeoisie widened and the popular revolt – as in Libya in 2011 –turned into a ‘civil war’ that has become a proxy war between imperialist powers. Syria is now transformed into a case study of barbarism, a chilling reminder of the alternative that capitalism has in store for mankind. In countries such as Tunisia and especially Egypt, where the social movement showed the real weight of the working class, the movements were unable to withstand the pressure of the dominant ideology and the situation is in the process of degenerating into a tragedy for the population, above all for the proletarians, who are becoming victims of the gangs and clashes between religious fundamentalists, supporters of the former regime and other rival factions of the bourgeoisie who have recently turned the national situation into bloody chaos. On the other hand, Turkey and Brazil, like other social revolts, continue to show the way that is open to humanity: the way to the rejection of capitalism, to the proletarian revolution and the construction of a new society based on solidarity and human needs.

The proletarian nature of the movements

Turkey

The movement of May/June began in opposition to the cutting down of trees to destroy Gezi Park in Taksim Square in Istanbul, and grew to a size unknown in the country’s history to date. Many sectors of the population, dissatisfied with recent government policy, participated, but what precipitated the masses in the streets was state terror and this same terror caused a profound stir in a large part of the working class. The movement in Turkey is not only part of the same dynamic as the revolts in the Middle East in 2011, the most important of which (Tunisia, Egypt, Israel) have been strongly marked by the working class, but is above all a direct continuation of the Indignados movement in Spain and Occupy in the United States, where the working class represents not only the majority of the population as a whole but also of the participants in the movement. The same is true of the current revolt in Brazil, where the vast majority of those involved belong to the working class, especially the proletarian youth.

The sector that participated the most in the movement in Turkey was the one dubbed the “1990s generation.”Apoliticism was the label given to this generation, many of whom could not remember the time before the AKP government2. The members of this generation, who were said to be unconcerned with the social situation and only sought to help themselves, understood that there was no salvation on their own. They have had enough of the government telling them what to do and how to live. Students, especially high school students, participated in the demonstrations in a massive way. Young workers and unemployed youth were largely present in the movement. Workers and educated unemployed were also present.

One part of the working proletariat also participated in the movement and formed the main body of the proletarian tendency within it. The Turkish Airlines strike in Istanbul tried to join the struggle at Gezi. Particularly in the textile sector we saw voices expressed in this way. One of these protests was held in Bagcilar-Gunesli, in Istanbul, where textile workers, subjected to harsh conditions of exploitation, wanted to express their class demands at the same time as they declared their solidarity with the struggle at GeziPark. They protested with banners saying “Greetings from Bagcilar to Gezi!”and “Saturday should be a day off!”. In Istanbul, workers with banners saying “General strike, general resistance” called on others to join them during a march attracting thousands of them in Alibeykov; or again “No to work, fight!”as carried by shopping centre and office employees gathered in Taksim Square. In addition, the movement has created a will to fight among unionized workers. Undoubtedly, KESK, DISK and other union organisations that called for strikes had to do so, not only because of social networking but under pressure from their own members. Finally, the platform of the various branches of Istanbul Turk-Is3, an emanation of all the local unions of Istanbul, called on the organisation and all other unions to declare a general strike against the state terror on the Monday after the attack against Gezi Park. If these calls were made, it was because there was an outrage among the membership over what had happened.

Brazil

The social movements last June have a particular significance for the proletariat of Brazil, Latin America and the rest of the world, and to a large extent went beyond the traditional regionalism of the country. These massive movements were radically different from the ‘social movements’ controlled by the state, by the PT (Workers’ Party) and other political parties, such as the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST); similarly, it was different from other movements which have arisen in various countries of the region in the last decade or so, like the one in Argentina at the beginning of the century , the ‘indigenous’ movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, the Zapatista movement in Mexico or Chavism in Venezuela, which were the result of confrontations between bourgeois or petty bourgeois factions, disputing control of the state and the defence of national capital. In this sense, the mobilisations of June in Brazil represent the largest spontaneous mass mobilisation in this country and in Latin America for the past 30 years. This is why it is essential to learn the lessons of these events from a class point of view.

It is undeniable that this movement surprised the Brazilian and world bourgeoisie. The struggle against the public transport price rises (which are negotiated each year between the transport chiefs and the state) was just the detonator of the movement. It crystallised all the indignation which had been brewing for some time in Brazilian society and which took shape in 2012 with the struggles in public administration and in the universities, mainly in São Paulo, also with a number of strikes against wage cuts and insecure working conditions and against health and education cuts over the last few years.

Unlike the massive social movements in various countries since 2011, the one in Brazil was engendered and unified around a concrete demand, which made it possible for there to be a spontaneous mobilisation of wide sectors of the proletariat: against the rise in public transport fares. The movement took on a massive character at the national level from the 13th June, when the demonstration in São Paulo against the fare increases called by the MPL (Movimento Passe Livre – Movement for Free Access to Transport)4, as well as by other social movements, were violently repressed by police in Sao Paulo5. For five weeks, in addition to large protests in São Paulo, various protests were held around the same demand in different cities in the country, so much so that, for example, in Porto Alegre, Goiânia and other cities, the pressure forced several local governments, whatever their political colour, to agree to revoke the higher transport prices, after hard struggles strongly repressed by the state.

The movement straight away situated itself on a proletarian terrain. In the first place, we should underline that the majority of the participants belong to the working class, mainly young workers and students, mainly coming out of proletarian families or those undergoing proletarianisation. The bourgeois press has presented the movement as an expression of the ‘middle classes’, with the clear intention of creating a division among workers. In reality, the majority of those categorised as middle class are workers who often receive lower wages than skilled workers in the country’s industrial zones. This explains the success of, and the widespread sympathy with, the movement against the transport increases, which represented a direct attack on the income of working class families. This also explains why this initial demand rapidly turned into the questioning of the state, given the dilapidation of sectors such as health, education and social assistance, and increasing protests against the colossal sums of public money invested in organising next year’s World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.6. For these events the Brazilian bourgeoisie has not hesitated to resort to the forced expulsion of people living near the stadia: at the Aldeia Maracanã in Rio in the first part of the year; in the zones chosen by construction firms in São Paulo, who have been burning down favelas in the way of their plans.

It is very significant that the movement organised demonstrations around the football stadia where Confederation Cup matches were being played, in order to get a lot of media attention and to reject the spectacle prepared by the Brazilian bourgeoisie; and also in response to the brutal repression of the demonstrations around the stadia, which resulted in a number of deaths. In a country where football is the national sport, which the bourgeoisie has obviously used as a safety valve for keeping society under control, the demonstrations of the Brazilian proletariat are an example for the world proletariat. The population of Brazil is known for its love of football, but this didn’t prevent it from rejecting austerity imposed to finance the sumptuous expenses devoted to the organisation of these sporting events, which the Brazilian bourgeoisie is using to show the world that it is capable of playing in the premier league of the world economy. The demonstrators demanded public services with a ‘FIFA type’ quality7.

An extremely significant fact was that there was a massive rejection of the political parties (especially the Workers’ Party, the PT which produced the current president Lula)) and of the unions; in São Paulo some protestors were excluded from the marches because they held up banners with slogans of political, union or student organisations supporting the power.

Other expressions of the class character of the movement were shown, even though in a minority. There were a number of assemblies held in the heat of the movement, even though they did not have the same extension or reach the level of organization of the Indignados in Spain. For example the ones in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, which were called ‘popular and egalitarian assemblies’ which proposed to create a “new spontaneous, open and egalitarian space for debate”, in which over 1000 people took part.

These assemblies, although they demonstrated the vitality of the movement and the necessity for the self-organisation of the masses to impose their demands, revealed a number of weaknesses:

  • Even if several other groups and collectives took part in organising them, they were animated by the capitalist left, who mainly kept their activity to the periphery of the cities

  • Their main aim was to be organs of pressure on and negotiation with the state, for particular demands for improvements in this or that community or town. They also tended to see themselves as permanent organs;

  • They claimed to be independent of the state and the parties, but they were very well infiltrated by the pro-government or leftist organisations which annihilated any spontaneous expressions;

  • They put forward a localist or national vision, struggling against the effects of problems rather than their causes, without questioning capitalism.

In the movement there were also explicit references to the social movements in other countries, especially Turkey, which also referred to Brazil. Despite the minority character of these expressions, they were still revealing about what was felt to be shared by the two movements. In different demonstrations, we could see banners proclaiming: “We are Greeks, Turks, Mexicans, we are homeless, we are revolutionaries” or signs bearing the slogan: “This is not Turkey, not Greece, it is Brazil that is coming out of its inertia.”

In Goiãnia, the Frente de Luta Contra o Aumento (Front for the Struggle Against the Increase), which regrouped various base organisations, underlined the need for solidarity and for debate between the different components of the movement:“WE MUST REMAIN FIRM AND UNITED! Despite disagreements, we must maintain our solidarity, our resistance, our fighting spirit, and deepen our organisation and our discussions. In the same way as in Turkey, peaceful and militant elements can co-exist and struggle together, we must follow this example.”

The great indignation which animated the Brazilian proletariat was concretised in the following reflections by the Rede Extremo Sul, a network of social movements on the outskirts of São Paulo:“For these possibilities to become a reality, we can’t allow the indignation being expressed on the streets to be diverted into nationalist, conservative and moralist objectives; we can’t allow these struggles to be captured by the state and by the elites in order to empty them of their political content. The struggle against the fare increases and the deplorable state of services is directly linked to the struggle against the state and the big economic corporations, against the exploitation and humiliation of the workers, and against this form of life where money is everything and people are nothing.

The traps set by the ruling class

Turkey

Various bourgeois political trends have been active, trying to influence the movement from the inside to keep it within the boundaries of the existing order, to avoid it radicalising and prevent the proletarian masses who took to the streets against state terror from developing class demands around their living conditions. So, while we cannot claim that they were adopted unanimously in the movement, it was democratic demands which generally dominated. The line calling for “more democracy” that formed around an anti-AKP, or rather anti-Erdogan position, expressed nothing but a reorganization of the Turkish State apparatus on a more democratic basis. The impact of democratic demands on the movement was its greatest ideological weakness. For Erdogan himself has built all his ideological attacks against the movement around the axis of democracy and elections; government authorities combining lies and manipulations repeated ad nauseam the argument that, even in countries considered more democratic, the police use violence against illegal demonstrations – in which they were not wrong. In addition, the line aimed at obtaining democratic rights tied the hands of the masses faced with police attacks and state terror and pacified their resistance.

The most active element of this democratic tendency, which took control of the Taksim Solidarity Platform, was in the left union confederations like KSEK and DISK. The Taksim Solidarity Platform, and therefore the democratic tendency, consisting of representatives of all kinds of associations and organisations, drew its strength not from an organic link with the protesters but its bourgeois legitimacy and the resources that it could therefore mobilise. The base of the left parties, which can also be defined as the legal bourgeois left, was to a large extent cut off from the masses. In general, it was the tail of the democratic tendency. The Stalinist and Trotskyist circles. along with the bourgeois radical left, were also largely cut off from the masses. They were only really influential in the neighbourhoods where they traditionally have a certain strength. While opposing the democratic tendency when the latter tried to disperse the movement, they generally supported it. Their most widely accepted slogan among the masses was “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism.”

Brazil

The national bourgeoisie has for decades been working to make Brazil a major continental or world power. To achieve this, it’s not enough to dispose of an immense territory which covers almost half of South America, or to count on its important natural resources. It has also been necessary to maintain social order, above all control over the workers. Thus in the 1980s it established a kind of alternation between right and centre left governments, based on ‘free and democratic’ elections. All this was indispensable for strengthening Brazilian capital on the world arena.

The Brazilian bourgeoisie was thus better placed to reinforce its productive apparatus and face up to the worst of the economic crisis of the 90s, while on the political level it succeeded in creating a political force which could control the impoverished masses, but above all maintain social peace. This situation was consolidated with the accession of the PT to power in 2002, making use of the charisma and ‘working class’ image of Lula.

In this way, during the first decade of the new century, the Brazilian economy raised itself to seventh place on the world ladder, according to the World Bank. The world bourgeoisie has hailed the ‘Brazilian miracle’ carried out under Lula’s presidency, which has supposedly pulled millions of Brazilians out of poverty and allowed more millions to enter this famous ‘middle class’. In fact, this ‘great success’ has been achieved by distributing a part of the surplus value as crumbs to the most impoverished, while at the same time the situation of the mass of workers has become ever more insecure.

The crisis nevertheless remains at the root of the situation in Brazil. To try to attenuate its effects, the Brazilian bourgeoisie has launched a policy of major works, provoking a construction boom in both the public and private sectors; at the same time it has been facilitating credit and debt among families to stimulate internal consumption. The limits are already tangible in the economic indicators (a slowdown of growth), but especially in the deterioration of working class living conditions: rising rates of inflation (an annual forecast of 6.7% in 2013), increased prices of consumer goods and services (including transport), a marked development of unemployment, cuts in public spending. So, the protest movement in Brazil does not come from nowhere.

The only concrete result obtained under pressure from the masses was the suspension of the increase in public transport fares that the state managed to compensate for in other ways. At the beginning of the wave of protests, to calm things down while the government worked out a strategy to control the movement, President Dilma Rousseff declared, via one of her mouthpieces, that she considered the population’s protests as “legitimate and compatible with democracy”. Lula meanwhile criticised the “excesses” of the police. But state repression didn’t stop, and neither did the street demonstrations.

One of the most elaborate traps against the movement was the propagation of the myth of a right wing coup, a rumour spread not only by the PT and the Stalinist party, but also by the Trotskyists of the PSOL (PartidoSocialismo e Liberdade) and PSTU (Partido Socialista dos TrabalhadoresUnificados): this was a way of derailing the movement and turning it towards supporting the Rousseff government, which has been severely weakened and discredited. In reality the facts show precisely that the ferocious repression against the protests in June by the left government led by the PT was equally if not more brutal than that of the military regimes. The left and extreme left of Brazilian capital are trying to obscure this reality by identifying repression with fascism or right wing regimes. There is also the smokescreen of ‘political reform’ put forward by Rousseff, with the aim of combating corruption in the political parties and imprisoning the population on the democratic terrain by calling for a vote on the proposed reforms. In fact, the Brazilian bourgeoisie showed more intelligence and know-how that its Turkish counterpart, which mostly confined itself to repeating the cycle of provocation/repression faced with social movements.

To try to regain an influence within the movement on the street, the political parties of the left of capital and the trade unions announced, several weeks in advance, a ‘National Day of Struggle’ for the 11 July, presented as a way of protesting against the failure of the collective labour agreements. Similarly, Lula, showing his considerable anti-working class experience, called on 25 June for a meeting of the leaders of movements controlled by the PT and the Stalinist party, including youth and student organisations allied with the government, with the explicit aim neutralising the street protests.

The strengths and weaknesses of the two movements

Turkey

Just as was the case with the Indignados movement and Occupy, these mobilizations have responded to the will to break with the atomisation of economic sectors where mostly young people work in precarious conditions (delivering for kebab shops, bar staff, workers in call centres and offices ...) and where it is usually difficult to struggle. An important driver of engagement and commitment is indignation but also the sense of solidarity against police violence and state terror.

But at the same time it is often as individuals that the largest concentrations of workers participated in the demonstrations, which has been one of the most significant weaknesses of the movement. The living conditions of the proletarians, subject to the ideological pressure of the ruling class in this country, have made it difficult for the working class to perceive itself as a class and helped to reinforce the idea among the demonstrators that they were essentially a mass of individual citizens, legitimate members of the “national” community. The movement, having not recognised its own class interests, found its possibilities for maturation blocked, the proletarian tendency within it having remained in the background. This situation has contributed a good deal to the focus on democracy, the central axis of the movement against government policy. A weakness of the demonstrations throughout Turkey has been the difficulty of creating mass discussions and gaining control of the movement through forms of self-organisation. This weakness was certainly favoured by a limited experience of mass discussion, meetings, general assemblies, etc. However at the same time the movement has felt the need for discussion, and the means to organise it began to emerge, as evidenced by some isolated experiences: the creation of an open forum in Gezi Park, which did not attract much attention or last very long, but nevertheless had some impact; during the strike of June 5, employees of the university who were members of Eğitim-Sen8 suggested establishing an open forum but the KSEK leadership not only rejected the proposal but also isolated the Eğitim-Sen branch to which the university employees belong. The most crucial experience was provided by the Eskişehir demonstrators who, in a general assembly, created committees to organise and coordinate the demonstrations; finally, on 17 June, in parks in different areas of Istanbul, masses of people inspired by the Gezi Park forums put in place mass assemblies also called “forums”. In the following days, others were held in Ankara and other cities. The most discussed issues related to problems of the clashes with the police. Nevertheless, there has been a tendency among the protesters to understand the importance of involvement in the struggle of part of the working proletariat.

Although the movement in Turkey failed to establish a serious relationship with the whole of the working class, the strike calls via social networks had a certain echo that was manifested in work stoppages. In addition, proletarian tendencies were clearly revealed in the movement through elements who were conscious of the importance and strength of the class and who were against nationalism. In general, a significant portion of the protesters defended the idea that the movement must create a self-organisation that would allow it to determine its own future. Moreover, the number of people who said that unions like KSEK and DISK, supposed to be “militant”, were no different from the government, grew significantly.

Finally, another characteristic of the movement, and not least: Turkish protesters welcomed the response from the other end the world with slogans in Turkish: “We are together, Brazil + Turkey!” and “Brazil resists!”.

Brazil

The great strength of the movement was that, from the beginning, it affirmed itself as a movement against the state, not only through the central demand against the fare increases but also as a mobilisation against the abandonment of public services and the orientation of spending towards the sporting spectacles. At the same time the breadth and determination of the protest forced the bourgeoisie to take a step back and annul the fare increases in a number of cities.

The crystallisation of the movement around a concrete demand, while being a strength of the movement, also put limits on it as soon as it was unable to go any further. Obtaining the suspension of the fare increases marked a step forward, but the movement did not on the whole see itself as challenging the capitalist order, something which was much more present in the Indignados movement in Spain.

The distrust towards the bourgeoisie’s main forces of social control took the form of the rejection of the political parties and the trade unions, and this represented a weakness for the bourgeoisie on the ideological level, the exhaustion of the political strategies which have emerged since the end of the dictatorship of 1965-85 and the discrediting of the teams which have succeeded each other at the head of the state, in particular as a result of their notoriously corrupt character. However, behind this undifferentiated rejection of politics stands the danger of the apoliticism, which was an important weakness of the movement. Without political debate, there is no possibility of taking the struggle forward, since it can only grow in the soil of discussion which is aimed at understanding the roots of the problems you are fighting against, and which cannot evade a critique of the foundations of capital. It was thus no accident that one of the weaknesses of the movement was the absence of street assemblies open to all participants, where you could discuss the problems of society, the actions to carry out, the organisation of the movement, its balance sheet and its objectives. The social networks were an important means of mobilisation, a way of breaking out of isolation. But they can never replace open and living debate in the assemblies.

The poison of nationalism was not absent from the movement, as could be seen from the number of Brazilian flags displayed on the demonstrations and the raising of nationalist slogans. It was quite common to hear the national anthem in the processions. This was not the case with the Indignados in Spain. In this sense the June movement in Brazil presented the same weaknesses as the mobilisations in Greece and in the Arab countries, where the bourgeoisie succeeded in drowning the huge vitality of the movements in a national project for reforming and safeguarding the state. In this context, the focus on corruption in the last analysis also worked for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and its political parties, especially those in opposition, and gave a certain credibility to the perspective of the next elections. Nationalism is a dead-end for the proletarian struggle, a violation of international class solidarity

Despite the majority of participants in the movement being proletarians, they were involved in an atomised way. The movement didn’t manage to mobilise the workers of the industrial centres who have an important weight, especially in the São Paulo region. It wasn’t even proposed. The working class, which certainly welcomed the movement and even identified with it, because it was struggling for a demand which it saw was in its interest, did not manage to mobilise as such. This attitude is a characteristic of the period where the working class is finding it hard to affirm its class identity, aggravated in Brazil by decades of immobility resulting from the action of the political parties and the unions, mainly the PT and the CUT.

Their importance for the future

The emergence of social movements of massive size and unparalleled historical importance since 1908 in Turkey, and for 30 years in Brazil, give an example to the world proletariat of the response of a new generation of proletarians to the deepening global crisis of the capitalist system. Despite their differences, these movements are an integral part of the chain of international social movements, of which the mobilisation of the Indignadosin Spain constitutes a reference point, in response to the historic and mortal crisis of capitalism. Despite all their weaknesses, they are a source of inspiration and lessons for the world proletariat. As for their weaknesses, they must be the subject, for the proletarians themselves, of an uncompromising critique to draw their lessons so that, tomorrow, they will arm future movements by helping them avoid the ideological influence and traps of the enemy class.

These movements are nothing other than the manifestation of “the old mole” of Marx, which continues to dig away at the foundations of the capitalist order.

Wim (11 August)


1See our series of articles on the Indignados movement in Spain, especially in International Review n° 146 (3rd quarter 2011) and no 149 (3rd quarter 2012).

2Adaletve KalkinmaPartisi(Party for Justice and Development).This ‘moderate’ Islamist party has been in power in Turkey since 2002.

3Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions.

4 Faced with rising transport fares, the MPL conveyed strong illusions about the state by claiming that, by popular demand, it could guarantee the right to free public transport for the whole population faced with private transport companies.

5See our article ‘Brazil: police repression provokes the anger of youth’, published on our website on 20 June 2013 and in our printed territorial press.

6 According to forecasts, these two events will cost the Brazilian government $31.3 billion or 1.6% of GDP while the "Family Allowance" program, presented as the Lula government’s key social measure, represents less than 0.5% of GDP.

7FIFA –International Federation of Association Football.

8Teachers' union, part of KSEK.

 

Recent and ongoing: 

Rubric: 

Social movements in Turkey and Brazil

20th ICC Congress: Resolution on the international situation

1) A century ago the capitalist mode of production entered its period of historical decline, its epoch of decadence. It was the outbreak of the First World War which marked the passage from the ‘Belle Epoque’, the high point of bourgeois society, to the ‘epoch of wars and revolutions’ described by the Communist International at its first congress in 1919. Since then, capitalism has continued to sink into barbarism, most notably in the shape of a Second World War which cost 50 million lives. And if the period of ‘prosperity’ which followed this horrible butchery could sow the illusion that this system had finally been able to overcome its contradictions, the open crisis of the economy at the end of the 1960s confirmed the verdict which revolutionaries had already pronounced half a century before: the capitalist mode of production could not escape the destiny of the modes of production which had preceded it. It too, having constituted a progressive step in human history, had become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces and the progress of humanity. The time for its overthrow and its replacement by another society had arrived.

2) At the same time that it showed the historic dead end that the capitalist system now faced, this open crisis, like the one in the 1930s, once again placed society in front of the alternative between generalised imperialist war and the development of decisive proletarian struggles with the perspective of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Faced with the crisis of the 1930s, the world proletariat, which had been ideologically crushed by the bourgeoisie following the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave, had not been able to come up with its own response, leaving the bourgeoisie to impose its own: a new world war. By contrast, with the first blows of the open crisis at the end of the 1960s, the proletariat had launched very widespread struggles: May 1968 in France, the ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy 1969, the massive strikes of the workers in Poland in 1970, and many other combats, less spectacular but no less significant as signs of fundamental change in society. The counter-revolution was over. In this new situation, the bourgeoisie did not have a free hand to head towards a new world war. There followed more than four decades marked by the world economy getting more and more bogged down and by increasingly violent attacks against the living conditions of the exploited. During these decades, the working class waged many resistance struggles. However, even though it did not suffer a decisive defeat which could have overturned the historic course, it was not able to develop its struggles and its consciousness to the point of offering society the outline of a revolutionary perspective.

In this situation, where society’s two decisive - and antagonistic - classes confront each other without either being able to impose its own definitive response, history nonetheless does not just come to a stop. Still less for capitalism than for preceding social forms, is a “freeze” or a “stagnation” of social life possible. As a crisis-ridden capitalism’s contradictions can only get deeper, the bourgeoisie’s inability to offer the slightest perspective for society as a whole, and the proletariat’s inability, for the moment, openly to set forward its own can only lead to a situation of generalised decomposition. Capitalism is rotting on its feet’ (International Review n°62, Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism).

Thus a new phase in the decadence of capitalism opened up a quarter of a century ago, the phase where the phenomenon of decomposition has become a decisive element in the life of the whole of society.

3) The area where the decomposition of capitalist society is expressed in the most spectacular way is that of military conflicts and international relations in general. What led the ICC to elaborate its analysis of decomposition in the second half of the 1980s was the succession of murderous attacks which hit the big European cities, especially Paris – attacks that were not carried out by isolated groups but by established states. This was the beginning of a form of imperialist confrontations, later described as ‘asymmetrical warfare’, which marked a profound change in relations between states and, more generally, in the whole of society. The first historic manifestation of this new and final stage in the decadence of capitalism was the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Europe and of the eastern bloc in 1989. Straight away the ICC pointed out the significance of this event in terms of imperialist conflicts:

The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its one-time ‘partners’ are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rivalries. For the moment, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into a world war…. However, with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more violent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest. (International Review n°61, After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, destabilization and chaos).

Since then the international situation has only confirmed this analysis:

  • Gulf war in 1991

  • War in ex-Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001

  • Two wars in Chechnya (in 1994-95 and 1999-2000)

  • War in Afghanistan from 2001, which is still going on 12 years later

  • The war in Iraq in 2003, the consequences of which continue to effect this country in a dramatic way, but also the initiator of the war, the USA

  • The many wars which have ravaged the African continent (Rwanda, Somalia, Congo, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Mali, etc)

  • The numerous military operations by Israel against Lebanon or the Gaza Strip in response to rocket attacks from Hezbollah or Hamas

4) In fact, these different conflicts graphically illustrate how war has taken on a totally irrational character in decadent capitalism. The wars of the 19th century, however murderous they may have been, had a rationality from the standpoint of the development of capitalism. Colonial wars allowed the European states to establish empires where they could obtain raw materials or as outlets for their commodities. The American Civil War, won by the north, opened the door to the full industrial development of what would become the world’s leading power. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 was a decisive element in German unity and thus in creating the political framework for the future powerhouse of Europe. By contrast, the First World War bled the countries of Europe dry, both the ‘victors’ and the ‘vanquished’, above all those which had been the most ‘warlike’ (Austria, Russia and Germany). As for the Second World War, it confirmed and amplified the decline of the European continent where it had begun, with a special mention for Germany, which in 1945 was a pile of ruins, as was the other ‘aggressor’ power, Japan. In fact, the only country which benefited from this war was the one which had entered it later on and which, because of its geographic position, meant that the war was not fought on its territory – the USA. However, the most important war waged by the US after the Second World War, the war in Vietnam, certainly showed its irrational character because it brought nothing to the American power despite a considerable cost at the economic and above all human and political levels.

5) This said, the irrational character of war has gone on to a new level in the period of decomposition. This has been clearly illustrated by the American adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars also had a considerable cost, notably at the economic level. But their benefits were severely limited, if not negative. In these wars, the American power was able to display its immense military superiority, but this did not enable it to obtain the objectives it was seeking: stabilising Iraq and Afghanistan and forcing its old allies of the western bloc to close ranks around the US. Today, the phased withdrawal of American and NATO troops from Iraq and Afghanistan is leaving these countries in an unprecedented state of instability, threatening to aggravate the instability of the whole region. At the same time, the other participants in these military adventures have jumped or will jump ship in dispersed order.

6) During the last period, the chaotic nature of the imperialist tensions and conflicts has been illustrated once again with the situation in Syria and the Far East. In both cases, we are witnessing conflicts which bring with them the threat of a much wider extension and destabilisation. In the Far East we’ve seen rising tensions between the states of the region. Thus in recent months there have been tensions involving a number of countries, from the Philippines to Japan. China and Japan have been in dispute over the Senkaku/Diyao islands, Japan and South Korea over the island of Takeshima/Dokdo, while there are other tensions involving Taiwan, Vietnam and Burma. But the most spectacular conflict is obviously the one ranging North Korea against South Korea, Japan and the US. In the grip of a dramatic economic crisis, North Korea has upped the stakes on the military level, with the aim of putting pressure on the others, and especially the USA, in order to gain a certain number of economic advantages. But this adventurist policy contains two very serious elements. On the one hand, the fact that it involves, even if in an indirect manner, the Chinese giant, which remains one of North Korea’s only allies, and which is more and more pushing forward its imperialist interests wherever it can, in the Far East of course, but also in the Middle East, through its alliance with Iran (which is its main supplier of hydrocarbons), and also in Africa where a growing economic presence is aimed at preparing the ground for a future military presence when it has the means to establish it. On the other hand, the adventurist policy of the North Korean state, a state whose brutal police rule is evidence of its basic fragility, contains the risk of things getting out of hand, of an uncontrolled process creating a new focus for direct military conflicts whose consequences would be hard to predict but which we can already say would be a further tragic episode to add to the long list of expressions of military barbarism ravaging the planet today.

7) The civil war in Syria followed on from the ‘Arab spring’ which, by weakening the Assad regime, opened up a Pandora’s Box of contradictions and conflicts which the iron hand of this regime had managed to keep under control for decades. The western countries have come out in favour of Assad’s departure but they are quite incapable of coming up with an alternative, given that the opposition is totally divided and that the preponderant sector is made up of the Islamists. At the same time, Russia has given unstinting military support to the Assad regime, which has guaranteed it the capacity to maintain its war fleet in the post of Tartus. And this is not the only state supporting the regime: there are also Iran and China. Syria has thus become the stakes of a bloody conflict involving multiple imperialist rivalries between powers of the first and second order – rivalries which have exacted a heavy price from the populations of the Middle East for decades. The fact that the manifestation of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Syria has resulted not in the least gain for the exploited and oppressed masses but in a war which has left over 100,000 dead is a sinister illustration of the weakness of the working class in this country – the only force which can form a barrier to military barbarism. And this situation also applies, even if in less tragic forms, to the other Arab countries where the fall of the old dictators has resulted in the seizure of power by the most retrograde sectors of the bourgeoisie, represented by the Islamists in Egypt or Turkey, or in utter chaos, as in Libya.

Thus, Syria offers us today a new example of the barbarism which capitalism in decomposition is unleashing on the planet, a barbarism which is taking the form of bloody military confrontations but which is also affecting zones which have avoided war but where society is sinking into growing chaos, as for example in Latin America where the drug gangs, with the complicity of sectors of the state, have imposed a reign of terror in a number of areas.

8) But it’s at the level of the destruction of the environment that the short term consequences of the collapse of capitalist society take on a totally apocalyptic quality. Although the development of capitalism has from the beginning been characterised by the extreme rapacity of its search for profit and accumulation in the name of the ‘conquest of nature’, the depredations brought about by this tendency over the last 30 years have reached levels of devastation that are unprecedented whether in previous societies or at the time of its birth ‘in blood and filth’. The concern of the revolutionary proletariat faced with the destructive essence of capitalism is as old as the threat itself. Marx and Engels already warned against the negative impact – both on nature and on human beings – of the agglomeration and confinement of people in the first industrial concentrations in Britain in the mid-19th century. In the same spirit, revolutionaries have in different epochs understood and denounced the ignoble nature of capitalist development, showing the danger that it represents not just for the working class, but for the whole of humanity and now for its very survival on the planet.

The current tendency towards the definitive and irreversible degradation of the natural world is frankly alarming, as shown by the constant terrible scenarios of global warming, pillage of the planet, deforestation, soil erosion, destruction of species, pollution of water sources, seas and air and nuclear catastrophes. The latter are an example of the latent danger of the devastation resulting from the potential that capitalism has put at the service of its mad logic, turning it into a Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of humanity. And although the bourgeoisie tries to attribute the destruction of the environment to the wickedness of individuals ‘lacking an ecological conscience’ – thereby creating an atmosphere of guilt and anguish - the truth revealed by its vain and hypocritical attempts to resolve the problem is that this is not a problem of individuals or even of companies or nations, but of the very logic of devastation inscribed in a system which, in the name of accumulation, a system whose principle and goal is profit, has no scruples about undermining once and for all the material premises for metabolic exchange between life and the Earth, as long as it can gain an immediate benefit from it.

This is the inevitable result of the contradiction between the productive forces- human and natural- which capitalism has developed, compressing them to the point of explosion, and the antagonistic relations based on the division between classes and on capitalist competition.

This dramatic scenario must also stimulate the proletariat in its revolutionary efforts, because only the destruction of capitalism can enable life to flourish once again.

9) Fundamentally, this powerlessness of the ruling class in front of the destruction of the environment, even though it is more and more conscious of the threat it poses to the whole of humanity, has its roots in its inability to overcome the economic contradictions which assail the capitalist mode of production. It is the irreversible aggravation of the economic crisis which is the fundamental cause of the barbarism which is more and more spreading throughout society. For the capitalist mode of production, there is no way out. Its own laws have led it into this impasse and it can’t get out of this without abolishing its own laws, i.e. without abolishing itself. Concretely, the motor of capitalism’s development from the beginning has been the conquest of new markets outside its own sphere. The commercial crises which it went through from the early years of the 19th century, and which expressed the fact that the commodities produced by a capitalism in full development could not find enough buyers to absorb its products, were overcome by a destruction of excess capital but also and above all by the conquest of new markets, mainly in the zones which had not yet been developed from a capitalist point of view. This is why this century was the century of colonial conquests: for each developed capitalist power it was essential to constitute zones where they could obtain cheap raw materials but which also and above all could serve as outlets for its commodities. The First World War was fundamentally the result of the fact that the division of the world among the capitalist powers meant that any conquest of new zones dominated by this or that power could only mean a confrontation with other colonial powers. This did not mean however that there were no longer any extra-capitalist markets capable of absorbing the excess of commodities produced by capitalism. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote on the eve of the First World War: ‘The more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata, at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer. But even before this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital’ (Rosa Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, chapter 32).

The First World War was precisely the most terrible expression of this epoch of “catastrophes and convulsions” capitalism was going through “even before this natural economic impasse of capital’s own making is properly reached”. And 10 years after the imperialist slaughter, the great crisis of the 1930s was the second expression, a crisis which would lead to a second generalised imperialist massacre. But the period of ‘prosperity’ which the world went through in the second post-war period, a prosperity piloted by the mechanisms set up by the western bloc even before the end of the war (notably the Bretton Woods accords in 1944), and which were based on the systematic intervention of the state in the economy, proved that this ‘natural economic impasse’ had not yet been reached. The open crisis at the end of the 1960s demonstrated that the system was getting closer to these limits, especially with the end of the process of decolonisation which, paradoxically, had made it possible to open up new markets. From then onwards, the increasing narrowness of extra-capitalist markets has forced capitalism, more and more threatened by generalised overproduction, to resort more and more to credit, a real headlong flight since the more the debts accumulated, the less possibility there was for these debts to be repaid.

10) The rising influence of the financial sector of the economy, to the detriment of the productive sphere proper, and which today is stigmatised by politicians and journalists of all kinds as being responsible for the crisis, is in no way the result of the triumph of one kind of economic thinking over another (‘monetarists’ against ‘Keynesians’ or ‘neo-liberals’ against ‘interventionists’). It derives fundamentally from the fact that the forward flight into credit has given a growing weight to those organisms whose function is to distribute credit, the banks. In this sense, the ‘financial crisis’ is not the source of the economic crisis and the recession. On the contrary, it is overproduction which is the source of ‘financialisation’ and it is the fact that it is more and more risky to invest in production, given that the world market is more and more saturated, and this directs the flow of finance more and more towards speculation. This is why all the ‘left wing’ economic theories which call for ‘reining in international finance’ in order to get out of the crisis are empty dreams since they ‘forget’ the real causes of this hypertrophy of the financial sphere.

11) The crisis of the ‘sub-primes’ in 2007, the huge financial panic of 2008 and the recession of 2009 marked a new and very important step in capitalism’s descent into irreversible crisis. For decades, capitalism had used and abused credit to counter-act the growing tendency towards overproduction, expressed in particular by a succession of recessions which were increasingly profound and devastating, followed by ‘recoveries’ which were more and more timid. The result of this was that, leaving aside variations on growth rates from one year to the next, average growth in the world economy has continued to fall from decade to decade while at the same time unemployment has increased. The recession of 2009 has been the most important capitalism has been through since the Great Depression of the 1930s, bringing unemployment rates in many countries to levels not seen since the Second World War. It was only a massive intervention by the IMF, decided at the G20 summit of March 2009, which saved the banks from generalised bankruptcy resulting from their accumulation of ‘toxic debts’, i.e. loans which would never be repaid. In doing so, the ‘debt crisis’, as the bourgeois commentators describe it, was taken onto a higher level: it was no longer just particular individuals ( as happened in the US in the USA with the housing crisis), not just companies or banks, who were unable to reimburse their debts, or even pay the interest on their debts. It was now entire states which were confronted with the increasingly crushing weight of debt, ‘sovereign debt’, which affects their capacity to intervene in order to revive their respective national economies through budget deficits.

12) It’s in this context which we saw, in the summer of 2011, what has henceforward been known as the ‘Euro crisis’. Like the Japanese state or the American state, the debt of the European states has grown in a spectacular manner, particularly in those countries of the Eurozone whose economies are the most fragile or the most dependent on the illusory palliatives put in motion during the previous period – the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain). In the countries which have their own currency, like the USA, Japan or the UK, state debt can be partly compensated by the printing of money. Thus the American FED has bought up large quantities of American state Treasury Bonds, i.e. the recognition of state debts, in order to transform them into greenbacks. But such a possibility does not exist at the individual level for countries which have abandoned their national currency in favour of the Euro. Deprived of this possibility of ‘monetising’ debt, the countries of the Eurozone have no other recourse but to borrow even more to make up for the hole in their public finances. And if the countries of northern Europe are still able to raise funds from private banks at reasonable rates, such a possibility is out of the question for the PIIGS whose loans are subjected to exorbitant rates because of their flagrant insolvability, which obliges them to call on a series of ‘salvage plans’ put into place by the European Central Bank and the IMF, accompanied by the demand for drastic reductions in their public deficits. The consequence of these reductions are dramatic attacks on the living conditions of the working class; but they still don’t give states a real capacity to limit their public deficits since the recession they provoke has the consequence of reducing the resources that can be derived from taxes. Thus the snake oil remedies used to ‘heal the sick’ threaten more and more to kill the patient. This is also one of the reasons why the European Commission decided very recently to soften its demands for the reduction of deficits in certain countries like Spain and France. We can thus note once again the impasse that capitalism faces: debt has been used as way of supplementing the insufficiency of solvent markets but it can’t grow indefinitely as could be seen from the financial crisis which began in 2007. However, all the measures which can be taken to limit debt once again confront capitalism with its crisis of overproduction, and this in an international context which is in constant deterioration and which more and more limits its margin of manoeuvre.

13) The case of the ‘emergent’ countries, notably the ‘BRICs’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China) whose rates of growth have stayed well above those of the US, Japan, or western Europe, does not contradict the insoluble nature of the contradictions of the capitalist system. In reality, the ‘success’ of these countries (the differences between which should be underlined since a country like Russia is notable mainly for the preponderance of exports of raw materials, especially hydrocarbons) has in part been the consequence of the capitalist economy’s general crisis of overproduction, which, by exacerbating competition between enterprises and obliging them to reduce drastically the cost of labour power, has led to the ‘relocation’ of major parts of the productive apparatus of the old industrial countries (automobiles, textiles and clothing, electronics, etc) to regions where workers’ wages are much lower. However, the close dependence of these emerging countries on exports towards the most developed countries will sooner or later lead to convulsions in these economies when sales to the former are affected by deepening recessions, which will not fail to develop.

14) Thus, as we said 4 years ago, ‘even though the capitalist system is not going to collapse like a pack of cards, the perspective is one of sinking deeper and deeper into a historical impasse, of plunging more and more into the convulsions that affect it today. For more than four decades, the bourgeoisie has not been able to prevent the continual aggravation of the crisis. Today it is facing a situation which is far more degraded than the one it faced in the 60s. In spite of all the experience it has gained in these decades, it can only do worse, not better’, (18th ICC Congress: Resolution on the International Situation). This does not mean however that we are going back to a situation similar to that of 1929 and the 1930s. 70 years ago, the world bourgeoisie was taken completely aback faced with the collapse of its economy, and the policies it applied, with each country turning in on itself, only succeeded in exacerbating the consequences of the crisis. The evolution of the economic situation over the last four decades has proved that, even if it’s clearly incapable of preventing capitalism from sinking deeper and deeper into the crisis, the ruling class has the ability to slow down this descent and to avoid a situation of generalised panic like on ‘Black Thursday’ on October 24th 1929. There is another reason why we are not going to relive a situation similar to that of the 1930s. At this time, the shock wave of the crisis began from the world’s leading power, the USA, and then spread to the second world power, Germany. It was in these two countries that we saw the most dramatic consequences of the crisis, like the mass unemployment that hit 30% of the active population, or the endless queues outside employment offices or soup kitchens, whereas countries like Britain and France were relatively spared. Today, a somewhat comparable situation is developing in countries in the south of Europe (notably Greece), without yet reaching the same level of workers’ misery as in the US and Germany in the 1930s. At the same time, the most developed countries, in northern Europe, the USA and Japan, are still very far from such a situation. One the one hand, because their national economies are better able to resist the crisis, but also, and above all, because today the proletariat of these countries, and especially in Europe, is not ready to accept such a level of attacks on its conditions. Thus one of the major components of the evolution of the crisis escapes from a strict economic determinism and moves onto the social level, to the rapport de forces between the two major classes in society, bourgeoisie and proletariat.

15) Although the ruling class would like to present its putrid sores as if they were beauty spots, humanity is beginning to wake up from a dream which has become a nightmare, and to grasp the total historic bankruptcy of this society. But although the feeling that there is a need for a different order of things is gaining ground faced with the brutal reality of a world in decomposition, this vague consciousness does not yet mean that the proletariat has become convinced of the necessity to abolish this world, still less that it has developed the perspective of constructing a new one. Thus the unprecedented aggravation of the capitalist crisis in the context of decomposition is the framework in which the class struggle develops today, although in an uncertain manner given that this struggle is not developing in the form of open confrontations between the two classes. Here we must underline the unprecedented framework of the present struggles since they are taking place in the context of a crisis which has lasted for nearly 40 years and whose gradual effects - apart from particular convulsions - have ‘habituated’ the proletariat to seeing a slow, pernicious deterioration in its living conditions, which make it all the harder to grasp the gravity of the attacks and to make a consequent response. Even more, it’s a crisis whose rhythm makes it difficult to understand who lies behind the attacks which are made ‘natural’ by their slow, staggered nature. This is very different from the obvious and immediate convulsions in the whole of social life in a situation of war. Thus there are differences between the development of the class struggle – at the level of possible responses, of breadth, of depth, of extension and content – in a context of war which makes the need to fight dramatically urgent, as was the case during the First World War early in the 20th century, even if there was not an immediate response to the war - and a crisis evolving at a slow pace.

The starting point for today’s struggles is precisely the absence of class identity in a proletariat which, since capitalism entered into its phase of decomposition, has had serious difficulties not only in developing its historic perspective but even in recognising itself as a social class. The so-called ‘death of communism’, supposedly brought about by the fall of the eastern bloc in 1989, unleashed an ideological campaign whose aim was to deny the very existence of the proletariat, and it dealt a very heavy blow to the consciousness and militancy of the proletariat. The attacking force of this campaign has weighed on the course of the struggle ever since. But despite this, as we have been saying since 2003, the tendency towards class confrontations has been confirmed by the development of various movements in which the working class ‘demonstrated its existence’ to a bourgeoisie which had wanted it buried while it was still alive. Thus, the working class of the whole world has not stopped fighting, even if its struggles have not attained the hoped for breadth or depth given the critical situation it faces. However, thinking about the class struggle in terms of ‘what should be’, as though the present situation had just fallen from the sky, is not permissible for revolutionaries. Understanding the difficulties and the potential of the class struggle has always been a task demanding a patient, historical, materialist approach, in order to find sense in apparent chaos, to understand what is new and difficult and what is promising.

16) It’s in this context of crisis, of decomposition and the fragile subjective state of the proletariat that we can understand the weaknesses, insufficiencies and errors as well as the potential strength of the struggle, confirming us in our conviction that the communist perspective does not derive in an automatic or mechanical way from determined circumstances. Thus, during the last two years, we have seen the development of movements which we have described with the metaphor of the five streams:

  1. Social movements of young people in precarious work, unemployed or still studying, which began with the struggle against the CPE in 2006, continued with the youth revolt in Greece in 2008 and culminated with the movement of the Indignados and Occupy in 2011;

  2. Movements which were massive but which were well contained by the bourgeoisie preparing the ground in advance, as in France 2007, France and Britain in 2010, Greece in 2010-12, etc;

  3. Movements which suffered from a weight of inter-classism, like Tunisia and Egypt in 2011;

  4. Germs of massive strikes as in Egypt in 2007, Vigo (Spain) in 2006, China in 2009;

  5. The development of struggles in the factories or in localised industrial sectors but which contained promising signs, such as Lindsey in 2009, Tekel in 2010, electricians in the UK in 2011.

These five streams belong to the working class despite their differences; each one in its own way expresses an effort by the proletariat to find itself again, despite the difficulties and obstacles which the bourgeoisie puts in its way. Each one contained a dynamic of research, of clarification, of preparing the social soil. At different levels they are part of the search “for the word that will lead us to socialism” (as Rosa Luxemburg put it, referring to the workers’ councils) via the general assemblies. The most advanced expressions of this tendency were the Indignados and Occupy movements - especially in Spain - because they were the ones which most clearly showed the tensions, contradictions and potential of the class struggle today. Despite the presence of strata coming from the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, the proletarian imprint of these movements manifested itself in the search for solidarity, in the assemblies, in the attempts to develop a culture of debate, in the capacity to avoid the traps of repression, in the seeds of internationalism, and in an acute sensibility towards subjective and cultural elements. And it is through this dimension of preparing the subjective terrain that these movements show all their importance for the future.

17) The bourgeoisie has in turn been showing signs of anxiety at this resurrection of its worldwide grave digger, which has been reacting against the horrors imposed on it on a daily basis to maintain the present system. Capitalism has therefore been widening its offensive by strengthening union containment, sowing democratic illusions and shooting off the fireworks of nationalism. It’s no accident that its counter-offensive focussed on these questions: the aggravation of the crisis and its effects on the living conditions of the proletariat have provoked a resistance which the unions try to control through actions which fragment the unity of the struggles and prolong the proletariat’s loss of confidence in its own strength.

Since the development of the class struggle is taking place today in the framework of an open crisis of capitalism that has been going on for nearly 40 years - which is to some degree an unprecedented situation in the experience of the workers’ movement- the bourgeoisie is trying to prevent the proletariat from becoming aware of the world wide and historic character of the crisis. Thus the idea of national solutions and the development of nationalist discourse prevent an understanding of the real character of the crisis which is indispensable for the struggle of the proletariat to take on a radical direction. Since the proletariat doesn’t recognise itself as a class, its resistance tends to start out as a general expression of indignation against what is happening throughout society. This absence of class identity and thus of a class perspective enables the bourgeoisie to develop mystifications about citizenship and struggles for a “real democracy”. And there are other sources of this loss of class identity, which trace their roots to the very structure of capitalist society and the form which the current aggravation of the crisis is taking. Decomposition, which entails a brutal worsening of the minimal conditions for human survival, is accompanied by an insidious devastation of the personal, mental and social terrain. This translates itself into a “crisis of confidence” of humanity. Furthermore the aggravation of the crisis through the spread of unemployment and precarious working has weakened the socialisation of young people and facilitated the tendency to escape into a world of abstraction and atomisation.

18) Thus, the movements of these last two years, and especially the “social movements”, are marked by many contradictions. In particular the rarity of specific demands apparently doesn’t correspond to the “classic” trajectory from the particular to the general which we expect from the class struggle. But we must also take into account the positive aspects of this general point of view, which derives from the fact that the effects of decomposition are felt at the general level, and from the universal nature of the economic attacks mounted by the ruling class. Today the road taken by the proletariat has its point of departure in the “general”, which tends to raise the question of politicisation in a much more direct way. Confronted with the obvious bankruptcy of the system and the deleterious effects of decomposition, the exploited mass revolts and cannot go forward until it understands these problems as products of the decadence of the system and the necessity to overcome it. It’s at this level that the methods of proletarian struggle that we have seen (general assemblies, open and fraternal debates, solidarity, the development of an increasingly political perspective) take on all their importance, since it is these methods which make it possible to undertake a critical reflection and arrive at the conclusion that the proletariat can not only destroy capitalism but can create a new world. A decisive moment in this process will be the entry into the struggle of the workplaces and their conjunction with the more general mobilisations, a perspective which is beginning to develop despite the difficulties we are going to encounter in the years ahead. This is the content of the perspective of the convergence of the ‘five streams’ we mentioned above into the “ocean of phenomena” which Rosa Luxemburg called the mass strike.

19) To understand this perspective of convergence, the relationship between class identity and class consciousness is of capital importance and a question arises: can consciousness develop without class identity or will the latter emerge from the development of consciousness? The development of consciousness and of a historic perspective are rightly associated with the rediscovery of class identity, but we cannot envisage this developing bit by bit in a rigid sequence: first forge your identity, then struggle, then become conscious and develop a perspective, or some other order of these elements. The working class today does not appear as an increasingly massive pole of opposition, so the development of a critical stance by a proletariat which still doesn’t know itself is more probable. The situation is complex but it is more likely that we will see a response in the form of a general questioning which is potentially positive in political terms, starting off not from a sharply distinct class identity but from movements which tend to find their own perspective through their own struggle, As we said in 2009 “For consciousness of the possibility of the communist revolution to gain a significant echo within the working class, the latter has to gain confidence in its own strength, and this takes place through the development of massive struggles” (Resolution on the international situation, point 11, 18th ICC Congress). The formulation ‘develop its struggles to gain confidence in itself and its perspective’ is perfectly adequate since this means recognising a ‘self’ and a perspective, but the development of these elements can only derive from the struggles themselves. The proletariat does not ‘create’ its consciousness but becomes conscious of what it really is.

In this process, debate is the key to criticising the insufficiencies of partial points of view, to exposing traps, rejecting the hunt for scapegoats, understanding the nature of the crisis, etc. At this level, the tendencies towards open and fraternal debate of these last years are very promising for this process of politicisation which the class will have to take forward. Transforming the world by transforming ourselves begins to take form in the evolution of initiatives for debate and in the development of concerns based on a critique of the most powerful chains holding the proletariat. The process of politicisation and radicalisation needs debate in order to make a critique of the present order, giving a historical explanation of problems. At this level it remains valid to say that “the responsibility of revolutionary organisations and the ICC in particular is to participate fully in the reflection going on in the working class, not only intervening actively in the struggles which are already developing but also by stimulating the positions of the groups and elements who aim to join the struggle” (ICC's 17th Congress: Resolution on the international situation). We must be firmly convinced that the responsibility of revolutionaries in the phase now opening up is to contribute to and catalyse the nascent development of consciousness expressing itself in the doubts and criticisms already arising in the proletariat. Developing and deepening theory has to be at the heart of our contribution, not only against the effects of decomposition but also as a way of patiently sowing the social field, as an antidote to immediatism in our activities, because without the radicalisation and deepening of theory by revolutionary minorities, theory will never seize hold of the masses.

 

 

 

 

 

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Bilan, the Dutch left, and the transition to communism (ii)

In the previous article in this series, we looked at the way the Belgian/Italian left communists around the review Bilan in the 1930s criticised the conceptions of the Dutch council communists regarding the transition from capitalism to communism. We looked mainly at the political aspects of the transition period, in particular Bilan’s argument that the Dutch comrades underestimated the problems posed by the proletarian revolution and the inevitable recomposition of a form of state power during the transitional period. In this article we will study Bilan’s criticisms of the central focus of the Dutch communists book Grundprinzipien Kommunistischer Produktion und Veiteilung (Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, published by the Groep van Internationale Communisten, GIC): the economic programme of the proletarian revolution.

Their criticisms centre round two main areas:

  • the problem of value and its elimination

  • the system of remuneration in the transition period

Value and its elimination

The author of the Bilan articles, Mitchell, begins by affirming that the proletarian revolution cannot immediately introduce integral communism, but only a transitional, hybrid social form, still marked ideologically by the ‘stigmata’ of the past and by its more material incarnations: the law of value, and thus even by money and wages, even if in a modified form. In short, labour power does not immediately cease to be a commodity because the means of production has become collective property. It continues to be measured in terms of ‘value’, that mysterious quality which “while finding its source in the activity of a physical force – labour – has no material reality in itself” (Bilan 34, republished in IR 130). Regarding the difficulties posed by the whole concept of value, Mitchell quotes Marx from his Preface to Capital, where he notes that, regarding the value-form, “the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all” (and it is fair to say that this question remains a source of puzzlement and controversy even among genuine followers of Marx...).

In his own effort to get to the bottom of it all, to discover what makes a commodity ‘worth’ something on the market, Marx, in line with the classical economists, recognised the core of value is in concrete human activity, in labour carried out within a given social relationship – more precisely, in the average labour time embodied in the commodity. It is not a pure result of supply and demand, or arbitrary whims and decisions, even if these elements may cause fluctuations of price. It is thus the regulating principle behind the anarchy of the market. But Marx went beyond the classical economists in showing how it is also the basis for the particular form of exploitation in bourgeois society and of the specific character of the crisis and breakdown of capitalism, and thus of a complete loss of control by humanity over its own productive activity. These revelations led to the majority of bourgeois economists abandoning the labour theory of value even before the capitalist system entered its epoch of decline.

In 1928, the Soviet economist I I Rubin, soon to be accused of deviation from marxism and eliminated along with thousands of other communists, published a masterly analysis of Marx’s theory of value, which appeared in English in 1972 under the title Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, published by Black and Red. From the beginning of the work, he insists that Marx’s theory of value is inseparable from his critique of commodity fetishism and the “reification” of human relations in bourgeois society – the transformation of a relationship between people into a relationship between things:

Value is a production relation among autonomous commodity producers; it assumes the form of being a property of things and is connected with the distribution of social labour. Or, looking at the same phenomenon from the other side, value is the property of the product of labour of each commodity producer which makes it exchangeable for the products of labour of any other commodity producer in a determined ratio which corresponds to a given level of productivity of labour in the different branches of production. We are dealing with a human relation which acquires the form of being a property of things and which is connected with the process of distribution of labour in production. In other words, we are dealing with reified production relations among people. The reification of labour in value is the most important conclusion of the theory of fetishism, which explains the inevitability of ‘reification’ of production relations among people in a commodity economy." (Rubin, p72, chapter 8, ‘Basic characteristics of Marx’s theory of value’).

The Dutch left were certainly aware that the question of value and its elimination was key to the transition towards communism. Their book was an attempt to elaborate a method that could guide the working class away from a society where their products rule over them, to one where the producers are in direct command of the entirety of production and consumption. Their driving concern was to replace the “reified” relations characteristic of capitalist society with the simple transparency of social relations which Marx alludes to in the first chapter of Capital when he describes the future society of associated producers.

How did the Dutch comrades envisage this being achieved? As we wrote in the previous article,

For the Grundprinzipien the nationalisation or collectivisation of the means of production can perfectly well co-exist with wage labour and the alienation of the workers from their own product. What is key, therefore, is that the workers themselves, through their own organisations rooted in the workplace, dispose not only of the physical means of production but of the entire social product. But in order to ensure that the social product remained in the hands of the producers from the beginning to the end of the labour process (decisions on what to produce and in what quantities, distribution of the product including the remuneration of the individual producer) a general economic law was needed which could be subject to rigorous accounting: the calculation of the social product on the basis of the average socially necessary labour time”.

For Mitchell, as we have seen, the law of value inevitably persists during the transition period. This is certainly the case during the phase of civil war, where the proletarian bastion “cannot abstract itself from a world economy which continues to evolve on a capitalist basis” (Bilan 34). But he also argues that even within the “proletarian economy” (and after the victory over the bourgeoisie in the civil war) not all sectors of the economy can be immediately socialised (he had in mind the example of the huge peasant sector in Russia and throughout the peripheries of the capitalist system). There will thus be exchange between the socialised sector and these very considerable vestiges of small-scale production, and this will impose, with more or less weight, the laws of the market on the sector directly controlled by the proletariat. The law of value, instead of being abolished by decree, must instead go through a kind of historical reversion: “the law of value, instead of developing the way it did by going from simple commodity production to capitalist production must go through the reverse process of regression and extinction which leads from the ‘mixed’ economy to full communism” (Bilan 34).

Mitchell considers that the Dutch comrades are deluded in thinking that you can abolish the law of value simply through the calculation of labour time. For one thing, their idea of formulating a kind of mathematical law of accounting that will make it possible to do away with the value-form will encounter considerable difficulties. To precisely measure labour value, you need to establish the ‘socially average’ labour time embodied in commodities. But the unit of this social average can only be unskilled or simple labour, i.e. labour in itsmost elementary expression: skilled or compound labour needs to be reduced to its simplest form. And in Mitchell’s view Marx himself accepted that he did not manage to solve this problem. In sum, “the reduction of compound labour to simple labour (which is the real unit of measure) remains unexplained, and that as a result the elaboration of a scientific method for calculating labour time, which is a necessary function of this process of reduction, is impossible. Probably the conditions for the emergence of such a law will only come together when it is no longer of any use: i.e. when production can answer all needs and when, as a result, society will no longer need to calculate labour: the administration of things will only require a simple register of what has been produced. In the economic domain we can thus see an analogy with political life, when democracy will be superfluous at the moment that it has been fully realised” (Bilan 34).

Perhaps more important is Mitchell’s charge that both in their means of advancing towards the higher goals, and in their definition of the more advanced stages of the new society, the Grundprinzipien’s vision of communism actually contains a disguised form of the law of value, since it still contains its essence, the measure of labour by socially average labour time.

To support this argument, Mitchell warns that there is a danger that the Grundprinzipien’s ‘non-centralised’ network of enterprises could actually function as a society of commodity production (not dissimilar from the anarcho-syndicalist view that the Dutch comrades rightly criticise in their book):

They note however that ‘the suppression of the market must be interpreted in the sense that while the market appears to survive under communism, its social content as regards circulation is entirely different: the circulation of products on the basis of labour time is the basis of new social relation’ (p 110). But if the market survives (even if its form and basis are different) it can only function on the basis of value. This is what the Dutch internationalists don't seem to see, ‘subjugated’, as they are, to their formulation about ‘labour time’, which in substance is nothing but value itself. Furthermore, for them it is not excluded that in ‘communism’ we will still talk about ‘value’; but they refrain from drawing out the significance of this with regards to the mechanism of the social relations that result from maintaining labour time as a unit of measurement. Instead they conclude that since the content of value will have changed, all we need to do is replace the term value with the term production time. But this obviously doesn't change the economic reality at all; it's the same thing when they say that there is no longer any exchange of products, but only the passage of products (p 53-54). Equally: ‘instead of the function of money, we will have the registering of the movement of products, social accounting on the basis of the average social labour time’ (p 55)”.

The remuneration of labour and the critique of egalitarianism

Mitchell’s criticism of the Dutch left’s advocacy of equal remuneration through the system of labour time vouchers is connected to a more general criticism, which we looked at in the first part of this article: that of an abstract vision where everything operates smoothly from the day after the insurrection. Mitchell does recognise that both the Dutch comrades and Hennaut share Marx’s distinction (developed in the Critique of the Gotha Programme) between the lower and higher stages of communism, and that for both, in the first stage, there is still a persistence of “bourgeois right”. But for Mitchell, the Dutch comrades have a one-sided interpretation of what Marx was saying in this document:

But apart from this, the Dutch internationalists falsify the significance of Marx's words about the repartition of products. When they say that the worker receives from the process of distribution a pro rata of the quantity of labour he has given, they only discover one aspect of the dual inequality which we have underlined, and it is the one which results from the social situation of the worker (p 81); but they don't dwell on the other aspect, which expresses the fact that the workers, in the same amount of labour time, provide different quantities of simple labour (simple labour which is the common measure exerted through the play of value), thus giving rise to unequal repartition. They prefer to stick with their demand for the suppression of inequality in wages, which remains hanging in mid air because the suppression of capitalist wage labour does not immediately result in the disappearance of the differences in the remuneration of labour”. (Bilan 35, republished in IR 131).

In other words, although the Dutch comrades are in continuity with Marx who saw that the differing situations of individual workers mean that there would be a persistence of inequality (“But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time....one worker is married, another is not, one has more children than another, and so on and so forth”, as Marx puts it in Critique of the Gotha Programme ), they ignore the deeper problem of the calculation of simple labour, which means that remunerating workers on the basis of hours of labour alone means that workers in the same social situation but working with different means of production will still not be equally rewarded.

Mitchell criticises Hennaut on similar grounds:

Comrade Hennaut comes up with a similar solution to the problem of distribution in the period of transition, a solution which he also draws from a mistaken, because incomplete, interpretation of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. In Bilan, p 747, he said: the inequality which still exists in the first phase of socialism results not from an unequal remuneration being applied to various kinds of labour: the simple work of the labourer or the compound work of the engineer, with all the stages in between. No, all these types of labour are of equal worth, only their duration and intensity has to be measured; inequality results from the fact that men who have different capacities and needs are carrying out the same tasks with the same resources’. And Hennaut inverses Marx's thinking when he locates inequality in the fact that the part of the social profit remains equal - an equal amount of remuneration of course - for each individual, whereas their needs and the effort made to achieve the same remuneration are different; whereas, as we have indicated, Marx saw inequality in the fact that individuals received unequal shares because they provided unequal shares of labour and this is the basis for the application of bourgeois equal rights.” (ibid).

At the same time, underlying this rejection of ‘absolute’ egalitarianism in the earlier phases of the revolution is a deeper critique of the very notion of equality:

the fact that in a proletarian economy the basic motive force is no longer the ceaselessly enlarged production of surplus value and of capital but the unlimited production of use values does not mean that the conditions are right for a levelling of "wages" that translates into equality in consumption. In fact, such an equality can exist neither at the beginning of the transitional period nor in the communist phase, which is based on the formula "to each according to his needs". In reality, formal equality can never exist, while communism will finally realise a real equality in natural inequality” (ibid)

Marx’s communism began with a rejection of ‘barracks’ or crude communism which flourished in the early days of the workers’ movement; and against this kind of ‘downward’ collectivism – realised to some degree by Stalinist state capitalism - it opposes an associationof free individuals where natural ‘inequality’ or diversity, will be positively cultivated.

Labour time vouchers and the wage system

The other target of Mitchell’s critique is the GIC’s view that recompensing labour on the basis of labour time – the famous system of labour time vouchers – has already overcome the essentials of the wage system. Mitchell does not seem to disagree with Marx’s advocacy of this system in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, since he quotes it in his article without criticism. He also agrees with Marx that in this method of distribution, money has lost its characteristic as “abstract wealth’ capable of appropriating any kind of wealth” (Bilan 34). But unlike the GIC, Mitchell emphasises its continuity with the wage system rather than its discontinuity, since he puts particular emphasis on the passage from Gotha where Marx says frankly that

"Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form".

In this sense, it seems, Mitchell considers that the labour time vouchers are a kind of wage. Nor does he see any superior system in the first stages of the revolution: the system of equal rationing in the Russian revolution was this was “not an economic method capable of ensuring the systematic development of the economy; it was the regime of a people under siege and concentrating all its energies on the civil war”(Bilan 35).

For Mitchell, the key to really abolishing value was not in selecting the particular forms through which labour would be rewarded in the period of transition, but in overcoming the narrow horizons of bourgeois right by creating a situation where in Marx’s words, “all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”. Only such a society could inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”.

Comments on a response to Mitchell’s critique

The comrades of the GIC did not reply to Mitchell’s criticisms and council communism as an organised current has more or less disappeared. But the American comrade David Adam, who has written extensively about Marx, Lenin and the transition period1, does to a certain extent identify with the tradition represented by GIC and Mattick in America. In correspondence with the author of this article, he made these comments about Mitchell and Bilan :

With regard to Bilan's reading of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, I think it is confused. They clearly identify the first phase of communism with transition to communism and the law of value, and seem to identify the existence of ‘bourgeois right’ with the law of value. I think this creates problems, not least of which is the interpretation of the Grundprinzipien. They identify the sort of accounting that was called for by the Dutch left with the law of value, when the Grundprinzipien is clear that they are talking about a socialist society emerging after the period of proletarian dictatorship, which is in line with Marx. Mitchell also seems to think that the Dutch left were talking about a transitional phase in which the market still existed, and this is not the case. So I think this diminishes the value of the criticism of the Grundprinzipien, because I don't think they have understood Marx. And this could mean that they don't see the necessity for transformation of economic relations right from the beginning of the revolutionary process, as if the law of value can simply go through ‘profound changes in nature’ and eventually disappear. The whole idea of its disappearance is bound up with the emergence of effective social control over production, which is what the first phase of communism addresses. But Bilan seems to say that once such planning mechanisms are found they will no longer be necessary. I don't think this is true”.

There are a number of different elements here.

  1. Were the Dutch comrades always clear about the distinction between the lower and higher stages? We have seen that Mitchell accepts that they did make this distinction. In the previous article, we also quoted a passage from the Grundprinzipien which clearly recognises that the measurement of individual labour becomes less important as integral communism is reached. But we have also seen that the Grundprinzipien contain a number of ambiguities. As we noted in the first part of this article, they seem to speak far too soon of a society operating as an association of free and equal producers, and they don’t always clearly state whether they are talking about a particular proletarian outpost or a world in which the entire bourgeoisie has been overthrown.

  2. Perhaps the issue here is whether Marx himself envisaged the lower stage as beginning after or during the proletarian dictatorship. This would require a much longer discussion. It is certainly true that the period of transition in the full sense cannot get underway in a phase dominated by civil war and the struggle against the bourgeoisie. But in our view even after this ‘initial’ political and military victory over the old ruling class, the proletariat can only begin the positive communist transformation of society on the basis of its political domination, because it will not be the only class in society. We will return to this problem in a future article.

  3. Is the measurement of production and distribution in terms of labour time necessarily a form of value, as Mitchell implies when he criticises the Dutch left for being “subjugated’, as they are, to their formulation about ‘labour time’, which in substance is nothing but value itself.” (Bilan 34, quoted above)? As ever with the question of value, this raises complex questions. Can there be value without exchange value?

It’s true that Marx was obliged, in Capital, to make a theoretical distinction between value and exchange value,

We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value. But if we abstract from their use value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form”2.

However, as Rubin points out, it is nonetheless the case that:

“...the value form’ is the most general form of the commodity economy; it is characteristic of the social form which is acquired by the process of production at a determined level of historical development. Since political economy analyzes a historically transient social form of production, commodity capitalist production, the ‘form of value’ is one of the foundation stones of Marx's theory of value. As can be seen from the sentences quoted above, the ‘form of value’ is closely related to the ‘commodity form,’ i.e., to the basic characteristic of the contemporary economy, the fact that the products of labour are produced by autonomous, private producers. A working connection between producers is brought about only by means of the exchange of commodities3.

Both aspects – value and exchange value - only have a general application in the context of the social relations of capitalist commodity society. A society which no longer functions on the basis of exchange between independent economic units is no longer regulated by the law of value, so the question goes back to the degree to which the Dutch left envisaged the survival of exchange relations in the lower stage of communism. And as we have noted, there are ambiguities in the Grunprinzipien about this too. Earlier on in this article we quoted Mitchell’s argument that the network of enterprises envisaged by the GIC appears to retain a market relationship of sorts. On the other hand, there are other passages which go in the opposite direction and there is a strong case for arguing that they express the thinking of the GIC much more accurately. For example, in chapter 2, in the section headed ‘Free Communism’, the GIC develops a critique of the French anarchist Faure which makes it clear that they are in favour of forging the economy into a single unit: “The substance of the matter is not that one would hold it against the Faurian system that it seeks to forge the entire economy into one single unit; such an act of combination is indeed the end purpose of the process of development which is brought to fruition by the combined producers and consumers. Having done this, however, the basis must then be provided to ensure that they themselves keep control of it”.

We should add that Mitchell’s argument that any form of measurement of labour time is essentially an expression of value is not supported by Marx’s approach to the question in his descriptions of communist society. In the Grundrisse, for example, Marx argues that “economy of time along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree. However, this is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time”.4

The real weakness of the GIK lies, we would argue, less in their occasional concessions to the idea of the market, but in their inordinate faith in the system of accounting. As they say in the sentence which follows the passage just cited: “To achieve this they must keep an exact account of the labour-hours used up, in every form of economic activity, in order that they may know exactly how much labour-time is embodied in each product. Then it is quite unnecessary for the right of decision as to how the social product is to be distributed to be handed over to any ‘central administration’; on the contrary, the producers themselves in each factory or other establishments can then determine this through their computation of labour-time expended”. No doubt the computation of the exact amount of labour time expended by the producers is extremely important, but the GIC seems to radically underestimate the degree to which maintaining control over economic and political life during the transition period is a struggle for the development of class consciousness, for the conscious construction of new social relationships, a struggle which goes far deeper than elaborating a system of accounting.

Does Bilan underestimate the need for radical social and economic change from the start? This is perhaps a more substantial criticism. For example, in Mitchell’s critique of egalitarian remuneration he argues that this would undermine the productivity of labour and implies that in order to arrive at communism a prodigious development of the productive forces is required. It’s certainly true that the attainment of communism depends on a profound development and transformation of the productive forces. But the key question here is this: on what basis will this development take place? We know that the last chapter of Mitchell’s study contains a clear rejection of ‘productivism’, the sacrificing of workers’ consumption in the interests of building up industry, and throughout its existence this was a fundamental aspect of Bilan’s critique of the so-called ‘achievements of socialism’ in the USSR. Nonetheless, since Mitchell is so insistent that the wages system, in its essentials at least, cannot be this done away with until a much later stage of the revolutionary transformation, the doubt remains that Mitchell is advocating a more worker-oriented version of ‘socialist accumulation’.

In the final issue of Bilan (no 46, December-January 1938) a reader responding to the ‘Problems of the Period of Transition’ series goes so far as to dismiss the comrades of Bilan as a new species of reformists whose revolution will merely replace one set of masters with another (see the appendix for the text of this letter and Mitchell’s response).

We obviously think that this accusation is both uncomradely and unfounded but it is given a semblance of reality by two key weaknesses in Bilan’s theoretical armoury: their difficulty in seeing the capitalist nature of the USSR even in the 1930s, and their inability to break with the notion of the dictatorship of the party. Despite all their criticisms of the Stalinist regime and their recognition that a form of exploitation did exist in the USSR, they still clung to the view that the collectivised nature of the ‘Soviet’ economy conferred on it a proletarian character, however degenerated. This seems to betray a difficulty to draw the consequences from what was already basically understood by the Italian left – i.e.that an economy founded on the wage relationship can only be capitalist, whether or not the means of production are ‘individually’ or ‘collectively’ owned. And a result of this difficulty would be a reluctance to see the struggle against the wage form as being an integral part of the social revolution. And this is just another aspect of the struggle for what David Adam calls “effective social control of production” by the workers themselves.

At the same time, the idea that the role of the party is to exercise the proletarian dictatorship (albeit while somehow avoiding an entanglement with the state5) runs counter to the need for the working class to impose its control over both production and the apparatus of political power. It’s certainly true that the workers will have to learn a vast amount to take charge of production, not just in the framework of the individual enterprise but across an entire society. The same applies to the question of political power, which in any case is not a separate sphere from the problem of reorganising economic life. It’s also true that Bilan always understood that the workers would need to learn from their own mistakes and that they could not be coerced towards socialism. Nevertheless the idea of the dictatorship of the party still retains the somewhat substitutionist idea that the workers will only be able to take full control of their destiny at some point in the future, and that in the meantime a minority of the class must hold onto power ‘on their behalf’.

Precisely because the Italian left was a proletarian current and not a variant of reformism, these weaknesses would in time be addressed and overcome, particularly by the French Fraction and by elements in the party formed in Italy in 1943. In our view, it was the French Fraction, later the Gauche Communiste de France, which took these clarifications the furthest, and it is no accident that it was able, in the years after World War Two, to engage in a fruitful debate with the tradition and organisations of the Dutch communist left. We will take this up in the next article in this series.

We don’t pretend to have resolved all the questions raised by the debate between the Italian and Dutch lefts on the period of transition. These questions – such as how the law of value will be eliminated, how labour will be remunerated, how the workers will keep control over production and distribution – remain to be clarified and indeed can only be finally resolved in the course of a revolution itself. But we do think that the contributions and discussions developed by these revolutionaries in a dark period of defeat for the working class remain an indispensable theoretical point of departure for the debates that will one day be used to guide the practical transformation of society.

CD Ward


Appendix: Echo of the study of the period of transition, Bilan 46, December-January 1938

Just as Bilan was going to press, the group received a letter from a correspondent in the Parisian suburb of Clichy. The letter and the reply from Mitchell were printed in the following issue and we reproduce both here.

We have received from a reader in Clichy a letter of critique which we publish in full followed by some brief comments from our collaborator. We hope our impatient correspondent will excuse us for not having put his letter in the previous issue, but it arrived at exactly the same moment that this issue was coming off the press.

On the period of transition

After the publication in Bilan of Hennaut’s summary of the book by the Dutch left communists on the ‘fundamentals of communist production and distribution’, some may have thought that the reformists of right and left had been definitively disarmed and they wouldn’t dare to move an inch. But that is if you don’t know them very well. In the issue which published the end of the summary, their criticisms could already be heard: the Dutch comrades, like Hennaut, don’t think like marxists...Then we had Mitchell’s critical study on ‘The problems of the period of transition’. The aim of this study was, of course, to demonstrate the anti-marxist utopianism of those who believe that the proletarian revolution will really free the workers from exploitation in all its forms. Thus we should not be astonished that all through his article Mitchell is at pains to prove, with the use of numerous quotes, that this revolution will only serve to bring a new master to the proletarians who made it – just like the revolutions of the past. We recognise the traditional standpoint of reformists of all types. What’s more Mitchell was careful to warn is in his ‘introductory expose’ that his work would deal with the following points: “ a) the historic conditions in which the proletarian revolution arises; b) the necessity for the transitional state; c) the economic and social categories which will of necessity survive in the transitional phase; d) finally, some elements regarding a proletarian management of the transitional state”.

Once these points have been enounced, it was easy to imagine what the article would be like. Mitchell is not embarrassed to affirm, a priori, the survival after the revolution of “the economic and social categories which will of necessity (!) survive in the transitional phase”. This assertion alone is enough for anyone with an alert mind to see what’s coming next. What is most astonishing in Mitchell’s article is the abundance of quotes which a revolutionary marxist could at any moment turn against what he tries to prove and justify. One doesn’t need 50 pages of Bilan to annihilate the sage arguments of the reformist Mitchell. All those who have read Marx and Engels know that, for them, the famous period of transition marks the end of the capitalist society and the birth of an entirely new society in which the exploitation of man by man will have ceased to exist; i.e. where classes will have disappeared and the state as such will have no reason to exist. Now, in the society of transition as Mitchell and all the avowed reformists understand it, the exploitation of the proletariat subsists and in the same way as it does under the capitalist regime: by means of wage labour. In this society there will be a scale of wages...just like now! This will make it possible to socialise (?) the most advanced branches of production; then, we don’t know when or how, all of industrial and agricultural production. In other words, during the transitional phase, a part of the workers will continue to be exploited by particular people, with the others already being exploited by the State-Boss. Starting from this viewpoint, the higher phase of communism would correspond to the full statification of production – to state capitalism as we see operating in Russia! The most revolting thing is that Mitchell dares to base himself on Marx and Engels to defend such a point of view. We know that Stalin also dared in his speech of June 2 1931 to base himself on Marx to justify the incredible inequality of wages reigning in the USSR, and just like Mitchell, he did so by invoking the quality of labour supplied. However Marx explained himself clearly on this subject in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. Do we need to recall that for Marx the inequality which subsists in the first phase of communism does not derive, contrary to what Mitchell thinks, from inequality in the retribution of labour, but simply from the fact that the workers don’t always live in the same way”

One worker is married”, says Marx, “another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal”. This is so clear it doesn’t need further elaboration

We know that, for Marx, “wage labour is the precondition for the existence of capital”, which means that if we want to kill capital, we have to abolish wage labour. But the reformists don’t think this way at all: for them the revolution means that all capital has to progressively be taken over by the state so that it becomes the only master. What they want is to replace private capitalism with state capitalism. But don’t talk to them about abolishing capitalist exploitation, about destroying the state machine which serves to maintain this exploitation: the proletarians must make the revolution solely in order to change their master. All those who see the revolution as a way of liberating yourself from exploitation are vulgar utopians. Revolutionary workers be warned!

Mitchell’s reply

Nothing is more difficult than replying to a critique which takes the liberty of decrying material which it has not assimilated or has assimilated very imperfectly and which believes all the more easily that it has come up with the right formulations, even though they are in fact purely illusory.

Thus our correspondent should not be astonished if we suggest to him that the discussion continues on the basis of an attentive and thorough examination of the study that has been published.

Let’s reassure our contradictor right away about our so-called “left reformism”: everything that he invokes against is to justify this charge of “reformism” is precisely what is fought in our study in the least equivocal way possible. What’s more, it’s not enough for our correspondent to reproach us for the “abundance” of our quotes: he also has to prove what he insinuates, i.e. that these quotes have a meaning that runs counter to the one we give hem. If he can’t demonstrate this, it would still be permissible, if he likes facile and simplistic answers, to contest the bases of certain conceptions, for example Marx’s remarks about the necessity to temporarily tolerate unequal remuneration of labour in the transitional period. He could then “repudiate” Marx, but not deform his thought.

On the question of the remuneration of labour, since our correspondent is of the opinion that Marx did not put things the way we say he did, he should go back over the whole part of our work where we deal with the measurement of labour (Bilan 34, p 1133 to 1138....) and the whole part where we deal with the remuneration of labour, particularly beginning at the bottom of page 1157 up to the top of the second column on page 1159, Bilan no. 35.

Furthermore, whether the comrade likes it or not, it is Marx who affirmed the transitional survival of capitalist categories like value, money and wages since the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat “is still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges” (see Critique of the Gotha Programme and p 1137 of Bilan)

Again, on the problem of the state, how can be seen as defenders of state capitalism on the basis of what we developed in the second part of our work (Bilan 31, p 1035).

If our correspondent doesn’t share our opinion on this major question, the he should at least give his own opinion and engage in a positive critique.

Mitchell.


2 Capital Vol 1, chapter 1, p 46)

3 Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, chapter 12. ‘Content and form of value’, p114-115 of the 1972 edition

4 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook 1, pp. 172-3. Mitchell’s assumption that measurement of labour time always equals value is carried over into the criticisms of the Grundprinzipien in our book on the Dutch left. The concluding paragraph of this section, reproduced as an annex to the first part of the article, puts it thus: “The final weakness of the Grundprinzipien lies in the very question of the accounting of labour time, even in an advanced communist society which has gone beyond scarcity. Economically, this system could reintroduce the law of value, by giving the labour time needed for production an accounted value rather than a social one. Here the GIC goes against Marx, for whom the standard measure in communist society is no longer labour time but free time, leisure time”. The latter point is no doubt taken from the passage in the Grundrisse where Marx writes: real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time” (Marx, Grundrisse notebook VII, p708). But for Marx this did not imply that society would cease measuring the time it put into maintaining and reproducing itself (the material basis for setting free the creative capacities of the individual). This is made plain in Theories of Surplus Value where Marx writes: Labour-time, even if exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for free activity which—unlike labour—is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfilment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s inclination”. Theories of Surplus Value, Book III

5 Bilan’s contradictory position on ‘the dictatorship of the party’ is examined at greater length in a previous article: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition

 

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Presentation of the 20th International Congress

Recently the ICC held its 20th International Congress. The congress of a communist organisation is one of the most important moments of its life and activity. It’s when the whole organisation (through delegations nominated by each of its sections) makes a balance-sheet of its activities, analyses in depth the international situation, draws out perspectives and elects a central organ, which has the task of ensuring that the decisions of the congress are applied.

Because we are convinced of the need of debate and cooperation between organisations who fight for the overthrow the capitalist system, we invited three groups - two from Korea, and OPOP from Brazil, who have already attended previous international congresses. Since the work of a communist organisation's congress is not an ‘internal’ question but is of interest to the working class as a whole we aim here to inform our readers about the essential questions discussed there.

The congress took place against the background of sharpening tensions in Asia, ongoing war in Syria, worsening economic crisis and a situation of class struggle marked by a low development of ‘classic’ workers’ struggles against the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie but also by the international upsurge of social movements, the most significant examples being the Occupy movement in the US and the ‘Indignados’ in Spain

The analysis of the world situation – a challenge that demands major theoretical effort

The resolution on the international situation adopted by the 20th Congress, which summarises the analyses which came out of the discussions, is published in this issue of the Review, and we need not return to it in detail here.

The resolution recalls the historical framework within which we understand the present situation of society – the decadence of the capitalist mode of production, whose beginning was marked by the outbreak of World War I; and the final phase of decadence, which the ICC, since the mid-80s, has defined as that of decomposition, of a society rotting on its feet. Social decomposition is illustrated very clearly by the form being taken by today’s imperialist conflicts, with the situation in Syria being a particularly tragic example, as we can see in the report on imperialist tensions adopted by the Congress and published in this issue, but also by the catastrophic degradation of the environment which the ruling class, despite all its alarmed declarations and campaigns, is quite incapable of preventing, or even slowing down.

The congress did not have a specific discussion on the imperialist conflicts since our preparatory discussions had already demonstrated a large measure of agreement on the question. However, the Congress heard a presentation by the Korean group Sanoshin on the imperialist tensions in the Far East, which we hope to publish as an annex on our website.

On the economic crisis

Incapable of overcoming the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie finds itself – as the resolution points out – caught in a deadlock: a striking confirmation of marxist analysis. All the ‘experts’, whether they support or reject ‘neo-liberalism’, regard the marxist analysis with the contempt of the ignorant; above all, they fight it, precisely because it foretells the historical failure of this mode of production and the necessity to replace it with a society where the market, profit and wage labour will have been relegated to the museum of history, a society where humanity will be free of the blind laws that today are dragging it towards barbarism, and will be able to live according to the principle “from each according to their capacities, to each according to their needs”.

As regards the present situation of the crisis of capitalism, the Congress stated clearly that the current ‘financial crisis’ is by no means the source of the contradictions plaguing the world economy, nor do its roots lie in the ‘financialisation of the economy’ and the obsession with short-term profit and speculation. “On the contrary, it is overproduction which is the source of ‘financialisation’ and it is the fact that it is more and more risky to invest in production, given that the world market is more and more saturated, which directs the flow of finance more and more towards speculation. This is why all the ‘left wing’ economic theories which call for ‘reining in international finance’ in order to get out of the crisis are empty dreams since they ‘forget’ the real causes of this hypertrophy of the financial sphere. (Resolution on the international situation, point 10). Similarly, the Congress recognised that “The crisis of the ‘sub-primes’ in 2007, the huge financial panic of 2008 and the recession of 2009 marked a new and very important step in capitalism’s descent into irreversible crisis. (ibid, point 11).

Having said this, the Congress noted that our organisation is far from unanimous on the economic crisis and that it will be necessary to continue the discussion around a number of questions, for example: Was the aggravation of the crisis in 2007 a qualitative break, opening a new chapter in history, pushing the economy towards an immediate and rapid collapse? What was the significance of the events of 2007? More generally what kind of development of the crisis should we expect: a sudden collapse or a slow, politically ‘managed’ decline? Which countries will sink first and which last? Does the ruling class have choices, room for manoeuvre, and what kind of mistakes are they trying to avoid? Or more generally: when analysing the economic crisis and its perspectives, can and does the ruling class ignore the expected reactions of the working class? Which criteria does the ruling class take into consideration when adopting austerity programmes in different countries? Are we in a situation where everywhere the ruling class can attack the working class in the same way as it has been doing in Greece? Can we expect a repetition of the same scale of attacks (wage cuts of up to 40% etc) in the old industrial heartlands? What difference is there between the crisis of 1929 and today's? How far has pauperisation advanced in the big industrial countries?

The organisation recalled that soon after 1989 we were able to predict the fundamental changes on the imperialist level and the class struggle which had occurred with the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the so-called ‘socialist’ countries.1 However, we did not foresee the major economic changes which have occurred since. What, for example, has been the effect on the world economy of China’s and India’s abandonment of their previous mechanisms of relative economic autarchy?

Obviously, as we did for the debate we had a few years ago in our organisation on the mechanisms which allowed for the ‘boom’ that followed the Second World War2, we will bring to our readers the main elements of the current debate once the discussion has reached a sufficient level of clarity.

On class struggle

The report on the class struggle to the Congress drew a balance sheet of the past two years (from the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy movements, the struggles in Asia etc.) and the difficulties of the class to respond to the ever increasing attacks by the capitalists in Europe and the USA. The discussions at the Congress dealt mainly with the following questions: how are we to explain the difficulties of the working class to respond ‘adequately’ to the increasing attacks? Why are we not yet moving towards a revolutionary situation in the old industrial heartlands? Which policies is the ruling class putting in place to avoid massive struggles in the old industrial centres? What are the conditions for the mass strike?

What role does the working class in East Asia, in particular China, play in the global balance of forces between the classes? What can we expect from the class? Has the centre of the world economy, of the world proletariat, moved to China? How are we to assess the changes in the composition of the working class worldwide? The debate recalled our position on the “weak link” which we developed in the 1980s, in opposition to Lenin’s idea that the chain of capitalist domination would break in its “weakest link”3, i.e. the less developed countries.

Even if the discussions didn’t reveal disagreements on the report presented (which is summarised in the section on class struggle in the resolution), we felt that the organisation has to give deeper thought to this question, in particular by discussing around the theme: “What method should we use to analyse the class struggle in the present historical period?”

On the life and activities of the organisation

Discussions on the life of the organisation, of the balance sheet and perspectives of its activities and functioning occupied a large part of the 20th Congress’ agenda, as has always been the case in previous congresses. This is an expression of the fact that questions of organisation are not merely ‘technical’ questions but are political questions in their own right and must be approached in as great a depth as possible. When we look back at the history of the three Internationals created by the working class, we can see that these questions were always resolutely taken up by their marxist wing, as illustrated, among many others, by the following examples:

  • the struggle of Marx and the Central Council of the International Workingmen’s Association against Bakunin’s Alliance, especially at the Hague Congress in 1872;

  • the struggle of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the petty bourgeois and opportunist conceptions of the Mensheviks during the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 and subsequently;

  • the struggle of the left fraction of the Communist Party of Italy against the degeneration of the International and to prepare the political and programmatic conditions for a new proletarian party when the historical conditions were suitable.

The historical experience of the workers’ movement has shown that specific political organisations that defend the revolutionary perspective within the working class are indispensable if the class is going to be able to overthrow capitalism and create a communist society. But proletarian political organisations cannot just be proclaimed: they must be built. While the goal is to overthrow the capitalist system, and while a communist society can only be built once the power of the bourgeoisie has been overturned and an end been put to capitalism, a revolutionary organisation must be built within capitalist society. Therefore the construction of the organisation must confront all kinds of pressures and obstacles that spring from the capitalist system and its ideology. This means that the process of construction does not take place in a vacuum. Revolutionary organisations are like a foreign body within capitalist society, which this system constantly aims to destroy. A revolutionary organisation is therefore constantly obliged to defend itself against a whole series of threats coming from capitalist society.Obviously, it must resist repression. The ruling class, whenever it has felt the necessity, has never hesitated to unleash its police and even its military forces to silence the voices of the revolutionaries. Most of the organisations in the past existed for a long-time under conditions of repression: they were “outlawed” and many militants were driven into exile. However, this repression rarely crushed them; on the contrary, it often strengthened their resolve and helped to defend themselves against democratist illusions. This was the case for example with the SPD in Germany during the anti-socialist laws which resisted the poison of ‘democracy’ and ‘parliamentarism’ much better than it did during the period when it was legal.

The revolutionary organisation also has to resist destruction from within – penetration through spies, informers, adventurers, etc., which can often cause more damage than open repression.

Finally, and above all, it has to resist the pressure of the dominant ideology, in particular democratism and ‘good old common sense’, which was roundly attacked by Marx. They have to fight against all ‘values’ and ‘principles’ of capitalist society. The history of the workers’ movement has taught us, through the opportunist gangrene that carried off the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, that the main threat to revolutionary organisations is precisely their inability to combat the penetration of the ‘values’ and habits of thought of bourgeois society.

Therefore, a revolutionary organisation cannot function in the same way as capitalist society; it must function in an associated manner.

Capitalist society works through competition, alienation, ‘comparing’ each other, establishing norms, streamlining. A communist organisation requires working together and overcoming the spirit of competition. It can only function if its members do not act like a flock of sheep, tail-ending and accepting blindly what the central organ or other comrades say. The search for truth and clarity must constantly stimulate all the activities of the organisation. Independent thinking, the capacity to reflect, to put things into question, are vital. This means we cannot hide behind a collective, but we must assume our individual responsibility by expressing our opinions and pushing forward clarification. Conformism is a big obstacle in our struggle for communism.

In capitalist society, if you do not fit into the norm, you are quickly “excluded”, made into a scapegoat, the one who is blamed for everything. A revolutionary organisation has to establish a mode of functioning where all kinds of different individuals and personalities can be integrated into one big body. It requires the art of drawing on the riches of all personalities. This means a fight against personal pride and other ideas linked to competition. It means valuing the contribution of each comrade. And at the same time this means an organisation must have a set of rules and principles which are based on ethical principles. These need to be elaborated, which is a political battle in itself. Whereas the ethics of capitalist society know no scruples, the goal of the proletarian struggle must be in harmony with the means of the struggle.

The construction and the functioning of an organisation thus entail a theoretical and moral dimension, both of which require a constant and conscious effort. Any sluggishness or wavering, any weakening of effort and vigilance on one level pave the way for a weakening on the other. These two dimensions are inseparable from each other and determine each other mutually. The less theoretical efforts an organisation undertakes, the easier and quicker a moral regression can occur; and at the same time the loss of our moral compass will inevitably weaken our theoretical capacities. Thus, at the turning point of the 19th and 20th centuries, Rosa Luxemburg showed that the opportunist trajectory of German social democracy went hand in hand with its moral and theoretical regression.

One of the most fundamental aspects of the life of a communist organisation is its internationalism, not only at the level of its principles, but also at the level of the conception it has of its own way of life, its mode of functioning.

The goal – a society without exploitation and producing for the needs of humanity – can only be achieved internationally, and it requires the unification of the proletariat across all borders. This is why internationalism has been the slogan of the proletariat since its appearance. Revolutionary organisations must be the vanguard in adopting an international point of view and fighting against a ‘localist’ perspective.

Although from the outset the proletariat has always attempted to organise internationally (the Communist League 1847-1852 was the first international organisation), the ICC is the first organisation which is internationally centralised, and where all sections defend the same positions. Our sections are integrated into international debates in our organisation, where all our members – across the continents – can draw on the experience of the entire organisation. This means we have to learn to bring together militants from all sorts of backgrounds, learn to hold debates in spite of all the different languages – all of which is a very inspiring process, where clarification and the deepening of our positions is enriched by the contributions of comrades from the whole planet.

Last but not least, it is vital for the organisation to have a clear understanding of the role it has to play in the proletarian struggle for emancipation. As the ICC has often emphasised, the function of the revolutionary organisation today is not to ‘organise the class’ or its struggles (as could be the case during the first steps of the workers’ movement in the 19th century). Its essential role, already set out in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, derives from the fact that communists “have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”. In this sense, the permanent and essential function of the organisation is the elaboration of political positions, and in order to do this it cannot afford to be totally absorbed by its tasks of intervention in the class. It has to be able to take a step back and arrive at a general view. It must be permanently preoccupied with deepening the questions posed by the class as a whole and with placing them within a historical perspective. This means that it cannot limit itself to an analysis of the world situation. It needs to explore broader, underlying theoretical questions, rejecting superficiality and the distortions of capitalist society and ideology. This is a permanent struggle, one with a long-term view that embraces a whole series of aspects that go well beyond the questions posed to the class at this or that moment in the struggle.

Since the proletarian revolution is not just a struggle around “bread and butter” issues, as Rosa Luxemburg underlined, but the first revolution in the history of humanity where all the chains of exploitation and oppression are overthrown, this struggle necessarily implies a great cultural transformation. A revolutionary organisation does not only deal with questions of political economy and the class struggle in a narrow sense. It must develop its own vision on the most important questions facing humanity, constantly expanding its views and being open and ready to face new questions. Theoretical elaboration, the search for truth, the wish for clarification, must be our daily passion.

And at the same time we can only fulfil our role if the old generation of militants transmits the experience and lessons they have acquired to the new militants. If the old generation has no “treasure” of experience and lessons to pass on to the new generation, it has failed in its task. The construction of the organisation thus requires the art of drawing the lessons of the past in order to prepare the future.

As we can see, the task of building a revolutionary organisation is extremely complex and demands a permanent struggle. In the past, our organisation has already waged important battles for the defence of its principles. But experience has shown that these battles have been insufficient and they have to be carried on in the face of the difficulties and weaknesses that result from the origins of our organisation and the historical conditions in which it maintains its activity: “There is not one single cause for each of the different weaknesses of the organisation. The latter are the result of various factors which, while they can be linked together, must be clearly identified:

  • The weight of our origins in the historic resurgence of the world proletariat at the end of the 1960s, and in particular, the effects of the break in organic continuity;

  • The weight of decomposition which began to have an impact in the mid-80s;

  • The pressure of the ‘invisible hand of the market’, of reification, whose imprint on society has only intensified with the prolonged survival of capitalist relations of production.

The different weaknesses which we have identified, even if they can mutually influence each other, derive in the final instance from these three factors or their combination:

  • The underestimation of theoretical elaboration, and particularly on organisational questions, has its source in our very origins: the impact of the student revolt with its component of petty bourgeois academicism, with an opposing tendency which mixes up anti-academicism and a disdain for theory, and this in an ambiance of contesting authority, including that of an ‘old geezer’ like comrade MC, which affected a lot of young militants and thus the organisation. Later on this underestimation of theory was fed by the general atmosphere of the destruction of thought characteristic of the period of decomposition, and the growing impregnation of good old common sense, a manifestation in our ranks of the insidious penetration of reification;

  • The loss of acquisitions is a direct consequence of the underestimation of theoretical elaboration: the acquisitions of the organisation, whether on questions of programme, analysis or organisation, can only be maintained, above all in the face of the constant pressure of bourgeois ideology, if they are permanently fed and watered by theoretical reflection: thought which doesn’t move forward, which is content with the repetition of stereotyped formulas, is not only threatened with stagnation, it can only regress. The superficiality in the assimilation of our positions, which has often been noted in the past, is the best guarantee of losing our acquisitions;

  • Immediatism is one of the youthful faults of an organisation which was formed by young militants who awoke to political life at a time of spectacular revival in the class struggle, and many of whom thought that the revolution was just around the corner. The most immediatist among us did not hold fast and were in the end demoralised, abandoning the combat, but this weakness also survived among those who remained: it continued to imbue the organisation and has expressed itself on numerous occasions. It is a weakness which can be fatal because, associated with a loss of acquisitions, it inexorably leads towards opportunism, an approach which has regularly undermined the foundations of our organisation;

  • Routinism, for its part, is one of the major expressions of the weight of the alienated, reified relations which dominate capitalist society and which tend to turn the organisation into a machine and the militants into robots. It is obviously reinforced by the poverty of theoretical reflection which leads us to lose sight of the reason for the organisation’s existence;

  • Sclerosis results to a large extent from routinism but it is also fed by the loss of acquisitions and theoretical impoverishment, and is for this reason the other side to the coin of opportunism. Even if it does not lead to treason like the latter illness (the two can exist side by side), the paralysis which it provokes vis-à-vis the responsibilities of the organisation results in the death of the capacity of the latter to be an active factor in the development of class consciousness;

The circle spirit, as the whole history of the ICC bears out, along with the whole history of the workers’ movement, is one of the most dangerous poisons for the organisation, bringing with it not only the tendency to transform an instrument of proletarian combat into a mere ‘bunch of pals’, not only the personalisation of political questions which saps the culture of debate, but the destruction of collective work and the unity of the organisation, above all in the form of clanism. It is also responsible for the hunt for scapegoats which undermines moral health, just as it is one of the worst enemies of the culture of theory in that it destroys profound and rational thought in favour of contortions and gossip. Again, it is a frequent vehicle for opportunism, the antechamber of betrayal” (Resolution on activities adopted by the Congress, point 4).

To fight against the weaknesses and dangers facing the organisation, there is no magical formula and we have to direct our efforts in several directions. One of the points which was given particular emphasis was the necessity to combat routinism and conformism, stressing the fact that the organisation is not an anonymous, uniform body but an association of different militants, all of whom have a specific contribution to make to the common work.

In order to work for the construction of a real international association of communist militants where each one can bring his brick to the collective building, the organisation must reject the reactionary utopia of the ‘model militant’, the ‘standard militant’, or the invulnerable and infallible super-militant... Militants are neither robots nor supermen, but human beings with different personalities, histories and socio-cultural origins. It is only through a better understanding of our human ‘nature’ and of the diversity which is specific to our species that confidence and solidarity between militants can be built and consolidated... each comrade has the capacity to make a unique contribution to the organisation. It is also their individual responsibility to do so. In particular, it is the responsibility of each comrade to express his positions in debate, in particular disagreements and questioning, without which the organisation will not be able to develop its culture of debate and theoretical elaboration” (Resolution on activities, point 9).

And so the congress insisted in particular on the need to take up the tasks of theoretical elaboration with determination and perseverance.

The first challenge for the organisation is to become aware of the dangers we are facing. We cannot overcome these dangers by resorting to last minute “fire brigade” actions. We must examine all our problems with a theoretical-historical approach and oppose all pragmatist, superficial outlooks. This means we have to develop a long-term vision and not fall into a ‘day-to-day’ and empirical approach. Theoretical study and political combat must be brought back to the centre of the organisation’s life, not only in regard to immediate intervention, but most importantly by pursuing the deeper theoretical questions about marxism itself that have been posed in the past ten years through the orientations we have given ourselves but which remain undeveloped by the organisation. This means we must give ourselves the necessary time to deepen and fight any conformism in our ranks. The organisation has to encourage critical questioning, the expression of doubts and efforts to explore things deeper.

We must not forget that “theory is not a passion of the head but the head of passion”, and that “when theory grips the masses, it becomes a material force” (Marx). The struggle for communism contains not only an economic and political dimension, but also and above all a theoretical dimension (‘intellectual’ and moral). It is by developing a ‘culture of theory’, i.e. a capacity to permanently place all the activities of the organisation in a historical and/or theoretical framework, that we can develop and deepen the culture of debate in our ranks, and better assimilate the dialectical method of marxism. Without the development of this ‘culture of theory’, the ICC will not be able to maintain its compass over the long term so that it can orient itself, adapt to unprecedented situations, evolve and enrich marxism, which is not an invariant and immutable dogma but a living theory aimed towards the future.

This ‘culture of theory’ is not a problem of militants’ level of education. It contributes to the development of a rational, rigorous and coherent thought which is indispensable to the capacity to develop an argument, to advancing the consciousness of all the militants, and to the consolidation of the marxist method in our ranks.

This work of theoretical reflection cannot ignore the contribution of the sciences (and notably of the human sciences, such as psychology and anthropology), the history of the human species and the development of its civilisation. It is for this reason that the discussion on the theme “Marxism and science” has been of the highest importance and the advances which it has made possible must remain present and be reinforced in the thinking and life of the organisation.

The invitation to scientists

This concern for the sciences is not new for the ICC. In particular, in articles on our previous congresses we talked about the invitation of scientists who made a contribution to the reflection of the whole organisation by submitting their own thoughts from their areas of research. This time, we invited the British anthropologists Camilla Power and Chris Knight, who had already attended previous congresses, and whom we thank warmly for coming to this one. These two scientists shared a presentation on the theme of violence in prehistory, in societies which were not yet divided into classes. Communists obviously have a fundamental interest in this question. Marxism has devoted much research into the role of violence. Engels in particular dedicated an important part of Anti-Dühring to the role of violence in history. Today, as we get ready to mark the centenary of the First World War, a century distinguished by the worst violence humanity has ever known, and when violence is ever-present in social life, it’s important that those who fight for a society that has rid itself of the scars of capitalist society, of wars and oppression, should ask questions about the place of violence in different societies. In particular, faced with the standpoint of bourgeois ideology for whom the violence of today corresponds to ‘human nature’, whose rule is ‘everyman for himself’ and the domination of the strong over the weak, it is necessary to look into the role of societies which were not divided into classes, as in primitive communism.

We cannot give an account here of the very rich presentations by Camilla Power and Chris Knight (which we plan to publish as a podcast on our website). But it is worth pointing out that these two scientists argued against the theory of Steven Pinker4, who claims that thanks to ‘civilisation’ and the influence of the state, violence has been receding. Camilla Power and Chris Knight showed that amongst hunter and gatherer societies there was a much lower level of violence than in subsequent social formations.

The discussion that followed the presentation by Camilla Power and Chris Knight was, as at the previous congresses, very animated. In particular it illustrated once again how the contribution of the sciences can enrich revolutionary thought, an idea which Marx and Engels defended a century and half ago.

Conclusion

The 20th Congress of the ICC, by highlighting the obstacles facing the working class in its struggle for emancipation, as well as the obstacles encountered by the organisation of revolutionaries in carrying out its specific responsibilities within this struggle, showed the difficulty and length of the road ahead of us. But this should not be a source of discouragement. As the resolution adopted by the congress puts it:

The task which lies ahead of us is long and difficult. It will demand patience, which Lenin saw as one of the main qualities of a Bolshevik. We have to resist discouragement in the face of our difficulties. These are inevitable and we should see them not as a curse but on the contrary as an encouragement to pursue and intensify the combat. Revolutionaries, and this is one of their essential characteristics, are not people who look for comfort or the easy way out. They are fighters whose aim is to make a decisive contribution to the most immense and difficult task the human species will ever have to accomplish, but also the most exciting because it means the liberation of humanity from exploitation and alienation, and the beginning of its ‘real history’” (Point 16).


1 See International Review 60, first quarter of 1990: Collapse of Stalinism: New difficulties for the proletariat and International Review 64 (first quarter 1991): Orientation text: Militarism and decomposition

2Internal debate: the causes of the post-1945 economic boom’ in International Review nos. 133,135,136, 138, 2008-2009.

 

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ICC Congress

Report on imperialist tensions to the 20th Congress

At the end of the 80's. the ICC put forward the idea of the entry of capitalism into its phase of decomposition: "In this situation, where society's two decisive - and antagonistic - classes confront each other without either being able to impose its own definitive response, history nonetheless does not just come to a stop. Still less for capitalism than for preceding modes of production, is a 'freeze' or a 'stagnation' of social life possible. As crisis-ridden capitalism's contradictions can only get deeper, the bourgeoisie's inability to offer the slightest perspective for society as a whole, and the proletariat's inability, for the moment, to openly put forward its own historic perspective, can only lead to a situation of generalised decomposition. Capitalism is rotting on its feet" (International Review 62, 1990, ‘Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism’).

The implosion of the eastern bloc has dramatically accelerated the unwinding of the different components of the social body into "each for themselves", into a plunge into chaos, and if there is an area where this is straight away confirmed it is precisely that of imperialist tensions: "The end of the 'Cold War' and the disappearance of the blocs has thus only exacerbated the unleashing of the imperialist antagonisms specific to decadent capitalism and qualitatively aggravated the bloody chaos into which the whole of society is sinking (...)" (IR 67, 1991, 9th Congress of the ICC, Resolution on the International Situation, point 6). Two characteristics of imperialist confrontations in the period of decomposition were pointed out:

a) The irrationality of conflicts, which is one of the striking characteristics of war in decomposition: "While the Gulf War is an illustration of the irrationality of the whole of decadent capitalism, it also contains an extra and significant element of irrationality which is characteristic of the opening up of the phase of decomposition. The other wars of decadence could, despite their basic irrationality, still take on apparently 'rational' goals (such as the search for 'living space' for the German economy or the defence of imperialist positions by the allies during the Second World War). This isn't at all the case with the Gulf War. The objectives of this war, on one side or the other, clearly express the total and desperate impasse that capitalism is in today" (IR 67, 1991, 9th Congress of the ICC, Report on the International Situation [extracts]).

b) The central role played by the dominant power in the extension of chaos over the whole of the planet: "The difference is that today the initiative isn't being taken by a power that wants to overturn the imperialist balance but is on the contrary the world's leading power, the one that for the moment has the best slice of the cake (...) The fact is that at the present time the maintenance of 'world order' (...) doesn't imply a 'defensive' attitude (...) of the dominant power, but is characterised by an increasingly systematic use of the military offensive, and even of operations that will destabilise whole regions in order to ensure the submission of the other powers; (and this) expresses very clearly decadent capitalism's slide into the most unrestrained militarism. This is precisely one of the elements that distinguish the phase of decomposition from previous phases of capitalist decadence..." (IR 67, 1991, 9th Congress of the ICC, Report on the International Situation [extracts]).

These characteristics feed a growing chaos which accelerated still more after the attacks of September 11 2001 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which came out of these events. The 19th Congress aimed to evaluate the impact of these last 10 years of the "War on Terror" on the general spread of imperialist tensions, the development of "each for themselves" and the evolution of US leadership. It put forward the following four orientations in the development of imperialist confrontations:

a) The growth of each for themselves, which is particularly shown in the all-directional multiplication of imperialist ambitions, leading to the exacerbation of tensions, above all in Asia around the economic and military expansion of China. However, despite a strong economic expansion, a growing military power and a more and more marked presence in imperialist confrontations, China doesn't have the industrial and technological capacities sufficient to impose itself as the head of a bloc and thus to challenge the US on the global level.

b) The growing impasse of US policy and the slide into the barbarity of war: The crushing setback of the intervention in Iraq and in Afghanistan has weakened the world leadership of the USA. Even if the bourgeoisie under Obama, by choosing a policy of controlled retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, has reduced the impact of the catastrophic policy undertaken by Bush, it has not been able to overturn this tendency and that has led it to the flight into militarist barbarity. The execution of Bin Laden expressed an attempt of the USA to react to the setback to their leadership and underlined their absolute technical and military superiority. However, this reaction didn't call into question the basic tendency towards weakening. On the contrary, this assassination accelerated the destabilisation of Pakistan and thus the extension of the war, whereas the ideological bases for it (the "War against Terrorism") are more undermined than ever.

c) A tendency towards the explosive extension of permanent zones of instability and chaos over entire regions of the planet, from Afghanistan up to Africa, to such a point that some bourgeois analysts, such as J. Attali in France, bluntly talk about the "Somalisation" of the world.

d) The absence of any mechanical and immediate links between the aggravation of the crisis and the development of imperialist tensions, even if some phenomena can have a certain impact one on the other:

  • the exploitation by some countries of their economic weight in order to dictate their will over other countries and favour their own industrial power (USA, Germany);
  • the industrial and technical backwardness (China, Russia), but also budgetary difficulties (Britain, Germany) that can weigh on the development of military efforts.

These general orientations, put forward at the time of the preceding congress, have not only been confirmed during the last two years, but have been amplified in a spectacular manner over the same period: their exacerbation dramatically increases the destabilisation of the relations of force between imperialisms; it heightens the risk of war and chaos in important regions of the planet such as the Middle East and the Far East, with all the catastrophic consequences which can unfold from such events on the human, ecological and economic levels for the whole of the planet and for the working class in particular.

The forty-five year old history of the Middle East strikingly expresses the advance of decomposition and the loss of control by the leading world power:

  • the 70's: although the US bloc assures itself of the global control of the Middle East and progressively reduces the influence of the Russian bloc, the coming to power of the Mullahs in Iran marks the development of decomposition.
  • the 80s: The Lebanese swamp underlines the difficulties of Israel but also of the USA in keeping control over the region, the latter pushing Iraq into war with Iran;
  • 1991: first Gulf War where the US Godfather mobilises a number of states behind it in the war against Saddam, chasing him out of Kuwait;
  • 2003: setback of the mobilisation of Bush against Iraq and the growth of Iran which, since the 90's, is itself on the offensive as a regional power defying the USA;
  • 2011: US retreat from Iraq and growing chaos in the Middle East.

Certainly the policy of progressive retreat (“step by step”) of the USA from Iraq and Afghanistan by the Obama administration has succeeded in limiting the damage for the world cop, but these wars have resulted in an incommensurable chaos throughout the region.

The accentuation of each for themselves in imperialist confrontations and the extension of chaos, which opens up the particular development of unforeseen events, is illustrated in the recent period through four more specific situations:

  1. The dangers of military confrontations and the growing instability of states in the Middle East;
  2. The growth of China's power and the exacerbation of tensions in the Far East;
  3. The fragmentation of states and the extension of chaos to Africa;
  4. The impact of the crisis on tensions between states in Europe.

1. The extension of chaos to the Middle East

1.1. A brief historical perspective.

For economic and strategic reasons (commercial routes towards Asia, oil...) the region has always been an important stake in the confrontation between powers. Since the beginning of the decadence of capitalism and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in particular, it has been at the centre of imperialist tensions:

  • up until 1945: after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Sykes-Picot Accords carved up the region between Britain and France. It's the theatre of the Turkish civil war and the Greco-Turk conflict, of the emergence of Arab nationalism and Zionism, and it became one of the stakes of the Second World War (German offensives in Russia, North Africa, Libya);
  • after 1945: it made up a central zone for East-West tensions (1945-89), with attempts by the Russian bloc to implant itself in the region, which then came up against the strong presence of the USA. The period is marked by the implantation of the new state of Israel, Israeli-Arab wars, the Palestinian question, the Iranian "revolution" which was the first expression of decomposition, the Iran-Iraq War;
  • after 1989 and the implosion of the Russian bloc: all the contradictions which existed since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire exacerbated the development of each for themselves, the putting into question of US leadership and the extension of chaos. Iran, Iraq and Syria were denounced by the USA as rogue states. The region underwent the two US wars in Iraq, two Israeli wars in Lebanon, the growth of the power of Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon;
  • since 2003 we've seen an explosion of instability: the fragmentation of the Palestinian Authority and Iraq, the "Arab Spring" which has led to the destabilisation of a number of regimes in the region (Libya, Egypt, Yemen) and a war of factions and imperialisms in Syria. The permanent massacres in Syria, the efforts by Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, new Israeli bombardments of Gaza or the permanent political instability in Egypt, demand that each of these events are situated in the global dynamic of the region.

1.2. Growing danger of military confrontations between imperialisms

More than ever, war threatens in the region: preventative intervention by Israel (with or without the USA's approval) against Iran, the possibilities of intervention by different imperialisms in Syria, the war of Israel against the Palestinians (supported at present by Egypt), tensions between the Gulf monarchies and Iran. The Middle East is a terrible confirmation of our analysis of the impasse of the system and the descent into "each for themselves":

  • the region has become an enormous powder keg and arms purchases have again multiplied these last years (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman);
  • flocks of vultures of the first, second and third order confront each other in the region, as the conflict in Syria shows: the USA, Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt with more and more armed gangs at the service of these powers or the warlords acting on their own account:
  • in this context, we should point out the destabilising role of Russia in the Middle East (since it wants to maintain its last points of support in the region) and of China (which has a more offensive attitude, supporting Iran which is a crucial provider of oil). Europe is more discrete, even if a country like France is advancing its cards in Palestine, in Syria and even in Afghanistan (with the organisation of a conference in Chantilly, near Paris, in December 2012, bringing together the main Afghan factions).

It is an explosive situation which is escaping the control of the big imperialisms; and the withdrawal of western forces from Iraq and Afghanistan will further accentuate this destabilisation, even if the USA has made attempts to limit the damage:

  • by restraining Israel's desires for war against Iran and Hamas in the Gaza strip;
  • by attempting a rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi, the new president of Egypt.

Globally however, throughout the "Arab Spring", America has shown its incapacity to protect the regimes favourable to it (which has led to a loss of confidence: cf. the attitude of Saudi Arabia which has taken its distance from the USA) and is becoming increasingly unpopular.

This multiplication of imperialist tensions can lead to major consequences at any moment: countries such as Israel or Iran could provoke terrible shocks and pull the entire region into turmoil, without anyone being able to prevent it, because it's under no-one's control. We are thus in an extremely dangerous and unpredictable situation for the region, but also, because of the consequences that can arise from it, for the entire planet.

1.3. The growing instability of many states across the region

Since 1991, with the invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf war, the Sunni front put in place by the west to contain Iran has collapsed. The explosion of "every man for himself" in the region has been breathtaking and Iran has been the main beneficiary from the two Gulf wars, with the strengthening of Hezbollah and some Shi'ite movements; as for the Kurds, their quasi-independence has been the collateral effect of the invasion of Iraq. The tendency towards each for themselves is again sharpened in the extension of the social movements of the "Arab Spring", in particular where the proletariat is weakest and this has led to the more and more marked destabilisation of numerous states in the region:

  • it's evident in the case of Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, "free Kurdistan", Syria, or the Palestinian territories which are sinking into the war of clans or open civil war;
  • it's also the case in Egypt, of Bahrain, of Jordan (the Muslim Brotherhood against King Abdullah II) and even Iran for example, where social tensions and clan oppositions render the situation unpredictable.

The aggravation of tensions between adverse factions is mixed up with diverse religious tensions. Thus, outside of Sunni/Shi'ite or Christian/Muslim opposition, oppositions within the Sunni world are also increasing with the coming to power in Turkey of the moderate Islamist Erdogan or recently the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in Tunisia (Ennahda) and within the Moroccan government, supported today by Qatar, which opposes the Salafist/Wahhabi movement financed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai), which supported Mubarak and Ben Ali respectively.

Of course these religious tendencies, some more barbaric than others, are just there to hide imperialist interests which govern the policies of diverse government cliques. More than ever today, with the war in Syria or tensions in Egypt, it's evident that no such "Muslim bloc" or "Arab bloc" exists, but different bourgeois cliques defending their own imperialist interests by exploiting the religious oppositions (Christians, Jews, Muslims and diverse tendencies within Sunni or Shi'ite religions), which also appears in countries like Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia or Qatar for the control of mosques abroad (Europe).

But, in particular, this explosion of antagonisms and religious factionalism since the end of the 80s and the collapse of "modernist", "socialist" regimes (Iran, Egypt, Syria, Iraq...) above all expresses the weight of decomposition, of chaos and misery, the total absence of any perspective through a descent into totally retrograde and barbaric ideologies.

In brief, the idea that the USA could re-establish a form of control over the region, through the eviction of Assad for example, is not rational. Since the first Gulf war, all attempts to restore its leadership have failed and have, on the contrary, led to the unchaining of regional appetites, in particular those of a strongly militarised Iran, rich in energy and supported by Russia and China. But this country is in competition with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey... The "ordinary" imperialist ambitions of each state, the explosion of "each for themselves", the Israel-Palestine question, religious oppositions, but also the ethnic divisions (Kurds, Turks, Arabs), all play on the layers of tensions and make the situation particularly unpredictable and dramatic for the inhabitants of the region, but potentially also for the whole of the planet: thus, a greater destabilisation around Iran, and an eventual blockage of the Straits of Hormuz, could have incalculable consequences for the world economy.

2. Exacerbation of imperialist oppositions in the Far East

2.1. A brief historical perspective

The Far East has been a crucial zone for the development of imperialist confrontations since the beginning of decadence: Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, the Chinese "revolution" of 1911 and the ferocious civil war between diverse cliques and warlords, the Japanese offensive in Korea and Manchuria (1932), Japanese invasion of China (1937), Russian-Japanese conflict (May-August 1939) unfolding into the Second World War where the Far East made up one of the central fronts of this war and subsequent conflicts:

  • between 1945 and 1989, the region was at the centre of east-west tensions: the developing civil war in China (1949), the wars of Korea and Indochina (Vietnam), but also the Russo-Chinese border conflicts; the same for China-Vietnam, China-India, and India-Pakistan. The US policy of the "neutralisation" of China during the 1970's was to be an important moment in the increasing pressure by the US bloc on its Russian adversary.
  • since the implosion of the Russian bloc, "each for themselves" has also developed in the Far East. What marks this region above all else is the economic and military growth in the power of China, which has aggravated regional tensions (regular incidents these last months in the China Sea with Vietnam or the Philippines and above all with Japan, the repeated tensions between the two Korea's...) and in its turn the accelerated armament of the other states of the region (India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore...).

2.2 The growing power of China and the exacerbation of warlike tensions

The development of the economic and military power of China and its attempts to impose itself as a power of the first order not only in the Far East but also in the Middle East (Iran), in Africa (Sudan, Zimbabwe, Angola) or even in Europe where it's looking for a strategic rapprochement with Russia, means that it is seen by the US as the most important potential danger to its hegemony. It's from this starting point that the US is essentially orienting its strategic manoeuvres against China, as was shown by the 2012 visit of Obama to Burma and Cambodia, two countries allied to China.

The economic and military rise of China inevitably pushes it to advance its national economic and strategic interests, in other words to express a growing imperialist aggressiveness and thus to become a more and more destabilising factor in the Far East.

This growth in the power of China concerns not only the USA, but also numerous countries in Asia itself, from Japan to India, Vietnam to the Philippines, who feel threatened by the Chinese ogre and thus have palpably increased the money they spend on arms. Strategically, the US has tried to promote a large alliance aiming to contain Chinese ambitions, regrouping around the pillars of Japan, India and Australia the less powerful countries such as South Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. By standing in the front rank of such an alliance and above all with the aim of issuing a warning to China, the world cop aims to restore the credibility of its leadership which is in free-fall throughout the world.

Recent events confirm that in the present period the major economic development of a country cannot be made without an important increase of imperialist tensions. The context of the appearance of this most serious rival onto the world scene, in a situation of the weakening of the position of the leading world gendarme, announces a more dangerous future of confrontations, not only in Asia but in the entire world.

This danger of confrontations is much more real as the tendencies for "each for themselves" are very much present in other countries of the Far East. Thus the hardening of Japan's position is confirmed with the return to power of the nationalist Shinzo Abe who campaigned on the theme of the restoration of national power. He wants to replace the Self-Defence Force with a real army of national defence, going head to head with China over the conflict about a group of islands in the East China Sea, and wants to re-establish the somewhat degraded links with old allies in the region, the USA and South Korea. It's the same thing with South Korea and the election of Park Geun-Hye, the candidate for the Conservative Party (and daughter of the old dictator Park Chung-hee), which could also lead to an accentuation of "each for themselves" and of the imperialist ambitions of these countries.

Further, there's a whole series of apparently secondary conflicts between Asiatic countries which can further increase destabilisation: there's the Indo-Pakistan conflict of course, the continual altercations between the two Korea's, but also the less publicised tensions between South Korea and Japan (regarding the Dokdo/Takeshima islands), between Cambodia and Vietnam or Thailand, between Burma and Thailand, between India and Burma or Bangladesh, etc., all contributing to the exacerbation of tensions throughout the region.

2.3. Tensions within the political apparatus of the Chinese bourgeoisie

The recent congress of the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party has given various indications confirming that the present economic, imperialist and social situation is provoking strong tensions within the ruling class. This poses a question that's been insufficiently treated up to now: the question of the characteristics of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie in a country like China and the way in which the rapports de force have evolved within it. The inadequacy of this type of political apparatus was an important factor in the implosion of the Eastern bloc, but what about China? Rejecting any sort of "Glasnost" or "perestroika", the leading classes have successfully introduced mechanisms of the market economy while maintaining a rigid Stalinist organisation on the political level. In preceding reports, we have pointed to structural weaknesses of the political apparatus of the Chinese bourgeoisie as one of the arguments establishing why China could not become a real challenger to the USA. Also, the deterioration of the economy under the impact of the world crisis, the multiplication of social explosions and the growth of imperialist tensions will without doubt reinforce the existing tensions between factions of the Chinese bourgeoisie, as we've seen with certain surprising events, such as the removal of the "rising star" Bo Xilai and the mysterious disappearance for a fortnight of the "future president" Xi Jinping some weeks before the congress was held.

The different lines of fracture must be taken into account in order to understand the struggle between factions:

  • a first line of fracture concerns the opposition between regions which have strongly benefited from economic development and others who have been somewhat neglected, thus also between economic policies. Pitched against each other are the two great networks marked by cronyism: on the one hand a circumstantial coalition between the "party of the princes", children of the upper cadres during the time of Mao and Deng, and the Shanghai clique, functionaries from the coastal provinces. Representative of the leading groups from the more industrialised coastal provinces, they advocate economic growth at any price, even if that increases the social divide. This faction is represented by the new president Xi Jinping and the macro-economic expert Wang Qishan. Up against them is the "Tuanpai" faction around the Young Communist League, within which the main figures have made their careers. As it's a question of bureaucrats having made careers in the poorer provinces of the hinterland, this faction extols a policy of the economic development of the central and western regions, which would favour a greater "social stability". They represent groups having more experience in administration and propaganda. Represented by the former president Hu Jintao, this faction will be represented in the new direction by Li Keqiang, who will probably replace Wen Jiabao as prime minister. This confrontation seems to have played a role in the clash around Bo Xilai.
  • the social situation can equally generate tensions between factions within the state. Thus, certain groups, in particular in the industrial and export sectors could be sensitive to social tensions and favourable to more concessions at the political level towards the working class. They are thus opposed to the "hard" factions who favour repression in order to preserve the privileges of the cliques in power.
  • imperialist policy also plays a role in the confrontations between cliques. On one side there are the factions which have adopted a more aggressive attitude, such as the coastal regional governments of Hainan, Guangxi and Guangdong, who are looking for new resources for their enterprises, pushing for control of the areas rich in hydrocarbons and marine resources. On the other hand, this aggressiveness can bring counter blows on the level of exports or foreign investments, as was shown with the question of the Japanese islands. The more and more frequent fierce nationalist thrusts in China are without doubt the product of internal confrontations. What, moreover, is the impact of nationalism on the working class, what is the capacity of the young generation not to get hoodwinked and defend its own interests? On this level the context is quite different from that of 1989 in the USSR.

These three lines of fracture are not separate of course but overlap and have played on the tensions which have marked the congress of the CCP and the nomination of the new leadership. According to observers, the latter has been marked by the victory of the "conservatives" over the "progressives" (out of the 7 members of the permanent Political Bureau, 4 are conservatives). But the more and more frequent revelations bear on behaviour, corruption, the amassing of gigantic fortunes, which goes to the highest spheres of the party (thus, the fortune of the family of the old prime minister Wen Jiabao is estimated to be $2.7 billion through a complex network of businesses, often in his mother's, wife's or daughter's name; and that of the new president, Xi Jinping, is already estimated to be at least one billion dollars). This not only shows a problem of effectively gigantic proportions but also a growing instability within the sphere of the leadership that the new conservative and older leadership seem unable to get a grip on.

3. The extension of "Somalisation": the case of Africa

The explosion of chaos and "each for themselves" has given birth to "no-go" areas and zones of instability, which haven't stopped expanding since the end of the twentieth century and which are spreading at present over the whole of the Middle East up to Pakistan. They also cover the totality of the African continent which is sinking into a terrifying barbarity. This "Somalisation" is manifested in several forms.

3.1. The tendency towards the fragmentation of states.

Written into the charter of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, the principle of the inviolability of frontiers seems to have broken down. From 1993, Eritrea separated from Ethiopia and since then this process has affected the whole of Africa: since the end of the 90's, the disappearance of the central power in Somalia has seen the fragmentation of countries with the appearance of pretend states, such as Somaliland and Puntland. Recently there's been the secession of South Sudan from Sudan and the bloody rebellion in Darfur, the secession of Azawad regarding Mali; and separatist tendencies are appearingin Libya (Cyrenia around Benghazi), in Casamance in Senegal and, recently, in the Mombasa region of Kenya.

Outside of the more and more numerous regions who have declared independence, from the end of the 90's we also see a multiplication of internal conflicts with a political-ethnic or ethnic-religious character: Liberia and Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast are tending to re-start politico-ethnic civil wars which have exploded the state to the profit of armed clans. In Nigeria there is a Muslim rebellion in the north, the "Lord's Army" in Uganda and the Hutu and Tutsi clans who are tearing each other apart in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The transnational diffusion of tensions and conflicts in a context of weakened states mean that these areas, collapsing and incapable of assuring national order, fall back on religious or ethnic loyalties which are going to dominate. Consequently the defence of interests will be made on the basis of the militias that have appeared.

These internal fragmentations are often stirred up and exploited by interventions from the outside: thus, the western intervention in Libya has worsened internal instability and provoked the spreading of arms and armed groups throughout the Sahel. The growing presence of China on the continent and its support for the warlike policies of Sudan are an example of that and the destabilisation of the whole region. Finally, the big multinationals and the states that back them have even orchestrated local conflicts so as to get their hands on mineral wealth (in the east of the DRC, for example).

Alone, the south seems to escape from this scenario. We do see however a dilution of frontiers, here made to the profit of South Africa from the weaker countries of the region (Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, but also Namibia, Zambia, Malawi), which are being transformed into colonies of the former.

3.2. The wearing away of frontiers.

The destabilisation of states is being fed by a trans-frontier criminality, such as the traffic in arms, drugs and human beings. Consequently, these territorial limits are diluted to the profit of border zones where regulation is effected "from below". Armed insurrections, the incapacity of the authorities to maintain order, trans-national trafficking of arms and munitions, local gang leaders, foreign interference, access to natural resources, all play a part. Delinquent states are losing control of these more and more ample "grey zones", which are often administered in a criminal manner (sometimes also there is the perverse effect of the intervention of humanitarian organisations who make the protected zones "extra-territorial" in fact). Some examples:

  • all the zone around the Sahara and the Sahel, from the Libyan desert to Azawad, Mauritania, Niger and Chad being the terrain of criminal movements and the radical Islamist groups;
  • between Niger and Nigeria, there's a band of some 30 to 40 kilometres which is free from the supervision of Niamey and Abuja. The frontiers are evaporating;
  • the east of the DRC where the control of the borders with Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania by the central state is non-existent, facilitating trans-national movements of raw materials and arms;
  • through the states of Burkino Fasso, Ghana, Benin or Guinea where there's a pull of migrants towards agriculture or fishing. As to Guinea-Bissau, it's become a total "no-go" zone, a nerve centre for the entry and re-directing of drugs from South America or Afghanistan towards Europe and the USA.

3.3. The dominance of clans and warlords.

With the delinquency of national states, entire regions are falling under the control of groups and warlords along the frontiers. It's not only Somaliland and Puntland where clans and local armed bosses rule by force of arms. In the Sahel region this role is fulfilled by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar Dine, the movement for the unity of jihad in West Africa (Mujao) and some nomad Tuareg groups. In east Congo, a group like the M23 is a private army at the service of a warlord who follows the most money.

Such groups are generally linked to traffickers with whom they exchange money and services. Thus in Nigeria, in the Niger Delta, similar groups hold firms to ransom and sabotage oil installations.

The emergence and the extension of "no-go" zones are certainly not limited to Africa alone. Thus the generalisation of organised crime, the wars between gangs in various countries of Latin America, Mexico, Venezuela, for example, even the control of entire quarters by gangs in the big western towns, witness the progression of decomposition over the whole planet. However, the level of fragmentation and chaos reaching the scale of a whole continent gives an idea of the barbarity wrought by the decomposition of the system for the whole of humanity.

4. Economic crisis and the tensions between European states

In the report for the 19th Congress of the ICC, we underlined the absence of any immediate and mechanical link between the aggravation of the economic crisis and the development of imperialist tensions. That doesn't mean that they don't have an impact on each other. This is particularly the case with the role of European states on the imperialist scene.

4.1. The impact of imperialist ambitions in the world.

The crisis of the euro and the EU has imposed the cures of budget austerity on most European states, which is also expressed at the level of military spending. Thus, contrary to the states of the Far East or Middle East, who have seen their armaments budgets explode, the budgets of the main European powers have been appreciably lowered.

This retreat in armaments provisions is accompanied by less pronounced European imperialist ambitions on the international scene (with the exception perhaps of France, which is present in Mali and is attempting a diplomatic push in Afghanistan by bringing all the Afghan factions together under its tutelage at Chantilly): there is less emphasis on autonomy on the part of the European powers and even a certain rapprochement with the USA, a partial "return to the ranks" that is without doubt contingent.

4.2. The impact on tensions between European states.

Within the EU, this goes along with a growing tension between centripetal tendencies (a need for stronger centralisation in order to face up more strongly to economic collapse) and centrifugal tendencies towards each for themselves.

The conditions for the birth of the EU were a plan to contain Germany after 1989, but what the bourgeoisie needs today is a much stronger centralisation, a budgetary union and thus a much more political union. It needs this if it is to face up to the crisis in the most effective manner possible, which also corresponds to German interests. The necessary thrust for greater centralisation thus strengthens German control over other European states inasmuch as it allows Germany to dictate the measures needed to be taken and to directly intervene in the functioning of other European states: "From now on, Europe will be talking German", as the president of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag noted in 2011.

On the other hand, the crisis and the drastic measures imposed are pushing towards a break-up of the EU and a rejection of submission to the control of another country, that's to say a push towards each for themselves. Britain has out and out refused the proposed measures of centralisation and in the southern European countries a nationalist anti-Germanism is growing. Centrifugal forces can also imply a tendency towards the fragmentation of states, the autonomy of regions such as Catalonia, northern Italy, Flanders and Scotland.

Thus, the pressure of the crisis, through a complex play of centripetal and centrifugal forces, is accentuating the break-up of the EU and is exacerbating tensions between states.

In a global manner, this report accentuates the orientations laid out in the report to the 19th Congress of the ICC and underlines the acceleration of the tendencies it identified. More than ever, the more and more absolute nature of the historic impasse of the capitalist mode of production is being made clear. Thus, the period opening up "will tend to impose the more and more clear cut connections between

  • the economic crisis, revealing the historic impasse of the capitalist mode of production;
  • its warlike barbarity, showing the fundamental consequences of the historic impasse: the destruction of humanity.

From today, for the working class, this link represents a point of fundamental reflection on the future that capitalism is reserving for humanity and on the necessity to find an alternative faced with this dying system”.
 

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ICC Congress

2014 - International Review

International Review - 1st semester 2014

A history of class struggle in South Africa

After West Africa,1we begin a second series on the history of the African workers’movement with a contribution on the class struggles in South Africa. A country famous mainly for two reasons: on the one hand, its mineral wealth (gold, diamonds, etc.) due to which it is relatively well developed; and on the other, its monstrous apartheid system, the aftermath of which we still see today.At the same time, apartheid gave birth to a huge “icon”, namely Nelson Mandela, considered its principal victim but above all the product of this system of another age, who with his titles of “hero of the anti-apartheid struggle”and man ofpeace and reconciliation of the peoples of South Africa”was revered throughout the capitalist world.Mandela’s media image veils everything else to the point where the history and struggles of the South African working class before and during apartheid are either completely ignored or distorted by being systematically categorised under the rubric of “anti-apartheid struggles” or “national liberation struggles”.Of course, for bourgeois propaganda, all struggles can be incarnated in Mandela, even though it is public knowledge that since coming to power, Mandela and his party, the African National Congress (ANC), have not exactly been kind to the strikes of the working class2.

The main purpose of this contribution is to restore the historical truth about the struggles between the two fundamental classes, namely the bourgeoisie (for whom apartheid was only one means of domination) and the proletariat of South Africa that, for most of the time, was left to struggle for its own demands as an exploited class, from the epoch of the Dutch-British colonial bourgeoisie and then under the Mandela/ANC regime.In other words, a South African proletariat whose struggle fits perfectly with that of the world proletariat.

A brief survey of the history of South Africa

According to some historical sources, this area was originally occupied by the Xhosa, Tswana and Sotho people who settled there between 500 and 1000AD. In this regard, the historian Henri Wesseling tells us the following:

South Africa was not a virgin land when European ships landed for the first time in 1500 at the foot of Table Mountain. It was populated by different ethnic groups, mostly nomads. Dutch settlers divided them into Hottentots and Bushmen. They regarded them as two totally distinct peoples from a physical and cultural point of view. Bushmen were smaller than the Hottentots and they spoke a different language. Moreover, they were more ‘primitive’, practicing hunting and gathering, while the Hottentots had reached the level of pastoral peoples. This traditional dichotomy has long dominated the historiography. Today, we no longer use these terms, but those of Khoikhoi or Khoi for Hottentots and San for the Bushmen, the term Khoisan serving to designate the ethnic group they form together. In fact, currently, one emphasizes less the distinction between these people, mainly because they are both very different from neighboring ethnic groups speaking Bantu languages and formerly known as Kaffirs, from the Arabic kafir (infidel). This term has equally fallen into disuse.3

It can be noted how the Dutch settlers considered themselves the first inhabitants of this region, as colonial ideology established rankings between “primitive” and “advanced”. Furthermore the author indicates that the term South Africa is a (recent) political concept and that many of its populations are historically from neighboring countries in southern Africa.

As far as European colonization is concerned, the Portuguese were the first to set foot in South Africa in 1488 followed by the Dutch who landed in the area in 1648.The latter decided to settle there permanently from 1652, markingthe beginning of the permanent “white”presence in South Africa.In 1795, Cape Town was occupied by the British, who 10 years later took possession of Natal, while the Boers (Dutch) led the Transvaal and Orange Free State in winning recognition of their independence from Britain in 1854. As for the various African states or groups, through prolonged warfare they resisted the presence of European settlers on their soil before finally being defeated by the dominant powers.At the end of the wars against the Afrikaners and the Zulus, the British proceeded in 1920 to unify South Africa under the name “Union of South Africa”, which it remained until 1961 when the Afrikaner regime decided to simultaneously leave the Commonwealth (the English-speaking community) and change the name of the country.

Apartheid was officially established in 1948 and abolished in 1990.We will return to this later in more detail.

Concerning imperialist rivalries, South Africa played the role of “delegated policeman”for the Western imperialist bloc in southern Africa, and it was in this role that Pretoria intervened militarily in 1975 in Angola which was supported by the Eastern imperialist bloc with Cuban troops.

South Africa is considered today as an “emerging”member of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), and is looking to make its entry into the arena of the great powers.

Since 1994, South Africa has been governed principally by the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, in company with the Communist Party and the COSATU trade union federation.

The South African working class emerged at the end of the 19th century and constitutes today the largest and most experienced industrial proletariat on the African continent.

Finally, we think it useful to explain two related but nevertheless distinct terms, that we will use often in this contribution, namely the terms “Boer” and “Afrikaner”, which have Dutch roots.

Those called Boers (or Boertrekkers) were originally Dutch farmers (predominantly small peasants) who in 1835-1837 undertook a vast migration in South Africa due to the abolition of slavery by the British in the Cape Colony in 1834.The term is still used today for descendants, direct or not,of these farmers (including factory workers).

Concerning the definition of the term Afrikaner, we refer to the explanation given by the historian Henri Wesseling: “The white population that settled in the Cape was of different origins.It consisted of Dutch, but also many Germans and French Huguenots.This community gradually adopted a different way of life.One could even say that a national identity was formed, that of the Afrikaners, who considered the British government as a foreign authority.4

We can therefore say that the term refers to a kind of identity claimed by a number of European migrants of the time, a notion that is still used in recent publications.

Birth of South African capitalism

The birth of capitalism in each region of the world like South Africa has been marked by specific or local characteristics. Nevertheless it developed in general in three different phases, as by described by Rosa Luxemburg:

“(In its development) we must distinguish three phases: the struggle of capital against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for theremaining conditions of accumulation.

The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata asa market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its meansof production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system.

In South Africa, capitalism followed these three phases. In the 19th Century there was a natural economy, a market economy and a workforce sufficient to develop wage labour.

In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, pure peasant economy prevailed until the sixties of the last century. For a long time the Boers had led the life of animal-tending nomads; they had killed off or driven out the Hottentots and Kaffirs with a will in order to deprive them of their most valuable pastures. In the eighteenth century they were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported by ships of the East India Company, which frequently did away with entire Hottentot tribes whose lands then fell to the Dutch immigrants.

(…)Boer economy in general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based on natural economy until the sixties. But their patriarchal attitude did not deter the Boers from extreme brutality and harshness. It is well known that Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about the Kaffirs.

(…)In fact, peasant economy and great capitalist colonial policy were here competing for the Hottentots and Kaffirs, that is to say for their land and their labour power. Both competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into service by the abolition of their social organisations. Only their methods of exploitation were fundamentally different. While the Boers stood for out-dated slavery on a petty scale, on whichtheir patriarchal peasant economy was founded, the British bourgeoisie represented modern large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and the natives.5

We should note the fierceness of the struggle engaged in by Boers and the British for conquest and the establishment of capitalism in this zone which emerged, as elsewhere,“mired in blood and filth”. In the end it was British imperialism that dominated the situation and concretized the advent of capitalism in South Africa, as related in her own way by the researcher Brigitte Lachartre:

British imperialism, when it manifested itself in the south of the continent in 1875, had other aims: citizens of the leading economic power of the time, representatives of the most developed mercantile and capitalist society in Europe, the British imposed on their colony in southern Africa a much more liberal native policy than that of the Boers.Slavery was abolished in the areas they controlled, while the Dutch settlers fled into the interior of the country to escape the new social order and the administration of the British settlers.After defeating the Africans by arms (a dozen ‘Kaffir’wars in a century), the British devoted themselves to ‘liberating’ the labour force: the defeated tribes were regrouped in tribal reserves whose limits were more and more restricted; Africans were prevented from leaving without authorisation and their pass in order.But the true face of British colonization appeared with the discovery of diamonds and gold in 1870.A new era began which brought about a profound transformation of all social and economic structures of the country: mining led to industrialization, urbanization, disruption of traditional African societies, but also of the Boer communities, immigration of new waves of Europeans (...).”6

Clearly, this statement can be read as a concrete continuation of the process described by Rosa Luxemburg, by which capitalism emerged in South Africa. In its struggle against the “natural economy”, British economic power had to break the old tribal societies and violently get rid of the old forms of production such as slavery, incarnated by thethe Boers who were forced to flee to escape the modern capitalist order. This was at the root of the wars between the proponents of the old and the new economic order by which the country passed so rapidly to modern capitalism, thanks to the discovery of diamonds (1871) and gold (1886). The gold rushtranslated itself into a lightning acceleration of industrialization of the country as a result of the exploitation and commercialisation of precious materials, which hugely attracted capitalist investors from the developed countries. It was therefore necessary to recruit engineers and skilled workers,and in this way thousands of Europeans, Americans and Australians came to settle in South Africa. And the City of Johannesburg came to symbolize this emerging dynamism by its rapid development. On 17 July 1896, a census showed that the city had had 3,000 inhabitants in 1887 and 100,000 ten years later. A little over ten years later the white population had grown from 600,000 to over a million. In the same period the gross domestic product (GDP) rose from £150,000 to nearly £4 million. This is how South Africa became the first and only African country to be relatively developed on an industrial scale – something which was not slow to whet the appetites of rival economic powers:

The economic and political center of South Africa was no longer in the Cape, but in Johannesburg and Pretoria.Germany, Europe’s biggest economic power, was established in South West Africa and had expressed an interest in South East Africa.If the Transvaal showed itself unwilling to submit to the authority of London, the future of England would be challenged in the whole of South Africa.7

At this time you can see that behind the economic issues lurked imperialist issues between the major European powers vying for control of this region. Moreover, British power did everything to limit the presence of its German rival to the west of South Africa, which is today called Namibia (colonised in 1883), after neutralising Portugal, the other imperialist presence with far more limited means.The British Empire could therefore boast that it was the sole master in command of the booming South African economy.

But the economic development of SouthAfrica, powered by mineral discoveries, very quickly ran into a series of problems which in the first place were social and ideological:

Economic development, stimulated by the discovery of minerals, will soon face the white settlers with a profound contradiction (...).On the one hand the introduction of the new economic order required the creation of a waged labour force; on the other, the release of the African workforce from the reserves and out of their traditional subsistence economy put in jeopardy the racial balance of the whole territory.At the end of the last century (the 19th), the African populations were therefore subject to a multitude of laws with often contradictory effects.Some aimed to make them migrate to areas of white economic activities to submit to wage labor.Others tended to keep them partly on the reserves.Among the laws intended to make manpower available, there were some which penalized vagrancy in order to ‘tear the natives away from this idleness and laziness, teach them the dignity of work, and to contribute to the prosperity of the state.’There were others to submit Africans to taxation.(…) Among other laws,those on passes were intended to filter the migrations, to steer them according to the needs of the economy or stop them in the event of a flood.8

We see here that the British colonial authorities found themselves caught up in contradictions related to the development of the productive forces. But we can say that the strongest contradiction here was ideological, when British power decided to consider the black labour force on segregationist administrative criteria, in particular with the laws on passes and the penning of Africans. In fact, this policy was in flagrant contradiction with the liberal orientation that led to the abolition of slavery.

Difficulties also related to the colonial wars. After suffering defeats and winning the wars against its Zulu and Afrikaner opponents between 1870 and 1902, the British Empire had to digest the extremely high cost of its victories, especially that of 1899-1902, both in human and economic terms. Indeed, the “Boer War” was a real butchery:

The Boer War was the greatest colonial war of the modern imperialist era.It lasted more than two and a half years (11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902).The British engaged around half a million soldiers, 22,000 of whom were killed in South Africa.Their total losses, that is to say killed, wounded, and missing, rose to more than 100,000 men.The Boers, meanwhile, mobilized nearly 100,000 men.They lost more than 7,000 soldiers and nearly 30,000 died in the camps.An unknown number of Africans fought alongside one or the other side.The losses they suffered are also undetermined.Tens of thousands of them probably lost their lives.The British War Office also calculated that 400,346 horses, donkeys and mules died during the conflict, as well as millions of cattle belonging to the Boers.This war cost the British taxpayer £200 million, or ten times the annual budget of the army or 14% of national income in 1902.If the subjugation of the future British subjects of Africa cost on average fifteen pennies per head,the submission of the Boers however cost £1000 per man.9

In other words, an open pit of warfare inaugurated the entry of British capitalism into the 20th century. Furthermore, we can see in the details of this horrible butchery that the Nazi concentration camps found a source of inspiration. British capitalism developed a total of forty four camps destined for the Boers where about 120,000 women and children were imprisoned. At the end of the war in 1902 it was found that 28,000 white detainees had been killed, including 20,000 children under the age of 16.

Yet it was without remorse that the commander of the British Army, Lord Kitchener, justified the massacres in speaking of the Boers as “a species of savages born from generations leading a barbarous and solitary existence.10

This is rich coming from a major war criminal. Certainly we must note that in this butchery, Afrikaner troops were not to be outdone in terms of mass killings and atrocities, and that the Afrikaner leaders were later allies of the German army during the Second World War,above all to settle accounts with British power.

Defeated by British imperialism,submitted to the capitalist system, humiliated in their culture and traditions, the Afrikaner people (...)organized from 1925 to 1930 a strong movement to rehabilitate the Afrikaner nation.Its vengeful, anti-capitalist, anti-communist and profoundly racist ideology designated Africans, mestizos, Asians and Jews as a threat to the Western civilization they claimed to represent on the African continent.Organized at all levels, school, church, union and terrorist secret societies (the best known is the Broederbond), Afrikaners later proved fervent partisans of Hitler, Nazism and its ideology.”11

The fact that the Afrikaner workers were dragged into this same movement shows the immensity of the obstacle to be crossed by the working class of this country to join the struggles of workers of other ethnicities.

This conflict permanently shaped relationships between the British and Afrikaner colonialisms on South African soil until the fall of apartheid. To divisions and ethnic hatred between British and Afrikaner whites, can be added those between on the one hand these two categories and on the other blacks (and other people of colour) that the bourgeoisie systematically used to destroy all attempts at unity in the workers’ ranks.

Birth of the working class

The birth of capitalism led to the dislocation of many traditional African societies. From the 1870s, the British Empire began a liberal colonial policy by abolishing slavery in areas it controlled, in order to “liberate” the labour force then consisting of Boer and African farm workers. We have noted that the Boer settlers themselves continued to exploit black farmers under the old form of slavery before being defeated by the British. But ultimately it was the discovery of gold which accelerated sharply the birth of capitalism and the emergence of the working class:

There was no shortage of capital. Exchanges in London and New York willingly supplied the necessary funds.The global economy, which was growing, demanded gold.Workers streamed in too.Mining attracted crowds in the Rand.People went there not in their thousands, but tens of thousands.No city in the world knew a development as rapid as Johannesburg.12

In the space of 20 years the European population of Johannesburg grew from a few thousand to 250,000, the majority of whom were skilled workers, engineers and other technicians. These are the ones who gave birth to the South African working class in the marxist sense of the term, that is to say, those who, under capitalism, sell their labour in exchange for a wage. Capital had a strong and urgent need for a more or less skilled labour force which it could not find on the spot whithout recourse to migrants from Europe, including the British Empire. But gradually, as economic development progressed, the industrial apparatus was driven to recruit more and more unskilled African workers from the interior of the country or from outside, including Mozambique and Zimbabwe. From then the workforce of the South African economy truly “internationalized” itself.

As a result of the massive arrival in South Africa of British-born workers, the working class was immediately organized and supervized by the British trade unions and in the early 1880s there were numerous companies and corporations which were created on the “English model” (the trade union). This meant that workers of South African origin, as groups or individuals without organisational experience, could only with difficulty organize outside of the pre-established unions13. Certainly, there were dissensions within the unions as well as in parties claiming to defend the working class, with attempts to develop an autonomous union activity on the part of radical proletarian elements who could no longer put up with the “treachery of the leaders.” But these were in a tiny minority.

Everywhere in the world where there are conflicts between the classes under capitalism, the working class always secretes revolutionary minorities defending, more or less clearly, proletarian internationalism. This was also the case in South Africa. Some elements from the working class were at the origin of struggles but also initiated the formation of proletarian organizations. We propose to introduce three figures from this generation in the form of a short summary of their trajectories.

  • Andrew Dunbar (1879-1964). A Scottish immigrant, he was general secretary of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) created in South Africa in 191014. He was a railway worker in Johannesburg and actively participated in the massive strike of 1909 after which he was dismissed. In 1914 he fought against the war and participated in the creation of the International Socialist League (ISL), which belonged to the revolutionary syndicalist tendency. He also fought against the repressive and discriminatory measures against Africans which earned him the sympathy of black workers. He was also responsible for creating the first “African Union”modeled on the IWW in 1917. But his sympathy for the Russian revolution became more and more enthusiastic, so he decided with other comrades to form the “Communist Party of Africa” in October 1920 on an essentially syndicalist platform and of which he was secretary. In 1921 his organization decided to merge with the official Communist Party which had been formed. But he was expelled a few years later and in the wake of this he abandoned his union activities.
  • TW Thibedi (1888-1960). Considered a prominent trade union member of the IWW (he joined in 1916). He was originally from the South African town of Vereeniging and had a teaching job in a school attached to a church in Johannesburg. As part of his trade union activities he advocated class unity and mass action against capitalism. He was part of the left wing of the African nationalist party, the South African Native National Congress (SANNC). Thibedi was also a member of the ISL and, during a strike movement led by this group in 1918, along with is comrades, he suffered harsh police repression. A member of the South African CP from its formation, he was expelled in 1928 but due to the reaction of many of his comrades he was reinstated before finally being driven from the party. He then decided to sympathize briefly with the Trotskyist movement before entering into complete anonymity. The sources we have do not give a total strength of South African Trotskyist militants at that time.15
  • Bernard Le Sigamoney (1888-1963). Of Indian origin and from a farming family, he was an active member of the Indian IWW union and as with his above-mentioned comrades he was also a member of the ISL. He showed himself in favour of the unity of the industrial workers of South Africa, and along with his fellow ISL comrades he was at the head of important strike movements in 1920/1921. However, he did not join the Communist Party and decided to abandon his political and union activities, going to study in Britain in 1922. In 1927 he returned to South Africa (Johannesburg) as an Anglican missionary clergyman while resuming his trade union activities within an organization close to the IWW. He was then denounced as a “troublemaker” by the authorities and eventually became discouraged, simply working in the church and promoting civil rights for people of colour.

So here are three “portraits” of the trajectories of union and political militants which are quite similar despite being of different ethnic origin (European, African and Indian). Above all they share an essential common characteristic: proletarian class solidarity, an internationalist spirit and a great combativity against the capitalist enemy. It is they and their comrades in struggle who are the precursors of the current working class fighters in South Africa.

Other organizations, of different origins and nature, were active within the working class. These are the main parties and organizations16claiming more or less formally at their origins to be working class or to defend its “interests”, excluding the Labour Party which remained faithful to its bourgeoisie since its active participation in the first world slaughter. More precisely, we give here an overview17 of the nature and origin of the ANC and of the South African CP as part of the forces of the ideological containment of the working class since the 1920s.

The ANC. This organization was created in 1912 by and for the indigenous petty bourgeoisie (doctors, lawyers, teachers and other functionaries, etc.), individuals who demanded democracy, racial equality and defended the British constitutional system, as illustrated in the words of Nelson Mandela:

For 37 years, that is to say, until 1949, the African National Congress fought with scrupulous respect for the law (...) It believed that the grievances of the Africans would be considered after peaceful discussions and that we would move slowly towards full recognition of the rights of the African nation.18

In this sense, since its birth up until the 1950s,19far from seeking to overthrow the capitalist system, the ANC led peaceful actions respectful of the established order, and was therefore very far from seeking to overthrow the capitalist system. This same Mandela boasted of his “anti-communist”struggle, as outlined in his autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom. But its Stalinist orientation, suggesting an alliance between the (“progressive”) bourgeoisie and the working class, allowed the ANC to rely on the CP to gain a foothold in the ranks of the workers, especially in the base of the unions that these two parties together control even today.

The South African Communist Party. The CP was created by elements claiming to defend proletarian internationalism and as such a member of the Third International (1921). In its beginnings it advocated the unity of the working class and put forward the perspective of the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism. But by 1928 it became simply an executive arm of Stalinist policies in the South African colony. The Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country” was accompanied by the idea that the underdeveloped countries were required to go through “a bourgeois revolution” and that, in this vision, the proletariat could fight against colonial oppression but not establish any proletarian power in the colonies at this time.

The South African CP took this orientation to absurd lengths, becoming the faithful lapdog of the ANC in the 1950s, as this quote illustrates: “The CP made offers of service to the ANC. The Secretary General of CP explained to Mandela: “Nelson, what do you have against us? We are fighting the same enemy. We are not talking about dominating the ANC; we are working in the context of African nationalism.” And in 1950 Mandela accepted that the CP would put its militant apparatus in the service of the ANC, thus giving him control over a good part of the labour movement and a significant advantage allowing the ANC to take hegemony over the whole of the anti-apartheid movement. In exchange the ANC would provide a legal front for the prohibited CP apparatus.20

Thus, both openly bourgeois parties have become inseparable and are now at the head of the South African government for the defence of the interests of national capital and against the working class which they oppress and massacre, as in the strike of the miners at Marikana in August 2012.

Apartheid against the class struggle

This barbaric word is hated today worldwide even by its former supporters as symbolizing and incarnating the most despicable form of capitalist exploitation of the layers and classes belonging to the South African proletariat. But before going further, we propose one definition among others of this term: in the “Afrikaans” language spoken by the Afrikaners, apartheid more precisely means “separation.” This includes all kinds of separation (racial, social, cultural, economic, etc.). But behind this formal definition of apartheid lies a doctrine promoted by the “primitive”capitalists and colonialistswhich combines economic and ideological objectives:

Apartheid is derived from both the colonial system and the capitalist system; in this dual capacity, it stamps on South African society divisions of racial characteristics in the first place and inherent divisions of class in the second.As in many other parts of the globe, there is almost perfect coincidence between the black races and the exploited class. At the other extreme, however, the situation is less clear. Indeed, the white population cannot be regarded as a dominant class without further ado. It is, certainly, constituted by a handful of owners of the means of production, but also from the mass of those who are dispossessed: agricultural and industrial workers, miners, service workers, etc. So there is no identity between the white race and the dominant class. (…) But, nothing like this has ever happened [the white workforce rubbing shoulders with the black workforce on an equal footing] or will ever happen in South Africa as long as apartheid is in effect. Because this system is designed to avoid any possibility of the creation of a multiracial working class.This is where the anachronistic system of South African power, its mechanisms dating from another era,come to the aid of the capitalist system which generally tends to simplify relationships within society. Apartheid - in its most comprehensive form- came to consolidate the colonial edifice, at the moment when capitalism was at risk of bringing down the entire power of the Whites. The means was an ideology and legislation aiming to annihilate class antagonisms within the white population, to extirpate the germs, to erase the contours and replace them with racial antagonisms.

By replacing the contradictions of a terrain difficult to control (division of society into antagonistic classes) with ones more easily manageable, the non- antagonistic division of society between races, white power has almost achieved the desired result: to constitute a homogeneous and united block on the basis of white ethnicity- a bloc all the more solid because it feels historically menaced by black power and communism - and on the other side, to divide the black population within itself, by different tribes or by social groups with different interests.

Dissonances, class antagonisms that are minimized, ignored or erased on the white side are encouraged, emphasized and provoked on the black side. This enterprise of division - facilitated by the presence on South African soil of populations of diverse origins- has routinely been conducted since colonization: detribalization of one part of the African population, the retention in traditional structures of another; evangelization and training of some, denial of any possibility of education of others, establishing small elites of leaders and officials, pauperisation of the great masses; and finally, the putting in place, to great fanfares,of an African, Mestizo, Indian, petty bourgeoisie - a buffer ready to interpose itself between their racial brothers and their class allies.21

We generally agree with this author’s framework for defining and analyzingthe system of apartheid. We are particularly in agreement when it states that apartheid is above all an ideological instrument in the service of capital against the unity (in struggle) of different members of the exploited class; in this case the workers of all colours. In other words, the apartheid system is primarily a weapon against the class struggle as the motor of history, the only one capable of overthrowing capitalism. Also, if apartheid was theorized and fully applied from 1948 by the most backward Afrikaner fraction of the South African colonial bourgeoisie, it was the British, bearers of the “most modern civilization”, who laid the foundations of this despicable system.

Indeed, it is from the early nineteenth century that the British invaders took legislative and military measures to group part of the African population in ‘reserves’, allowing or forcing the other part to leave them to be employed across the country in diverse economic sectors. The area of these tribal reserves was fixed in 1913 and slightly enlarged in 1936 to offer the (black) population only 13% of the national territory. These tribal reserves,fabricated in every way by white power (...) were named Bantustans (...),’national homelands for the Bantus’, each theoretically to regroup members of the same ethnicity.22

Thus, the idea of separate races and populations was initiated by the British colonialism which methodically applied its famous strategy of “divide and rule” by implementing ethnic separation, not only between blacks and whites but even more cynically between black ethnic groups.

However, the proponents of the system could never prevent the breakdown of their own contradictions, inevitably generating the confrontation between the two antagonistic classes. Clearly under this barbaric system, many workers’ struggles were conducted by white workers as well as black workers (or mestizo and Indian).

Certainly the South African bourgeoisie was remarkably successful in rendering workers’ struggles powerless by permanently poisoning the class consciousness of the South African proletariat. This was reflected in the fact that some groups of workers often fought at the same time against their exploiters but also against their comrades of a different ethnic group, and fell into the deadly trap set by the class enemy. In sum, rare were the struggles uniting workers of different ethnic origins. We also know that many so-called “workers’” organizations, namely unions and parties, facilitated the task of capital by endorsing this policy of the “racial division “of the South African working class. For example, the unions of European origin along with the South African Labour Party, defended first (or exclusively) the “interests” of white workers. Similarly, the various black movements (parties and unions) struggled first of all against the system of exclusion of the blacks by claiming equality and independence. This orientation was incarnated principally by the ANC. We should note the particular case of the South African CP which, at first (in the early 1920s), tried to unite the working class without distinction in the fight against capitalism but was soon to abandon the terrain of internationalism by deciding to focus on “the black cause.” This was the beginning of its definitive “Stalinization”.

Strike movements and other social struggles between 1884/2013

First workers’struggle in Kimberley

By coincidence the diamond that symbolically gave birth to South African capitalism was also the origin of the first movement of proletarian struggle. The first workers’ strike broke out in Kimberley, the “Diamond Capital”, in 1884, when British-born miners decided to fight against the decision of the mining companies to impose the so-called “compound” system (ie. forced labour camps) reserved up until then for black workers. In this struggle the miners organized strike pickets to impose a balance of power enabling them to win their demands, while to break the strike the employers on the one hand engaged “scabs” and on the other troops armed to the teeth who were not slow to fire on the workers.There were 4 deaths among the strikers,who nevertheless continued the struggle with a vigour which forced the employers to meet their demands. This was the first movement of the struggle between the two historical forces in South African capitalism that ended in blood but also victory for the proletariat. Therefore we can say that it was here that the real class struggle began in capitalist South Africa, laying the foundations for future confrontations.

Strike against wage cuts in 1907

Not content with the work rates which they imposed on the workers to improve performance, the Rand employers23 decided in 1907 to reduce salaries by 15%, in particular those of British-born miners who were considered to be “privileged.” As in the Kimberley strike, employers recruited strike breakers(very poor Afrikaners) who, without being in solidarity with the strikers, nevertheless refused to do the dirty work they were ordered to. Despite this the employers were eventually able to wear the strikers down. We should note that the sources we have to hand talk about the strike’s extent but do not give a total for the number of participants in the movement.

Strikes and demonstrations in 1913

Faced with massive wage cuts and deteriorating working conditions, miners entered massively into struggle. During 1913 a strike was launched by mine workers against the additional hours the company wanted to impose on them. And it did not take much to generalise the movement to all sectors, with mass demonstrations which nevertheless were violently broken up by the forces of order. In the end twenty dead and a hundred wounded were counted (officially).

Railway and coal miners’strike in 1914

At the beginning of the year a series of strikes broke out among both coal miners and railway workers against the degradation of working conditions. But this movement of struggle was in a particular context; that of the preparations for the first generalized imperialist slaughter. In this movement we can see the presence of the Afrikaner fraction, but set apart from the British fraction. Although both were well supervised by their respective unions, each defending its own “ethnic clients.”

Accordingly the government hastened to impose martial law to physically break the strike and its initiators, imprisoning or deporting a large number of strikers, the exact number of whom is still unknown. In addition, we want to emphasize here the particular role of unions in this strike movement. It was in this same context of the repression of the struggles that the union and Labour Party leaders voted for “war credits” by supporting the entry of the Union of South Africa into the war against Germany.

Labour unrest against the war in 1914 and attempts to organize

If the working class was generally muzzled during the 1914-1918 war, some proletarian elements did however try to oppose it by advocating internationalism against capitalism. Thus:

(...)In 1917, a poster appears on the walls of Johannesburg, convening a meeting for July 19: ‘Come and discuss issues of common interest between white and indigenous workers.’ This text is published by the International Socialist League (ISL), a revolutionary syndicalist organization influenced by the American IWW (...) and formed in 1915 in opposition to the First World War and the racist and conservative policies of the South African Labour Party and craft unions. Comprising at the beginning mostly white activists, the ISL moves very quickly towards black workers, calling in its weekly newspaper International, to build ‘a new union that overcomes the limitations of trades, skin colors, races and of sex to destroy capitalism by a blockade of the capitalist class.’24

By 1917, the ISL was organizing coloured workers. In March 1917, it founded an Indian workers’ union in Durban. In 1918, it founded a textile workers’ union (also later formed in Johannesburg) and a horse drivers’ union in Kimberley, the diamond mining town. In the Cape, a sister organization, the Industrial Socialist League, founded in the same year a sweets and confectionery workers’ union.

The July 19 meeting was a success and formed the basis of weekly meetings of study groups led by members of the ISL (including Andrew Dubar, founder of the IWW in South Africa in 1910). These meetings discussed capitalism, the class struggle and the need for African workers to unionize in order to obtain wage increases and to abolish the pass system. On 27 September, the study groups were transformed into a union, the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), modelled on the IWW. Its organizing committee was composed entirely of Africans. The demands of the new unions were simple and uncompromising in a slogan: SifunaZonke! (“We want everything!”).

Finally, here is the expression of the birth of proletarian internationalism. An internationalism taken up by a minority of workers but of great importance at the time, because it was the moment when many proletarians were bound and dragged into the first world imperialist slaughter by the traitor Labour Party in the company of the official unions. Another aspect that illustrates the strength and dynamic of these small internationalist groups is the fact that elements (including the International Socialist League and others) were able to emerge from them in order to form the South African Communist Party in 1920. It was these groups, seemingly dominated by supporters of revolutionary syndicalism, which could actively promote the emergence of radical unions especially among black and coloured workers.

A wave of strikes in 1918

Despite the harshness of the time with martial law suppressing any reaction or protest, strikes could occur:

In 1918, an unprecedented wave of strikes against the cost of living and for salary increases, bringing together white and coloured workers, overwhelms the country. When the judge McFie imprisons 152 African municipal workers in June 1918, urging them to continue to “do the same job as before” but now from prison under the supervision of an armed escort, progressive whites and Africans are outraged. The TNT (Transvaal Native Congress, forerunner of the ANC) called for a mass rally of African workers in Johannesburg on June 10.25

An important or symbolic fact should be noted here: this is the only (known) involvement of the ANC in a movement of the class struggle in the first sense of the term. This is certainly one of the reasons explaining the fact that this nationalist fraction as a result had an influence within the black working class.

Massive strikes in 1919/1920 drowned in blood

During 1919 a radical union (the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union), consisting of black and mixed race employees but without white workers, launched a massive strike especially among the dockworkers of Port Elizabeth. But once again this movement was crushed militarily by the police backed by armed white groups, causing over 20 deaths among the strikers. Here again the strikers were isolated which ensured the defeat of the working class in an unequal battle on a military terrain.

In 1920, this time it was African miners who sparked one of the biggest strikes in the country affecting some 70,000 workers. The movement lasted a week before being crushed by the forces of order who, armed with guns, liquidated a large number of strikers. Despite its massiveness, this movement of African workers could not count on any support from the white unions, which refused to call a strike or aid the victims of the bullets of the colonial bourgeoisie. Unfortunately this lack of solidarity promoted by the unions became systematic in each sturggle.

In 1922 an insurrectionary strike crushed by a well-equipped army

At the end of December 1921, the coal mine bosses announced massive wage cuts and layoffs aimed at replacing 5000 European miners with indigenous workers. In January 1922, 30,000 miners decided to fight against the attacks of the mining employers. Faced with the procrastination of the unions, a group of workers took the initiative by establishing a committee to fight and declaring a general strike. In this way the miners forced the union leaders to follow the movement, but this strike was not quite “general” because it concerned only the “whites”.

Faced with the pugnacity of the workers, the united state and employers then decided to use the utmost military means to defeat the movement. In order to deal with the strike the government declared martial law and mobilised some 60,000 thousand men with machine guns, cannons, tanks and even airplanes.

For their part, seeing the extent of their enemy’s forces, the strikers began to arm themselves by purchasing weapons (guns, etc.) and organizing themselves into commandos. We therefore witnessed a veritable military battle as in a conventional war. At the end of the fight on the workers’ side there were more than 200 dead, 500 injured, 4,750 arrests, 18 death sentences. Clearly, this was a real war, as if South African imperialism,which took active part in the first world butchery,wished to extend its activity by bombing the miners as if it was facing German troops. By this gesture the British colonial bourgeoisie was demonstrating its absolute hatred of the South African proletariat, but also its fear of it.

In terms of lessons learned from this movement, it must be said that despite its military character, the bloody confrontation was above all a real class war, of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, with, however, unequal means. This only underlines the fact that the main power of the working class is not military but resides above all in its greatest possible unity. But instead of seeking the support of all the exploited, the miners (whites) fell into the trap set by the bourgeoisie with its plan to replace the 5,000 European workers by indigenous workers. This was shown tragically by the fact that throughout the battle between the European miners and the armed forces of capital, other workers (black, coloured and Indian), some 200,000 of them, were working or idle. It is also clear that, from the outset, the bourgeoisie was clearly aware of the weakness of the workers who went into battle deeply divided. The abject recipe of “divide and rule”was applied here with success well before the formal establishment of apartheid (whose main purpose as we recall was to contain the class struggle). But above all the bourgeoisie took advantage of its military victory over the South African proletarians to reinforce its grip on the working class. It organized elections in 1924 from which emerged victorious the populist parties defending“white interests”, namely the National Party (Boer) and the Labour Party, which formed a coalition government. It was this coalition government that passed the laws establishing racial divisions, as far as considering a breach of work contract by a black worker as a crime; or again imposing a system of passes for blacks and establishing compulsory residence zones for natives. Similarly there was a “colour bar”aimed at reserving skilled jobs for whites, providing them with a much higher salary than blacks or Indians. To this were added other segregationist laws including one entitled “The Industrial Conciliation Act” to ban non-white organizations. It was on the basis of this ultra repressive apartheid system that the Afrikaner government legally established apartheid in 1948.

In this way the bourgeoisie succeeded in permanently paralyzing all expressions of proletarian class struggle and it was not until the eve of the Second World War that we see the working class get its head above water by taking the path of the class struggle. In fact, between late 1920 and 1937, the field of struggle was occupied by nationalism: on the one hand, by the South African CP, the ANC and their unions, and on the other, by the Afrikaner National Party and its satellites.

Lassou (To be continued)


 

1 See the series “Contribution to a history of the workers’ movement in Africa”, on Senegal in particular, in the International Review nos.145, 146, 147, 148 and 149.

2In August 2012, the police of the ANC government massacred 34 strikers at the Marikana mines.

3See Henri Wesseling, Le partage de l’Afrique, Editions Denoel, 1996, for the French translation.

4 Ibid.

5Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, Section 3, Chapter 27, “The Struggle Against Natural Economy”,https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch2...

6Brigitte Lachartre, Luttes ouvrières et libération en Afrique du Sud, Editions Syros, 1977.

7Henri Wesseling, ibid.

8BrigitteLachartre,ibid.

9Wesseling, ibid.

10Cited inWesseling, ibid.

11Lachartre, ibid.

12Wesseling, ibid.

13 The South African government certainly contributed to this with laws against all non-white organization.

14The IWW was at the time one of the few trade union movements to organize white and non-white workers, not only in the same union but in the same union branches, regardless of race. See our articles in International Review nos. 124, 125: https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200601/1609/iww-fail...

15 Lucien van der Walt (Bikisha collective media), https://www.zabalaza.net

16 We will return later to the unions claiming to defend the working class.

17In the next article we will we will develop on the role of the parties/unions active within the working class.

18Quoted by Brigitte Lachartre, ibid.

19It is after the formal establishment of apartheid in 1948 that the CP and the ANC enter into armed struggle.

20Circle Leon Trotsky, Presentation 29/01/2010, website www.lutte-ouvrière.org

21Lachartre, ibid.Our emphasis.

22Lachartre, ibid.

23The Rand is the common name for the Witwatersrand (White Waters Ridge) region which saw the first discoveries of gold and the first industrialisation of the country.

 

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South Africa

A history of trade unionism in the Philippines

Introduction and early history

The creation of the world market is capitalism’s great historical achievement. For the first time in history, the whole of humanity has been brought together in a single network of commerce and industry; for the first time in history also, the revolutionary class is a worldwide class. This means that the historical evolution of any country is no longer determined by local or even by regional conditions, but fundamentally by the overall development of world capitalism.

That said, the local and national forms that this development takes are always strongly influenced by the specific history that predates capitalism, and by geography. The case of the Philippines is no exception to this general rule, and to understand the development of Filipino unionism we must therefore understand something of Filipino history.

Geographically, the Philippines is a vast archipelago of over 7000 islands, of which some 2000 are inhabited.1 Prior to the beginning of colonization by Spain from 1521 onwards, the archipelago – unsurprisingly – was not united in a single political or even cultural entity. To this day, some 150 languages and dialects are spoken in the Philippines and at least 20% of the population does not speak the national language (Filipino, a derivative of Tagalog which is spoken by 29% of the population).

Situated on the eastern flank of the South China Sea, with China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Indonesia as its immediate maritime neighbors, the archipelago was integrated as much as 2000 years ago into a vast trading network which brought Indian, Chinese, and even Persian influences to the islands: Islam in particular made its appearance from 1200 CE onwards and remains dominant in the southern island of Mindanao.

Despite the emergence of various kingdoms (whose rulers often took the Indian title of "rajah") and sultanates, the majority of the archipelago was divided into fiefdoms of varying sizes known as barangays: the word continues to designate the Philippines' smallest administrative unit. The barangays' rulers – the datus – owed their position in part to their membership of an aristocratic caste, but also and largely to their own personal power. Rulers could lose power or prestige, or even be overthrown if they failed to live up to their promises.

Spanish colonialism profoundly modified this traditional social structure: the fluid system of barangays and power based on personal prestige and tribute was transformed into one based on land ownership and debt servitude. Power was divided between Spanish overlords placed in authority over encomiendas (settlements created for the purposes of tax collection), local chiefs whose authority was guaranteed by the Spanish in exchange for cooperation with the colonial power, and the Catholic Church, which became a major landowner in its own right: "dependency and indebtedness characterized this multifaceted relationship [between rulers and ruled]. At best it gave way to a paternalistic relationship, at worst it created an exploitative set up".2 It could be argued that this form of political domination based on a mixture of wealth, family connections, personal prestige and the ability to mobilize groups of supporters, has simply mutated with the arrival of capitalism and survives to this day in the form of domination of the Filipino bourgeoisie, strongly marked by clientelism.

Spanish colonization during the 16th century was by no means a mere extension to the Philippines of the feudal social structure which still largely dominated Spain itself. On the contrary, the driving force behind Spanish and Portuguese expansion to the Far East was the desire of the merchant classes, and of the crown which stood to profit from the undertaking, to break into the immensely lucrative spice trade with the East, and to shatter the monopoly exercised by Ottoman, Arab, and to an extent Venetian merchants. By tying the Philippines into a Spanish imperial economy that already existed on the other side of the Pacific, colonization extended the world market of an emerging capitalism from Europe all the way to China, where an embryonic monetary and capitalist economy was already developing under the Ming dynasty. By the beginning of the 17th century, Manila was thus – together with Macao under Portuguese rule – one of the main points of contact between Europe and Asia, and the lynch-pin of trade between Asia and the Americas. Silver was in huge demand by Chinese merchants, and "When the Manila galleon established the link across the Pacific with New Spain, Chinese junks rushed to meet it. Goods were traded in Manila solely for Mexican silver, to a volume of around a million pesos every year".3 From the outset, Filipino workers were involved in this worldwide commercial network: "European ships of the 'country trade' were worked, even in the early days of the Portuguese, by mixed crews with a majority of local sailors. Even ships from the Philippines employed 'few Spaniards, many Malays, Hindus, and Filipino mestizos'".4

Another important factor in Filipino history is the role of religion, and especially of the Catholic Church, introduced by the Spanish colonizers as a justification of their rule and a means of eliminating rival religions which could serve as a rallying point for opposition to the colonial power.

In Europe, ever since its establishment as an official state religion by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine in the 4th century CE, the Catholic Church in particular has had to accommodate a constant contradiction between the biblical ideal of poverty and service to the poor,5 and the material reality of the Church's enormous wealth and social position as temporal overlord. In general, the Catholic Church tried to incorporate the ideal of poverty into its own structures of power and wealth, for example through the creation of monastic orders like the Cistercians or the Franciscans. In the Philippines, this contradiction was given an added twist by the fact that "It was not even until the 19th century that select members of the Chinese mestizo ["mixed blood"] and Filipino illustrado [ie educated] class were for the first time admitted into the priesthood".6 As a result of these material and ideological contradictions, the Church in the Philippines included both corrupt and ruthless exploiters of Filipino labor (especially on the monastic estates, which by the end of the 19th century owned some 171,000 hectares of prime agricultural land7), and courageous and dedicated defenders of the rights of the labouring population (after the 1872 Cavite revolt, for example, three priests – Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora – were garrotted to death for their supposed part in the conspiracy).

Conflict within the Catholic Church between Filipino nationalism and attempts to defend the poor on the one hand, and the Church's role as landlord and defender of the colonial power on the other, led in 1902 to the creation of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente with the Catholic priest Gregorio Aglipay as its first "Obispo Maximo" (see below). Paradoxically, this came just as the Catholic Church's role as defender of the colonial power ended with Spain's eviction from the Philippines by the United States.

Our very brief consideration of some important features of the history of the Philippines prior to the 20th century would be incomplete without a look at its geography. The Philippines' position in the South China Sea has always been, and continues to be, crucial, both commercially and militarily. For the Spaniards, as we have seen, the Philippines were the commercial gateway to China, and this was even more true for the USA. In the first decades of the 20th century, the increasing importance of China as a region of competition and conflict between rival imperialist powers, and the rise of Japan as a formidable industrial power in its own right,8 increased the military significance of the Philippines: their defense played an important part in slowing the Japanese advance towards Australia in World War II, and their reconquest by the American army was a key moment in Japan's military defeat. Following World War II, the Philippines served as a rear base for the American military effort in Vietnam, and the US naval base at Subic Bay remained one of the US' key military installations throughout the Cold War,9 until its closure in 1992 by the Filipino government. The closure was of short duration: increasing fears of Chinese expansionism led to the signature in 1999 of a "Visiting Forces Agreement" which allowed US ships to use Subic Bay during the joint US-Filipino Balikatan military exercises, and to a reported 2012 agreement for a permanent US military presence in the base.

The 19th century: capitalism, nationalism, and the workers' movement

Despite the backwardness of the Spanish economy, and the weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie, the 19th century saw an ever-tighter integration of the Filipino economy into the world capitalist market. The low-volume, high-value trade of the Manila galleon with the Americas was replaced by farming for cash crops, notably logging, tobacco and sugar. Simultaneously, and as a direct consequence, there emerged a new ruling stratum of wealthy landowners and merchants including in particular Chinese mestizos linked to the trading families of Fukien and Kwantung, and members of what became known as the principalia: leading Filipino or Spanish mestizo families who had successfully accumulated landed wealth, but who were also often linked to their share-cropping tenants by family or tribal ties. These wealthy families often sent their children to Spain for their education, thus encouraging the development of a Spanish language but specifically Filipino culture borne by Filipino intellectuals known as illustrados. The development of this intellectual class, linked to an emerging bourgeoisie and strongly imbued with radical democratic ideals, found expression in 1888 with the creation of the journal La Solidaridad and what became known as the Propaganda Movement. It is striking that La Solidaridad was founded only forty years after the national revolutions of 1848 in Europe, and that its nationalist democratic program is broadly similar to that of Hungarian, Polish, and even Irish nationalists of the same epoch: far from being hopelessly mired in feudal backwardness, the Filipino bourgeoisie followed the same path trodden by its European counterparts only a few decades earlier.

It is therefore unsurprising that the birth of the Filipino labor movement should have many features in common with the movement in Europe, although a lack of documentation makes its beginnings difficult to follow.

The earliest seeds of the labor movement were formed in the 1850s. These were secret organizations for mutual aid and benefits of workers, similar in aim to the Friendly Societies formed by workers in Britain. Among the earliest were the Gremio de Obrero de Sampaloc, the Gremio de Escultores del Barrio Sta.Cruz, the Gremio de Carpinteros and the Gremio de Impresores y Litograficos. The Filipino labor movement can even claim to be one of the oldest in Asia.

The working class in the Philippines appeared at a time of the zenith of world capitalism, the stage of expanding imperialism. Furthermore, it appeared at a time of the victorious bourgeois revolution in Spain itself. In other words, it appeared on the ruins of feudalism on a world scale and in Spain in particular. The feudal remnants are only remnants, nothing more.

The first recorded mass working class action was conducted by members of the Gremios de Impresores in 1872 when they walked out of a government printing press in San Fernando, Pampanga on account of abuse and maltreatment by Spanish foremen and to demand better terms and conditions of work and higher wages.

The emerging Filipino workers' movement suffered not only from the relatively less developed condition of Filipino industry, but perhaps still more from their geographical isolation from the proletariat's European core. Marx in the Manifesto describes the ease with which, thanks to the railways, European workers could organize, travel, and develop their political culture. But the enormous distances involved made this less an option for Filipino workers, and this inevitably meant that the 19th century workers' movement was strongly influenced by an illustrado leadership.

These first mass actions coincided with the proletarian struggles in Europe that culminated in the first attempt of the class to seize power in Paris, France in 1871, although there is no evidence that the Filipino movement was directly aware of the momentous events of the Commune.

Since at that time the Philippine proletariat was still regrouping and learning to struggle as a class, the early workers' struggles were closely connected to Filipino nationalism, to the struggle for independent nationhood, and against colonialism. And one of the prime movers of this sense of nationalism was the Filipino clergy who were discriminated against by the Spanish-controlled Catholic Church. This is why both religion and nationalism had great influence on the early proletarian movement – an influence which survives to this day. This is an expression of the way that the consciousness of the revolutionary class lags behind the changes of objective conditions.

The close ties between unionism, nationalism, and religion, which have severely handicapped the ability of the Filipino workers to develop a revolutionary class consciousness, are exemplified by Isabelo delos Reyes, often considered the founding father of Filipino unionism. Born in 1864, delos Reyes was an illustrado nationalist journalist (in 1889 he founded El Ilocano, said to be the first newspaper written solely in a Filipino language) who was exiled to Spain in 1897 for his nationalist activities. While in Spain – such are the strange contradictions to which capitalism could give rise in those days – he was employed as Consejero del Ministerio del Ultramar (Counsellor of the Ministry for the Colonies) while at the same time taking in the influence of the radical and revolutionary thinkers of the age: on his return to the Philippines he brought with him books by Marx, Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin and other European anarchists and socialists, as well as literary works. While in Spain he wrote articles attacking the United States and its war to strip Spain of its colonies (see below), which is doubtless one of the reasons that the Spanish government allowed him to return to the Philippines in 1901.10

In February 1902, delos Reyes, together with the print union leader Herminigildo Cruz, Dominador Gomez and Lope Santos brought together more than 85 unions to found the Union Obrera Democratica (UOD), the first labor federation in the country. Its members included unions of printers, lithographers, cigar makers, tailors, mechanics, and others in various trades and occupations. At least some of these unions were apparently organized along industrial lines similar to the International Workers of the World (IWW).

In the same year, delos Reyes played a key role in founding the Philippine Independent Church11 together with the Catholic priest Gregorio Aglipay, who became the church’s first “Obispo Maximo”.12

1896-1901: nationalist revolution and imperialist war

In 1892, the rise of Filipino nationalism led to the formation of the gradualist Liga Filipina by the novelist Jose Rizal, and of the Katipunan ("The worshipful association of the sons of the people") by Andres Bonifacio, an admirer of Rizal who hoped to draw the latter into an active involvement in agitation for independence. By 1896, the Katipunan had grown to be a substantial force with between 100,000 and 400,000 members, and was strong enough to launch a nationalist revolt against Spain under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo. This first attempt ended in a negotiated stalemate which left Spain in control, but Aguinaldo and his cadres free to continue organising from their exile in Hong Kong.

It was in this context that in 1898 the United States declared war on Spain following the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor (Cuba belonging to Spain at the time).13 This war allowed the US to carry off a land grab on the Philippines, which had obviously been prepared in advance and which combined brutality and hypocrisy to a truly startling degree.14

At the beginning of the war, the US presented itself as the champion of Filipino independence. The American naval commander Commodore Dewey organised Aguinaldo's return to the Philippines: the war with Spain came to an end in 1898 with American troops in Manila, while the Filipino nationalists controlled most of the rest of the country and had already declared a Filipino Republic with its provisional capital in Malolos and Aguinaldo as President. The peace was of short duration: in February 1899, US troops in Manila provoked the outbreak of a new war, this time against the fledgling Filipino Republic, which was to end in 1902 after the defeat of the Filipino army by a vastly superior American force, and a protracted and brutal guerilla campaign that left 22,000 Filipino soldiers and more than 500,000 civilians dead. The Philippines was thus given a taste of the delights of "civilisation" and "democracy": in just three years, the USA killed more Filipinos that the Spaniards had done in 300.15

All the more remarkable, in this context, is the third recorded strike of March 1899 by the printers union led by Herminigildo Cruz, demanding increased wages and an end to the abuses of a press superintendent. The mass action was directed at the management of the nationalist government’s printing press in Malolos, Bulacan, where the La Independencia was printed. Editor and General Antonio Luna intervened and arranged for a 25% pay raise to workers.

We can appreciate the symbolism of this strike, at the turn of the century, being directed not against the old or new colonial power but against the rising national democratic bourgeoisie that was supposed to be a "reliable ally" of the workers' movement. Filipino labor was confronted from the outset by national government, nationalist movements, and brutal repression by the colonial power.

1898-1930s: Under US colonial power

Given its own anti-imperialist ideology (which for America meant the opposition to the fully colonial structures set up by the old European empires, especially the British), the USA could hardly transform the Philippines into a colony in the old style. Hence alongside US military occupation under the authority of an American Governor-General, the 1902 Philippine Bill adopted by the US Congress provided for the creation of an elected legislature: the first elections were held in 1907 and led to a resounding victory for the Nacionalista Party.16

The American ruling class was united in its desire to preserve its commercial, industrial, and military strategic interests in the Philippines, but was divided on how best to do so: by continual direct rule and military occupation, or through nominal independence, with client status ensured by treaties and the maintenance of US military bases in the country. By 1934, following the election of Roosevelt's Democrat "New Deal" administration in 1933, the second option was chosen and the Tidings-McDuffie Act of that year created the Philippine Commonwealth, which was to become fully independent after a ten-year transition period. Manuel Quezon was elected as the first President of the Philippines under the Act, in 1935.

Returning to August 1902 and the beginning of the American occupation, when Isabelo delos Reyes was arrested and imprisoned for charges of sedition and rebellion, Dominador Gomez took over and changed the name of UOD to Union Obrera Democratica de Filipinas (UODF). But Gomez was also arrested for sedition and illegal association in 1903 after thousands of workers marched on May 1, 1903 demanding national independence.

Gomez articulated the orientation of Philippine unionism in a speech delivered as leader of the Union Obrera Democratica:

The banner of UOD is dynamic nationalism against any form of imperialism, against oppression.”

And on May 1, 1903, in a workers rally of Union Obrera Democratica de Filipinas Gomez declared:

We are not against capitalists (…) What we are against is the practice of the capitalists robbing the workers of the product of their sweat by not giving what is due to them…17

If the nationalist unions were not against capitalism, then neither was the American colonial regime against trades unions as such, provided that they were tightly controlled by the state, and inspired by the most conservative forces of the workers’ movement in the United States. This two-pronged strategy led to the entry of the American Federation of Labor led by Samuel Gompers into the Philippines, where it gave support to the Union del Trabajo de Filipinas (UTF), set up by Lope K. Santos.18

At the same time, the Bureau of Labor (BOL) was set up (June 10, 1908) to organize the legalization and regulation of trade unionism throughout the country. The Bureau, under the Department of Commerce and Police, was tasked to regulate and provide information on the labor force and market, and to settle disputes between labor and employers. The US also gave the go-ahead for the Philippine Assembly to recognize May 1st as a national holiday, to appease the class anger of the workers.

The US attempt to control the union movement was not completely successful, and some unions continued to have close ties to the nationalist cause. This was notably the case with the Union de Impresores de Filipinas (UIF) which participated in the UODF; when the UODF was dissolved in 1903 and reorganised as the Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (COF), the UIF's president Crisanto Evangelista went on to play a leading role in the new federation. As a leader of COF, he was included in the Independence Mission sent to the USA in 1919 along with the then rising leader of the Nacionalista Party, Manuel Quezon. While in the US, Evangelista was ignored by the AFL, but did attend a convention of the International Workers of the World.19

The Philippines thus entered the last phase of capitalism’s ascendant period with a development of workers’ struggles taking the union form, but with the first signs of the unions’ integration into the state apparatus. Given the Philippines' relative isolation from the heart of world capitalism, it does not seem to have been immediately affected either by World War I, or by the betrayal of the Social Democracy (which had no presence in the country) and its consequences.

The labor movement continued to gain strength and experience in the legal battle and strikes became common. There were stoppages in many cigarette factories, at the harbor in Iloilo, in Negros logging companies and in the sugar mills of Negros, Pampanga and Laguna. There were also strikes on the railroads, at the copra factory of Franklin Baker, at the Manila Gas Company, in the rice mills of Nueva Ecija, and in the embroidery firms of Manila. In addition, Filipino workers who were working abroad at this time also participated in workers’ struggles in their country of emigration, thus showing that they are part of an international class.20

Despite its growing strength and militancy, the Filipino labor movement remained unable to establish its own political identity distinct and separate from the bourgeois forces of colonial politics. As we have just seen, the union movement remained politically dominated either by radical anti-American nationalism, or by US imperialism in the form of the AFL. One can perhaps draw an analogy with the situation in Britain at the turn of the 20th century where, in different circumstances and for different reasons, the workers' movement had no distinct mass political expression of its own, and remained substantially under the influence of the Liberal Party.

Whereas in Europe and the US, the union question was posed starkly in 1914 by the unions' betrayal of the workers in war,21 in the Philippines it was only posed gradually and as a result of the unions' inability to disentangle themselves either from bourgeois nationalism or from imperialism.

Formation of the Communist Party and integration into the Communist International

The Russian revolution of 1917 aroused immense hope and enthusiasm amongst workers all over the world: the Philippines was no exception.

In 1922, with Evangelista and Antonio Ora at the helm, the Progressive Workers' Party (also known as the Partido Obrero) was formed. Contacts with labor movements of other countries were intensive. The classic works of Marx and Engels found their way to the Philippines. Through the Workers’ Party, the COF became a member of the Pacific Secretariat of Trade Unions set up by the Red International of Labor Unions,22 and in 1924, Crisanto Evangelista was elected its president. The RILU invited the radical union leaders of the Philippines to its Pacific Conferences held in Canton, China on June 18-24, 1924, and in 1928 Evangelista represented the COF at both the 4th RILU Congress and the 6th Comintern Congress in Moscow.

After the Canton Conference, the American and Chinese communists were in regular communication with the radical nationalist unions in the Philippines.

Conflict between pro- and anti-Moscow tendencies within the COF led to a split in 1929 when Evangelista's grouping left, to form the following year the Proletarian Congress of the Philippines: Katipunan ng mga Anak-Pawis ng Pilipinas, or KAP. The KAP also formed the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, or PKP), founded in 193023 and whose existence was announced publicly to a mass meeting of some 6000 workers in Tondo, Manila.24

While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Evangelista and his comrades, the impetus of the movement in the Philippines towards proletarian internationalism was derailed by two factors: first, neither the movement as a whole nor its key leaders had really broken with the national perspective with which they had entered political activity; second, and perhaps more importantly, the Communist International even in 1922 had begun the process of degeneration which was to transform it from the centre of world revolution to a mere tool in the service of the Russian state's imperialist interests. As we have already shown in relation to Turkey,25 the isolation of the revolution and the increasing consolidation of the capitalist powers led the Russian state to subject the political activity of the communist parties in Eastern countries to the demands of the USSR's alliances with bourgeois nationalist movements or even bourgeois governments.26 Significantly, 1922 – the year the Partido Obrero was founded – was also the year of the Congress of the Toilers of the East, held in Moscow and attended by representatives of both the Chinese CP and Sun Yat-sen's bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, which was followed by the CI's insistance that the CCP should enter the Kuomintang. The massacre of the Shanghai workers by the Kuomintang in 1927 was the last gasp of the revolutionary upsurge that had begun ten years earlier in Russia, and by 1928 the counter-revolutionary process was completed with the adoption of Stalin's slogan of "Socialism in one country".

As the Comintern degenerated, the tendency was increasingly to put responsibility for the activity of the Communist parties in the colonies under the authority of the parties in the corresponding imperialist power, so that for example Algeria came under the responsibility of the French CP. This fitted perfectly with the general movement towards integration of the USSR – and therefore of the Comintern – into the system of imperialist alliances, since it meant that the orientation of the activity of militants in the colonies would be determined above all by the USSR's alliances or rivalry with the colonial power rather than by the needs or the possibilities of the class struggle internationally or locally. The Philippines was no exception: in April 1925, the Comintern's first resolution on the Philippines gave the American CP the responsibility of supporting both the national liberation movement, and the formation of a Communist Party.27 This corresponded to Russian policy in the Far East, which was to work with the local bourgeoisie (China being the classic case) in order to weaken the encirclement of Russia by other imperialist powers.28 This position was to change, as we shall see, with the rise of Japan to threaten Russia.

The formation of the PKP thus created, not an independent working class party, but on the contrary a basically nationalist organization under the domination of Russian imperialism.

In May 1, 1931, The Quezon government tried to suppress the organized forces of PKP. The military dispersed the marching workers in Caloocan with water cannons and attacked a worker’s meeting held by the laborers. Evangelista was arrested and accused of sedition, rebellion and illegal assembly.

American military authorities raided the KAP (Association of the Toilers) Congress. Several KAP leaders were arrested and the Court of First Instance declared the PKP and the KAP illegal. The Supreme Court upheld the decision.

The nationalist Filipino bourgeoisie once again showed its fangs against the working class. The “anti-American” Quezon allied with its “enemy” to suppress the working class. While the US ruling class still feared the USSR as an expression of a “communist threat”, the USSR was already integrated into the world wide system of imperialist conflicts and alliances: in reality, the repression of the PKP thus had nothing to do with socialism but on the contrary, the intensification of the rivalry between two imperialist powers – the USA and the Stalinist USSR.

Hand in hand with the iron fist of the bourgeoisie went regulation and control of the unions. In December 1933, the Department of Labor (DOL) was established. In succeeding years, many laws were enacted to integrate the unions to the state.

During the 1930s, three federations – influencing over 300 affiliated and independent unions – dominated the labor scene with the launching of the President Quezon’s Social Justice Program. There were the Collective Labor Movement (CLM), Confederated Workers Alliance (CWA), and National Federation of Labor (NFL); the CWA and the NFL were right-wing organizations which had emerged after the 1929 split in the COF, the NFL in particular being led by Ruperto Cristobal, the private secretary of the Secretary of Labor in the Quezon government. The CLM's leaders,29 on the contrary were all identified with pro-USSR "socialism".30 The CLM was the biggest labor center uniting 76 unions, but it did not prosper as a formal organization because personal and ideological conflicts prevented its transformation into a coherent organization.

In a period when it is no longer possible for workers to gain meaningful reforms within the capitalist system, and where every mass movement of the class immediately comes up against the repressive forces of the state, trade unions are inevitably integrated into the capitalist state apparatus and take on the characteristics of bourgeois organizations.31

Like the Filipino bourgeoisie, trade unionism in the Philippines in the decadent stage of capitalism is riddled with internal rivalries. It has no capacity to unify even its organized forces because unions are divided between imperialist rivalries. This is the lesson of 20th century history which so many obstinately refuse to learn.

In every workers' struggle the unions tied the class struggle into union and nationalist struggles. Thus, workers’ demands become demands to defend the unions and the “right to organize unions” and for national independence from US imperialism.

The “Popular Front” and World War II

By the mid-1930s, the world situation was changing: the rise of Nazi Germany and militaristic Japanese imperialism led the USSR to seek an accommodation with the "democratic" powers against the emerging fascist bloc. As a result, the policy of the American CP towards Roosevelt changed from opposition to support in the 1936 US elections, and the PKP was now urged to support the "democratic camp". The first step was the formation of a "popular front": “On September 20, 1936 the PKP Central Committee issued a manifesto entitled, “Forward for the Formation of the Popular Front”. It called for an alliance of all labor, peasant and middle class organizations and political and social groups who were in opposition to the policies of the Commonwealth government, particularly the Quezon-Osmeña coalition and were willing to work for better social conditions and absolute national independence. It announced as the aim of the Popular Front “to save the Filipino people from the danger of imperialist war, dictatorship and fascism, to improve the conditions of the masses and obtain independence””.32

As James Allen, the American CP's emissary to the Philippines, wrote "By June of 1937, I was conveying to my correspondents anxiety over the ominous state of affairs and particularly concern about Japan's aggressive intentions in Southeast Asia. To safeguard the cause of independence, I suggested, the Philippines would need to place itself on the anti-fascist side and also recognize that the United States was the major power in the Pacific able to confront the Japanese military-fascists".33 The American CP also advocated a switch to supporting the government of Manuel Quezon.

As a result, when Allen made a second visit to the Philippines in 1938 it was with the blessing of Roosevelt's New Deal government. He encountered a changed political situation. Evangelista, who had lived in semi-clandestinity since the banning of the PKP, was allowed to go to Moscow for medical treatment and received by Quezon in Malacanang (the presidential palace) before his departure. Allen was given an official invitation by Quezon, and the PKP was once again legalised. A 1938 PKP convention was held in public, with invited representatives from the Quezon government and the Kuomintang: the PKP could hardly hope for more official endorsement from the nationalist ruling class!

Together with his changed attitude to the PKP, Quezon also relaxed restrictions on workers' demonstrations, and in June 3, 1939, Commonwealth Act. No. 444 or the Eight-Hour Workday Law was enacted. What in the 19th century had been an object of workers' struggle, was offered as a gift on the eve of World War II, not as a result of a strong independent workers movement but to dragoon the Filipino workers for the 2nd imperialist war. As we know, the Philippine Commonwealth Government was allied with American imperialism.

World War II and Japanese occupation

The policy of bringing the PKP into the "democratic camp" of US imperialism was to pay off as soon as the war began. The Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor was quickly followed by that of the Philippines in December 1941. The PKP immediately decided to begin organising a guerilla movement, and informed the Quezon government and US administration of its "pledge of all-out support to national unity around an anti-Japanese United Front and of loyalty to the existing government, declaring that 'All people and all strata of the population must organize, secretly if necessary, to assist the Philippine and American government to resist Japan' (…) Over 50,000 workers and peasants were organized by the PKP and put at the disposal of the US Corps of Engineers".34 This United Front policy was the same as that followed by Stalin in Europe, and by Mao in China.

Despite this the speed of the Japanese invasion caught the PKP by surprise and its entire top leadership was captured in January 1942 when the Japanese troops entered Manila. This included Crisanto Evangelista, who was tortured and killed. This led, in March, the formation of a fullscale guerilla movement, the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon ("People's army against Japan"), better known as the Hukbalahap or just "the Huks".35

We do not propose here to go into the history of the Japanese occupation, during which the Hubalahap was undoubtedly the most effective fighting force on the American side in the occupied areas.

After World War II

Even before the end of World War II in Asia, the USA “used nuclear weapons against Japan in August 1945, even as that country sent out feelers for a negotiated surrender36 principally as a warning to Russian imperialism that the US had both the will and the means to prevent any extension of Russian influence in the East.

With the end of the war, US imperialism was the world's dominant imperialist power,37 and immediately began to prepare for a confrontation with the other major victor of the war and new imperialist superpower – Russia.

Naturally, the USSR resisted this policy of "containment". As a result, the years following the war were marked by a whole series of proxy wars as the USA (sometimes with its allies Britain and France) and the USSR tested each other's positions: in Greece, in Vietnam, in Korea, in Malaysia – and in the Philippines. This is why – predictably – the USA and its Filipino puppets set out to destroy the (pro-USSR) Hukbalahap immediately after the war.

The PKP's betrayal of proletarian internationalism by supporting the American war effort was paid for in blood by the Filipino workers and peasants. Its cadres and mass sympathizers were suppressed and arrested (many were killed) by the forces led by the democratic USA following the defeat of Japanese imperialism in the Philippines.38

Thus began the intense and armed rivalries between the two imperialist powers in Philippine soil using national liberation in post-war confrontations. In March 1945, the labor movement under the influence of Russian imperialism was reconstituted as the Committee of Labor Organizations and later organized as the Congress of Labor Organizations (CLO), the first national labor center.39 The CLO fought for the rights of the working class within the legal framework of Filipino capitalism, but was essentially a nationalist organization aiming at “genuine” national independence on the “socialist” (ie state capitalist) model as the way of the future.

Since in decadent capitalism national independence is impossible and the “independence” of the Philippines was just part of the American imperialist policy to contain the expansionism of Stalinist Soviet imperialism.40 To prevent the nationalist Filipino bourgeoisie to change master, US imperialism made a smart move: Grant political independence to its colony.

On the other hand, imperialist powers realized also after two world wars that the colonies are no longer beneficial to them unlike in the 19th century. These colonies “could no longer serve as the basis for the enlarged reproduction of global capital, having themselves become capitalist, that they lost their importance for the major imperialisms (in fact it was the more backward colonial powers like Portugal which clung most tenaciously to their colonies).41

On 4th July 1946, the Philippines gained its formal independence from the United States:42 the latter however continued to maintain a powerful and growing military presence, with Subic Bay and Clark Air Base becoming the US' largest installations in the Far East or indeed the world: the Philippines was now in the front line of the confrontation between the USA and the USSR in Asia. The US also maintained a substantial industrial and commercial presence in the country, certain sectors of the US bourgeoisie being closely allied to Filipino industrialists.

Quezon having died in exile during the war, a period of parliamentary rivalry began between parties whose politics were indistinguishable and who were differentiated only by personal allegiances and rivalries. Nor was collaboration with the Japanese quisling government considered an obstacle to participation in power either by the Filipino bourgeoisie or their American mentors. From the outset, the political life of the Filipino bourgeoisie has been marked by violence, fraud, and corruption.43

This characteristic of political life is not of course unique to the Philippines. It is a general feature of life under decadent capitalism, that countries which did not develop a national unity during capitalism's rise, and which moreover are economically under-developed, have great difficulty in creating a unified ruling class. In many cases, as we have pointed out elsewhere, the only really united body in the state is the army, which explains why the army or even outright military dictatorship, has been the only force able to give some political stability to the ruling class.

Apart from the Marcos dictatorship, which lasted for 21 years from 1965 to 1986, the Filipino bourgeoisie has exercised its political domination through an apparently democratic system, where power is in fact divided between ruling clans who fight for domination on an electoral battleground. To give just one particularly violent example, in the 2009 elections 21 politicians and journalists were abducted and murdered on the island of Mindanao. According to the BBC's Asia analyst "Every election period features assassinations of rivals, particularly in provincial areas where the forces of law and order are often tightly connected to local clans. Every local politician has some form of personal security which, in some areas, balloons to private armies of scores or hundreds of well-armed, unregulated gunmen".44

Given that the "labor movement" was never able to shake itself free from its roots in nationalism, it comes as no surprise that in the Philippines, it merely mirrors the clientelism and factionalism of the wealthier fractions of the ruling class. In 1986, Rolando Olalia (later murdered) declared that "about 85% of today's supposed leaders of the working class are engaged in racketeering".45 As leader himself of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, see below), Olalia presumably knew what he was talking about.

The PKP and the Huks at first thought they could make a deal with the ruling parties to participate in normal political life, and even worked in coalition with the Democratic Alliance and the Nacionalista Party.46 On the face of it this was not unreasonable, since these parties were essentially nationalist and posed no threat to the continued domination of capitalism or of the bourgeoisie. Moreover – and ironically given future events – the American OSS47 had supported not only the Huks during the war with Japan, but also Mao's regime in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Indeed the Vietminh nationalists were initially helped into power by the OSS, against the returning French colonizers. However, the independence of the Philippines was an illusion, not so much because of continued American military occupation as because the division of the world into two rival imperialist blocs meant that political life in any country was determined by its position within the system of the blocs. In 1950, General Douglas MacArthur as commander of the US occupying forces in Japan, and Dean Acheson as Secretary of State, "defined the new American 'defensive perimeter' in the Pacific as running along a line connecting the Aleutians, Japan, Okinawa, the Ryukyus, and the Philippines".48 This was a public declaration that the Philippines, like Japan, was firmly within the US sphere of interest and that for the USA, it was no more acceptable to see the PKP in power in the Philippines than it would have been to let the Italian CP into government in Italy.

The Huks therefore found themselves increasingly under aggressive military pressure, and it was decided to continue the guerilla war by reorganizing the movement as the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB, People's Liberation Army) which acted as the military arm of the Communist Party. The Americans tried to stop the rebellion and destroy the peasant organizations by developing agrarian services and support projects, alongside military aid to the government. The Americans and the government launched operations in Central Luzon and Manila. Many HMB leaders were captured while others, including Luis Taruc, surrendered. By 1955 the military defeat was complete, and Jesus Lava ordered the HMB to disband. Thousands of lives and properties had been sacrificed in these inter-imperialist armed confrontations.

At the same time, “Economic assistance was supplemented by a policy of fostering pro-Western (i.e. pro-Washington) institutions and organizations, creating anti-Communist trade unions and political organizations, with American Federation of Labor (AFL) operatives working hand in glove with the CIA49 like the Federation of Free Workers (FFW)50 to counter the PKP-led CLO.

The militant workers organized by CLO were dragged into the “war for national liberation” waged by the HMB. Basically, the unions were used as cannon-fodder in the imperialist rivalries as they were fought out between the USSR and the USA in the post-war period. The suppression of pro-USSR unions and establishing pro-USA unions was part of the consolidation of US imperialist control in the Philippines.

On April 1951, President Quirino banned the CLO after declaring it a communist organization with ties to the Huk armed movement. Its leader, Amado Hernandez51, was arrested and charged with rebellion and murder. He was later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but finally acquitted by the High Court.

As the workers’ resistance against the attacks of capitalism and against the suppression by the state intensified, the government tried to regulate these by enacting the Industrial Peace Act (Republic Act No. 875) in 1953. This promoted collective bargaining and guaranteed the right to organize in unions. It also introduced mediation and conciliation as new modes of dispute settlement. This act was supported and funded by US imperialism and bourgeois institutions.52

Collective bargaining imprisons the workers in the bureaucracy of union organizations and diverts their struggles into fights for government mediation and conciliation. With these maneuvers of the capitalist state, the unions from Right to Left called it a “victory” for the workers’ struggle. The result is intense rivalries between different union federations for collective bargaining rights that deepen the division within the Filipino working class: the number of unionized workers increased, and the more they were unionized the more they were divided.53

With the Philippines under the unambiguous domination of the United States, remnants of the banned communist party set up the Workers’ Party54 (Lapiang Manggagawa) in 1963 with some of the country's major labor federations.

On the other hand, unions led by the Philippine Labor Center (PLC) of Democrito Mendoza pushed the one-union-one industry system.55 Because of this, union rivalries and workers’ division further intensifies. PLC itself split into factions leading to the creation of Pinagbuklod na Manggagawang Pilipino (PMP) led by Roberto S. Oca Sr. and the Philippine Congress of Trade Unions (PHILCONTU) led by Mendoza.

Marcos and Maoism

The Marcos dictatorship

It is particularly striking that the rise and fall of the Marcos dictatorship was roughly contemporaneous with the rise of Maoism and its integration into the mechanisms of Filipino politics. These two apparently opposing currents were to a large extent determined by the broader conditions of inter-imperialist conflict in South-East Asia: the war in Vietnam, and the rivalry between the USSR and China.

We do not have the space here to give a full account of the Marcos dictatorship, however some indicators are necessary if we are to understand the evolution of Filipino unionism and politics during the 1970s and 1980s.

It is said that during the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt remarked of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”, and this epithet perfectly summarizes the US bourgeoisie’s attitude to the plethora of vicious military dictatorships that it has supported over the years.56 American willingness to sponsor these dictatorships – not least, of course, that of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam – which did so much to discredit US claims to defend “democracy” around the world, can be explained essentially by two factors.

The first, was the context of the Cold War with the USSR. The USSR’s efforts to gain footholds within the underdeveloped countries of the American bloc by sponsoring trades unions, “leftist”, “pro-peasant” movements meant that the USA tended to supported their opponents on the right, in other words the military and the wealthy élite.

In addition, the economic interests of the wealthy élite tended to coincide with those of their American counterparts in ways that could sometimes be very explicit: the CIA coup which overthrew the Guatemalan regime in 1954, for example, also allowed the American United Fruit Co to recover land that had been nationalized by the elected government. Countries outside the capitalist heartlands in effect found themselves in an impossible contradiction. On the one hand, the fraction of the bourgeoisie which best understood and expressed the needs of an independent national capital in the decadent period necessarily tended to adopt the policies of a left-wing, nationalist state capitalism which inevitably drew them towards the “Russian model”; as the old European colonial regimes dismantled their empires during the 1950s and 1960s, these left-wing regimes were also the best placed to canalize, absorb, and profit from the accompanying rise of nationalist sentiment allied to radical social protest.57 On the other hand, the United States evidently could not permit its client states to install governments which threatened to adopt a “Soviet” model which would tend to draw them into the Russian bloc. Given the weakness of the national capitals and therefore the lack of a well-established bourgeois class, the US inevitably was forced to rely on the corrupt local elites and the army to maintain its power over its clients.

Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled as president from 1965 until he was overthrown by the “People Power Revolution” in 1986, is a perfect expression of this situation. At first sight, Marcos was nothing more than the usual corrupt politician of the Filipino elite: he had been suspected of involvement in the assassination of a political rival shortly after the war, and came to power by switching parties shortly before the presidential elections. His second term electoral victory in 1969 was achieved thanks to massive fraud and bribery.58 His third term, and continuation in office, was ensured by the equally fraudulent declaration of martial law in 1972.

But 1965 was also the year that the US Army began its direct involvement in the Vietnam war. This meant a build-up of US bases in the Philippines. To ensure stability in the country hosting these critical military installations, the US government was ready to pay handsomely, with the result that the Marcos regime was awash with cash that it could use to bribe its opponents, and to maintain a military dictatorship.

In the period prior to 1972, the rising militancy of the Filipino workers was easily dragged into inter-factional struggles of the ruling class led by the unions. The workers were hoodwinked by bourgeois nationalist slogans like those of the Maoist CPP: "Tunay, Palaban, Makabayan" (Genuine, Militant and Nationalist Trade Unionism).

Marcos thus declared martial law not against a rising independent Filipino working class movement but on the contrary because the movement had been temporarily defeated by the triumph of the counter-revolutionary ideology of Maoism within the militant workers movement in the 60’s. The bourgeois theory of “protracted people’s war” dragged the workers onto the terrain of its class enemy.

Corruption is endemic in the Filipino ruling class, but Marcos took it to new heights, using government power to take over for his own and his family’s benefit, profitable companies and land holdings. As a result, by the beginning of the 1980s Marcos not only faced the growing anger of the workers engaged in the wave of struggles that swept across the world in the wake of the massive French strike movement of May 1968, he had also forfeited the support of the wealthy elite.59

Maoism in the Philippines

When Mao Zedong's new regime came to power in China, its leaders were well aware that a ruined country in a world dominated by two great power blocs had no choice but to "lean to one side", to use Mao's expression. The US' support for the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan, and its intense suspicion of "communism" meant that China had no choice but to "lean" to the USSR. But although Stalin's USSR provided economic help and expertise to rebuild the shattered Chinese economy, including military assistance during the Korean War, the two sides never really trusted each other, especially since Stalin forced Mao to accept the "independence" (in reality a Russian tutelage) of Outer Mongolia.

When Khruschev took over the leadership of the USSR following Stalin's death in 1953, his efforts to find some kind of stable understanding with the USA led to increasing (and not unfounded) suspicion on the Chinese side, that they were about to be abandoned by the Russians. The rift between the two countries found concrete expression in the withdrawal of Russian technical experts in 1960, and in 1969 their armies clashed bloodily along the Ussuri River.60

China therefore embarked on a policy of asserting its own claim to leadership of the "anti-imperialist" movement of "national liberation" around the world, partly as a means of building up its own prestige against the USSR's claims to be the "bastion of socialism", and partly to prevent the creation of a stable anti-Chinese bloc in South-East Asia (the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation had been formed in 1954 for precisely that purpose).

Given this orientation, it is hardly surprising that the new generation of student youth that emerged during the 1960s, radicalised by the first renewed onset of the capitalist crisis and by the Vietnam War, should turn to China and to Maoist nationalism for inspiration. Hence in the Philippines the young university professor José Maria Sison founded, in 1964, the Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth) movement to oppose the Vietnam War and in 1968 he effectively infiltrated the almost moribund PKP and set up an alternative Central Committee with his idealistic student activists. From this time on the PKP becomes the pro-China, nationalist Communist Party of the Philippines.

Thus, Maoism, the counter-revolutionary ideology of the bourgeois Left spread in the Philippines from the germs of the petty-bourgeois student activism using nationalism and anti-imperialism. Once again, with the open crisis of world capitalism following the post-World War II boom, nationalism had been used as bait to chain the new generation of Filipino revolutionaries to support for nationalism. From then on until now, national freedom and democracy and anti-US imperialism have been the battle cry of the militant Filipino workers.

Whereas in the period leading up to World War II and in its immediate aftermath, the labor movement in the Philippines had divided workers between two great rival imperialisms, with China's increasing assertion of its independence from the USSR, they were subjected to a three-way split between the two world imperialisms and the newly assertive regional power of China.61

China’s support for Sison’s CPP has to be seen in the context of China’s own imperialist interests, and it was to be shortlived. By the end of the 1960s, Mao’s rift with Moscow was already leading towards military confrontation, as Russian troops built up on China’s northern border. China badly needed new and powerful friends against the Russian threat: the way was open to Nixon’s visit in 1972, which in effect was to bring the Vietnam war to a conclusion with China switching camps from Russia to the USA.

The class struggle revives

Insofar as he had a political program, Marco aimed at strengthening his regime by entangling workers’ class action in a forest of legal restrictions which would tie the workers to the state through the unions. In May 1974, the Labor Code was enacted with the promulgation of PD 442. This overhauled the labor relations framework in the country and introduced a restructuring plan to govern the one-union-one industry system. It created the National Labor Relations Commission to replace the Court of Industrial Relations.

This did not stop a resurgence of class struggle during the 1970s.

The first great wave of strikes that hit Metro Manila after Martial Law made strikes illegal came in late 1975, and was triggered by the workers from La Tondeña, a distillery factory against capitalist attacks and against the barbarism of the state.

The workers’ defiance of the state’s ban on strikes was a combative action aimed at taking their fate into their own hands. But this was prevented by the mentality of unionism.

The strike in La Tondeña was triggered by the issue of regularization. The workers who staged the strike were contractuals working for many years in the company. However, the regular workers had a union and a collective bargaining agreement with the management. This divided the workers between regular and contractual and seasonal.

The La Tondeña struggle did not really win its demands for regularization, but instead, through the instigation of unionization, fell into the trap of union recognition and collective bargaining as contractual workers.62

Worse, the union’s “victory” further divided the workers between regulars and contractuals and so weakened workers’ unity and resistance: “Meanwhile, the regular employees’ union feels that the regularization demand is a threat to the permanency of the positions held by regulars (…) This attitude was obvious to their indifference to the KMM [contractuals'] activities, particularly during the strike…".63

Nevertheless, the La Tondeña strike served as an inspiration to other workers by popularising the idea that united, we can defy the repressive laws of the state.

During the 1980s political and economic labor unrest in the Philippines intensified. Even the export processing zones where the government had tried to suppress strikes were experiencing waves of strikes, particularly the Bataan Export Processing Zone.64 The Filipino workers again showed their solidarity with their international class, many workers following attentively and drawing inspiration from the struggles in Poland. But unfortunately, the Maoists profited from the workers' efforts in struggle to establish the Kilusang Mayo Uno65 (KMU) as a labor center under the domination of the CPP.

However, these labor alliances were mainly composed of unions from different labor federations that were united against the Marcos dictatorship. Initiated by the Maoist KMU, but supported by the “pro-Moscow” unions affiliated with the World Federation of Trade Unions. Ultimately, many of these alliances were transformed into Maoist unions. The non-unionized workers who organized themselves to struggle were later converted into unions under the KMU as part of “consolidating” the workers.

The KMU was established by Felixberto Olalia of the National Federation of Labor Unions (NAFLU), Cipriano Malonzo of NFL, and Crispin Beltran of PANALO. As a labor center on capitalism's left wing, it advocated “genuine, militant and nationalist unionism” supporting the CPP's guerilla struggle. The inter-connection between the unions, the CPP and its guerrilla war, and the "bourgeois opposition",66 is illustrated by the case of Alex Boncayao, a union leader attracted to Maoism, who ran as assemblyman under the coalition with the bourgeois opposition during 1979-80; defeated in the elections, he went to the countryside and died as a guerrilla.

The suppression of strikes was evident between 1973 and 1975, as there were no actual strikes recorded. From 1976 through 1980, the number of strikes decreased to an average of 48 per year. From 1981 to 1985, the yearly average was 245. In 1986, there were 581 recorded strikes; the highest in country’s history with 3.6 million man-days lost in which 21% of these strikes were wildcat or without legal notices as prescribed by capitalist law.

There were several factors that explained this dramatic increase: the worsening international economic condition, the resurgence of international working class movement initiated by the Polish workers, the growing dissatisfaction of the people against the Marcos administration, and other factors inside the Philippines which were under the effects of renewed crisis of decadent capitalism in 1980s.

The inability of the Marcos regime to suppress the rise in workers’ struggles coincided with a change in the international situation. From 1980 onwards, China's attitude towards its Philippine client, the Maoist CPP, also changed. Following Mao Zedong's death in 1976, a new leadership under Deng Ziaoping ousted Mao's successor Hua Guofeng and eliminated the "Gang of Four" which had opposed any opening to the West. Deng intended to open the country to foreign capital and trade in order to gain access to the foreign technology necessary for the country’s economic survival, which necessarily meant normalizing relations with its neighbors. This led to China cutting off relations with Sison's party.67

Upon the failure of the Maoist CPP to import arms from China for its protracted “people’s war”, its “communist” guru Sison called for a united front with the anti-Marcos factions of the ruling class against the dictator. Thus, the “anti-fascist” united front was formed under the leadership of the Maoist CPP with the battle cry of “overthrow the fascist dictatorship”.

In 1983, Benigno Aquino, the popular figure of the anti-Marcos bourgeois opposition was assassinated by Marcos' henchmen. Workers' resistance succumbed to the inter-classist movement led by the maoist KMU. Thousands of workers participated in inter-classist protest actions drowned in the "Filipino people oppressed by Marcos dictatorship”.

Any attempt by the Marcos regime to suppress and control the strike wave ended in futility because the militant workers did not heed to these laws.68 In October 1983, workers of the US Military Bases went on strike. Although this was led by the union it demonstrated the readiness of Filipino workers to defend their welfare and interests.

In the "People Power Revolution" in 1986 that toppled the Marcos dictatorship, the Filipino workers actively participated not as an independent class movement but as atomized citizens.

As with the “anti-fascist popular front” during World War II, the Filipino proletariat, thanks to the Stalinist tactics of the maoist CPP, was once again disarmed in 1986 and caught up in the conflict between different factions of the national capital. The democratic bourgeois faction of Corazon Aquino which had been brought to power by the "People Power Revolution" unleashed attacks against the proletariat and even against the left factions which had previously supported her. The democratic Aquino regime undertook total war against the anti-US faction of the bourgeoisie led by the Maoist CPP.

Democratic Philippines and the Counter-Revolutionary Role of Unionism

Upon Corazon Aquino's arrival in power, unions in the Philippines fragmented into many labor centers and federations each defending its own bailiwick against its rivals. One reason for this is that democracy was re-established in the country and the unifying factor of opposition to the Marcos regime no longer existed. Once again, the mystification of democracy effectively disarmed the working class.69

After the fall of Marcos the Filipino workers continued to struggle against the attacks of capital.70 But these struggles were imprisoned in the framework of leftism, and legal trade unionism.

In August 1987, Filipino workers launched a general strike against an oil price hike. Unions under the Labor Advisory Coordination Council (LACC) and TUCP led this general strike asking the Aquino government to take control of the oil industry. In 1988, Filipino workers were again in the forefront of struggles asking for a legislated Php10.00 – Php 15.00 wage increase and demanded a Php1.00 – Php1.50 oil price reduction. In March 29, more than 500,000 workers joined the general strike led by LACC to demand a Php30.00 wage increase. The wave of protest and the sensation of workers' strength even led to a strike by women working in bars serving US troops from Subic Bay, who were being forced into degrading "boxing displays" by the bars owners.

In September 17-21, 1988 thousands of school teachers led by ACT71 and MPSTA72 went on strike due to unpaid allowances. Classes were completely paralyzed, prompting Education Secretary Cariño to dismiss and suspend 3,000 teachers. This struggle was “led” by the CPP. Instead of generalizing the struggle of the teachers, CPP isolated it, leading to its failure. This took place as the workers’ movement in general was on the wane.

These struggles led by the unions ended in defeat. Prices of oil products were only decreased by 0.50 centavos and the government did not heed the legislated wage increase but instead created a law R.A. No. 6727, or Wage Rationalization Act. This law contained the last legislated wage increase under the Aquino administration and created the Regional Tripartite Wage and Productivity Boards (RTWPB), which divided the workers by region in their struggles for wage increases, leaving them at the mercy of government, management and union representatives to decide any wage increase.

The years 1987-1988 were the last expression of the generalization of workers’ struggles. Attempts of the militant workers to generalize their struggles were marred by union sabotage of sectoral and industry by industry struggles of the unions.

Since the government successfully integrated the unions into its structure, it created more laws to appease and control the labor movement through the unions. As the union leaders were committed to participating in elections73, the workers' participation in militant struggles waned. The numbers taking part in “people’s strikes” spearheaded by the Maoists dwindled considerably. They were launched in some regions where the Maoists still had a considerable mass base.

As the militant mobilizations led by the ultra-leftists dwindled, the state also accelerated its integration of the union leaders to parliamentarism and legalized activity. In January 1993, under the Ramos administration, sectoral representatives for labor74 were appointed to the Ninth Congress.75 From then on, the so-called “communists” in the left of capital followed the road of parliamentarism.

In 1992, the CPP was marked by splits because of the vanguardism and absolutism of its leadership. Its regional organization in National Capital Region (NCR), led by Filemon Lagman declared autonomy and started to reorient towards “Marxism-Leninism” against Maoism.76 After the split, the Lagman group seized control of the KMU-NCR and transformed it into the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP).

As in the past, the leftists tried to unify the different unions to make their presence felt as a bargaining power within the state apparatus. In September 1993, three major federations (NFL, NAFLU and UWP) announced their disaffiliation from KMU due to ideological infighting within the organization. These federations became the core of the National Confederation of Labor of the Philippines (NCLP). In October of the same year, the Labor Alliance for Wage Increase of P35 (LAWIN 35) was formed to spearhead the call for a Php35 hourly wage increase for the private sector and a Php2,000 across-the-board salary hike for public sector employees. This campaign was supposed to usher in a new era in labor cooperation as LMLC, TUCP, FFW, BMP, KATIPUNAN, NFL, NAFLU, TUPAS, and CIU joined forces. But these alliances did not last.

The last attempt at union unification was the Katipunan ng mga Pangulo ng Unyon sa Pilipinas (KPUP) or Brotherhood of Union Presidents of the Philippines set up by the group of Filemon ‘Popoy’ Lagman. But this also failed since the different union federations did not want their rivals entering their own unions.

In February 1998, the Social Accord for Industrial Harmony and Stability was signed by representatives from the LACC, TUCP, ECOP, PCCI, DOLE and DTI. This accord was in essence the same as the Social Justice Program promoted by Manuel Quezon in the 1930s. Once again, the unions are to be found acting as accomplices of the state to imprison the consciousness of the class.

In May 1998, Joseph Ejercito Estrada was elected as the 13th President of the Philippine Republic. He was dubbed as the “president of the masses”.

In May 2000, the Labor Solidarity Movement (LSM) was launched in a massive rally at the Araneta Coliseum with a clear anti-Erap (Estrada) stance. It was composed of four national labor centers namely: Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), the Federation of Free Workers (FFW), the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) and the National Confederation of Labor (NCL). They claimed to constitute about 60% of the organized labor. LSM’s "impeachment or resign position" followed its early analysis and judgment on the Estrada administration and it promptly allied itself with the Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino 2 (KOMPIL 2), a coalition of the anti-Estrada "bourgeois opposition". In reply, the pro-Estrada faction formed its own Labor Reform Bloc (LRB) under the leadership of Roberto Oca, Jr., who is a childhood friend of Erap and Attorney Roberto Padilla, a vice-president of TUCP and the brother of Congressman Roy Padilla of LAMP. Two labor representatives known for their left-wing politics from the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) also signed. Even the NAFLU - the former KMU union that formed the NCL - joined this new formation.

This only showed how the unions work as appendages of the different factions of the ruling class in their internecine power struggles.

In January 2001, an inter-classist “People Power” movement ousted Joseph Estrada as president and brought Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to power as the 14th President of the Republic of the Philippines.

Once again the workers had been led by the unions and the Leftists to support a faction of the ruling class.

In May 1, 2001, Estrada supporters, mostly urban poor led a violent attack on Malacanang Palace. The uprising was labeled as a “poor man’s revolt” due to the mobilization of many die-hard Erap supporters from the lower income bracket of the society. It was crushed by the state led by Gloria Arroyo.

This was an indication how the non-proletarian exploited strata – the urban poor and informal sector – in the absence of a strong and independent working class movement can be used by the bourgeoisie in its own interests.

In May 2001, the second party-list elections saw the failure again of “labor” parties to win a seat in the House of Representatives. Nine parties based on a working-class electorate joined this round and the highest ranking party within the labor sector in Partido ng Manggagawa (PM), a “Marxist-leninist” front of the Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino of late Filemon Lagma. Labor leader Crispin Beltran of KMU won a party list Representative under the Bayan Muna Party. This completed the absorption of the ultra-left maoist organizations into “classical” bourgeois parliamentary politics. The “victory” of the Leftist labor leaders in the bourgeois parliament only increased their opportunistic appetites.

Conclusion

Over and over again, the Filipino workers have demonstrated their unbreakable courage and their ability to organize in their own defense. They have taken part in every wave and phase of struggles of their international class.

Filipino workers have been forced to emigrate all over the world, and have taken part directly in the class struggle world wide.77 This has the potentiel to contribute a precious experience to the rest of their class.

Yet for all their courage and their combativeness, the workers in the Philippines remain mired in the morass of bourgeois politics, used and abused by an ever-changing, bewildering kaleidoscope of unions, "socialist", "communist", and "worker" parties whose only interest is their struggle for petty advantage in the endless factional warfare of the Filipino ruling class.

As we have tried to show in this article, if workers in the Philippines have been unable, in the final analysis, to assert their own independent organization as a class, outside the structure of the state and all its factions, whether of the "bourgeois" or the "workers'" opposition, this is fundamentally for two inter-related reasons: first, their inability to break with nationalism, and second their belief that revolutionary opposition to capital can only be national and nationalist.

The mentality of militant, nationalist unionism is still very strong in the minds of Filipino workers. For these workers, only unions with a “revolutionary” leadership could defeat capitalism. Furthermore, this militant unionist line entraps the workers behind the prison walls of nationalism, parliamentarism, guerilla warfare, democracy and reformism.

We have aimed here to highlight some of the many historical factors responsible for this situation:

1. The experience of colonization; first by Spain from the 1500s to late 1800s and then by American capitalism from 1900s up to 1940s (with a short interregnum under Japanese rule during World War II). Thus, nationalism (ie, anti-foreign domination) is very strong even among militant workers.

2. The Filipino bourgeoisie together with their foreign patrons effectively utilize unions by dividing them between “purely economistic”, nationalist, radicals and moderate; dividing the workers and putting the “radicals” in the opposition so as to sow false hope that there are “bad” and “good” unions, “pro-worker” and “anti-worker” unions.

The generally anti-union sentiment of the capitalists in the Philippines strongly contributed to the illusion that unions are really pro-worker and that their constant betrayals are just a problem of “good” and “bad” leadership.

3. The effectiveness of bourgeois propaganda that Stalinism and Maoism are “communist” ideologies. This propaganda has never been refuted for more than 80 years. And lately, those leftist organizations that claim to be “anti-Stalinism” and “anti-Maoism”, instead of giving clarification only spew more confusion since their behavior is identical to the Stalinists and Maoists before them.

These factors are exacerbated by the decomposition of decadent capitalism since the end of the 1980s. The sabotage of the Leftists created demoralization and pushed many workers to submissiveness and a loss in self-confidence, the fertile ground for the penetration of bourgeois ideology of “every man for himself” and “one against all” within the working class.

4. In more than 100 years history of unionism, the state adapted the “militancy” of unions by making laws regulating and controlling them. After the unions effectively sabotage the struggles, the state made suppressive laws restricting the struggles. When the workers showed “uncontrollable” militance, the state “liberalizes” its laws so that the unions could again imprison the class in their structure.

The workers will never be strong until they learn to stand alone, outside and inevitably against the whole capitalist class, whether left or right, whether private capitalist or state capitalist. And when the union bosses come, yet again, to dragoon them into another futile struggle on behalf of this or that senator or presidential hopeful, then let the Filipino workers remember these words of the great 19th century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui, that still echo to us down the years: "Those proletarians who allow themselves to be amused by ridiculous street demonstrations, by the planting of liberty trees, by the grand words of lawyers, will be met first with priestly blessings, then with insults, and finally with bullets, and with famine and poverty always".

Talyo/Jens


  1. 2Wilfredo Fabros, The Church and its social involvement in the Philippines, 1930-72, cited in Kathleen Nadeau, History of the Philippines.

  1. 3Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe – XVIIIe siècle, Vol 1, Editions Livre de Poche, p515. According to a contemporary observer, Father Sebastian Maurique, cited by Braudel, the Chinese "would go down to hell to find new merchandise to exchange for the reales they so passionately desire. They go so far as to say, in their pidgin Spanish, 'plata sa sangre' [silver is blood]".

  1. 4 Braudel, op.cit., Vol 3, p612.

  1. 5In one Bible story, a rich young man asks how to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus replies "give all your worldly goods to the poor and follow me", adding that "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".

  1. 6 Kathleen Nadeau, History of the Philippines, Greenwood Press, 2008, Kindle edition, location 605.

  1. 7Nadeau, op.cit., loc 705

  1. 9Subic Bay and the nearby Clark Air Force Base were the United States' two largest military installations abroad.

  1. 10See Ildefonso Runes, The First Three Filipino Marxists. Delos Reyes' concept of radicalism was more influenced by bourgeois nationalism and religious radicalism than by the socialist thinkers.

  1. 11The Independent church at first adopted a curious form of "materialist" Christianity. According to the American CP emissary James Allen, who knew Aglipay, "The altars I have seen bear the inscription: 'Bible and Science, Love and Liberty'. In the sermons and discourses of the Obispo Maximo and in the official literature of his church the supernatural, the miracles, and myths in the Bible and in the Roman dogma have been eliminated. 'The advance of scientific truth', the head bishop holds, 'rendered the old dogmas obsolete'". The ideas of Jesus were seen as a "mixture of holiness and subversion". According to Aglipay, "we relegate the miracles to the category of 'candid creations of popular imagination'. We have produced instead a real Jesus, patriot, iconoclast, reformer, defender of the oppressed and lover of mankind". The church today continues to criticise government corruption, but it has long since abandoned its embrace of science and condemnation of miracles.

  1. 12Returning to the Philippines early in 1901, delos Reyes campaigned relentlessly for the establishment of a Filipino Church. In July in the same year, he founded the first labor union in Philippines: Union Obrera Democratica (Democratic Labor Union). Its founding is significant, for it gave a broad basis to the religious movement to which the masses were favorably disposed." (Teodoro Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People.)

  1. 13The USS Maine's explosion has never been satisfactorily explained. However, the US government's immediate use of the opportunity to declare war, and its evident preparedness for the same, lends credence to the suspicion that the explosion was deliberately engineered as a pretext to start the war.

  1. 14For a brief appreciation of US imperial expansion, see this article from an ICC internal debate on economics: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2009/136/war-economy

  1. 15Here is Arthur MacArthur, military governor of Manila in 1898, on the eve of the massacre: "The future of the Philippine Islands is now in the hands of the American people, and the Paris Treaty commits the free and Franchised Filipinos to the guiding hand and the liberalizing influences, the generous sympathies, the uplifting agitation, not of their American masters, but of their American emancipation. No imperial designs lurk in the American mind. They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose. Our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun. They go with a fiat: 'Why read ye not the changeless truth, the free can conquer but to save'" (quoted in Robert Harvey, American Shogun).

  1. 16Since all politicians had to subscribe to full independence if they hoped to be elected, ideological differences between them were minimal. According to the historian Renato Constantino (cited by Nadeau, op.cit.), "affiliation was based on affinities of blood, friendship, and regionalism, as well as on personal expedience. Under these circumstances, patronage was vital to the retention of a personal following, a fact which induced the party leaders time and again to barter the country's long-term interests for short-term bonuses for the party of power".

  1. 17Dante Guevarra, History of the Philippine Labor Movement, 1995.

  1. 18Lope K. Santos had already in 1908 organized a union among the workers of the Katabusan Cigar and Cigarette Factory, which was also the country’s first workers’ cooperative.

  1. 19James S Allen, The Philippine Left on the eve of World War II, MEP Publications, 1985 and 1993. The IWW was a revolutionary syndicalist union, strongly internationalist and opposed to the reformism of the more established unions in the United States. It attempted to organise outside the USA and, strikingly, was the only union in the USA at the time to fight race discrimination uncompromisingly, organising white and negro workers in the same union branches. The IWW maintained an internationalist position during World War I and was crushed by state repression as a result. See the two articles on the IWW published in our series on revolutionary syndicalism. According to Jose Ma. Sison, Impact of the Communist International on the Founding and Development of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Evangelista at this point was actually a member of the Nacionalista Party.

  1. 20An example of this was the participation of Filipino sugar workers in the strikes in Hawaii from 1920-34.

  1. 21See our publication Trade Unions against the working class, in particular Chapter 3, on the struggle in capitalism's decadence.

  1. 22The Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, also known by its Russian abbreviation Profintern) which was organized in 1921 and the Peasants’ International (or Krestintern) in 1923 were the vehicles for the Russian state to enter the territory of its rival enemy. Subsequently, subsidiary offices of these were established in China in order to cover the Far East and Pacific area. See Jose Ma. Sison, op.cit.

  1. 23The exact date, significantly, was 26th August, anniversary of Andres Bonifacio's “Cry of Balintawak” that launched the national liberation guerrilla war against Spain.

  1. 24Allen, op.cit., p26

  1. 26As we have pointed out in the article on Turkey, the communists on the spot were often clearer, in its early days, of the catastrophic effects of these policies than the Comintern leadership, Lenin included. This was true for China, for example, where in July 1921 the First Congress of the Chinese CP "adopted a resolution declaring that the new party should 'stand up on behalf of the proletariat, and should allow no relationship with the other parties or groups'" (see Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, Marxism in Asia, Penguin Press 1969, p51).

  1. 27Jose Ma. Sison, op.cit. Sison took over the Communist Party of the Philippines from 1968 and turned it into a Maoist nationalist organization: his historical assessment of events is thus to be treated with a good deal of caution.

  1. 28This led to some strange positions being adopted notably with regard to Turkey and Germany. For example, in 1922 Ts'ai Ho-sen, an intimate friend of Mao Zedong, could write about Turkey "General Kemal, a great man endowed with a great revolutionary spirit, led his nationalist party and started an insurrection in Ankara (…) [The Turkish people's] nationalist party has already led them along the path of great victories! We admire them, and even more than that we want to imitate their great example" (Kemal Ataturk's army went on to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the Greek population in Turkey, ruthlessly suppress workers' struggles, and massacre the militants of the Communist Party). In 1923, after the French occupation of the Ruhr, an article by Kao Chün-yü could describe Germany as a "small and weak country", going on to say that "these acts of France prompt us all – the popular masses of China and not only the workers – to side with Germany, which is oppressed like us" (Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, op.cit., pp216-218).

  1. 29Crisanto Evangelista, Jose Nava, Jacinto Manahan, Pedro Abad Santos, Juan Feleo and Mateo Castillo

  1. 30Kenneth K Kurihara, Labor in the Philippine economy, Stanford University Press, 1945, p70.

  1. 32Jose Ma. Sison, op.cit.

  1. 33James Allen, op.cit., p60

  1. 34William J Pomeroy, The Philippines: colonialism, collaboration, and resistance!, International Publishers Co, 1992, p124

  1. 35Labor activities were suppressed during the Japanese occupation but the communists under the leadership of the scientist Vicente Lava were prepared. They channeled their efforts into guerilla resistance activities against the Japanese Imperial Army. Under the Hukbalahap, they established a merger with the socialist/nationalists (Abad Santos and Luis Taruc) and allied with the conservative Filipino dynastic and middle class elites (led by Quezon) and the American colonial administration (led by McArthur).” Jorge V. Sibal, A Century of the Philippine Labor Movement

  1. 37ICC, History of US Foreign Policy Since WW II.

  1. 38When, on February 5 [1945], the American entered Manila in force they promptly disarmed the Huk squadrons that had entered the city ahead of them….the Huks in Obando and Maykawayan, Bulakan, were also disarmed for no reason at all. Further dignity was heaped upon the Huks when Squadron 77, while passing through Malolos on their way to Pampanga was… seized, thrown to jail, and shot to death with the knowledge of American MP’s". Teodoro A. Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People, p. 449.

  1. 39The organization was led by Felixberto Olalia, Guillermo Capadocha, Amado Hernandez and Cipriano Cid, CLO’s first president.

  1. 40The doctrine was called “containment,” and it was designed to resist the further spread of Russia imperialism’s tentacles in Europe and the Near East. (ICC, History of US Foreign Policy since WW II)

  1. 41ICC, History of US Foreign Policy since WW II

  1. 42Later, the “independence day” of the Philippines was changed to June 12 and July 4 was named “Filipino-American Friendship Day” to make it appear that Philippine “independence” was not given by American imperialism.

  1. 43The 1949 election, held after the death of President Manuel Roxas, were typical. Vice-President Quirino who had succeeded Roxas, was opposed by Jose Laurel, who had accused Roxas of collaboration with the Japanese but who had himself been the president of the Japanese-sponsored republic during the war. The election was marked by the violence and fraud.

  1. 45Lois A West, Militant Labor in the Philippines, Temple University Press, 1997, p37.

  1. 46William J Pomeroy, op.cit., p174.

  1. 47Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

  1. 48Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, Norton, 1999, p502.

  1. 49ICC, History of US Foreign Policy since WW II

  1. 50Federation of Free Workers (FFW, 1950) was inspired mainly by the teachings of the Catholic encyclicals through Fr. Walter Hogan, S.J. and organised by young Ateneans headed by Juan C. Tan. (Asper, 2002) Jorge V. Sibal, A Century of the Philippine Labor Movement

  1. 51Amado Hernandez was a nationalist petty-bourgeois intellectual who became the CLO president in 1947 and a member of the Stalinist PKP. According to his biography: “When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, Amado joined the resistance movement and became an intelligence operative of the Marking and Anderson guerrilla outfit whose operations covered Hagonoy, Bulacan, and the mountain fastnesses of the Sierra Madre.” The Filipino bourgeoisie made him “two-time awardee in the Commonwealth Literary Contest; four-time winner of the Palanca Literary Memorial Awards; winner of four consecutive years of journalism awards in the NPC-ESSO sponsored contest.” (source: "Amado V. Hernandez (1903-1970)", Filipinos in History, National Historical Institute, 1989.)

  1. 52To support the collective bargaining system in the Philippines and Asia, the Asian Labor Education Center (ALEC) of the University of the Philippines (now called UP School of Labor and Industrial Relations or UP SOLAIR) was set up in May 1954 by the National Economic Council (NEC) and the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), forerunners of the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) and the US Agency for International Development (US AID) respectively. See Jorge V. Sibal, op.cit.

  1. 53The number of unions increased three-fold from 1953 to 1956 and collective bargaining agreements concluded increased by four times. From 1953 to 1966, the number of unions registered increased from 836 to 2,522. (Jorge V. Sibal, op.cit.)

  1. 54Worker’s Party was organised to field candidates for elections in Manila. Their candidates lost which once again showed the lack of solidarity in labor through a unified labor vote. (Jorge V. Sibal, A Century of the Philippine Labor Movement)

  1. 55This concept of one federation-one industry was patterned after the US system. (Jorge V. Sibal, A Century of the Philippine Labor Movement)

  1. 56A far from exhaustive list can serve to illustrate the point: the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, the CIA-sponsored coups against elected governments in Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953), etc.

  1. 57One example is that of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime in Egypt, established by a military coup, and which not only looked to the USSR for inspiration but turned to the Russian bloc for material and military support against Israel and the United States.

  1. 58According to Nadeau, he spent $50 million of government money in a campaign that was “the most fraudulent in local history”.

  1. 59This is analogous to the situation in Iran, where the Shah’s kleptomaniac rule turned the whole of Iranian society, even including its wealthy elite, against him, leaving him bereft of any political support against the uprising that brought Khomeini to power.

  1. 61To try to avoid confusion, from this point on the Maoist “Communist Party of the Philippines” is called the CPP, while the pro-Moscow rump is called the PKP-1930. The PKP-1930 survived the martial law era as pro-government supporters, after being pardoned by Marcos. They supported the government in its land reform program, including its so-called “Land Collectivisation”, and the “Democratic Revolution from the centre” envisioned by Marcos. The Maoist faction, led by Jose Maria Sison (comfortably installed in exile in the Netherlands), to this day maintains a guerrilla force of several thousand essentially in Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. The PHP-1930 has survived as a minor party engaged in parliamentary activity; it publishes Ang Komunista, and is organized mainly in Metro Manila. In the late 1980s, when the Maoist CPP was courting the Gorbachov regime in USSR, the USSR’s first condition for a “fraternal” relation with the Maoist CPP was that the former integrate with the PKP-1930.

  1. 62After the “victorious” strike, only 300 out of 1,200 contractuals (total workforce is 1,400) underwent the process of regularization and in the end, only 80 were subjected to yearly “non-rotation basis, ie, they would not be subjected to the regular lay-offs as the other casuals” (Linda A. Kapunan, ‘La Tondeña strike of 1976’, Philippine Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol II no. 2, 2nd semester, 1979-80).

  1. 63Ibid.

  1. 64June 5-7, 1981 - The first general strike after Martial Law was held in the Bataan Export Processing Zone, leading to the formation of Alyansa ng Manggagawa sa Bataan - Bataan Labor Alliance (AMBA-BALA).

  1. 65KMU - May First Movement, a maoist CPP led labor center

  1. 66In the Philippines, the term "bourgeois opposition" is used to refer to opposition groups which do not claim to be "socialist", "communist", or in any way connected to the workers' movement. The ruling faction can become a “bourgeois opposition” when it is out of power, and vice versa.

  1. 68In May 1982, BP 130 was promulgated restricting trade union rights and freedoms. It prohibited strikes in industries “affecting the national interest”. It also required a two-thirds vote before a union may stage a strike. It stipulated that law enforcement agencies could assist in ensuring the compliance of return-to-work orders or injunctions. In August of the same year, BP 227 was enacted. This was later popularly known as the Free Ingress-Egress Law that allowed management to enter company premises and to bring in or out all company equipment, materials or goods during a strike.

  1. 69Efren Aranzamendez, FFW Vice-President, broke away from FFW and formed his own federation called the Confederation of Free Workers (CFW). Pinag-isang Diwang Manggagawang Pilipino (PDMP) was organized by the PTGWO-Oca Wing, PSSLU (led by Tony Diaz) and PLAC (led by Jack Tamayo).

  1. 70In 1986, the Philippines experienced over 580 strikes nationally, the highest ever recorded.

  1. 71ACT – Association of Concerned Teachers

  1. 72MPSTA – Manila Public School Teachers Association

  1. 73March 18, 1992, the first election-based coalition called the Kongreso ng Malayang Manggagawang Pilipino (KMMP) was formed by Antonio Diaz of PDMP and Jesus Diamonon, formerly of TUCP, to the presidential bid of the big capitalist Eduardo Cojuangco, of the Nationalist People’s Coalition. Another election-based alliance called the Manggagawang Kaisa ni Salonga-Pimentel (MAKISAPI) was launched by about 400 trade union leaders. Only Ernesto Herrera of TUCP made it to the Senate out of five senatorial candidates from labor. The others who failed to make it to the Senate were Ruben Torres, Israel Bocobo, Bonifacio Tupaz and Amado Inciong. Crispin Beltran of KMU also run for senator in 1987.

  1. 74The Filipino electoral system includes parliamentary representation of different “sectors” of the population: peasants, industrial workers, etc.

  1. 75Alejandro Villaviza, Zoilo dela Cruz and Andres Dinglasan of TUCP composed the first batch. They were later joined by Ramon Jabar and Ernesto Verceles of FFW, Temistocles Dejon of TUCP and Paterno Menzon of ILAW-LACC. The group of Popoy Lagman fielded “communist” candidates in the party-list election in 1998 and the Maoists followed in the coming years.

  1. 76For an analysis of Lagman's positions, see our "critique of Filemon 'Ka Popoy' Lagman".

  1. 77For example, in October 2007 Filipino nurses were part of the biggest nurses' strike in California in nearly a decade, reports Philippine News. More than 5,000 registered nurses went on strike in fifteen mostly San Francisco Bay Area hospitals operated by the Sutter Health Corporation. (New America Media, October 12, 2007)

 

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Far East

In the aftermath of World War Two: debates on how the workers will hold power after the revolution

The outbreak of the world war in 1939 was a shattering blow to the small revolutionary movement which had survived the first storms of the counter-revolution in the 20s and 30s. The Italian communist left in exile, which had been so lucid about the build-up to war for most of its existence, had succumbed to the consolations of the ‘theory of the war economy’, whose defenders insisted that world war, if it came, would be motivated by the need to contain the incipient world revolution, only to switch over to the theory of the ‘social non-existence of the proletariat’ during the war, a formula for liquidating the Fraction. Like the council communists, those comrades in Belgium or France who rejected these theories and wanted to maintain revolutionary activity soon faced the terrors of the Nazi occupation or the repression of collaborationist regimes. Scattered internationalist anarchist groups and individuals held firm to their principles, but many more had already capitulated to the ideology of anti-fascism1. And the most resounding betrayal of all was embodied by the Trotskyist current, the overwhelming majority of which signed up for the imperialist war under the banners of anti-fascism, the defence of democracy and of the USSR. The debates about the form and content of the future revolution, which had led to real theoretical advances in the 1930s, were inevitably put on a back burner.

But after a short period of disarray, the revolutionary movement began to recover, despite the enormous challenge posed by clandestine work and the isolation of the communist minority from a working class which had to a large extent been convinced that this war was different, that it was a war for the defence of civilisation against barbarism. In France, a small group active mainly in the Vichy-controlled south, having firmly opposed the liquidationist tendency in the Italian Fraction, formed itself into a French Fraction of the Communist Left in 19422. In Holland, survivors of the council communist current and in particular the ‘MLL’ group around Sneevliet were able to maintain an organised activity, including an intervention into the heroic 1941 strike of shipyard and other workers against both the deportation of work comrades to Germany and the persecution of the Jews3. In the Trotskyist milieu, a number of groups came out against the treason of the ‘official’ organisations: the Stinas group in Greece, the group around the Spanish revolutionary Munis, the RKD (Revolutionary Communists of Germany), composed mainly of Austrian revolutionaries exiled to France4. In Italy, in 1943, a powerful wave of strikes swept the big factories of the north and revived the hopes of many comrades that the second imperialist war would end in the same way as the first: with a wave of proletarian revolutions. This surge of optimism quickly led to the constitution of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy, made up of elements of the Italian left returning from exile and those who had remained in Italy, either (periodically) in jail, like Damen, or under house arrest, like Bordiga5.

And it was not long before theoretical reflection and debate about the goals of revolution also revived in this re-emerging movement. In occupied Holland, Anton Pannekoek secretly began writing his book Workers’ Councils6, which reaffirmed the perspective of revolution and investigated the forms and methods of struggle needed to overthrow capitalism and create a communist society. In the French Fraction, there were intense discussions about the class nature of ‘Soviet’ Russia and the characteristics of a genuine proletarian regime. And when the end of the war freed the various organisations from the restraints of underground activity, there was, for a time, a flourishing of debate within and sometimes between the different organisations, such as the conference of internationalists held in Holland in 19477. The post war period thus saw the formation of the Spartacusbond in Holland, which rejected the anti-organisational conclusions drawn by most of the Dutch groups in the 1930s; it also brought key texts by Bordiga on dictatorship and violence, and in particular a significant theoretical examination of the nature of the state in the period of transition by the group which succeeded the French Fraction in 1946, the Gauche Communiste de France.

We are publishing the latter here because it represents both continuity with and an advance on the work on the problems of the transition period published by Bilan and republished earlier in this series. In our opinion, it was the most enduring contribution on the problem of the transition to communism that emerged from the post-war period.

This doesn’t mean at all that there is nothing to be gained from studying the contributions by other currents in the revolutionary movement at the time.

Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils for example is an excellent presentation of his understanding of the dynamic of the class struggle, and the way in which its fundamental characteristics – the development of solidarity, organisation and consciousness, above all in the tendency towards the mass strike – were taken onto a new level with the appearance of workers’ councils, the finally discovered organisational form that would enable the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and reconstruct society on communist foundations. Any discussion of the forms of class organisation in the epoch of the proletarian revolution needs to assimilate this work.

And yet, as our book on the Dutch and German left points out, the essay suffers from certain key weaknesses8.

Regarding the period of transition, this work was in critical continuity with the GIC’s Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, focussing on the issue of labour time vouchers and ‘social’ book-keeping as the means for the working class to maintain control of the productive process in the construction of the new society. In other words, the central issue for Pannekoek, as for the GIC, is located in the sphere of the economy, even if he recognises that for the working class the economic and the political cannot be rigidly separated, and that the workers’ councils will certainly take on political tasks in the movement towards the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. And yet these political tasks remain vague in the extreme. The collective power of the working class in its councils, elected by workplace assemblies, is seen as the expression of Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but the problem of a transitional state – its inevitable appearance, and the dangers this entails, as put forward in the classics of Marxism such as Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State - is simply absent from his considerations; and this underestimation of the political dimension of the revolution is equally expressed in Pannekoek’s abandonment of the notion of a communist party which he had defended in the ascendant phase of the revolutionary wave in the early 20s.

Bordiga’s ‘Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle’ (1946)9 seems in many ways to fall into symmetrical errors to those of Pannekoek. The strength of the work is to re-affirm, against the pacifist hypocrisy of a post-war ‘democratic’ consensus which included the Stalinist Communist Party – a consensus which had emerged on the basis of the greatest slaughter in human history – the class basis of the revolution which was on the historical agenda, and the necessity for the proletariat to use organised violence in the overthrow of the capitalist regime and in the establishment of its own political dictatorship. Bordiga emphasised the inevitability of a civil war, of a transitional state to crush the resistance of the ruling class, and of a communist party to express and defend the goals of communism against the inevitable confusions and hesitations existing in the class.

Bordiga also understood the historic importance of soviet or council type organs:

Soviets in their essence are actual class organisations and are not, as some believed, conglomerations of trade or craft organisations. Consequently they do not suffer from the narrowness of the purely economic organisation. For us their importance lies above all in the fact that they are organs of struggle. We do not try to view them in terms of ideal structural models but in terms of the history of their real development.

Thus it was a decisive moment in the Russian Revolution when, shortly after the election of the Constituent Assembly, the soviets rose up against the latter as its dialectical opposite and Bolshevik power dissolved the parliamentary assembly by force. This was the realisation of the brilliant historical slogan “All Power to the Soviets”.

At the same time Bordiga warned against making a fetish out of democratic majorities in such organs:

“However, all this was not sufficient for us to accept the idea that once such a form of class representation is born (and leaving aside here the fluctuations, in every sense, of its representative composition which we are not able to examine here), a majority vote, at whatever moment and turn in the difficult struggle waged by the revolution both domestically and externally is a reliable and easy method for solving every question and even avoiding the counter-revolutionary degeneration.

We must admit that the soviet system, due to the very complexity of its historical evolutionary cycle (which incidentally must end in the most optimistic hypothesis with the disappearance of the soviets along with the withering away of the state), is susceptible of falling under counter-revolutionary influence just as it is susceptible of being a revolutionary instrument. In conclusion, we do not believe that there is any constitutional form which can immunise us against such a danger – the only guarantee, if any, lies in the development of the domestic and international relations of social forces.

It is certainly true that a majority vote, or mere “constitutional forms”, is no guarantor of class consciousness and no automatic barrier against opportunism or degeneration. This criticism of what might be termed ‘democratism’ had already been elaborated in previous works on the transitional period by the Italian Fraction, such as Vercesi’s articles ‘Party-State-International’10. But Bordiga seemed totally unaware of the Fraction’s critical work on the problem of the post-revolutionary state - of those writings which, drawing on the experience of the degeneration of proletarian power in Russia, argued against ignoring the negative aspects even of the ‘semi-state’. Bordiga by contrast saw no distinction between the “proletarian state” and the real exercising of power by the proletariat, and even saw the state as the lever for the transformation of society; and where the Fraction had seen that there was a real problem with the party identifying itself with the state, that it had made a significant contribution to the inner degeneration of the revolution in Russia, Bordiga denied outright that this was a serious factor in the liquidation of proletarian political power. For him, the party was the principal instrument both of proletarian insurrection and of post-insurrectional rule. As he put it in a 1951 text, ‘Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party’11

The communist party unleashes and wins the civil war, it occupies the key positions in a military and social sense, it multiplies its means of propaganda and agitation a thousand-fold through seizing buildings and public establishments. And without losing time and without procedural whims, it establishes the "armed bodies of workers" of which Lenin spoke, the red guard, the revolutionary police. At the meetings of the Soviets, it wins over a majority to the slogan: "All power to the Soviets!". Is this majority a merely legal, or a coldly and plainly numerical fact? Not at all! Should anyone - be he a spy or a well-intentioned but misled worker - vote for the Soviet to renounce or compromise the power conquered thanks to the blood of the proletarian fighters, he will be kicked out by his comrades' rifle butts. And no one will waste time with counting him in the "legal minority", that criminal hypocrisy which the revolution can do without and which the counterrevolution can only feed upon.......

......In conclusion the communist party will rule alone, and will never give up power without a physical struggle. This bold declaration of not yielding to the deception of figures and of not making use of them will aid the struggle against revolutionary degeneration”.

The idea of delegating power to the party was to be challenged within the PCInt by Damen and others, and was an element in the 1952 split in the party, but in our view it was the GCF which went furthest in assimilating the real theoretical enrichments made by the Fraction in the previous decade. The GCF was the successor to the French Fraction following a split over the constitution of the party in Italy. A nucleus of comrades in France had been opposed to the hasty dissolution of the Italian Fraction and recognised that the hopes of a proletarian revival raised in 1943 had proved unfounded: the war’s outcome had strengthened the defeat of the proletariat and consequently the task of the hour was not the formation of a new party but essentially the continuation of the work of the Fraction. An element of this stance was the GCF’s commitment to continuing and developing the more general theoretical patrimony of the Fraction, and it applied this method to the question of the transition period.

Like the Fraction, the GCF text renewed the links with the most profound critiques of the state contained in the writings of Marx and Engels, showing that the relationship between the proletariat and the state – including the post-revolutionary state – was very different from that of previous revolutionary classes whose mission was to introduce a new form of class exploitation. But while the Fraction had taken up, in the light of the degeneration of the Russian revolution, Engels’ prescient warnings that even the transitional state should be treated as a “scourge”, and insisted that the proletariat could not identify with it, the GCF went a step further, because they concluded logically from this that if the proletariat cannot identify with the transitional state, it makes no sense to define the latter as proletarian.

The historic necessity for the proletariat to make use of the state must not lead to the fatal theoretical and political error of identifying this instrument with socialism. The state, like a prison, is not a symbol of socialism, nor of the class whose mission is to create it: the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, expressing the will of the revolutionary class to crush the resistance of the enemy and to ensure the movement towards a socialist society, also expresses its fundamental opposition to the idea of the proletarian nature of the state, the error of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilisation by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state....

...History and the Russian experience, in particular, have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist. If the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, the state will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a re-born capitalism

Again, while the Fraction had begun to develop an understanding of the general tendency towards state capitalism in the decadent period of bourgeois society, the GCF text makes this much more explicit, while at the same time rejecting Bilan’s ambiguities about the survivals of a ‘proletarian economy’ in the USSR of the 1930s, embodied in the collectivisation of the means of production. The GCF text is quite clear that capitalism is in no way dependent on ‘private’ individual ownership and is indeed perfectly compatible with state ownership even in an extreme and totalitarian form: therefore the system in the USSR, based as it was on the extraction of surplus value from the proletariat by a minority of state bureaucrats, was entirely capitalist. The GCF text even rejects the very idea of a ‘proletarian economy’, and instead sees the transitional period not as a stable mode of production but as a battleground between capitalism and the movement towards socialism.

In some areas, the GCF of 1946 had not yet gone beyond some of the weaker points of Bilan’s position:

  • The notion that the economic tasks of the transition period centre round the development of the productive forces towards a point where abundance can be achieved, conceived as a process of “accumulation of values”, albeit one marked by a proportional increase of variable capital as opposed to constant capital, by a fundamental switch from the production of capital goods to the production of consumer goods. This approach underestimates the necessity to struggle against the wage labour form from the beginning, even if both the Fraction and the GCF were right to understand that the law of value would not disappear overnight. Moreover, it is more than ever evident today, more than half a century after the GCF’s text was written, that the primary economic task of the proletariat will not be to ‘develop’ technology to the point where abundance becomes possible, but to reorganise and transform the social relations of production in order to release the already-existing potential for abundance;

  • The text still talks, as the Fraction did, about the party exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat, even though both warned against any identification between party and state. With the GCF, this is perhaps even more contradictory, since the 1946 text shows a greater understanding of the central role to be played by the workers’ councils in the process of economic and social transformation, and makes it quite explicit that the party can only ‘lead’ the councils through its political role, its capacity to convince the mass of workers:

In the councils, the proletarians will for the first time learn the art of administering society for themselves. The party will not impose its economic policies on the councils through decrees or by claiming some divine right. It will have to make its conceptions and policies prevail by proposing them, defending them, and submitting them to the approval of the masses organised in the councils or soviets, relying on the councils of workers and on the workers’ delegates to the central councils to bring its class policies to a successful conclusion”.

Equally explicit is the rejection of any relation of violence within the class, and even between the working class and other non-exploiting classes, who will be integrated into the new state through participation in soviet type organisations. Violence, while necessary and inevitable in the struggle against the exploiting class, is rejected as a method of social transformation because it is inconsistent with the goals of communism; and this position is further reinforced by the observation that the capitalist state, above all in its decadent epoch, has evolved from an instrument of violence on behalf of the ruling class to an instrument which tends to perpetuate violence for its own sake.

Given these contradictions, it is not surprising that the idea of the party exercising the dictatorship was to be definitively and quite rapidly rejected, partly as a result of the GCF’s capacity to assimilate the contribution of other left fractions, in particular the German-Dutch left. Thus in June 1948 (Internationalisme no 38), the GCF published a programmatic text ‘On the nature and function of the political party of the proletariat’, which states:

During the insurrectionary period of the revolution, the role of the party is not to demand power for itself, nor to call on the masses to ‘have confidence’ in it. It intervenes and develops its activity in favour of the self-mobilisation of the class, inside of which it aims for the triumph of its principles and the means for revolutionary action.

The mobilisation of the class around the party to which it ‘confides’ or rather abandons leadership is a conception reflecting a state of immaturity in the class. Experience has shown that in such conditions the revolution will find it impossible to triumph and will quickly degenerate, resulting in a divorce between class and party. The latter would find itself forced to resort more and more to coercive methods to impose itself on the class and would end up as a redoubtable obstacle to the forward march of the revolution.

The party is not an organism of direction and execution – these are the functions that belong to the unitary organisation of the class. If militants of the party participate in these functions, it is as members of the great community of the proletariat12

The emphasis on the councils – which the Italian Left of the 30s hesitated to generalise from the Russian experience - is also in contradiction with another weakness in the text: its expectation that the trade unions (or rather a renewed form of the trade unions) will play a key role in the defence of class autonomy in the transition period. This was based on the idea that the trade unions, despite their tendency towards bureaucratisation and entanglement with the bourgeois state, remained class organs. Again this idea would soon be dropped, partly in the light of direct experience of the class struggle (e.g. the Renault strike of 47) and partly, again, through debates with currents like the German-Dutch left who had been quicker to recognise that the unions had been irreversibly integrated into capitalism.

The GCF would never have seen their text as the last word on the problem of the period of transition. But the Theses are a shining example of the theoretical method needed to approach this and all other genuine questions: basing ourselves solidly on the acquisitions of the past, but ready to criticise and transcend those aspects of the work of our predecessors which have proved to be invalid or which history has left behind.

CDW


Theses on the Nature of the State and the Proletarian Revolution

1) The state appears in history as the expression of antagonistic interests which divide human society; it is the product and result of antagonistic economic relations. Although the state has played an active role in history, it is above all directly determined by the process of economic development.

It appears to stand above classes but in reality it is the juridical expression of the dominant economic system; it is the super-structure, the political dressing of the economic rule of a given class in society.

The economic relationships between men, the formation of classes, and the place they occupy in society are determined by the development of the productive forces at a given moment. The state’s only reason for being is to codify and sanction an already existing economic state of affairs, to give it a legal force which all members of society are obliged to accept. Thus, the state seeks to maintain an equilibrium, a stabilisation of the relations between classes, relations which flow from the economic process itself. At the same time the state seeks to prevent any attempt of the suppressed classes to put society into question by engaging in agitation and disturbances. Thus the state fulfils an important function in society, ensuring the security and order indispensable for the maintenance of production. But it can only do this through its essentially conservative character. In the course of history, the state has appeared as a CONSERVATIVE and REACTIONARY factor of the highest order, a fetter which the evolution and development of the productive forces has constantly had to confront.

2) In order to fulfil its dual role as an agent of security and an agent of reaction, the state bases itself on material force, on violence. Its authority resides in its coercive capacities. It posses an exclusive monopoly of all the existing forces of violence: police, army and prisons.

In the struggle between classes, the state, while being the representative of the ruling class, tends to develop a certain independence. As the bourgeoisie develops its national formations, its huge concentrated democratic and political units; as the antagonism between the classes reaches higher and higher levels; as the rivalry between the great capitalist states intensifies, the state is forced to develop its coercive forces to the very limit in order to maintain order. Internally it forces the proletariat and other labouring classes to put up with capitalist exploitation while formally and juridically recognising the freedom of the individual; externally it guarantees the frontiers of the area of economic exploitation against the greed of other capitalist groupings and enlarges them at the expense of other states.

Thus, in the decadent epoch of capitalism when the horizontal and vertical division of society and the struggles engendered by this division have reached a culminating point in human history, the state has also reached a zenith in its development as an organism of coercion and violence.

Having its origin in the historic necessity for violence (the use of coercion being the precondition of its growth), the state tends to resort independently to violence as a means of preserving its own existence. From being a means, violence becomes an end in itself, undertaken and cultivated by the state, which thus negates by its very nature any form of society which goes beyond violence as a way of regulating relations between men.

3) In the complexity of the contradictions which blossom and grow with the development of the capitalist economy, the state is constantly obliged to involve itself in every area of life: economic, social cultural, political; in the private life of each individual and in his relations with society on a local, national or world-wide scale.

In order to cope with its immense social obligations, the state has to call upon the services of an ever-growing mass of people, removing them from productive activity and creating a social spectrum apart, with its own interests, whose speciality and responsibility is the maintenance of the governmental state machine.

An important section of society (10% and perhaps more) thus constitutes an independent social stratum (politicians, the judiciary, the police and the army) with its own economic interests, living parasitically off society, their exclusive sphere of interest being the state apparatus.

This social stratum, beginning as servants of society in the hands of the ruling class, tends, because of its size and above all because of its place in society at the head of the state machinery, to free itself more and more and to put itself forward as the master of society, assimilating the ruling class into this tendency. It has an exclusive monopoly of the public finances, the right to dictate and interpret laws, and the material force of violence with which to apply these laws in its own interests.

Thus we can see the emergence of a new privileged social stratum which derives its material existence from the existence of the state, a parasitic and essentially reactionary stratum concerned with the perpetuation of the state, relatively independent, but always associated with the class whose economic system is based on the exploitation of man by man and whose main principle is the perpetuation of human exploitation and the protection of its economic and social privileges.

4) The development of technology and of the productive forces can no longer be imprisoned in the bourgeois principle of the private ownership of the means of production. Even capitalist production is obliged to violate the sacrosanct principle of private ownership and have recourse to the capitalist nationalisation of certain branches of the economy, such as the railways, the post, and to some extent aviation, the merchant marine, metallurgy and the mines. State intervention increasingly makes itself felt throughout the economy and this is obviously done to safeguard the capitalist system as a whole. Moreover, in the class struggle between conflicting forces in society, between classes and economic groupings, the state can only play its role as a representative, mediating force by supporting itself on a material, economic, independent, solid base.

In this historic evolution of capitalist society, the state takes on a new character, a new role – that of the state as boss. While maintaining and even accentuating its political functions, the capitalist state has evolved on the economic terrain towards state capitalism. Either the state levies part of the surplus-value generated in the sectors where private ownership of the means of production still exists, just like any other capital (bank or finance); or it directly exploits state-owned sectors as a single collective employer in order to create surplus value. This surplus value is shared out among the functionaries of the state (except for the part which is capitalised by being reinvested in production) according to the ranks and privileges they have obtained.

The economic tendency towards state capitalism, while being unable to reach complete socialisation and collectivisation within capitalist society, is nevertheless a very real tendency which, to some extent, frees the state from playing a strictly instrumental role and gives it a new economic character as a collective, anonymous employer which collectively extracts surplus-value.

Although the private ownership of the means of production was the fundamental basis of the economic system of capitalism and remains so today, it can, in the final phase of capitalism, undergo profound modifications without threatening the basic principles of capitalist economy. Far from signifying the end of the system, the more or less large-scale statification of the means of production is in perfect accord with the system and can even be the condition for the system’s survival, providing that the fundamental principle of capitalism still exists: that is to say the extraction of surplus value from the working class for the benefit of a powerful and privileged minority. The fundamental opposition between the capitalist economy and the socialist economy does not therefore reside in the private possession of the means of production. While socialism is incompatible with the private ownership of the means of production, the absence of private ownership (although an indispensible precondition for the creation of a socialist economy) is by no means in itself identical to socialism, since reality has demonstrated how capitalism can accommodate itself to the statification of the means of production by moving towards state capitalism.

The fundamental opposition between the capitalist economy and socialism is to be found:

  1. in the motive force and aim of production. Under capitalism this is the quest for a greater and greater amount of surplus value; the aim of socialism, on the other hand, is the satisfaction of the needs of society and its members;

  2. in the fact that under capitalism, in the immediate redistribution of the products and values created, a smaller and smaller fraction of the values created are given over to consumption, the largest part being reinvested in order to expand production. Under socialism an increasing proportion of the values created is immediately consumed by the producers. That part of the values produced which is directly consumable must tend to increase in relation to the part which is invested in production in order to contribute to the process of reproduction.

Thus, far from representing any weakening of capitalist society, the state’s growing tendency towards economic and political independence merely serves to transform the economic power of capitalism to the state by elevating the latter until it becomes the real seat of power in capitalism. In reaction to the proletariat and its historic mission of creating a socialist society, the capitalist state takes on the appearance of a Goliath. By its very nature the state represents the whole past history of humanity, of all the exploiting classes and reactionary forces in history. Its very character, as we have shown, being one of CONSERVATISM, VIOLENCE, BUREAUCRACY, THE DEFENCE OF PRIVILLEGES AND OF ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION, it is the incarnation of the principle of oppression and is irreconcilably opposed to the principle of liberation, incarnated by the proletariat and socialism.

5) Up until now all new classes have simply substituted their domination and privileges for that of other classes; the economic development of the new class unfolded slowly and over a long period prior to the establishment of its political hegemony. Because their economic interests (which coincided with the development of the productive forces) were the interests of a minority, of a single class, their power developed within the old society, first of all on the economic level. It is only after reaching a certain degree of economic development, after economically supplanting or partially absorbing the old ruling class, that the political power, ie the state and the juridical system, came to sanctify the new state of affairs. The bourgeoisie developed its economic domination over a long period, strengthening the power of merchant capital. It was only when the bourgeoisie had achieved its economic domination over the old feudal society that it carried out its political revolution. The bourgeois revolution had to break the resistance of feudalism and its ideological superstructure because feudal law had became a fetter on the development of the productive forces; but it did not destroy the state. Because the underlying principle of the state is the defence of exploitation of man by man, the bourgeoisie merely had to seize hold of the state machine and continue to use it in its own class interests. The revolutionary process in previous class societies was, thus, as follows:

a) the economic rise and strengthening of the new class within the old society;

b) its economic domination, a peaceful economic revolution;

c) a violent political revolution sanctifying the economic state of affairs;

d) the maintaining of the state apparatus in order to use it in the interests of the new class;

e) the gradual absorption of the old ruling classes who live on within the new ruling class.

6) However, unlike the other classes in history, the proletariat does not possess any wealth, any instrument of labour, any material property. It cannot build any economic system inside capitalist society. Its position as a revolutionary class resides in the objective evolution of society, which makes the existence of private property incompatible with the development of the productive forces, makes the continued production of surplus value an impossibility. Capitalist society is faced with an insufficient market for the realisation of the surplus value it creates. The objective necessity for a socialist society, insofar as socialism is the dialectical solution to the internal contradictions of the capitalist system, finds in the proletariat the only class whose interests coincide with the needs of historical evolution. This last class in history, possessing nothing, having no privileges to defend, complies with the historic necessity for the suppression of all privileges. The proletariat is the only class which can carry out this revolutionary task of suppressing every privilege, all private property, of liberating the productive forces from their capitalist fetters and developing them in the interests of humanity. The proletariat does not and cannot have any economic policy inside the capitalist system.

The proletariat has no class economy to set up before or after the revolution. In contrast to other classes, and for the first time in history, the revolution of the proletariat begins as a political revolution which precedes and creates the conditions for a social-economic transformation. The economic liberation of the proletariat is an economic liberation from the fetters of all class interests; it is the disappearance of all classes. The proletariat liberates itself by liberating the whole of humanity, by dissolving itself into the latter.

The state, the incarnation of class rule and economic oppression, cannot be conquered by the proletariat in the classic sense. On the contrary, the first step towards the proletariat’s emancipation is the revolutionary destruction of the state. Not having any economic power, nor any economic property, the proletariat draws its strength from the consciousness which it acquires from the objective historical laws of the economic process. Its strength lies exclusively in its CONSCIOUSNESS and its capacity for ORGANISATION. The class party, which crystallises the consciousness of the class, represents the indispensible precondition for the realisation of the proletariat’s historic mission, just as its unitary organs of struggle represent its practical material capacity for action.

Because other classes in history had economic power in society, they could more or less do without a party; they were themselves hardly conscious of where their actions were leading and they identified themselves with the state, the incarnation of privilege and oppression. But at every moment of its activity as a class, the proletariat comes up against the state – the proletariat is the historical antithesis of the state.

The conquest of the state by an EXPLOITING class in a given country marked the end of an historical process and was the last revolutionary act of that class. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE STATE by the proletariat is simply THE FIRST REVOLUTIONARY ACT OF THE CLASS, which opens the way for the proletariat and its party towards a whole revolutionary process, leading at first to the WORLD REVOLUTION and then on the economic terrain to the creation of a SOCIALIST SOCIETY.

7) There is a great historical gulf between, on the one hand, the level attained by the productive forces, which have entered into conflict with the capitalist system, and which have to go beyond the framework of that system and, on the other hand, the level of development necessary for the advent of socialist society, for the full satisfaction of the needs of everyone in society. This gulf cannot be wiped out by a simple programmatic declaration, as the anarchists believe, but must be bridged on the economic terrain by an economic policy, the economic policy of the proletariat. This is why theory posits the inevitability of a historic period of transition between capitalism and socialism – a transition period in which political power, and not economic power, is in the hands of the revolutionary class. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The development of the economic foundations of socialism is the political task of the proletariat and its party and cannot be undertaken on a national terrain, but only on a world-wide scale. Capitalism is a world system. The world domination of capital ensures that the economic development of the different sectors of the world economy and of different branches of industry can only take place within the limits imposed by the interests of capital.

In other words, the development of different sectors and branches of the world economy is being severely handicapped. Socialism, on the other hand, is based on a very high economic development of all sectors of the world economy. The liberation of the productive forces from their capitalist fetters by the proletarian revolution is, therefore, the first precondition for the economic evolution of society towards socialism.

The economic policy of the proletariat develops on the basis of the generalisation of the revolution onto the world scale; its content resides not in a one-sided affirmation of the development of production, but essentially in the establishment of a harmonious rhythm between the development of production and a proportional rise in the living standards of the producers.

The period of transition expresses an economic continuity with the pre-socialist epoch in the sense that it cannot yet satisfy all the needs of society and contains within it the necessity of continuing accumulation. But any policy which bases itself on the maximum accumulation in order to expand production has no proletarian content and is simply the continuation of the capitalist economy. There economic policy of the proletariat, therefore, is based on a necessary accumulation which is compatible with, and conditioned by, the improvement of the workers’ living standards, with a relative and progressive increase in variable capital.

After its victory over the bourgeoisie, the proletariat on the one hand becomes the politically dominant class, which with its class party assures its class dictatorship throughout the period of transition in order to lead society towards socialism; on the other hand, the proletariat remains a class in production which has particular immediate economic interests to defend and it must, therefore, continue to make these interests prevail through its own economic organisations – the unions – and its own methods of struggle – the strike – throughout the period of transition.

8) The revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state, the instrument of class domination, does not mean that the economic power of the enemy class has been destroyed or that it has disappeared. The expropriation and socialisation of the key sectors of production are the first, indispensible measures of the proletariat’s economic policy. The existence of backward sectors of the economy, particularly in agriculture, does not permit an immediate transition to a socialist economy or a total abolition of private property. Socialism cannot be built by mere decrees; it is the fruit of a long economic process in which the methods of socialism have to combat and defeat the methods of capitalism on an economic terrain.

The existence of these backward economic sectors, the inevitable survival of private property, represents a real danger: the soil of economic conservatism, of the consolidation and regeneration of those social forces which stand in the way of the movement towards socialism.

The period of transition is a period of bitter struggle between capitalism and socialism; in this struggle the proletariat will have the advantage of having won political power but this is not an automatic guarantee of its final victory.

The outcome of the struggle, the guarantee of the proletariat’s final victory resides exclusively in the strength of consciousness in the class and its ability to translate this consciousness into practical politics.

Any political mistake, any tactical error, will strengthen the position of the class enemy. The elimination of the political formations of the class enemy, of its organisations and press, is an indispensible measure for breaking its resistance. But this is not enough. The proletariat must above all safeguard the independence of its own class organisations, preventing them from being deformed by taking up tasks and functions which do not correspond to their real nature. The party, which represents the consciousness of the historic mission of the class and of its final goal, exercises the dictatorship in the name of the proletariat; the trade union, the unitary organ of the class which expresses its economic position and which has to defend the immediate interests of the class, must not identify with the state or become integrated into it.

9) The state, insofar as it is reconstituted after the revolution, expresses the immaturity of the conditions for a socialist society. It is the political superstructure of an economic base which is not yet socialist. By its nature it is opposed to and hostile towards socialism. Just as the period of transition is an historically inevitable stage which the proletariat has to go through, so the state is for the proletariat an unavoidable instrument of violence which it must use against the dispossessed classes, but with which it cannot indentify itself. “AND THE LEAST ONE CAN SAY IS THAT THE STATE IS A NECESSARY EVIL WHICH IS INHERITED BY THE PROLETARIAT IN ITS STRUGGLE FOR CLASS DOMINATION” (Engels, Preface to The Civil War in France).

As a social institution, the state set up after the victory of the proletarian insurrection remains alien and hostile to socialism.

Expropriation and nationalisation, the problems of managing the economy, the historic unpreparedness of the labouring classes and the proletariat to direct the economy, the need to have recourse to technical specialists, to men who come out of the ranks of the exploiting classes and their servants, the disastrous state of the economy following the civil war, all these are historical factors which will tend to strengthen the state machine and its fundamental characteristics of conservatism and coercion. The historic necessity for the proletariat to make use of the state must not lead to the fatal theoretical and political error of identifying this instrument with socialism. The state, like a prison, is not a symbol of socialism, nor of the class whose mission is to create it: the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, expressing the will of the revolutionary class to crush the resistance of the enemy and to ensure the movement towards a socialist society, also expresses its fundamental opposition to the idea of the proletarian nature of the state, the error of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilisation by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state.

10) When the proletariat becomes master of society through the victory of the revolution against the bourgeoisie, it will be faced with a social situation which is not yet ripe for socialism but which can only attain this ripeness under the proletariat’s leadership. In every sphere – economic, political, cultural, social – the proletariat will inherit remnants of nations and all kinds of backward superstructures, institutions and ideologies which the proletariat cannot abolish by a simple act of will. It will have to take them into account, to fight against them, to attenuate their most pernicious effects. Violence is not the essential means for doing this; it can only be used strictly in proportion to the violence used by the class enemy in order to crush him. Violence must absolutely and categorically be rejected in the relations between the proletariat and other labouring classes, and within itself. In a general way, the methods used to move towards socialism are closely related to the goal that is being sought after, in other words, to socialism itself.

In the beginning of the transition period, the proletariat will be forced to make use of instruments bequeathed to it by the whole past history of violence and class rule. The state is such an instrument; it is the very symbol of violence, plunder and oppression. The proletariat inherits this instrument and can only use it on the condition that:

  1. it recognises and proclaims the anti-socialist nature of the state and at no time indentifies itself with it; it must constantly stand against the state with its own class organs, the party and the unions, ensuring that the state is under the perpetual vigilance and control of the whole class;

  2. It attenuates the pernicious effects of the state as far as possible, as in the Paris Commune (Engels, Preface to The Civil War in France).

The Russian experience has amply vindicated Marx and Engels’ warnings concerning the dangers of the state and the need to take measures against these dangers.

These measures include: the working masses electing representatives who are revocable at any time; destruction of any armed force separate from the people and its replacement by the general armament of the proletariat and the toiling classes; the widest possible democracy for the working class and its organisations; vigilant and permanent control by the whole class over the functioning of the state; state functionaries to be paid no more than a workman’s wage. Such measures must cease to be mere formulae; they must be carried out to the letter and strengthened as far as possible by complementary social and political measures.

History and the Russian experience, in particular, have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist. If the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, the state will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a re-born capitalism.

THE TRADE UNIONS AFTER THE REVOLUTION

11) The trade unions, unitary organs for the defence of the proletariat’s economic interests, have their origins in the mechanisms of production. They arise out of the necessity for the proletariat to struggle against economic exploitation, against the extraction of an ever-growing mass of surplus value, i.e. an increase in unpaid labour-time.

By increasing productivity the development of technology diminishes the labour-time necessary for the reproduction of labour power. Under capitalism greater productivity does not tend to reduce labour-time nor create a proportional amelioration of the workers’ living standards. On the contrary, the capitalists’ search for greater productivity is carried out purely and simply to increase the production of surplus value.

The conflict between capital and labour, constant capital and variable capital, capitalism and the proletariat, is centred round an economic problem; the role of the two forces in production is based on a fundamental antagonism which gives rise to a continuous class struggle. In this struggle against capitalism, the proletariat organises for the defence of its immediate interests through an association of all those who are exploited: the trade union.

However much the trade unions have come under the influence of the agents of the bourgeoisie, i.e. the reformist bureaucracy, whose policies sabotage and deflect the role of the unions, they remain organs of the class as long as they maintain their independence from the capitalist state.

12) The proletarian revolution will not immediately do away with classes and with relations of production between different classes. The victorious revolution is simply “the organisation of the proletariat as the ruling class” which through its party opens up an historic path, an economic tendency which begins from the existence of classes and of exploitation and ends up in a classless society.

This period of transition between capitalism and socialism under the political dictatorship of the proletariat expresses itself on the economic terrain in an energetic policy which aims to diminish class exploitation, to constantly increase the proletariat’s share of the national income, to alter the relationship between variable and constant capital in favour of the former. This policy cannot simply be based on programmatic declarations of the party; still less is it the prerogative of the state, the organ of coercion and of management. This policy can only find a guarantee and a real expression in the working class itself, through the pressure which the class exerts over society, through its opposition to, and struggle against, all other classes.

Trade union organisation under capitalism represents a tendency towards the regroupment of the class against exploitation, which is constantly being held back and blocked by the influence and repression of the ruling bourgeoisie. It is only after the revolution that the trade union organisations will really become the unitary organs of the class, regrouping all the workers without exception. Only then will the unions really be able to undertake the defence of the proletariat’s immediate economic interests.

13) The role of trade union organisations after the revolution does not derive simply from the fact that they are the only organisations that can undertake the defence of the proletariat’s immediate interests, even though this in itself is enough justification for complete freedom and independence for the trade unions and for the rejection of any subordination or integration of the unions into the state. But more than this, the trade union organisations are an extremely sensitive living barometer which can quickly show whether the main trend in society is towards socialism (through the proportional increase of variable capital) or towards capitalism (through a much larger proportional growth of constant capital). When there is any oscillation in economic administration towards capitalist policies (as a result of economic pressures which come from immature conditions and from surviving non-proletarian classes), the proletariat, by means of its independent union and its specific struggles, will have to react and intervene thereby providing a social counterweight which will push economic policy back onto a socialist path.

To give trade unions the role of managing the economy will not eliminate the essential problems that arise out of this economic situation. This would not solve the difficulties which are engendered by a real lack of maturity in the economy, but such a role would deprive the proletariat and its organisations of their freedom. It would destroy the proletariat’s capacity to exert the pressure necessary both for the defence of its immediate interests and for guaranteeing a socialist policy for the economy.

14) Under capitalism, the trade unions provide a very imperfect reflection of the level of class consciousness. This consciousness can only be fully acquired by the proletariat after the revolution when it is free from all the shackles imposed on it by the bourgeoisie and its agents, the reformist leaders.

After the revolution, the trade unions will reflect much more clearly the level of consciousness that the whole class has reached and will provide a milieu for the political education of the masses. Communists draw their inspiration from the conception that that the defence of the revolution and the building of socialism cannot be achieved by the will of a small elite, but finds its strength only in the political maturity of the proletarian masses. Violence exerted against the proletarian masses, even if it aims at guaranteeing progress towards socialism, can in no way provide such a guarantee.

Socialism cannot be a rape of the proletariat, created against its will. Socialism can only be based on the consciousness and will of the working class. Communists reject all methods of violence within the proletariat because such methods stand in the way of any movement towards socialism, because they obstruct the class from attaining an understanding of its historic mission. Within the unions communists will fight for full freedom of expression and political criticism. It is among the proletariat organised in the unions that communists will fight for their political positions, against all the tendencies which reflect the persistence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois influences within the proletariat and within certain backward strata of the class. Freedom for fractions and tendencies within the unions, freedom of speech and of the press for all the currents inside the unions: these are the conditions which will enable the class party to recognise and evaluate the level of consciousness in the masses, to guarantee the movement towards socialism through the political education of the masses, to verify its own policies and correct them when necessary.

The relationship between party and class is simply the relationship between the party and the unions.

15) Any tendency to reduce the role of the trade unions after the revolution; any pretence that the existence of a ‘workers’ state’ means the end of freedom to engage in union activity or strikes; any advocacy of fusing the unions with the state through the theory of handing economic administration over to the unions, which seems revolutionary but which in fact leads to an incorporation of the unions into the state machine; any position which, however revolutionary in its intentions, calls for violence within the proletariat and its organisations; any attempt to stand in the way of the broadest workers’ democracy and the free-play of political struggle and of fractions within the unions: any such policies are anti-working class. They falsify the relationship between party and class and weaken the proletariat’s position during the transition period. The duty of communists will be to energetically denounce and fight against all these tendencies and to work for the full development and independence of the trade union movement, which is an indispensible condition for the victory of socialism.

MANAGEMENT OF THE ECONOMY

16) The management of the economy after the civil war is the most difficult and complex problem which the proletariat and its party will have to face. It would be puerile to try to provide a priori solutions to all the practical aspects of this problem. It would transform marxism into a system of rigid precepts, valid and applicable at any time regardless of the various concrete and circumstantial situations which could arise in different countries and sectors of the economy.

It is only through practical study that we will be able to find the necessary solutions to any situation that may arise. Following Marx and Engels, we can today only give a broad outline, provide the general principles of economic management during the transitional period, basing ourselves mainly on the experience of the Russian revolution.

17) The achievement of socialism demands a very advanced development of technology and of the productive forces. Following the victory of the revolution, the proletariat will not have a fully developed technology at its disposal. This is not because the revolution is premature; on the contrary, the development of the productive forces has reached its limit under capitalism. This fact justifies the assertion that the objective conditions for revolution are present. Capitalism has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces and must be destroyed. It is up to the proletariat to conduct a policy which will allow a full development of the productive forces so that socialism can become an economic reality.

The development of technology and of the productive forces is the basis of the economic policy of the proletariat. This requires an accumulation of part of the values produced in order to improve, intensify and ensure an expanded reproduction. But socialism is not simply a result of the speed with which the productive forces develop; the rhythm of the movement towards socialism will be subordinated to, and limited to, the concrete possibilities given by the real economic and political situation.

18) The management of the economy can at no time be separated from the development of the political struggle of the class, and this means on an international scale. A revolution that is victorious in one country cannot simply seek to develop its own economy, independently from the struggle of the proletariat in other countries. The Russian revolution has given us historic proof of the fact that the attempt to develop the economy in Russia outside of an ascendant movement of the revolution in other countries led Russia into a policy of compromises with world capitalism, a policy of external pacts and economic agreements and internal concessions. These compromises turned out to be just so many ways of economically propping up a capitalist system in open crisis, saving it from collapsing. But at the same time, these compromises had a deeply disturbing effect on a proletariat which was in the throes of a revolutionary struggle (the secret Rapallo Treaty of 1922 between the Soviet state and German militarism, for example).

The economic agreements which were aimed simply at achieving a partial strengthening of the country of the revolution in fact led to a political and economic reinforcement of capitalism, an overturn in the balance of class forces in favour of capitalism. Thus the country of the victorious revolution accentuated its isolation and lost its only ally, the only guarantee of its ultimate development: the international revolution. It ended up as a political and economic force diverted by the growing pressure of its historic enemy and was reabsorbed into the capitalist system.

The economic policy of the proletariat in one country cannot aim at the resolution of that country’s economic difficulties or the overcoming of underdevelopment within the narrow framework of one country. The future of that economy is indissolubly linked and directly subordinated to the development of the international revolution. Any internal economic policy must be of a provisional character and essentially aimed at helping the international revolution.

19) The Russian experience has also shown that the attempt to accelerate the rhythm of production beyond a proportionate development of consumption will lead to the production of goods destined for destruction. This is in line with the general tendency of world capitalism in its decadent phase which can only ensure the continuation of production by setting up a war economy.

Against this policy of speeding up industrial development as much as possible, of sacrificing the immediate interests of the proletariat in order to build a war economy, a genuine proletarian economic policy will be based on a rate of growth which is proportionate to the consumption requirements of the producers, and will therefore aim at the production of consumer goods immediately necessary for the satisfaction of workers’ needs.

Accumulation will not be based on the criterion of developing industry as quickly as possible, but will be fixed at a rate which is compatible with the progressive satisfaction of immediate needs. The fundamental principles of economic management will be the production of basic necessities, and the gradual harmonisation of the various branches of production, particularly between town and country, industry and agriculture.

20) As long as the productive forces have not reached a level of development which can do away with small-scale production in every branch of the economy, there can be no question of the complete and immediate disappearance of intermediary classes, of the artisans and small peasants.

After the revolution the proletariat will only be able to collectivise the developed and concentrated sectors of industry, the key industries: transport, banking, big landed property. It will expropriate the big bourgeoisie. But small private property will continue to exist and will only be abolished through a long economic process. Alongside the socialist sector of the economy there will still be a private sector of small producers. The economic relations between these sectors will probably take many forms, from socialist relations to co-operative ones and to the free exchange of commodities between the state and the small-holders and even between the individual, isolated producers themselves. Problems of production, of exchange prices, markets and money will also take many different forms. The economic policy of the proletariat will have to take this situation into account, rejecting bureaucratic violence as a way of regulating economic life and basing itself solely on the real possibilities of absorbing private production through the development of technology. It will aim at the elimination of private property and the isolated producer through the incorporation of these strata into the great family of the proletariat.

21) The management of economic and social life requires a centralised organism. The theory which would give each group of producers the task of managing their own enterprises is a reactionary petty bourgeois utopia. The development of technology requires the participation of the great mass of the workers, their cooperation in the productive process.

Production in each branch of the economy is linked to the whole of national and international production. It calls for the setting in motion of immense forces and for systematic planning, and only a centralised administration can ensure this. Otherwise one would have to transform each member and group of society into so many small proprietors, each with their own antagonistic interests, which would mean a return to the epoch of simple commodity production long since wiped out from history by the development of industry. Socialist society will engender its own organs of social and economic administration. In the period of transition, the function of economic management can only be undertaken by the political power which emerges from the revolution and which, under the control of the entire working population, will manage and direct the economy.

The broadest, most effective and most direct participation of all the workers at every level of the new power will be the only way of ensuring that the economy is under the management of the workers themselves. The Paris Commune gave us the first example of this new kind of state, while the Russian revolution reaffirmed this first attempt and gave it its definitive form in the organs of representation of all the workers at their workplace and in their localities: the councils or soviets.

22) Everyone who works will participate in the elections to organs of direction and management. Only those who do not work or who live off the labour of others will be excluded. The interests of all the working masses will be expressed in the councils, including those of the non-proletarian strata. The proletariat, because of its consciousness, its political strength, the place it occupies at the industrial heart of the economy, because of its concentration in the towns and factories, having acquired a sense of organisation and discipline, will play a preponderant role in the whole life and activity of the councils and will give leadership and direction to the other strata of the labouring population.

In the councils, the proletarians will for the first time learn the art of administering society for themselves. The party will not impose its economic policies on the councils through decrees or by claiming some divine right. It will have to make its conceptions and policies prevail by proposing them, defending them, and submitting them to the approval of the masses organised in the councils or soviets, relying on the councils of workers and on the workers’ delegates to the central councils to bring its class policies to a successful conclusion.

23) Just as the relationship between party and class is expressed through the trade unions, so the relationship the proletariat and its party have with other labouring classes is expressed through the councils or soviets. Just as violence within the class can only falsify its relationship with the party, so there must be a rejection of violence in the relations between the proletariat and the other labouring classes and strata. These relations must be based on full freedom of expression and criticism within the councils of workers’ and peasants’ delegates.

In a general sense, violence as a method of activity in the hands of the proletariat will be indispensable for destroying the rule of capitalism and its state, and for guaranteeing the victory of the proletariat against the resistance and violence of the counter-revolutionary classes during the civil war. But apart from this, violence can play no part in the constructive task of building socialism. On the contrary, it contains the risk of deviating the proletariat’s activity, of falsifying its relationship with other labouring strata, and of distorting its capacity to find class solutions to the problems which confront it, solutions which can only be based on the development of the political maturity of the masses.

Gauche Communiste de France.

First published in Internationalisme, no 9 (April 1946). Reprinted in Bulletin d’Etudes et de discussion of Révolution Internationale, no.1 and first published in English in the ICC pamphlet The period of transition from capitalism to socialism


1 Anarchism, and anarcho-syndicalism in particular, had of course been subjected to a very severe test in the war in Spain between 1936-39. We intend to return to this episode in the context of this series, since some revolutionaries consider that the collectivisation of the farms and factories in the first phase of the war went further in the direction of communism than anything seen before or since, including the revolution in Russia. For the fractions of the communist left, on the other hand, the political framework in which these collectivisations took place was dominated by what was in essence an imperialist war. Nevertheless, this question deserves a more detailed and in-depth examination.

2 See our book The Italian Communist Left, p 146f

3 See our book The Dutch and German Communist Left, p 316-19

4 Italian Communist Left, p148-9

5 Ibid, p 160f

8See Dutch and German Communist Left, pp 253-56. The book notes that Pannekoek’s treatment of the problems that will face the proletariat in the immediate aftermath of a revolution is more realistic than the somewhat idyllic picture painted in the GIK’s Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. This is not surprising given that Pannekoek was looking at a Europe that was being ruined by the clash of imperialist states. See the two previous articles in this series:

9 https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1946/violence.htm. Bordiga –in a curious parallel with Pannekoek(see Dutch and German Communist Left p 312....) – abstained from formally joining the organisation whose formation he helped to inspire, but his texts automatically became official documents of the Party.

12 The text on the party, the Theses on the state, and a number of other seminal works of the GCF, were written by our comrade Marc Chirik. In the next article in this series, we will try to explain more about how we see Marc’s role in the proletarian political movement and in particular in the debate about the nature of the communist revolution, which again become a subject of passionate argument in the early 70s, when the revolutionary minorities arising from the new generation of 1968 began to organise themselves in a more considered and deliberate manner.

 

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Communism: not just a nice idea

International Review - 2nd Semester 2014

Nature and function of the proletarian party

ICC Introduction

The document we are publishing below first appeared in 1947 in the pages of Internationalisme, the press of the small group “Gauche Communiste de France” (Communist Left of France), to which (amongst others) the ICC has traced its origins since its foundation in 1975. It was reprinted at the beginning of the 1970s in the Bulletin d’études et de discussion published by the French group “Révolution Internationale”, later to become the section in France of the newly formed International Communist Current. The Bulletin was itself the precursor of the ICC’s theoretical organ, the International Review, and its aim was to give the young group – and its very young militants – a more solid anchorage, through theoretical reflection and a better knowledge of the workers’ movement, including the history of the movement’s confrontation with new theoretical questions posed by history1.

The text’s main object is to examine the historical conditions which determine the formation and the activity of revolutionary organisations. The very idea of such determination is fundamental. Although the creation and survival of a revolutionary organisation is the fruit of a militant will, aiming to be an active factor in history, the form that this will takes does not come out of the blue, independently of social reality and independently above all of the consciousness and fighting spirit present in the broad masses of the working class. The conception that the creation of a class party depended only on the “will” of the militants has been characteristic of Trotskyism since the 1930s, but also – at the end of World War II – of the newly formed “Partito Comunista Internazionalista”, the precursor of the various Bordigist groups and of today’s International Communist Tendency (ex-IBRP). Internationalisme’s article insists, rightly in our view, that we have here two fundamentally different conceptions of political organisation: the one, voluntarist and idealist; the other, materialist and marxist. At best, the voluntarist conception could only engender congenital opportunism – as was the case for the PCInt and its descendants; at worst, as with the Trotskyists, it led to conciliation with the bourgeoisie and going over to the enemy camp.

For the young post-68 generation, the importance of historical and theoretical reflection on this issue is obvious. It was to preserve the ICC (though it did not immunise us, far from it) from the worst effects of the frenzied activism and impatience which were typical of this period, and were to lead so many groups and militants to abandon political activity.

We are deeply convinced that this text remains wholly relevant to this day for a new generation of militants, and especially in its insistence that the working class is not just a sociological category, but a class with a specific role to play in history: to overthrow capitalism and build a communist society2. The role of revolutionaries is equally dependent on the historical period: when the situation of the working class means that it is impossible to influence the course of events, the role of revolutionaries is not to ignore reality and pretend that their immediate intervention can change things, but to get down to an apparently much less spectacular task: preparing the theoretical and political conditions for an intervention which will be determinant for the class struggle of the future.


Internationalisme 38, October 1948

Introduction

Our group has taken on the task of re-examining the major problems posed by the need to re-constitute a new revolutionary workers’ movement. It has had to consider the evolution of capitalist society towards state capitalism, and of the old workers’ movement which for some time has served to support the capitalist class and help drag the proletariat behind the latter; it has also had to look at what, in this old workers’ movement, provided material which the capitalist class could use to this end, and how. Then we have been led to reconsider what, within the workers’ movement, remains given and what has become outdated since the Communist Manifesto.

Finally, it was quite normal for us to have studied the problems posed by the revolution and socialism. It was with this in mind that we presented a study on the state after the revolution3, and that we are now presenting for discussion a study of the problem of the revolutionary party of the proletariat. We should remember that this is one of the most important questions in the revolutionary workers’ movement. This question opposed Marx and the marxists to the anarchists, to certain social democratic tendencies and, finally to the revolutionary syndicalist tendencies. It was at the centre of Marx’s concerns, and he always retained a critical attitude towards the different organisms which called themselves ‘workers’’ or ‘socialist’ parties, Internationals and so on. Marx, although at given moments he participated actively in the life of certain of these organs, always saw them as political groups within which, following the expression of the Communist Manifesto, communists could express themselves as the “vanguard of the proletariat”. The goal of the communists was to push forward the activity of these organisations while maintaining the capacity for autonomous criticism and activity. Then came the split within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party between the Menshevik tendency and the Bolsheviks around the ideas developed by Lenin in What is to be done? Amongst the marxist groups which had broken from Social-Democracy to form the Communist International, the same problem was at the basis of the opposition between the council communists and the KAPD, and the Third International. It was also in this order of thinking that you have the divergence between the Bordiga group and Lenin around the subject of the ‘United Front’ advocated by Lenin and Trotsky and adopted by the Communist International. The same problem remains one of the major disagreements among the different oppositional groups: between ‘Trotskyists’ and ‘Bordigists’, and indeed it was a subject of discussion among all the groups of the time.

Today, we must critically re-examine all these expressions of the revolutionary workers’ movement. We hope to draw out of this process – i.e. in the expression of different currents of thought on this question – a current which, in our view, will best express the revolutionary standpoint, and thus try to pose the problem for the future revolutionary workers’ movement.

We also need to reconsider critically the points of view which have been brought to bear on this problem, to determine what remains constant in the revolutionary expression of the proletariat, but also what has become obsolete and what new problems have been posed.

It is evident that such work can only bear fruit if it is the object of discussion between and within the groups that aim to reconstitute a new revolutionary workers’ movement.

The study presented here is thus a means to participate in this discussion; it has no other pretension, even though it is presented in the form of theses. Its goal is above all to stimulate discussion and criticism and not to provide definitive solutions. It is a work of research which aims less at acceptance or rejection pure and simple than at stimulating other works of this kind.

The essential focus of this study is the expression of revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat. But there are a number of programmatic questions related to the party which are only touched on here; organisational problems, problems of the relationship between the party and organisms like the workers’ councils, problems relating to the attitude of revolutionaries faced with the formation of several groups claiming to be THE revolutionary party and trying to build it, the problems posed by the pre- and post-revolutionary tasks, etc.

Therefore militants who understand that the task of the hour is to examine these various problems should intervene actively in this discussion, either through their own papers or bulletins, or in this bulletin, for those who for the time being don’t have such a possibility of expressing themselves.

Internationalisme

Socialism and consciousness

1. The idea of the necessity for a political organism acting inside the proletariat for the social revolution seemed to be a given in the socialist workers' movement.

It is true that the anarchists have always protested against the term "political" which is given to this organism. But this anarchist protest comes from the fact that they understand the term political action in a very narrow sense, since it is synonymous for them with action for legislative reforms: participation in elections and bourgeois parliaments, etc. But neither the anarchists nor any other current in the workers' movement deny the necessity for the regroupment of revolutionary socialists in associations which, through action and propaganda, take on the task of intervening in and orienting workers' struggles. And any grouping which gives itself the task of orientating social struggles in a certain direction is a political regroupment.

In this sense, the struggle of ideas around the political or non-political character given to these organisations is only a debate about words, hiding at root, under general phrases, concrete divergences on the orientation and on the aims and the means to achieve them. In other words, precise political divergences.

If new tendencies are emerging today that call into question the necessity for a political organisation of the proletariat, this is a consequence of the degeneration of the parties which were once organisations of the proletariat and of their passage into the service of capitalism: the Socialist and Communist parties. Political terms and political parties are today suffering from discredit, even within the bourgeois milieu. However, what has led to these resounding weaknesses is not politics but SPECIFIC KINDS of politics. Politics is nothing other than the orientation that men adopt in the organisation of social life; to turn away from this action means renouncing any determination to give a direction to social life and, consequently, to transform it. It means accepting and submitting to society as it stands.

2. The idea of class is essentially historico-political, not merely an economic classification. Economically, all humans are part of one and the same system of production in a given historical period. The division based upon the distinct positions that men occupy in the same system of production and distribution, and which doesn't go beyond the framework of this system, cannot become the basis of the historic necessity for overcoming it. Division into economic categories is thus only a moment in the constant internal contradictions that develop with the system but remain circumscribed by its own limitations. Historic opposition is, so to speak, external, in the sense that it is opposed to all of the system taken as a whole, and this opposition is manifested in the destruction of the existing social system and its replacement by another based on a new mode of production. Class is the personification of this historic opposition at the same time as being the social-human force for its realisation.

The proletariat exists as a class in the full sense of the term only in the orientation that it gives to its struggles, not with a view to improving its conditions of life within the capitalist system but in its opposition to the existing social order. The passage from category to class, from the economic struggle to the political, is not an evolutionary process, a continual and inherent development, so that a historic class opposition emerges automatically and naturally after being contained for a long time in the economic position of the workers. There is a dialectical leap one to the other. It consists in the coming to consciousness of the historical necessity for the disappearance of the capitalist system. This historic necessity coincides with the aspiration of the proletariat for liberation from its condition of exploitation and is contained within it.

3. All social transformations in history have, as a fundamentally determining condition, the fact that the development of the productive forces has become incompatible with the restricted structures of the old society. Capitalism’s demise, and the reason for its collapse, lies in its inability to dominate any longer the productive forces that it has developed. This is also the historic justification of its transcendence by socialism.

Apart from this condition, however, the differences between previous revolutions (including the bourgeois revolution) and the socialist revolution remain decisive and demand a profound study on the part of the revolutionary class.

For the bourgeois revolution for example, the condition for the development of productive forces incompatible with those of feudalism still lay within a system based on the property of a possessing class. As a result, capitalism developed its economic foundation slowly and over a long period inside the feudal world. The political revolution followed the economic fact and consecrated it. Also as a result, the bourgeoisie has no imperious necessity to acquire an awareness of economic and social movement. Its actions are directly propelled by the pressures of the laws of economic development which act upon it as blind forces of nature and determine its will. Its consciousness remains a secondary factor. It comes after the fact. It records events rather than giving direction to them. The bourgeois revolution is situated in this prehistory of humanity where the still undeveloped productive forces dominate man.

Socialism, on the contrary, is based upon the development of productive forces which are incompatible with all individual or social property of a class. From this, socialism cannot be based upon the economic foundations within capitalist society. The political revolution is the condition of a socialist orientation of the economy and of society. And from this, socialism can only be realised through the consciousness of the movement’s final goals, the consciousness of the means for realising them and the conscious will for action. Socialist consciousness precedes and conditions revolutionary class action. The socialist revolution is the beginning of history where man is called upon to dominate the productive forces which have already been strongly developed, and this domination is precisely the purpose adopted by the socialist revolution.

4. For this reason, all attempts to establish socialism on realisations achieved within capitalist society are by their very nature destined to fail. Socialism demands, in terms of time, an advanced development of the productive forces, and in terms of space, the entire earth: its precondition is the conscious will of men. In the best of cases, the experimental demonstration of socialism within capitalist society cannot go beyond the level of a utopia. And persisting along this route leads to a position of conservation and the strengthening of capitalism4. Socialism within a capitalist regime can only be a theoretical demonstration, its materialisation can only take the form of an ideological force, and its realisation can only take place by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the existing social order.

And since the existence of socialism can only find expression first of all in socialist consciousness, the class which bears it and personifies it has a historic existence only through this consciousness. The formation of the proletariat as a historic class is nothing other than the formation of its socialist consciousness. These are the two aspects of the same historic process, inconceivable separately because one cannot exist without the other.

Socialist consciousness does not flow from the economic position of the workers, it is not a reflection of their condition as wage-earners. For this reason, socialist consciousness is not simply and spontaneously formed in the head of every worker, or in the heads of workers alone. Socialism as an ideology appears separately from and in parallel with the economic struggles of the workers. They do not engender each other although they influence each other, and the development of each conditions that of the other; both are rooted in the historic development of capitalist society.

The formation of the class party in history

5. If the workers only become "a class in itself and for itself" (according to the expression of Marx and Engels) through socialist consciousness, one can say that the process of the constitution of the class is identified with the process of the formation of groups of revolutionary socialist militants. The party of the proletariat is not a selection or a "delegation" of the class, it is the mode of existence and life of the class itself. No more than one can understand matter apart from its movement, one cannot understand the class apart from its tendency to constitute itself into political organisms: "The organisation of the proletariat into a class and thus into a political party" (Communist Manifesto) is no chance formula, but expresses the profound thought of Marx and Engels. A century of experience has masterfully confirmed the validity of this way of seeing the notion of class.

6. Socialist consciousness is not produced by spontaneous generation but is constantly reproduced; once it has appeared it becomes, in its opposition to the existing capitalist world, the active principle determining and accelerating its own development in and through action. However this development is conditioned and limited by the development of the contradictions of capitalism. In this sense, Lenin’s thesis of ‘socialist consciousness injected into the workers by the Party’ is certainly more precise than Rosa’s thesis of the ‘spontaneity’ of the development of consciousness, engendered during the course of a movement that starts with the economic struggle and culminates in a revolutionary socialist struggle. The thesis of ‘spontaneity’, despite its democratic appearances, reveals at root a mechanistic tendency, a rigorous economic determinism. It is based on a cause and effect relationship, with consciousness as merely an effect, the result of an initial movement, i.e., the economic struggle of the workers which gives rise to it. In this view, consciousness is seen as fundamentally passive in relation to the economic struggles which are the active factor. Lenin’s conception restores to socialist consciousness and the party which materialises it the character of an essentially active factor and principle. It does not detach itself from life and the movement but is included within it.

7. The fundamental difficulty of the socialist revolution lies in this complex and contradictory situation: on the one hand the revolution can only be made through the conscious action of the great majority of the working class; on the other hand the development of this consciousness comes up against the conditions to which all workers in capitalist society are subjected, and which endlessly hinder and destroy the workers’ consciousness of their revolutionary historic mission. This difficulty can absolutely not be overcome solely through theoretical propaganda independent of the historic conjuncture. But still less than through pure propaganda will the solution be found in the economic struggles of the workers. Left to their own internal development, the workers’ struggles against the conditions of capitalist exploitation can lead at most to the explosion of revolts, in other words negative reactions which are absolutely insufficient for the positive action of social transformation; the latter is made possible only through a consciousness of the aims of the movement. This factor can only be this political element of the class which draws its theoretical substance, not from the contingencies and particularities of the economic position of the workers, but from the unfolding of historic possibilities and necessities. Only the intervention of this factor will make it possible for the class to rise from the level of purely negative reaction to that of positive action, from revolt to revolution.

8. But it would be entirely wrong to want to substitute these organisms, which are expressions of the consciousness and existence of the class, for the class itself and to consider the class as merely a shapeless mass destined to serve as material for these political organisms. That would be to substitute a militarist conception for a revolutionary one in relations between being and consciousness and between the party and the class. The historic function of the party is not to be a General Staff leading the action of a class which is seen as an army ignorant both of the final aim and the immediate objective of operations. That would be to see its movement as a sum total of manoeuvres.

The socialist revolution is not at all comparable to military action. Its realisation is conditioned by the workers’ consciousness that dictates their decisions and actions.

The party does not, then, act in place of the class. It does not demand "confidence" in the bourgeois sense of the word, in other words to have delegated to it the fate and destiny of society. Its sole historic function is to act with a view to allowing the class itself to acquire the consciousness of its mission, of its aims and of the means which are the foundations of its revolutionary action.

9. Just as we must combat this conception of the party as General Staff, acting on behalf of the working class, we must with equal vigour reject the other conception which, on the basis that "the emancipation of the workers is the work of the workers themselves" (Inaugural Address of the First International) denies any role to the militant and the revolutionary party. Under the very praiseworthy pretext of not imposing their will on the workers, these militants shirk their tasks, run from their responsibility and leave revolutionaries tailing the workers' movement.

The former puts itself outside the class by denying it and substituting for it, the latter similarly puts itself outside the class by denying the specific function of the class organisation, i.e., the party, by denying their own existence as a factor of revolution and excluding themselves by forbidding themselves any action of their own.

10. A correct understanding of the conditions of the socialist revolution must start from and embody the following elements:

a. Socialism is a necessity only because the development reached by the productive forces is no longer compatible with a society divided into classes.

b. This necessity can only become a reality through the will and conscious action of the oppressed class whose social liberation is tied up with the liberation of humanity from its alienation from the forces of production, to which it has hitherto been subjected.

c. Socialism, being both an objective necessity and a subjective will, can only be expressed in revolutionary action that is conscious of its aims.

d. Revolutionary action is inconceivable without a revolutionary programme. Similarly, the elaboration of the programme is inseparable from action. It is because the revolutionary party is a "body of doctrine and a will to action" (Bordiga) that it is the most thorough concretisation of socialist consciousness and the fundamental element for its realisation.

11. The tendency towards the constitution of the party of the proletariat appears right from the birth of capitalist society. But as long as the historic conditions for socialism are not sufficiently developed, the ideology of the proletariat regarding the construction of the party can only remain at an embryonic stage. It is only with the "Communist League" that this accomplished form of the political organisation of the proletariat appears for the first time.

When one looks closely at the development of the formation of class parties, it is immediately obvious that the organisation into parties does not follow a constant progression, but on the contrary happens in periods of major development, alternating with others during which the party disappears. Thus the organic existence of the party does not appear to depend solely on the will of the individuals who compose it. Objective conditions determine its existence. The party, being essentially an instrument of revolutionary class action, can only exist in situations where the action of the class comes to the surface. In the absence of the conditions for workers’ class action (such as in periods of the economic and political stability of capitalism or following decisive defeats of the workers’ struggles) the party cannot continue to exist. Organically it breaks up or else if it wants to exist, in other words to continue to exercise an influence, then it must adapt to the new conditions which deny revolutionary action; inevitably, the party takes on a new content. It becomes conformist, that is to say it ceases to be a party of the revolution.

Marx understood the conditions of the existence of the party better than most. Twice he undertook the dissolution of a great organisation: first in 1851, following the defeat of the revolution and the triumph of the reaction in Europe, and secondly in 1873 after the defeat of the Paris Commune, he was quite openly for the dissolution of the party. The first time it was the Communist League, and the second, the First International.

The task of the hour for revolutionary militants

12. The experience of the Second International confirms the impossibility of maintaining the party of the proletariat during a prolonged period marked by a non-revolutionary situation. The participation of the parties of the Second International in the imperialist war of 1914 only revealed the long corruption of the organisation. The permeability and penetrability of the political organisation of the proletariat to the ideology of the reigning capitalist class, which is always possible, can in long periods of stagnation and reflux of the class struggle assume such an extent that the ideology of the bourgeoisie ends up substituting itself for that of the proletariat, so that inevitably the party is emptied of all its original class content and becomes instead an instrument of the enemy class.

The history of the Communist Parties of the Third International has again shown the impossibility of safeguarding the party in a period of revolutionary reflux and its inevitable degeneration during such a period.

13. For these reasons, the formation of parties, such as the Trotskyist International from 1935, or more recently the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy, is not merely artificial: these can only be enterprises of confusion and opportunism. Instead of being moments in the constitution of the future class party, these formations are obstacles and discredit it by the caricature that they present. Far from expressing a maturation of consciousness and an advance on the old programme that they have transformed into dogmas, they only reproduce the old programme and are imprisoned by these dogmas. Nothing surprising about the fact that these formations take up out of date and backward positions of the old party and worsen them still further, as with the tactics of parliamentarism, trade unionism, etc.

14. But the break in the party’s organisational existence does not mean a break in the development of class ideology. In the first place the revolutionary reflux signifies the immaturity of the revolutionary programme. Defeat is a signal for the necessity to critically re-examine previous programmatic positions and the obligation to go beyond them on the basis of the living experience of the struggle.

This positive critical work of programmatic elaboration is pursued through the organisms coming from the old party. They constitute, in the period of retreat, the active element for the constitution of the future party in a new period of revolutionary upsurge. These organisms are the left groups or fractions coming out of the party after its organisational dissolution or its ideological alienation. Such were: the fraction of Marx in the period between the dissolution of the League and the formation of the First International, the left currents in the Second International (during the First World War) which gave birth to the new Parties and International in 1919; also the Left Fractions and groups who continued their revolutionary work following the degeneration of the Third International. Their existence and their development is the condition which has enriched the programme of the revolution and the reconstruction of the party of tomorrow.

15. The old party, once it has passed into the service of the enemy class, definitively ceases being a milieu in which revolutionary thought can be elaborated and in which militants of the proletariat can be formed. Expecting currents coming from social democracy or Stalinism to serve as material for the construction of a new class party thus means ignoring the very foundation of the idea of the party. The Trotskyists’ adherence to the parties of the Second International, or their pursuit of the hypocritical practice of burrowing within these parties with the idea of cultivating, inside this anti-proletarian milieu, "revolutionary" currents with whom they could set up the new party of the proletariat, merely demonstrates that they themselves are a dead current, an expression of the past movement and not that of the future.

Just as the new party of the revolution cannot be set up on the basis of a programme which has been overtaken by events, neither can it be built with elements who remain organically attached to organisms which have forever ceased to be working class.

16. The history of the workers' movement has never known a period which is more sombre and more marked by such a profound retreat in revolutionary consciousness than the present. If the economic exploitation of the workers appears as an absolutely insufficient condition for assuming a consciousness of their historic mission, it turns out that the development of this consciousness is infinitely more difficult than revolutionary militants had previously thought. Perhaps, for the proletariat to recover, humanity will have to undergo the nightmare of a Third World War with the horror of a world in chaos, and the proletariat will have to face a very tangible dilemma: die or save yourself by revolution before it can find the conditions for recovering both itself and its consciousness.

17. It is not for us here in the framework of this thesis to look for the precise conditions that will allow the re-emergence of proletarian consciousness, nor what will be the conditions for the formation of the unitary organisation that the proletariat will adopt for its revolutionary combat. What we can say categorically, based on the experience of the last thirty years, is that neither economic demands, nor the whole range of so-called "democratic" demands (parliament, rights of peoples to self-determination, etc...) can be of use to the historic action of the proletariat. Concerning forms of organisation, it appears as still more evident that it cannot be the unions with their vertical and professional, corporatist structures. All these forms of organisation belong to a past workers' movement and will have to be relegated to the museum of history. But they will have to be abandoned and overtaken in practice. The new organisations will have to be unitary, that is to say inclusive of the great majority of the workers, and go beyond the particular divisions of professional interests. Their basis will be on the social level, their structure the locality. Workers' councils, like those that appeared in 1917 in Russia and 1918 in Germany, were a new type of unitary organisation of the class. It is in these types of workers' councils, and not in the rejuvenation of the unions, that the workers will find the most appropriate form of their organisation.

But whatever the new unitary forms of organisation of the class it changes nothing regarding the problem of the necessity for the political organism which is the party, nor regarding the decisive role that it has to play. The party remains the conscious factor in the action of the class. It is the ideologically vital motor force of the proletariat’s revolutionary action. In social action it plays a role similar to that of energy in production. The reconstruction of this organism of the class is conditioned by the appearance of a tendency within the class to break with capitalist ideology as it engages in practice in the struggle against the existing regime, while at the same time this reconstruction is a condition for the acceleration and deepening of this struggle and the decisive condition for its triumph.

18. The absence of the conditions required for the construction of the party should not lead to the conclusion that any immediate activity by revolutionary militants is useless or impossible. The militant has not to choose between the hollow "activism" of the party builders and individual isolation, between adventurism and an impotent pessimism: both must be fought, as being equally foreign to the revolutionary spirit and harmful to the cause of the revolution. We must reject both the voluntarist idea of militant action presented as the sole factor determining the movement of the class, and the mechanical conception of the party as a mere passive reflection of the movement. Militants must consider their action as one of the factors which, in interaction with others, conditions and determines the action of the class. This conception provides the foundation for the necessity and value of the militant’s activity, while at the same time setting the limits of its possibilities and impact. Adapting one’s activity to the conditions of the present conjuncture is the only means of making this activity efficient and fruitful.

19. The attempt to construct the new class party in all haste and at any cost, despite unfavourable objective conditions springs from both an infantile and adventurist voluntarism and a false appreciation of the situation and its immediate perspectives, as well as, moreover, a totally wrong appreciation of the idea of the party and the relationship between party and class. Thus all such attempts are fatally destined to fail and only manage, in the best of cases, to create opportunist groupings trailing in the wake of the big parties of the Second and Third Internationals. Their existence is henceforth justified solely by the development within them of the spirit of the chapel and the sect.

Thus all these organisations are not only caught up, in their positivity, in the cogs of opportunism through their immediate "activism", they also, in their negativity, produce a narrow spirit typical of the sect, a parochial patriotism, as well as a fearful and superstitious attachment to "leaders", a caricature of the bigger organisations, a deification of organisational rules and submission to a "freely consented" discipline that becomes all the more tyrannical and intolerable in inverse proportion to the numbers involved in them.

In this dual outcome, the artificial and premature construction of the party leads to the negation of the construction of the political organism of the class, to the destruction of cadres and the more or less rapid, but still inevitable, loss of militants, used up, exhausted, in the void, and completely demoralised.

20. The disappearance of the party, either through its contraction and its organisational dislocation as was the case in the First International, or, through its passage into the service of capitalism, as was the case for the parties of the Second and Third Internationals, expresses in both cases the end of a period of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. The disappearance of the party is thus inevitable and neither voluntarism nor the presence of a more or less brilliant leader is able to prevent it.

Marx and Engels twice saw the organisation of the proletariat, in whose life they both played a major part, break up and die. Lenin and Luxemburg looked on powerlessly at the betrayal of the great parties of social democracy. Trotsky and Bordiga could do nothing to alter the degeneration of the Communist parties and their transformation into the monstrous capitalist machines that we have been faced with ever since.

These examples tell us not that the party is futile, as a fatalist and superficial analysis would have it, but only that the necessary party of the class has no existence along a uniformly continuous and rising line, that its very existence is not always possible, that its existence and development are in correspondence with and closely linked to the class struggle of the proletariat which gives birth to it and which it expresses. That's why the struggle of revolutionary militants within the party during the course of its degeneration and before its death as a workers' party has a revolutionary meaning, but not the vulgar meaning given to it by various Trotskyist oppositions. For the latter, it is a matter of setting the party right, and to this end it is above all necessary that the organisation and its unity is not put in peril. For them it is a question of maintaining the organisation in its past splendour, when in fact this is impossible precisely because of the objective conditions, so that the organisation’s original splendour could only be maintained at the price of a constant and growing alteration of its revolutionary and class nature. They look to organisational measures and remedies in order to save the organisation without understanding that organisational collapse is always the reflection of a period of revolutionary reflux and is often a far better solution than its survival; and in any case what revolutionaries have to save is not the organisation but its class ideology which is at risk of going down with the organisation.

Without understanding the objective causes of the inevitable loss of the old party, one cannot understand the task of militants in this period. Some came to the conclusion that, because they had failed to preserve the old party of the class, it was necessary to construct a new one straight away. This incomprehension can only result in adventurism, the whole being based on a voluntarist conception of the party.

A correct study of reality makes clear that the death of the old party clearly implies the immediate impossibility of constructing a new one; it means that the necessary conditions for the existence of any party, old or new, do not exist in the present.

In such a period only small revolutionary groups can survive, assuring a continuity which is less organisational than ideological. These groups concentrate within themselves the past experience of the class struggle, providing a link between the party of yesterday and that of tomorrow, between the culminating point of the struggle and the maturation of class consciousness in a period of past upsurge and its re-emergence on a higher level in a new period of upsurge in the future. In these groups the ideological life of the class carries on through the self-criticism of its struggles, the critical re-examination of its past ideas, the elaboration of its programme, the maturation of its consciousness and the formation of new cadres, new militants for the next stage of the revolutionary assault.

21. The present period that we are living in is on the one hand the product of the defeat of the first great revolutionary wave of the international proletariat which put an end to the First World War and which reached its high point in the October 1917 revolution in Russia and in the Spartacist movement of 1918-19 and, on the other, of the profound transformation that has taken place in the politico-economic structure of capitalism, which has been evolving towards its ultimate and decadent form: state capitalism. What is more, a dialectical relationship exists between this evolution of capitalism and the defeat of the revolution.

Despite their heroic fighting spirit, despite the permanent and insurmountable crisis of the capitalist system and the unprecedented aggravation of the conditions of the working class, the proletariat and its vanguard have not been able to hold out against the counter-offensive of capitalism. They were not confronted with classic capitalism and were surprised by its transformations, which have posed problems for which they were unprepared, either theoretically or politically. The proletariat and its vanguard, which had for a long time generally identified capitalism with private property of the means of production and socialism with statification, were baffled and disorientated by modern capitalism’s tendencies towards the statified concentration of the economy and planning. The great majority of workers were left with the idea that this evolution presented a new transformation of society from capitalism towards socialism. They associated themselves with this idea, abandoned their historic mission and became the most staunch partisans of the conservation of capitalist society.

It is these historic reasons that give the proletariat its present physiognomy. As long as these conditions prevail, as long as state capitalist ideology dominates the heads of workers, there can be no question of the reconstruction of the class party. Only through the course of the bloody cataclysms which mark out the phase of state capitalism will the proletariat grasp the abyss which separates socialist liberation from the present monstrous state capitalist regime, only thus will it develop a growing capacity to detach itself from this ideology which currently imprisons and annihilates it. Only then will the way again be opened for "the organisation of the proletariat into a class and thus into a political party". This stage will be reached all the more quickly if its revolutionary nuclei have made the theoretical effort needed to respond to the new problems posed by state capitalism and to help the proletariat recover its class solution and the means for its realisation.

22. In the present period, revolutionary militants can only survive by forming small groups undertaking a patient work of propaganda, of necessity limited in scope, at the same time as making strenuous efforts of research and theoretical clarification.

These groups will only be able to fulfil their tasks through looking for contact with other groups on the national and international levels on the basis of criteria demarcated by class frontiers. Only such contacts and their multiplication, with the aim of confronting positions and the clarification of problems, can allow these groups and militants to physically and politically resist the terrible pressure of capitalism in the present period and allow all these efforts to be a real contribution to the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.

The party of tomorrow

23. The party will not be a simple reproduction of that of yesterday. It cannot be rebuilt on an old model drawn from the past. As well as its programme, its structure and the relations it has established between itself and the whole of the class are founded on a synthesis of past experience and the new, more advanced conditions of the present stage. The party follows the evolution of the class struggle and at each stage of the latter's history corresponds to a particular form of the political organism of the proletariat.

At the dawn of modern capitalism, in the first half of the 19th century, a working class still in its phase of constitution undertook local and sporadic struggles and could only give birth to doctrinal schools, sects and leagues. The Communist League was the most advanced expression of this period, while at the same time its Manifesto with its call "proletarians of all countries – unite" heralded the period to come.

The First International corresponded to the proletariat’s effective entry onto the stage of social and political struggle in the principal countries of Europe. It thus grouped together all the organised forces of the working class, its diverse ideological tendencies. The First International brought together both all the currents and all the contingent aspects of the workers' struggles: economic, educational, political and theoretical. It was the highest point of the working class’ unitary organisation in all its diversity.

The Second International marked a stage of differentiation between the economic struggle of wage labour and the social, political struggle. In this period of the full flourishing of capitalist society, the Second International was the organisation of the struggle for reforms and of political conquests, for the political affirmation of the proletariat, and at the same time it marked a higher stage in the ideological demarcation of the proletariat by clarifying and elaborating the theoretical foundations of its historic revolutionary mission.

The First World War revealed the historic crisis of capitalism and opened up the period of its decline. The socialist revolution evolved from the theoretical level to one of practical demonstration. In the heat of events the proletariat in some ways found itself forced to hastily construct its revolutionary organisation of combat. The immense programmatic contribution of the first years of the Third International nonetheless proved inadequate faced with the huge problems posed by this ultimate phase of capitalism and by the tasks of revolutionary transformation. At the same time, living experience quickly demonstrated the general ideological immaturity of the class as a whole. Faced with these two dangers and under the pressure of events, piled on in rapid succession, the Third International was left to respond through organisational measures: iron discipline of militants, etc.

The organisational aspect had to compensate for the inadequacy of the programme, and the party for the immaturity of the class As a result, the party ended up substituting itself for the action of the class itself, with a resulting alteration of the idea of the party and its relations with the class.

24. On the basis of this experience, the future party will be founded on the re-establishment of this truth: although the revolution contains a problem of organisation, it is not however a problem of organisation. Above all, the revolution is an ideological problem of the maturation of consciousness among the broad masses of the proletariat.

No organisation, no party can substitute for the class itself and it remains true more than ever that "the emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves". The party, which is the crystallisation of class consciousness, is neither different from nor synonymous with the class. The party necessarily remains a small minority; it has no ambition to be a great numerical force. At no moment can it separate from nor replace the living action of the class. Its function remains that of ideological inspiration within the movement and action of the class.

25. During the insurrectionary period of the revolution, the role of the party is not to demand power for itself, nor to call on the masses to “have confidence” in it. It intervenes and develops its activity in favour of the self-mobilisation of the class, within which it aims for the triumph of its principles and the means for revolutionary action.

The mobilisation of the class around the party to which it “entrusts” or rather abandons leadership is a conception reflecting a state of immaturity in the class. Experience has shown that in such conditions the revolution will find it impossible to triumph and will degenerate quickly, resulting in a divorce between the class and the party. The latter finds itself forced to resort to more and more coercive methods in order to impose itself on the class, and this ends up as a serious obstacle to the forward march of the revolution.

The party is not an organisation of direction and execution; these functions belong to the unitary organisation of the class. If militants of the party take part in these functions they do so as members of the greater community of the proletariat.

26. In the post-revolutionary period, the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party is not the Single Party that is the classic hallmark of totalitarian regimes. The latter are characterised by their identification and assimilation with the state power of which they hold the monopoly. On the contrary, the class party of the proletariat characterises itself by being distinguished from the state, which is its historic antithesis. The Totalitarian Single Party tends to bloat and incorporate millions of individuals, making this a physical element of its domination and oppression. The party of the proletariat, on the contrary, by its nature, remains a strict ideological selection whose militants have no advantages to gain or defend. Their privilege is only to be the clearest combatants and the most devoted to the revolutionary cause. Thus the party doesn't aim to incorporate large numbers, because as its ideology becomes that of greater masses, the necessity for its existence tends to disappear and the hour of its dissolution will begin to sound.

The internal regime of the Party

27. The problem of the organisational rules which constitute the internal regime of the party is just as decisive as that of its programmatic content. Past experience, and most particularly that of the parties of the Third International, has shown that the conception of the party makes up a unitary whole. Organisational rules are an aspect and an expression of this conception. The question of organisation is not separate from the idea that one has of the party’s role and function and of its relationship with the class. None of these questions exist in themselves, rather they make up elements that are constitutive and expressive of the whole.

The parties of the Third International had the rules or the internal regimes they had because they were set up in a period of evident immaturity of the class which led to the substitution of party for class, organisation for consciousness, discipline for conviction.

The organisational rules of the future party will thus have to be based on a very different conception of the role of the party in a much more advanced stage of the struggle, resting on a much greater ideological maturity of the class.

28. The questions of democratic or organic centralism which occupied a major place in the Third International have lost their sharpness for the future party. When the action of the class relies on the action of the party, the question of the maximum practical efficacy came to dominate the party which, moreover, could only provide partial solutions.

The effectiveness of the party’s action does not consist in its practical action of leadership and execution, but in its ideological action. Thus the strength of the party lies not in the submission of its militants to discipline, but in their knowledge, their greater ideological development and their solid conviction.

The rules of the organisation do not come from abstract notions raised to the level of immanent or immutable principles, democratic or centralist. Such principles are empty of meaning. If the settlement of decisions taken by the (democratic) majority has to be maintained in the absence of a more appropriate method, that doesn't in any way mean that by definition the majority has the monopoly on truth and correct positions. Correct positions flow from the greatest knowledge of the object, from the closest grip on reality.

Thus the organisation’s internal rules must correspond to its objectives and so to the role of the party. Whatever the importance of the efficiency of its practical immediate action, which can provide it with the basis for exercising a wider discipline, it still remains less important than the maximum flourishing of the thinking of its militants, and as a consequence is subordinate to it.

As long as the party remains the crucible where class ideology is elaborated and deepened, its guiding principle must not only be the greatest freedom of ideas and disagreement in the framework of its programmatic principles: an even more fundamental concern must be to ceaselessly maintain and facilitate the combustion of thought, by providing the means for discussion and the confrontation of ideas and of tendencies inside the organisation.

29. Looking at the conception of the party from this angle, nothing is more foreign to it than the monstrous idea of a homogeneous, monolithic and monopolist party.

The existence of tendencies and fractions within the party is not just something to be tolerated, a right to be accorded and thus subject to discussion.

On the contrary, the existence of currents in the party – in the framework of acquired and verified principles – is one of the manifestations of a healthy conception of the idea of the party.

Marco. June 1948


1Today we share all the key ideas presented in this text and in most cases can support them to the letter. This is especially true for its insistence on the fundamental and irreplaceable role of the political party of the proletariat for the victory of the revolution. However, the following expression in the text does not provide the best way of understanding the dynamic of the development of the class struggle and the relations between party and class: . “Left to their own internal development, the workers’ struggles against the conditions of capitalist exploitation can lead at most to the explosion of revolts”. In fact, historical experience has shown the revolutionary capacities of the class, in particular the fact that the combination of the economic with the political dimensions of the struggle can mutually dynamise each other. To be more precise about the role of revolutionaries, it is not to bring consciousness to the workers but to accelerate, to extend and deepen, the development of consciousness within the class. For more elements relating to our position on this subject, we refer readers to the following articles: ‘The mass strike opens the door to the proletarian revolution’, International Review 90 (part of the series on communism), and ‘Questions of organisation: have we become ‘Leninists’?’ in IR 96 and 97.

2 The same theoretical reflection underlies another article, ‘The tasks of the hour’, published in Internationalsme in 1946 and re-published in IR 32.

3 Republished, with a new introduction, under the title “In the aftermath of World War II...” (see recommended links)

4This is what happened to all the currents of utopian socialism which, having become schools, lost their revolutionary aspect and were transformed into actively conservative forces. Consider the examples of Proudhonism, Fourierism, the co-operatives, reformism and state socialism.

 

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On Organisation

News of our death is greatly exaggerated…

2014 Extraordinary Conference of the ICC

At the beginning of May the ICC convoked an Extraordinary International Conference. For some time a crisis had been developing within the ICC. It was judged necessary to call this Conference in addition to the regular International Congresses of the ICC, in view of the urgency of fully understanding the crisis, and developing the means to overcome it. Extraordinary Conferences have been convened before by the organisation in 1982 and 2002 according to the statutes of the organisation which allow for them when the fundamental principles of the ICC are called into question in a dangerous manner1.

All the international sections of the ICC sent delegations to this third extraordinary Conference and participated very actively in the debates. The sections which were not able to come physically (because of the Schengen fortress around Europe) sent statements to the conference on the different reports and resolutions submitted for discussion.

Crises are not necessarily fatal

Contacts and sympathisers of our organisation maybe alarmed by this news, just as the enemies of revolutionary organisation will receive a frisson of encouragement. Some of the latter have already assumed that this crisis is a harbinger of our demise. But this was also predicted in previous crises of our organisation. In the wake of the 1982 crisis - 32 years ago - we replied, as we do now, with the words of Mark Twain: news of our death is greatly exaggerated!

Crises are not necessarily a guarantee of impending collapse and failure. On the contrary, the existence of crises can be an expression of a healthy resistance to an underlying tendency towards failure that had hitherto been developing peacefully. And therefore crises can be the sign of reacting to danger and struggling against signs of collapse. A crisis is also an opportunity: to understand the root causes of serious difficulties that will enable the organisation to ultimately strengthen itself and temper its militants for future battles.

In the Second International (1889-1914) the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was well known for undergoing a series of crises and splits, and for this reason was held in contempt by the leaders of the larger parties of the International like the German Social Democracy (SPD) who presented an appearance of going from success to success, steadily increasing their membership and electoral votes. However the crises of the Russian Party, and the struggle to overcome and learn from them by the Bolshevik wing, steeled the revolutionary minority in preparation for standing against the imperialist war in 1914 and for leading the October Revolution of 1917. By contrast the facade of unity of the SPD (challenged only by ‘trouble-makers’ like Rosa Luxemburg) completely and irrevocably collapsed in 1914 with the complete betrayal of its internationalist principles in face of the First World War.

In 1982 the ICC recognised its own crisis - brought about by a growth of leftist and activist confusions that enabled Chenier2 to create havoc in its British section - and drew the lessons of its setback to re-establish at a deeper level the principles of its function and functioning3. The Bordigist Internationalist Communist Party (Communist Programme) which was at that time the largest group of the communist left, was invaded even more seriously by similar tendencies, but this party seemed to carry on as normal - only to collapse like a house of cards with the loss of the majority of its members4.

In addition to the recognition of its own crises ICC thus follows another principle learned from the Bolshevik experience: to make known the circumstances and details of its internal crisis in order to contribute to a more widespread clarification. We are convinced that the internal crises of the revolutionary organisation can bring into sharper relief general truths about the struggle for communism.

In the preface to One step forward, two steps back, in 1904, Lenin wrote:

"They [our adversaries] exult and grimace at the sight of our discussions; obviously, they will try, to serve their own purposes, to brandish my pamphlet devoted to the defects and weaknesses in our Party. The Russian social-democrats are sufficiently tempered in battle not to be troubled by such pinpricks, and to continue in spite of everything with their task of self-criticism, mercilessly unveiling their own weaknesses, which will be overcome necessarily and without fail by the growth of the workers' movement. Let our adversaries try to give us an image of the situation in their own 'parties' which comes close to that presented by the minutes of our 2nd Congress!".

We believe, like Lenin, that whatever superficial pleasure our enemies gain from learning about our problems, genuine revolutionaries will learn from our mistakes and emerge the stronger for it.

That is why we are publishing here, albeit briefly, an account of the evolution of this crisis in the ICC and the role that the Extraordinary Conference has played in responding to it.

The events of the present crisis of the ICC and the struggle against it

The epicentre of the present crisis of the ICC was the existence in the section in France of a campaign of denigration, hidden from the organisation as a whole, of a comrade, who was demonised to such an extent that her very presence in the organisation was supposed to constitute a barrier to its development. Naturally the existence of such scapegoating - blaming a particular comrade for the problems of the whole organisation - is anathema in a communist minority which rejects the bullying which is endemic to capitalist society and flows from its morality of ‘everyman for himself’ and ‘devil take the hindmost’. The problems of the organisation are the responsibility of the whole organisation according to its ethic of ‘all for one, and one for all’. The covert campaign of ostracism of one comrade put in question the very concept of communist solidarity that the ICC is founded on.

We could not be content to simply put a stop to this campaign once it had come into the open. We had to go to the roots and explain why and how such a blatant betrayal of a basic communist principle could develop once again in our ranks. The task of the Extraordinary Conference was to reach a common agreement on this explanation and the perspective for eradicating it in the future.

The organisation had already agreed to the maligned comrade’s request for a Jury of Honour. One of the tasks of the Extraordinary Conference was to hear and pronounce on the final report of the Jury. It was not enough for everyone to agree that the comrade had been subjected to slanders and denigrations - it had to be proven wrong in facts. The allegations and denigrations had to be brought into the open in order to remove any ambiguity and prevent any recurrence of slanders in the future. After a year of work, the Jury of Honour (made up of comrades from four ICC sections) systematically refuted, as devoid of any foundation, all the accusations (and particularly certain shameful slanders developed by one militant).5 The Jury was able to show that this campaign of ostracism had, in reality, been based on the infiltration into the organization of obscurantist prejudices spread by the circle spirit, and a certain ‘gossip culture’, inherited from the past and from which certain militants had not really broken free.

In devoting its resources to this Jury the organisation was following another lesson of the history of the revolutionary movement: that any militant who is the object of suspicions, of unfounded accusations or slanders has the duty to call for a Jury of Honour. To reject such an approach means implicitly recognizing the validity of the accusations.

The Jury of Honour is also a means of “preserving the moral health of a revolutionary organization”, as Victor Serge insisted in his book What every revolutionary should know about state repression, since distrust among its members is a poison which can rapidly destroy a proletarian organization.

This is a fact well known by the police who historically have tried to use this most favoured method to destroy revolutionary organisations from within. We saw this in the 1930s with the plots of the Stalinist GPU against the Left Opposition in France and elsewhere. Indeed singling out particular individuals for denigration and slander has been a principle weapon of the bourgeoisie as a whole in fomenting distrust of the revolutionary movement.

That’s why revolutionary Marxists have traditionally devoted every effort to unmasking such attacks on communist organisations.

At the time of the Moscow Trials in the 1930s, the exiled Leon Trotsky demanded a Jury of Honour (known as the Dewey Commission) to clear his name of the repulsive slanders made against him by the prosecutor Vishinsky at the Moscow Trials6. Marx broke off his writing of Capital for a year in 1860 in order to prepare an entire book systematically refuting the calumnies against him by ‘Herr Vogt’.

Concurrently with the work of the Jury of Honour the organisation looked to the underlying roots of the crisis. After the crisis in the ICC in 2000-2 the ICC had already embarked on a long term theoretical effort to understand how a secret ‘fraction’ could emerge within the organisation that behaved like thugs and informers: secretly circulating rumours that one of our militants was a state agent, stealing money and material from the organization (notably the list of addresses of militants and subscribers), blackmail, death threats towards one of our militants, publication on the outside of internal information that deliberately did the work of the police etc. This ignoble ‘fraction’ with its gangster behavior (recalling that of the Chenier tendency during the 1981 crisis) became known as the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’ (IFICC)7

In the wake of this experience the ICC began to examine from a historical and theoretical angle the problem of morality. In International Review 111 and 112 we published the Orientation Text on ‘Confidence and solidarity in the proletarian struggle’8 and in IR 127 and 128 another text ‘Marxism and Ethics’9 was published. Linked to these theoretical explorations there was also historical research into the phenomenon of ‘pogromism’ - that complete antithesis of communist values that was displayed by the FICCI. It was on the basis of these earlier texts and theoretical work on aspects of communist morality that the organisation elaborated an understanding of its current crisis. Superficiality, slidings towards workerism and opportunism, a neglect of reflection and of theoretical discussions in favour of activist, left-type intervention in immediate struggles, impatience and the tendency to lose sight of our activity in the long term, facilitated this crisis within the ICC. This crisis was thus identified as an “intellectual and moral crisis” and was accompanied by a loss of sight, and transgressions of, the ICC’s statutes10

The fight to defend the moral principles of marxism

At the Extraordinary Conference we returned in further depth to a Marxist understanding of morality in the interests of preparing the theoretical core of our activity in the coming period. We will continue to discuss and explore this question as the main weapon of our regeneration from the current crisis. Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary organisation.

Contained within the communist project, and inseparable from it, is an ethical dimension. And it is this dimension which is particularly menaced within a decomposing capitalist society that thrives on exploitation and violence, “oozing blood and filth from every pore” as Marx wrote in Capital. This threat is already particularly developed in capitalism’s decadent phase when the bourgeoisie progressively abandons even the moral tenets that it held in its expanding liberal period. The final episode of capitalist decadence - the period of social decomposition that begins approximately with the landmark of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 - accentuates this process still further. Today society is more and more openly, even proudly, barbaric. In every aspect of life we see it: the proliferation of wars whose main objective seems to be to humiliate and degrade its victims before slaughtering them; the widespread growth of gangsterism - and its celebration in film and music; the launching of pogroms to find a scapegoat for capitalism’s crimes and for social suffering; the rise of xenophobia towards immigrants and bullying at the workplace (“mobbing”); the development of violence towards women, sexual harassment and misogyny, including in schools and among the youth of city housing estates. Cynicism, lying and hypocrisy are no longer seen as reprehensible but are taught in “management” courses. The most elemental values of social existence - let alone those of communist society - have been desecrated as capitalism putrefies.

The members of revolutionary organisations cannot escape this environment of barbaric thought and behaviour. They are not immune to this deleterious atmosphere of social decomposition, particularly as the working class today remains relatively passive and disorientated and thus unable to offer an alternative en masse to the accelerating demise of capitalist society. Other classes in society close to the proletariat however provide an active vector of rotten values. The traditional impotence and frustration of the petit bourgeoisie - the intermediate strata between bourgeoisie and proletariat - becomes particularly exaggerated and finds an outlet in pogromism, in onscurantism and witch-hunts which provide a sense of cowardly empowerment to those hounding ‘trouble-makers’.

It was particularly necessary to return to the problem of morality at the 2014 Extraordinary Conference because the explosive nature of the crisis of 2000-2002, the odious and clearly repulsive actions of the IFICC, the behavior of certain of its members as nihilist adventurers, had tended to obscure the deeper underlying incomprehensions that had provided the soil for the pogromist mentality at the origin of the formation of this so-called “fraction”11.

Because of the dramatic nature of the IFICC scandal a decade ago, there had been a strong trend in the organisation in the intervening period to want to ‘return to normal’ - to try find an illusory breathing space. There was a mood to avert attention away from a deep theoretical and historical treatment of organisational questions to more ‘practical’ issues of intervention and to a smooth, but superficial, ‘building’ of the organisation. Despite devoting a considerable effort to the work of theoretically overcoming its previous crisis, this was more and more seen as a side issue rather than a life or death question for the future of the revolutionary organisation.

The slow and difficult revival of class struggle in 2003 and the greater receptivity within the political milieu to discussion with the communist left tended to reinforce this weakness. Parts of the organisation began to ‘forget’ the principles and acquisitions of the ICC, and develop a disdain for theory. The statutes of the organisation which encapsulate internationalist centralised principles tended to become ignored in favour of the habits of local and circle philistinism, of good old common sense and the “religion of daily life”, as Marx put it in volume one of Capital. Opportunism began to grow in an insidious manner.

However there was a resistance to this tendency to theoretical disinterest, political amnesia and sclerosis. One comrade in particular was outspoken in criticising this opportunist trend and as a consequence became increasingly seen as an obstacle to a ‘normal’ machine-like functioning of the organization. Instead of providing a coherent political answer to the comrade’s criticism, opportunism expressed itself by an underhand personal vilification. Other militants, notably in the ICC sections in France and Germany, who shared the comrade’s point of view against the opportunist deviations also became the “collateral damage” of this campaign of defamation.

Thus the Extraordinary Conference showed that today, as in the history of the workers movement, campaigns of denigration and opportunism go together. Indeed the former appears in the workers’ movement as the extreme expression of the latter. Rosa Luxemburg, who, as spokeswoman of the Marxist left was unsparing in her denunciations of opportunism, was systematically persecuted and denigrated by the leaders of German Social Democracy. The degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and Third International was accompanied by the unending persecution of the Bolshevik old guard, and in particular of Leon Trotsky.

The organisation had thus to also reprise the classical concepts of organisational opportunism from the history of the Marxist left that includes the lessons of the ICC’s own experience.

The need to reject both opportunism, and its conciliatory expression as centrism, was to be the motto of the Extraordinary Conference: the crisis of the ICC demanded a protracted struggle against the identified roots of the problems, which took the form of certain tendency to treat the ICC as a cocoon, a to turn the organization into a “club” of opinions and to try to find slot inside decomposing bourgeois society. In fact the very nature of revolutionary militancy means a permanent fight against the weight of the dominant ideology and of all the ideologies alien to the proletariat which can insidiously infiltrate revolutionary organisations. It is this combat which has to be understood as the ‘norm’ of the life of communist organisation and each of its members.

The struggle against superficial agreement, the courage to express and develop differences and the individual effort to speak one’s mind in front of the whole organisation, the strength to take political criticism - these were the qualities that the Extraordinary Conference insisted on. According to the Activities Resolution which was agreed at the Conference:

5d) The revolutionary militant must be a fighter, for the class positions of the proletariat and for his own ideas.

This is not an optional condition of militancy, it is militancy. Without it there can be no struggle for the truth which can only arise out of the clash of ideas and of each militant standing up for what he believes in. The organisation needs to know the positions of all comrades, passive agreement is useless and counter-productive,… Taking individual responsibility, being honest is a fundamental aspect of proletarian morality.”

The present crisis is not the ‘final’ crisis of the ICC

On the eve of the Extraordinary Conference the publication on the internet of an ‘Appeal to the proletarian camp and the militants of the ICC’, announcing the “final crisis” of the ICC, strongly underlined the importance of this necessity to fight for the defence of the communist organization and its principles, in particular against all those who try to destroy it. This particularly nauseating ‘Appeal’ emanates from the so-called ‘International Group of the Communist Left’, in reality a disguise for the infamous former IFICC thanks to its marriage with elements from Klasbatalo in Montreal. It’s a text dripping with hatred and calls for a pogrom against certain of our comrades. This text announces grandly that the ‘IGCL’ is in possession of internal documents of the ICC. Its intention is clear: to try to sabotage our Extraordinary Conference, to sow trouble and discord within the ICC by spreading suspicion in its ranks on the very eve of the Extraordinary Conference – sending out the message that ‘there is a traitor inside the ICC, an accomplice of the IGCL who is sending us the ICC’s internal bulletins’12.

The Extraordinary Conference immediately took position on the IGCL’s ‘Appeal’. To all our militants it was clear that the IFICC was once again, and in an even more pernicious manner, doing the work of the police in the manner so eloquently described in Victor Serge’s book What every revolutionary should know about state repression (written on the basis of the archives of the Czarist police discovered after the October revolution13).

But instead of turning the comrades of the ICC against each other, the unanimous disgust for the methods the ‘IGCL’, worthy of the political police of Stalin and of the Stasi, served to make plain the wider stakes of our internal crisis that the ICC was engaged in, and tended to reinforce the unity of the militants behind the slogan of the workers’ movement: “All for one and one for all!” (recalled in the book The Nature of Human Brain Work by Joseph Dietzgen, who Marx called “the philosopher of the proletariat”). This police-type attack by the IGCL made it clearer to all the militants that the internal weaknesses of the organisation, a lack of vigilance towards the permanent pressure of the dominant ideology within revolutionary organisations, had made it vulnerable to the machinations of the class enemy whose destructive intent is unquestionable.

The Extraordinary Conference saluted the enormous and extremely serious work of the Jury of Honour. It also saluted the courage of the comrade who and called for it and who had been ostracized for her political disagreements14. Only cowards and those who know they are completely guilty would refuse to clarify things in front of such a commission, which is an inheritance of the workers’ movement. The cloud hanging over the organisation had been lifted. And it was timely: the need of every comrade to fight together was more imperative than ever.

The Extraordinary Conference could not complete the struggle of the ICC against this “intellectual and moral crisis” - this struggle is necessarily ongoing - but it did provide an unambiguous orientation: the opening of a theoretical debate on the ‘Theses on Morality’ proposed by the central organ of the ICC. Obviously we will eventually publish the debates and divergences around this text when the discussion has reached a sufficient level of maturity.

Some of our readers may feel that the polarisation of the ICC around its internal crisis and on fighting against the police-type attacks aimed at us is the expression of a kind of narcissistic lunacy or of a collective paranoid delirium. The concern for the intransigent defence of our organisational, programmatic and ethical principles is, from this point of view, a diversion from the practical, common-sense task of developing our influence in the immediate struggles of the working class. This point of view in fact a repetition, in essence although in a different context, of the arguments about the opportunists comparing the smooth functioning of German social democracy with that the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which was shaken by crises throughout the period leading up to the First World war. The approach which seeks to avoid differences, to reject the confrontation of political arguments in order to preserve ‘unity’ at any price will sooner or later lead to the disappearance of organised revolutionary minorities.

The defence of fundamental communist principles, however distant this may seem from the current needs and consciousness of the working class, is nonetheless the primordial task of revolutionary minorities. Our determination to wage a permanent combat for the defence of communist morality – which is at the heart of the principle of solidarity – is key to preserving our organisation faced with the miasma of capitalism’s social decomposition which inevitably seeps through into all revolutionary organisations. Only by politically arming ourselves, by strengthening our work of theoretical elaboration, will we be able to face up to this deadly danger. Furthermore, without the implacable defence of the ethics of the class which is the bearer of communism, the possibility that the developing class struggle will lead to the revolution and the construction of a real world community will be continually smothered.

One thing became clear at the 2014 Extraordinary Conference: there would be no ‘return to normal’ whether in the internal or external activities of the ICC.

Contrary to what happened in the crisis of 2001, we can already rejoice in the fact that comrades who had got drawn into a logical of irrational stigmatisation and scapegoating were able to see the gravity of what they had been involved in. These militants have freely decided to remain loyal to the ICC and its principles and are now engaged in our combat for the for consolidating the organisation. As with the rest of the of the ICC, they are now taking part in the work of theoretical reflection and deepening which had been largely underestimated in the past. By appropriating Spinoza’s formula “neither laugh nor cry but understand”, the ICC is trying to return to a key idea of marxism: that the proletariat’s struggle for communism not only has an “economic” dimension (as the vulgar materialists imagine) but also and fundamentally an “intellectual and moral” dimension (as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in particular argued).

We must therefore regretfully inform our detractors that within the ICC there is no immediate perspective of a new parasitic split as was the case with previous crises. There is no perspective for the formation of a new “fraction” susceptible to joining up with the IGCL’s ‘Appeal’ for a pogrom against our own comrades - an appeal frenetically relayed by various ‘social networks’ and the so-called ‘Pierre Hempel’ who takes himself for a representative of the “universal proletariat”. On the contrary: the police methods of the IGCL (sponsored by a ‘critical’ tendency inside a bourgeois reformist party, the NPA15) have only succeeded in strengthening the indignation of the militants of the ICC and their determination to fight for the strengthening of the organisation. The news of our death is thus both exaggerated and premature….

International Communist Current


1 As at the time of the Extraordinary Conference of 2002 (see the article in International Review no.110, ‘Extraordinary Conference of the ICC: the struggle for the defence of organisational principles’, the one in 2014 partially replaced the regular congress of our section in France. So certain sessions were devoted to the extraordinary international conference and others to the congress of the section in France which our paper Révolution Internationale will write about at a later date

2 Chenier was a member of the section in France excluded in the summer of 1981 for having waged a secret campaign of denigration against the central organs of the organisation and certain of its most experienced militants with the aim of setting one against the other, activities which curiously enough recalled the work of GPU agents within the Trotskyist movement during the 1930s. a few months after his expulsion, Chenier took up a responsible post within the apparatus of the Socialist Party, then in government

3 See International Review No29 ’Report on the functioning of the revolutionary organisation’ en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR029_function.htm, and IR33 ‘Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation, en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR033_functioning.htm.

4 See IR 32 ‘Convulsions in the revolutionary milieu’, en.internationalism.org/node/3123

5 Parallel to this campaign, in informal discussions in the section in France, certain militants of the ‘old’ generation, spread some scandalous gossip about our comrade Marc Chirik, a founding member of the ICC and without whom our organisation would not have existed. This gossip was identified as an expression of the weight of the circle sprit and the influence of the decomposing petty bourgeoisie which profoundly marked the generation that came out of the student movement of May 68, with all its anarcho-modernist and leftist ideologies.

6 The ICC’ s Jury of honour based itself on the scientific method of investigation and verification of the facts by the Dewy Commission. All of its work (documents, verbal proceedings, recordings of interviews and testimonies etc) is carefully conserved in the ICC’s archives.

7 See in particular our articles ‘15th Congress of the ICC: Today the Stakes Are High—Strengthen the Organization to Confront Them’ ; https://en.internationalism.org/ir/114_congress.html; ‘The police-like methods of the ‘IFICC’, https://en.internationalism.org/262_infraction.htm; "Calomnie et mouchardage, les deux mamelles de la politique de la FICCI envers le CCI" (https://fr.internationalism.org/icconline/2006_ficci)

10 The central organ of the ICC, as well as the Jury of Honour, clearly showed that it was not the ostracised comrade who had not respected the statutes of the ICC but on the contrary the militants who had engaged in this campaign of denigration

11 The resistance in our ranks to developing a debate on the question of morality had its origin in a congenital weakness of the ICC (and which actually affects all the groups of the communist left): the majority of the first generation of militants rejected this question which could not be integrated into our statutes, as our comrade Marc Chirik had hoped. Morality was seen by these young militants at the time as a prison, a “product of bourgeois ideology”, to the point where some of them, coming out of the libertarian milieu, demanded to live “without taboos”! Which reveals a gross ignorance of the history of the human species and the development of its civilisation.

13 As if to confirm the class nature of the attack, a certain Pierre Hempel published on his blog further internal documents of the ICC that the ex-IFICC had given to him. He volunteered the comment that “if the police had passed such a document to me, I would have thanked them in the name of the proletariat”!This Holy Alliance of the enemies of the ICC, to a large extent made up of a “Friendly Society of Old ICC Combatants”, know which camp they belong to!

14 This had also been the case at the beginning of the crisis of 2001: when this same comrade had expressed a political disagreement with a text written by the International Secretariat of the ICC (on the question of centralisation), the majority of the IS put up the shutters and instead of opening a debate to reply to the comrade’s political arguments, stifled this debate and embarked on a campaign of slander against this comrade (holding secret meetings and spreading rumours in the sections in France and Mexico that this comrade, because of her political disagreements with members of the central organ of the ICC, was a “shit-stirrer” and even a “cop”, to cite the two members of the ex-IFICC, Juan and Jonas, who were at the origin of the formation of the IGCL.

15 We should point out that to this day the IGCL has given no explanation for its relations and convergence with this tendency which wrks inside the New Anti-Capitalist party, NPA, of Olivier Besancenot. Silence means assent!

 

Life of the ICC: 

Rubric: 

2014 Extraordinary Conference of the ICC

Spain 1936: Dissident voices within the anarchist movement

 

The Friends of Durruti

The first part of this article looked at the process which led to the integration of the official anarcho-syndicalist organisation, the CNT, into the bourgeois Republican state in Spain in 1936-37, and sought to link these betrayals to the underlying programmatic and theoretical weaknesses of the anarchist world-view. Certainly these capitulations did not go unopposed by proletarian currents inside and outside the CNT. The Libertarian Youth, a left tendency in the POUM around Rebull,1 the Bolshevik Leninist (Trotskyist) group around Munis, the Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri who edited Guerra di Classe, and in particular the Friends of Durruti, animated by Jaime Balius and others.2 To a greater or lesser extent all these groups were made up of working class militants who fought in the heroic struggles of July ‘36 and May ‘37, and without ever reaching the clarity of the Italian communist left, which we highlighted in the first part, opposed the official CNT/POUM policy of participation in the bourgeois state and the strike breaking role of the CNT and the POUM during the May days.

The Friends were perhaps the most important of all these tendencies. They greatly outweighed the other groups numerically, and were able to carry out a significant intervention in the May days, distributing the famous leaflet which defined their programmatic positions:

CNT-FAI ‘Friends of Durruti’ group. Workers! A revolutionary Junta. Shoot the culprits. Disarm the armed corps. Socialise the economy. Disband the political parties which have turned on the working class. We must not surrender the streets. The revolution before all else. We salute our comrades from the POUM who fraternised with us on the streets. Long live the social revolution! Down with the counter-revolution!

This leaflet was a shorter version of the outline list of demands which the Friends had published in the form of a wall poster in April 1937:

From the Group of the Friends of Durruti. To the working class:

  1. The immediate constitution of a Revolutionary Junta formed of workers from the city and the countryside and combatants.
  2. The family wage. Rationing card. Direction of the economy and control over distribution by the trade unions.
  3. Liquidation of the counterrevolution.
  4. Creation of a revolutionary army.
  5. Absolute control of public order by the working class.
  6. Firm opposition to any armistice.
  7. A proletarian justice system.
  8. Abolition of prisoner exchanges.

Attention, workers: our group is opposed to the advancing counterrevolution. The decrees on public order, sponsored by Aiguadé, will not be implemented. We demand that Maroto and the other imprisoned comrades be released.

All power to the working class. All economic power to the trade unions. Against the Generalitat, the Revolutionary Junta.”

The other groups, including the Trotskyists, tended to look to the Friends of Durruti as a potential vanguard: Munis was even optimistic that they would evolve towards Trotskyism. But perhaps the most significant aspect of the Friends was that, despite emerging from inside the CNT, they recognised the inability of the CNT to develop a revolutionary theory and thus the revolutionary programme which they considered was demanded by the situation in Spain. Agustin Guillamon draws our attention to a passage in the pamphlet Towards a Fresh Revolution, published in January 1938, where the author, Balius, writes:

The CNT was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete programme. We had no idea of where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty: but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion which erupted inside our organisations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Marxists who support the farce of yesteryear. What is worse, we allowed the bourgeoisie a breathing space: to return, to re-form and to behave as would a conqueror.3

As pointed out in our article “The Friends of Durruti: lessons of an incomplete break with anarchism” in IR nº 102, the CNT did in fact have a theory of sorts at this stage – a theory justifying participation in the bourgeois state, above all in the name of anti-fascism. But the Friends were correct in the more general sense that the proletariat cannot make the revolution without a clear and conscious understanding of the direction in which it is heading, and it is the specific task of the revolutionary minority to develop and elaborate such an understanding, based on the experience of the class as a whole.

In this quest for programmatic clarity, the Friends were obliged to question some fundamental assumptions of anarchism: the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat and for a revolutionary vanguard to fight within the working class for its implementation. The advance made by the Friends at this level is clearly recognised by Guillamon, particularly in his analysis of the articles Balius wrote from exile,

After a reading of these two articles, it has to be acknowledged that the evolution of Balius’s political thinking, rooted in analysis of the wealth of experience garnered during the civil war, had led him to confront issues taboo in the anarchist ideology: 1) the need for the proletariat to take power. 2) the ineluctability of the destruction of the capitalist state apparatus to clear the way for a proletarian replacement. 3) the indispensable role of a revolutionary leadership.4

Aside from Balius’s reflections, the notion of a revolutionary leadership was more implicit in the practical activity of the group than explicitly formulated, and was not really compatible with the Friends’ definition of itself as an “affinity group”, which at best implies a temporary formation limited to specific ends, rather than a permanent political organisation based on a definite set of programmatic and organisational principles. But the group’s recognition of the need for an organ of proletarian power is more explicit. It is contained in the idea of the “revolutionary junta”, which the Friends admitted was a kind of innovation for anarchism, “we are introducing a slight variation in anarchism into our programme. The establishment of a Revolutionary Junta.”5 Munis, in an interview with the French Trotskyist paper Lutte Ouvrière, equates the junta with the idea of the soviet and has no doubt that “This circle of revolutionary workers (the Friends of Durruti) represented a beginning of anarchism’s evolving in the direction of Marxism. They had been driven to replace the theory of libertarian communism with that of the ‘revolutionary junta’ (soviet) as the embodiment of proletarian power, democratically elected by the workers”.6

In his book Guillamon recognises this convergence between the “innovations” of the Friends and the classic positions of marxism, although he is at pains to refute any idea that the Friends were directly influenced by the marxist groups that they were in contact with, such as the Bolshevik-Leninists. Certainly the group itself, as we can see from the passage in the Balius pamphlet above, would have angrily repudiated the charge that they were heading in the direction of marxism, which they were barely able to distinguish from its counter-revolutionary caricatures. But if marxism is indeed the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, it is not surprising that revolutionary proletarians, reflecting on the lessons of the class struggle, should be drawn towards its fundamental conclusions. The question of the specific influence in such a process of this or that political group is not unimportant, but it is a secondary element.

An incomplete break with anarchism

Nevertheless, despite these advances, the Friends never succeeded in making a profound break with anarchism.

The Friends remained powerfully attached to anarcho-syndicalist traditions and ideas. To be eligible to join the group, you had to also be member of the CNT. As can be seen from the April wall poster and other documents, they still considered that workers’ power could be expressed not only through a “revolutionary junta” or through the workers committees’ created in the course of the struggle, but simultaneously through union control of the economy and through “free municipalities”7– formulae which reveal a continuity with the Zaragoza programme whose severe limitations we examined in the first part of this article. Thus the programme elaborated by the Friends had not succeeded in drawing out the real experience of the revolutionary movements of 1905 and 1917-23, where the practice of the working class had seen workers going the beyond the union form, and where the Spartacists, for example, had called for the dissolution of all existing organs of local government in favour of the workers’ councils. It is significant in this respect that in the columns of the group’s paper, El Amigo del Pueblo, which tried to draw the lessons of the events of 36-37, a major historical series was written on the experience of the French bourgeois revolution, not the proletarian revolutions in Russia or Germany.

The Friends certainly saw the “revolutionary junta” as the means for the proletariat to take power in 1937, but was Munis right that the “revolutionary junta” was equivalent to the soviet? There is an area of ambiguity here, no doubt precisely because of the Friends’ apparent incapacity to connect with the experience of the workers’ councils outside Spain. For example, it is not clear how they saw the junta as being formed. Did they see it as the direct emanation of general assemblies in the factories and the militias, or was it to be the product of the most determined workers on their own? In an article in nº 6 of El Amigo, they “advocate that the only participants in the revolutionary Junta should be the workers of city and countryside and the combatants who have shown themselves at every crucial juncture in the conflict to be the champions of social revolution.8 Guillamon is in no doubt about the implication of this: “The evolution of the Friends of Durruti’s political thinking was by now unstoppable. After the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat had been acknowledged, the next issue to arise was: And who is to exercise that dictatorship of the proletariat? The answer was: the revolutionary Junta, promptly defined as the vanguard of revolutionaries. And its role? We cannot believe that it be anything other than the one which Marxists ascribe to the revolutionary party.9 But from our point of view, one of the fundamental lessons of the revolutionary movements of 1917-23, and the Russian revolution in particular, was that the revolutionary party cannot exercise its role if it identifies itself with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here Guillamon seems to theorise the Friends’ own ambiguities on this question; we shall return to this shortly.

In any case, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the junta was a kind of expedient, rather than the “finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” as marxists like Lenin and Trotsky had viewed the soviets. In Towards a fresh revolution, for example, Balius argues that the CNT itself should have taken power “When an organisation’s whole existence has been spent preaching revolution, it has an obligation to act whenever a favourable set of circumstances arises. And in July the occasion did present itself. The CNT ought to have leapt into the driver’s seat in the country, delivering a severe coup de grace to all that is outmoded and archaic. In this way, we would have won the war and saved the revolution”10 Apart from severely underestimating the deep process of degeneration that had been gnawing away at the CNT well before 1936,11 this again reveals an inability to assimilate the lessons of the whole 1917-23 revolutionary wave, which had made it clear why the soviets, and not syndicalist unions, were the indispensable form of the proletarian dictatorship.

The Friends’ attachment to the CNT also had major implications at the organisational level. In their manifesto of 8th May, the role played by the CNT’s upper echelons in undermining the May 1937 uprising was characterised without hesitation as treason; those it denounced as traitors had already attacked the Friends as agents provocateurs, echoing the habitual slanders of the Stalinists, and threatened their immediate expulsion from the CNT. This fierce antagonism was without doubt a reflection of the class divide between the political camp of the proletariat and forces that had become an agency of the bourgeois state. But faced with the necessity to make a decisive break with the CNT, the Friends drew back and agreed to drop the charge of treason in exchange for the lifting of the call for expulsion, a move which undoubtedly undermined the capacity of the Friends to continue functioning as an independent group. The sentimental attachment to the CNT was simply too strong for a large part of the militants, even if many – and not only members of the Friends or other dissident groups - had torn up their membership cards on being ordered to dismantle the barricades and return to work in May ‘37. This attachment was summed up in the decision of Jaoquin Aubi and Rosa Muñoz to resign from the group under threat of expulsion from the CNT: “I continue to regard the comrades belonging to the ‘Friends of Durruti’ as comrades: but I say again what I have always said at plenums in Barcelona: ‘The CNT has been my womb and the CNT will be my tomb.”12

The “national” limitations of the Friends’ vision

In the first part of this article, we showed that the CNT programme was stuck in a narrowly national framework, one which saw “libertarian communism” as being possible in the context of a single self-sufficient country. The Friends certainly had a strong internationalist attitude at an almost instinctive level – for example, in their appeal to the international working class to come to the aid of the insurgent workers in May ‘37 – but this attitude was not informed theoretically either by a serious analysis of the balance of class forces on a global and historical scale, or in a capacity to develop a programme on the basis of the international experience of the working class, as we have already noted in discussing the imprecision of their notion of the “revolutionary junta”. Guillamon is particularly scathing in his criticisms of this weakness as revealed in a chapter of Balius’s pamphlet:

The next chapter in the pamphlet tackles the subject of Spain's independence. The entire chapter is replete with wrong-headed notions which are short-sighted or better suited to the petit bourgeoisie. A cheap and vacuous nationalism is championed with limp, simplistic references to international politics. So we shall pass over this chapter, saying only that the Friends of Durruti subscribed to bourgeois, simplistic and/or backward-looking ideas with regard to nationalism13

The influences of nationalism were particularly crucial in the Friends’ incapacity to understand the real nature of the war in Spain. As we wrote in our article in IR nº 102:

In fact the Friends of Durruti's considerations on the war were made on the basis of anarchism's the narrow and ahistorical nationalist thinking. This led them to a vision of the events in Spain as the continuation of the bourgeoisie's ludicrous revolutionary efforts against the Napoleonic invasion of 1808. Whilst the international workers' movement was debating the defeat of the world proletariat and the perspective of a Second World War, the Anarchists in Spain thought about Fernando VII and Napoleon:

What is happening today is a re-enactment of what happened in the reign of Ferdinand VII. Once again in Vienna there has been a conference of fascist dictators for the purpose of organising their invasion of Spain. And today the workers in arms have taken up the mantle of El Empecinado. Germany and Italy need raw materials. They need iron, copper, lead and mercury. But these Spanish mineral deposits are the preserves of France and England. Yet even though Spain faces subjection, England does not protest. On the contrary - in a vile manoeuvre, she tries to negotiate with Franco (...) It is up to the working class to ensure Spain's independence. Native capitalism will not do it, since international capital crosses all frontiers. This is Spain's current predicament. It is up to us workers to root out the foreign capitalists. Patriotism does not enter into it. It is a matter of class interests(from Towards a fresh revolution).

As we can see, it takes a clever piece of work to turn an imperialist war into a patriotic war, a ‘class’ war. This is an expression of Anarchism's political disarming of such sincere worker militants as the Friends of Durruti. These comrades who wanted to struggle against the war and for the revolution, were incapable of finding the point of departure for an effective struggle. This would have meant calling on the workers and peasants, enlisted in both gangs - the Republic and the Franquistas - to desert, to turn their guns on the officers who oppressed them and to return to the rear and struggle through strikes and demonstrations, on a class terrain, against the whole of capitalism.”

And this takes us to the most crucial question of all: the Friends’ position on the nature of the war in Spain. Here there is no doubt that the group’s name signified more than a sentimental reference to Durruti,14 whose bravery and sincerity was much admired by the Spanish proletariat. Durruti was a militant of the working class but he was completely unable to make a thorough critique of what had happened to the Spanish workers after the July ‘36 uprising – of how the ideology of anti-fascism and the transfer of the struggle from the social front to the military fronts was already a decisive step which dragged the workers into an imperialist conflict. Durruti, along with many sincere anarchists, was a “jusqu’au boutiste15 when it came to the war, arguing that the war and the revolution, far from being in contradiction with each other, could reinforce each other as long as the struggle on the fronts was combined with the “social” transformations in the rear, which Durruti identified with the establishment of libertarian communism. But as Bilan insisted, in the context of a military war between capitalist blocs, the self-managed industrial and agricultural enterprises could only function as a means of further mobilising the workers for the war. This was a “war communism” that was feeding an imperialist war.

The Friends never challenged this idea that the war and the revolution had to be fought simultaneously. Like Durruti, they called for the total mobilisation of the population for the war, even when they analysed that the war was being lost.16

Guillamon’s position on the war and his criticisms of Bilan

For Guillamon, summing up, the events in Spain were “the tomb of anarchism as a revolutionary theory.17 We can only add that despite the heroism of the Friends and their laudable efforts to develop a revolutionary theory, the anarchist soil on which they attempted to grow this flower proved inhospitable.

But Guillamon himself was not free from ambiguities about the war in Spain and this is evident in his criticisms of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left that published Bilan.

On the central question of the war, Guillamon’s position, as summarised in his book, seems clear enough:

  1. Without destruction of the State, there is no revolution. The Central Anti-fascist Militias Committee of Catalonia (CAMC) was not an organ of dual power, but an agency for military mobilization of the workers, for sacred union with the bourgeoisie, in short, an agency of class collaboration.
  2. Arming of the people is meaningless. The nature of military warfare is determined by the nature of the class directing it. An army fighting in defense of a bourgeois State, even should it be antifascist, is an army in the service of capitalism.
  3. War between a fascist State and an antifascist State is not a revolutionary class war. The proletariat's intervention on one side is an indication that it has already been defeated. Insuperable technical and professional inferiority on the part of the popular or militia-based army was implicit in military struggle on a military front.
  4. War on the military fronts implied abandonment of the class terrain. Abandonment of the class struggle signified defeat for the revolutionary process.
  5. In the Spain of August 1936, revolution was no more and there was scope only for war: A non-revolutionary military war.
  6. The collectivizations and socializations in the economy count for nothing when State power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.”18

This looks very much like a reprise of the positions defended by the communist left. But Guillamon actually rejects some of the most important positions of Bilan, as we can see from another document, “Theses on the Spanish civil war and the revolutionary situation created on July 1936” published in 2001 by the group Balances.19 Despite his acknowledgment that there were brilliant aspects of Bilan’s analysis of the events in Spain, he makes some fundamental criticisms both of this analysis and the political conclusions drawn from it:

1. Bilan failed to recognise that there was a “revolutionary situation” in July ‘36. “On the one hand, Bilan acknowledges the class character of the struggles of July and May, but on the other hand not only denies their revolutionary character, but even denies the existence of a revolutionary situation. This viewpoint can only be explained by the distance of an absolutely isolated Parisian group, which placed a higher priority on its analyses than on the study of the Spanish reality. There is not even one word in Bilan about the real nature of the committees, or on the struggle of the Barcelona proletariat for socialization and against collectivization, or on the debates and confrontations within the Militia Columns concerning the militarization of the Militias, or a serious critique of the positions of The Friends of Durruti Group, for the simple reason that they are practically totally unaware of the existence and the significance of all these matters. It was easy to justify this ignorance by denying the existence of a revolutionary situation. Bilan’s analysis fails because in its view the absence of a revolutionary (Bordigist) party necessarily implies the absence of a revolutionary situation.”

2. Bilan’s analysis of the May events is incoherent: “The incoherence of Bilan is made evident by its analysis of the May Days of 1937. It turns out that the ‘revolution’ of July 19th, which one week later ceased to be a revolution, because its class goals had been turned into war goals, now reappears like the Phoenix of history, like a ghost that had been hiding in some unknown location. And now it turns out that in May 1937 the workers were once again ‘revolutionary’, and defended the revolution from the barricades. Was it not the case, however, that, according to Bilan, a revolution had not taken place? Here, Bilan gets all tangled up. On July 19 (according to Bilan) there was a revolution, but one week later, there was no longer a revolution, because there was no (Bordiguist) party; in May 1937 there was another revolutionary week. But how do we characterize the situation between July 26th 1936 and May 3rd, 1937? We are not told anything about this. The revolution is considered to be an intermittent river [“Guadiana”: a river in Spain that runs on the surface, then underground, then reappears on the surface— libcom Translator’s note] that emerges onto the historical stage when Bilan wants to explain certain events that it neither understands, nor is capable of explaining”.

3. Bilan’s position on the party and its idea that it’s the party, not the class that makes the revolution, is based on a “Leninist, totalitarian and substitutionist concept of the party.”

4. Bilan’s practical conclusions about the war were “reactionary”:“According to Bilan the proletariat was immersed in an antifascist war, that is, it was enrolled in an imperialist war between a democratic bourgeoisie and a fascist bourgeoisie. In this situation, the only appropriate positions were desertion and boycott, or to wait for better times, when the (Bordigist) party would enter the stage of history from the wings where it had been biding its time” Thus: denying the existence of a revolutionary situation in ‘36 led Bilan to “reactionary political positions such as breaking up the military fronts, fraternization with the Francoist troops, cutting off weapons to the republican troops.

To respond in depth to Guillamon’s criticisms of the Italian Fraction would take a separate article but we want to make a few remarks in reply:

  • It’s not true that Bilan were totally unaware of the real class movement in Spain. It is true that they didn’t appear to know about the Friends, but they were in touch with Camillo Berneri, so despite their stringent criticisms of anarchism they were quite capable of recognising that a proletarian resistance could still emerge within its ranks. More important, they were able, as Guillamaon accepts, to see the class character of the July and May events and it’s simply false to claim that they said not one word about the committees that emerged from the July uprising: in part one of this article we cited an extract from their text “Lessons of the events in Spain” in Bilan nº 36 which mentions these committees, sees them as proletarian organs but then also recognises the rapid process of recuperation via the “collectivisations”. Bilan do imply in that same article that power was within the workers’ grasp and that the next step was the destruction of the capitalist state. But they had a historic and international framework which enabled them to have a clearer view of the overall context which determined the tragic isolation of the Spanish proletariat - one of triumphant counter-revolution and a course towards world imperialist war, for which the Spanish conflict was a dress rehearsal. This is something which Guillamon hardly deals with, just as it was more or less absent from the analyses of the Spanish anarchists at the time;

  • the May events confirmed Bilan’s analysis rather than showing its confusions. The class struggle, like class consciousness itself, is indeed rather like a river that can go underground only to resurface: the most important example being the revolutionary events of 1917-18, which followed a terrible defeat of the class on the ideological level in 1914. The fact that the initial proletarian impetus of July 1936 was stymied and diverted did not mean that the fighting spirit and class consciousness of the Spanish proletariat had been utterly smashed, and they re-appeared in a last rearguard action against the unending attacks on the class, imposed above all by the republican bourgeoisie; but this reaction was crushed by the combined forces of the capitalist class from the Stalinists to the CNT, and this was a blow from which the Spanish proletariat did not recover;

  • it is an example of lazy thinking, surprising in a historian normally as rigorous as Guillamon, to dismiss Bilan’s view of the party as “Leninist and substitutionist”. Guillamon implies that Bilan had the view that the party is a deus ex machina, which waits in the wings till the time is ripe. This could be said about today’s Bordigists who claim to be The Party, but Guillamon totally ignores Bilan’s conception of the fraction, which is based on the recognition that the party cannot exist in a situation of counter-revolution and defeat precisely because the party is the product of the class and not the other way round. It’s true that the Italian left had not yet broken with the substitutionist idea of the party that takes power and exercises the proletarian dictatorship –but we have already shown that Guillamon himself is not entirely free of this conception, and Bilan were beginning to provide a framework that would make it possible to break with the whole notion.20 In Spain ‘36 they explained the absence of the party as a product of the world-wide defeat of the working class, and although they did not discount the possibility of revolutionary upsurges, they saw that the cards were stacked against the proletariat. And as Guillamon himself acknowledges, a revolution which does not give birth to a revolutionary party cannot succeed. Thus, Bilan’s position was not, as was so often falsely asserted, the idealist “there is no revolution in Spain because there is no party”, but the materialist “there is no party because there is no revolution”;

  • Guillamon’s own incoherence is shown most clearly in his rejection of Bilan’s “revolutionary defeatist” position on the war. Guillamon accepts that the war was very rapidly transformed into a non-revolutionary war, and that this was in no way altered by the existence of armed militias, collectivisations, etc. But this idea of a “non-revolutionary war” is ambiguous: Guillamon seems reluctant to accept that this was an imperialist war and that the class struggle could only revive by returning to the class terrain of the defence of the material interests of the proletariat, against the labour discipline and sacrifices imposed by the war. This would have certainly undermined the military fronts and sabotaged the republican army – precisely the reason for the savage repression of the May events. And yet when push comes to shove Guillamon argues that the classic proletarian methods of struggle against imperialist war – strikes, mutinies, desertions, fraternisations, strikes in the rear – were reactionary, even though this is a “non-revolutionary war”. This is at best a centrist position which aligns Guillamon with all those who fell for the siren calls of participation in the war, from the Trotskyists to the anarchists and sections of the communist left itself.

As for Bilan’s isolation, they recognised that this was a product not of geography but of the dark times they were going through, when all about them were betraying the principles of internationalism. As they wrote in an article entitled precisely “The isolation of our Fraction faced with the events in Spain” in Bilan nº 36, October-November 1936.

Our isolation is not fortuitous. It is the consequence of a profound victory by world capitalism which has managed to infect with gangrene even those groups of the communist left whose spokesman up until now was Trotsky. We do not claim that at the pre­sent moment we are the only group whose positions have been confirmed by every turn of events, but what we do claim categorical­ly is that, good or bad, our positions have been based on a permanent affirmation of the necessity for the autonomous class acti­vity of the proletariat. And it is on this question that we have seen the bankruptcy of all Trotskyist and semi-Trotskyist groups”.

It was the strength of the Italian marxist tradition that it was able to give to give rise to a fraction as clear sighted as Bilan. It was a severe weakness of the Spanish workers’ movement, characterised by the historical predominance of anarchism over marxism, that no such fraction was able to emerge in Spain.

Berneri and his successors

In the manifesto produced in response to the crushing of the workers’ revolt in May 1937 in Barcelona, the Italian and Belgian Fractions of the Communist Left paid homage to the memory of the Camillo Berneri,21 whose murder at the hands of the Stalinist police was part of the general repression doled out by the republican state to all those, workers and revolutionaries, who had played an active part in the May Days and who, either by words or by action, came out in opposition to the CNT-FAI policy of collaboration with the capitalist state.

This is what the Left Fractions wrote in Bilan nº 41, June 1937:

The proletariat of the whole world salutes Berneri as one of its own, and his martyrdom for the ideal of anarchism is yet another protest against a political school which has met its downfall during these events in Spain. It was under the direction of a government in which the anarchists participated that the police have done to the body of Berneri what Mussolini did to the body of Matteotti!

In another article in the same issue, “Antonio Gramsci –Camillo Berneri”, Bilan noted that these two militants, who had died with a few weeks of each other, had given their lives to the cause of the proletariat despite the serious weaknesses of their ideological standpoints.

Berneri, a leader of the anarchists? No, because even after his murder, the CNT and the FAI are mobilising the workers around the danger that they will be kicked out of the government which is dripping with Berneri’s blood. The latter thought that he could count on the school of anarchism to contribute to the task of the social redemption of the oppressed, and it was a ministry made up of anarchists which launched the attack on the exploited of Barcelona!

The lives of Gramsci and Berneri belong to the proletariat which will be inspired by their example to continue its struggle. And the communist victory will enable the masses to honour the two of them with all due dignity, because it will also enable them to better understand the errors to which they were victims and which certainly added, along with the action of the enemy class itself, the torment of seeing events tragically contradicting their convictions, their ideologies.

The article ends by saying that more would be written on these two figures of the workers’ movement in the next issue of Bilan. There is indeed a specific article devoted to Gramsci in that issue (Bilan nº 42, July-August 1937), which though of considerable interest is outside the focus of this essay. Berneri himself was mentioned in the editorial to the issue, “The repression in Spain and in Russia”, which examines the tactics the police had used to assassinate Berneri and his comrade Barbieri.

We know how Berneri was murdered. Two policemen presented themselves at his house. ‘We are friends’ they said. Why had they come? They had come to check on where two rifles were kept. They came back, to make a simple requisition, and they took the two weapons away. They came back a last time and it was for the final blow. Now they were sure that Berneri and his comrade were disarmed, that they had no possibility of defending themselves, they arrested them on the basis of a legal order drawn up by the authority of a government of which Berneri’s political friends , the representatives of the CNT and the FAI, are a part. The wives of Berneri and Barbieri were then informed that the bodies of their two comrades were in the morgue.

We know, finally, that in the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, this is standard practice from now on. Armed squads, controlled by the centrists, are wandering the streets killing workers suspected of subversive ideas.

And all this without the edifice of socialisations, militias, trade union control of production, being wiped out by a new reorganisation of the capitalist state.”

In fact there are to this day different accounts of the murder: Augustin Souchy’s contemporary account, “The tragic week in May”, originally published in Spain and the World and republished in The May Days Barcelona 1937 (Freedom Press, 1998) is very similar to Bilan’s; on the other hand the short biography on libcom written by Toni22 has it that he was gunned down in the street after going to the offices of Radio Barcelona to speak about the death of Gramsci; and there are other variations in descriptions of the details. But the key issue, as Bilan said, was that in the general repression that followed the defeat of the May revolt it was now standard practice to proceed to the physical elimination of troublesome elements like Berneri who had the courage to criticise the social democratic/Stalinist/anarchist government, and the counter-revolutionary foreign policy of the USSR. The Stalinists, who had a tight grip over the police apparatus, were in the vanguard of these assassinations. Despite the continuing use of the term, “centrists” to describe the Stalinists, Bilan clearly saw them for what they were: violent enemies of the working class, cops and assassins with whom no collaboration was possible. This was in marked contrast to the Trotskyists who continued to define the CPs as workers’ parties with whom a united front was still desirable, and the USSR as a regime that should still be defended against imperialist attack.

What was the common ground between Berneri and Bilan?

If some of the facts about Berneri’s murder are still rather hazy, we are even less clear about the relationship between the Italian Fraction and Berneri. Our book on the Italian left informs us that, following the departure of the minority of Bilan to fight in the militias of the POUM, the majority sent a delegation to Barcelona to try to find elements with whom a fruitful debate might be possible. Discussions with elements in the POUM proved fruitless, and “only a discussion with the anarchist teacher Camillo Berneri had any positive results” (p 98). But the book isn’t precise about what these positive results were.

At first sight, there is not an obvious reason why Bilan and Berneri should find common ground.

If for example we look at one of his better known texts, the open letter written to Frederica Montseny after she had become a minister in the Madrid government, dated April 1937,23 we don’t find a lot to distinguish Berneri’s position from that of many other “left” antifascists of the day. Underlying his approach – which is more a dialogue with an erring comrade than a denunciation of a traitor - is the conviction that there is indeed a revolution in progress in Spain, that there was no contradiction between deepening the revolution and prosecuting the war till victory, provided that revolutionary methods were used – but such methods did not preclude calling on the government to take more radical action, such as immediately granting political autonomy to Morocco to weaken the grip of the Francoist forces over their North African recruits. Certainly the article is very critical of the decision of the CNT-FAI leaders to enter the government, but there is much in this article to support Guillamon’s contention that “The Friends of Durruti’s criticism was even more radical than that of Berneri, because Berneri was critical of CNT participation in the Government, whereas the Group was critical of the CNT’s collaboration with the capitalist state.24 So why was the Italian Fraction able to hold positive discussions with him? We suspect that it was because Berneri was, like the Italian left, committed first and foremost to proletarian internationalism and a global outlook, whereas, as Guillamon himself has noted, a group like the Friends of Durruti still showed signs of bearing the heavy baggage of Spanish patriotism. Certainly Berneri had taken a very clear position during the First World War: when he has still a member of the Socialist Party, he had worked closely with Bordiga in expelling the “interventionists” from the Socialist paper L’Avanguardia.25 His article on the imperialist rivalries behind the conflict, “Burgos and Moscow”,26 published in 'Guerra di Classe' nº 6, 16th December 1936, despite leaning towards calls for intervention by France in defence of its national interests,27 is at the same time rather clear about the anti-revolutionary and imperialist designs of all the big powers, fascist, democratic and “Soviet”, towards the conflict in Spain. Souchy in fact argues that it was in particular this denunciation of the USSR’s imperialist role in the situation which became Berneri’s death warrant.

In our text “Marxism and Ethics”, we wrote: “Characteristic of moral progress is the enlarging of the radius of application of social virtues and impulses, until the whole of humanity is encompassed. By far the highest expression of human solidarity, of the ethical progress of society to date, is proletarian internationalism. This principle is the indispensable means of the liberation of the working class, laying the basis for the future human community.”28

Behind the internationalism that united Bilan and Berneri, there lies a profound commitment to proletarian morality – the defence of fundamental principles no matter what the cost: isolation, ridicule, and physical threat. As Berneri put it in the last letter he wrote to his daughter Marie-Louise:

One can lose one's illusions about everything and about everyone, but not about what one affirms with one's moral conscience.29

Berneri’s stand against the “circumstantialism” adopted by so many in the anarchist movement of the day – “principles are well and good, but in these particular circumstances we have to be more realistic and practical” - would certainly have struck a chord among the comrades of the Italian left, whose refusal to abandon principles in face of the euphoria of anti-fascist unity, of the opportunist immediatism that swept through almost the entire proletarian political movement at that time, had obliged them to furrow a very lonely path indeed.

Vernon Richards and the Lessons of the Spanish Revolution

As we have noted elsewhere,30 Camillo Berneri’s daughter Marie-Louise Berneri, and her partner, the Anglo-Italian anarchist Vernon Richards, were among the few elements within the anarchist movement, in Britain or internationally, who carried on an internationalist activity during the Second World War, through their publication War Commentary. The paper “strongly denounced the pretence that the war was an ideological struggle between democracy and fascism, and the hypocrisy of the democratic allies’ denunciations of Nazi atrocities after their tacit support for the fascist regimes and for Stalin’s terror during the 1930s. Highlighting the hidden nature of the war as a power struggle between British, German and American imperialist interests, War Commentary also denounced the use of fascist methods by the ‘liberating’ allies and their totalitarian measures against the working class at home.”31 Marie Louise and Richards were arrested at the end of the war on the charge of fomenting insubordination among the armed forces; although Marie-Louise did not stand trial on the basis that spouses cannot be considered to be conspiring together, Richards went to prison for nine months. Marie-Louise gave birth to a still-born child and died not long afterwards in April 1949 as a result of a viral infection contracted during childbirth, a tragic loss for Vernon Richards and the proletarian movement.

Richards also published a very influential book, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, based on articles published in Spain and the World during the 1930s. This book, first published in 1953 and dedicated to Camillo and Marie-Louise, is quite unstinting in its exposure of the opportunism and degeneration of “official” anarchism in Spain. In his introduction to the first English edition, Richards tells us that some in the anarchist movement had “suggested to me that this study provides ammunition for the political enemies of anarchism”, to which Richards responds: “Apart from the fact that the cause of anarchy surely cannot be harmed by an attempt to establish the truth, the basis of my criticism is not that anarchist ideas were proved unworkable by the Spanish experience, but that the Spanish anarchists and syndicalists failed to put their theories to the test, adopting instead the tactics of the enemy. I fail to see, therefore, how believers in the enemy, i.e. government and political parties, can use this criticism against anarchism without it rebounding on themselves.”32

During the Second World War, large parts of the anarchist movement had succumbed to the seductions of anti-fascism and the Resistance. This was particularly true of important elements in the Spanish movement, who have bequeathed to history the image of armoured cars festooned with CNT-FAI banners leading the “Liberation” parade into Paris in 1944. In his book Richards attacks the “combination of political opportunism and naivety” which resulted in CNT-FAI leaders adopting the view “that every effort should be made to prolong the war at any cost until the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and Britain, which everyone knew to be inevitable sooner or later. Just as some hoped for victory as a result of the international conflagration, so many Spanish revolutionaries gave their support to World War II because they believed that a victory of the ‘democracies’ (including Russia!) would result in Spain’s automatic liberation from the Franco-fascist tyranny.”33

And again, this loyalty to internationalism is integrally linked to a powerful ethical stance, expressed both at the intellectual level and in Richard’s obvious indignation at the repellent behaviour and hypocritical self-justifications of the official representatives of Spanish anarchism.

In a response to the arguments of the anarchist minister Juan Peiro, Richards puts his finger on the mentality of “circumstantialism”: “every compromise, every deviation, it was explained, was not a ‘rectification’ of the ‘sacred principles’ of the CNT, but simply actions determined by the ‘circumstances’ and that once these were resolved there would be a return to principles.34 Elsewhere, he denounces the CNT leadership for being “prepared to abandon principles for tactics”, and for their capitulation to the ideology of “the end justifies the means”: “The fact of the matter is that for the revolutionaries as well as for the Government all means were justified to achieve the ends of mobilising the whole country on a war footing. And in those circumstances the assumption is that everybody would support the ‘cause’. Those who do not are made to; those who resist are hounded, humiliated, punished or liquidated.35

In this particular example, Richards was talking about the CNT’s capitulation to traditional bourgeois methods for the disciplining of prisoners, but the same anger is lucidly expressed at the political betrayals of the CNT in a whole series of areas. Some of these are evident and well-known:

  • The rapid abandonment of the traditional critique of collaboration with government and political parties in favour of anti-fascist unity. Most famously this included the acceptance of ministerial posts in the central government and the infamous ideological justification of this step by the anarchist ministers, who claimed that it signified that the state was ceasing to be an instrument of oppression. But Richards also castigates anarchist participation in other state organs such as the regional government of Catalonia and the National Defence Council - which Camillo Berneri had himself recognised as part of the government apparatus, despite its “revolutionary” label, rejecting an invitation to serve on it.

  • CNT participation in the capitalist normalisation of all the institutions that had emerged out of the workers’ uprising in July 1936: the incorporation of the militias into a regular bourgeois army, and the institution of state control of the enterprises, even though masked by the syndicalist fiction that the workers were now masters in their own house. His analysis of the Extended National Economic Plenum of January 1938 (chapter XVII) shows how totally the CNT had adopted the methods of capitalist management, with its obsession with increasing productivity and punishing idlers. But the rot had certainly set in much earlier than that, as Richards shows by exposing what it meant for the CNT to sign the “Unity of Action” pact with the Socialist UGT union and the Stalinist PSUC – acceptance of militarisation, of nationalisation of the enterprises with a thin veneer of “workers control” , and so on.36

  • The CNT’s role in sabotaging the May Days of 1937. Richards analysed these events as a spontaneous and potentially revolutionary rising by the working class, and as the concrete expression of a growing divide between the rank and file of the CNT and its bureaucratic apparatus, which used all its capacities for manoeuvring and outright deceit to disarm the workers and get them back to work.

But some of Richards’ most revealing exposés are of the manner in which the CNT’s political and organisational degeneration necessarily involved a growing moral corruption, above all of those most in the forefront of this process. He shows how this was expressed both in the statements of the anarchist leaders and in the CNT press. Three expressions of this corruption in particular aroused his fury:

  • A speech by Federica Montseny to a mass meeting on August 31st, 1936, which says of Franco and his followers that they were “this enemy lacking dignity or a conscience, without a feeling of being Spaniards, because if they were Spaniards, if they were patriots, they would not have let loose on Spain the Regulars and the Moors to impose the civilisation of the fascists, not as a Christian civilisation, but as a Moorish civilisation, people we went to colonise for them now come and colonise us, with religious principles and political ideas which they wish to impose on the minds of the Spanish people.37 Richards comments acidly: “Thus spoke a Spanish revolutionary, one of the most intelligent and gifted members of the organisation (and still treated as one of the outstanding figures by the majority section of the CNT in France). In that one sentence are expressed nationalist, racialist and imperialist sentiments. Did anyone protest at the meeting?

  • The cult of leadership: Richards cites articles in the anarchist press which, almost from the beginning of the war, aim to create a semi-religious aura around figures like Garcia Oliver: “the lengths to which the sycophants went is displayed in a report published in Solidaridad Obrera (August 29th, 1936) on the occasion of Oliver’s departure to the front. He is variously described as ‘our dear comrade’, ‘the outstanding militant’, ‘the courageous comrade’. ‘our most beloved comrade’”, and so on and so forth. Richards adds further examples of this sycophancy and ends with the comment: “It goes without saying that an organisation which encourages the cult of the leader, cannot also cultivate a sense of responsibility among its members which is absolutely fundamental to the integrity of a libertarian organisation.”38 Note that both Montseny’s speech and the canonisation of Oliver come from the period before they became government ministers.

  • The militarisation of the CNT: “Once committed to the idea of militarisation, the CNT-FAI threw themselves wholeheartedly into the task of demonstrating to everybody that their rank and filers were the most disciplined, the most courageous members of the armed forces. The Confederal Press published innumerable photographs of its military leaders (in their officers’ uniforms), interviewed them, wrote glowing tributes on their elevation to the exalted ranks of colonel or major. And as the military situation worsened so the tone of the Confederal Press became more aggressive and militaristic. Solidaridad Obrera published daily lists of men who had been condemned by the military Tribunals in Barcelona and shot for ‘fascist activities’, ‘defeatism’ or ‘desertion’. One reads of a man sentenced to death for helping conscripts to escape over the frontier...” Richards then quotes an item in Solidaridad Obrera of 21st April 1938 about another man executed for leaving his post, “to set a greater example. The soldiers of the garrison were present and filed past the body cheering the Republic”, and he concludes: “this campaign of discipline and obedience through fear and terror…did not prevent large-scale desertions from the fronts (though not often to Franco’s lines) and a falling output in the factories.”39

Anarchist ideology and proletarian principle

These examples of Richards’ outrage at the total betrayal of class principles by the CNT are an example of the proletarian morality which is an indispensable foundation to any form of revolutionary militancy. But we also know that anarchism tends to distort this morality with ahistorical abstractions, and this lack of method underlines some of the key weaknesses in the book.

This can be illustrated by Richards’ approach to the union question. Behind the question of the unions there is an “invariant” element of principle: the necessity for the proletariat to equip itself with forms of association to defend itself from the exploitation and oppression of capital. Anarchism historically has usually accepted that trade unions (or industrial unions of the IWW type, or anarcho-syndicalist organisations) are one such form of association while maintaining an opposition to all political parties. But because it rejects the materialist analysis of history, it cannot understand that these forms of association can change profoundly in different historical epochs. Hence the position of the marxist left that with capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decadence, the trade unions and the old mass parties lose their proletarian content and are integrated into the bourgeois state. The growth of anarcho-syndicalism at the beginning of the 20th century was a partial response to this process of degeneration in the old unions and parties, but it lacked the theoretical tools to really explain the process, and therefore got trapped into new versions of the old unionism: the tragic fate of the CNT in Spain was proof that in the new epoch, it would not be possible to maintain permanent mass organisations which retained their proletarian, let alone their overtly revolutionary, character. Influenced by Errico Malatesta40 (as was Berneri), Richards41 was aware of some of the limitations of the anarcho-syndicalist idea: the contradiction involved in constructing an organisation which both proclaims itself to be for the defence of the workers’ day-to- day interests, and is thus open to all workers, and which at the same time is committed to the social revolution, a goal which at any given time inside capitalist society will only be espoused by a minority of the class. This would inevitably foster tendencies towards bureaucratism and reformism, both of which exploded to the surface in the events of ‘36-‘39 in Spain. But this view doesn’t go far enough in explaining the process whereby all permanent mass organisations, which had been possible in the past as expressions of the proletariat, are now directly incorporated into the state. Thus Richards, despite some intuitions that the treason of the CNT was not simply a matter of the “leaders”, is unable to recognise that the apparatus of the CNT itself had, at the culmination of a long process of degeneration, become part of the capitalist state. This inability to understand the qualitative transformation of trade unions is also seen in his view about the Socialist union federation, the UGT: for him, while collaboration with the political parties and the government was a betrayal of principle, he was positively in favour of a united front with the UGT, which in reality could only have been a more radical version of the popular front.

The key weakness in the book, however, is the one shared by overwhelming majority of the dissident anarchists and oppositional groups of the day: that there had actually been a proletarian revolution in Spain, that the working class had indeed come to power, or had at least established a dual power situation which lasted well beyond the initial days of the July uprising. For Richards, the organ of dual power was the Central Committee of the Anti-fascist Militias, even though he was aware that the CCAM later on became an agent of militarisation. In fact, as we noted, following Bilan, in the previous article, the CCAM was crucial to preserving capitalist rule almost from day one of the uprising. From this fundamental error, Richards is unable to break from the notion, which we have already noted in the positions of the Friends of Durruti, that the war in Spain was in essence a revolutionary war which could have simultaneously beaten back Franco on the military front and established the bases for a new society, instead of seeing that the military fronts and the general mobilisation for war were in themselves a negation of the class struggle. Although Richards makes some very lucid criticisms of the concrete manner in which the mobilisation for war led to the forced militarisation of the working class, the crushing of its autonomous initiative, and the intensification of its exploitation, he remains ambiguous about questions like the necessity to increase the pace and hours of work in the factories in order to ensure the production of arms for the front. Lacking a global and historical view of the conditions of the class struggle in this period, which was one of defeat for the working class and preparation for a new imperialist re-division of the world, he does not grasp the nature of the war in Spain as an imperialist conflict, a general rehearsal for the coming world holocaust. His insistence that the “revolution” made a key error in not using Spain’s gold reserves to buy weapons from abroad shows (as did Berneri’s more or less open call for intervention by the democracies) a deep underestimation of the degree to which the very rapid shift from the terrain of class struggle to the military terrain also flung the conflict into the world-wide inter-imperialist pressure-cooker.

For Bilan, Spain 1936 was to anarchism what 1914 was to social democracy: a historical act of treason which marked a change in the class nature of those who had betrayed. It did not mean that all the various expressions of anarchism had passed to the other side of the barricade, but – as with the survivors of the shipwreck of social democracy – it did call for a process of ruthless self-examination, of profound theoretical reflection precisely on the part of those who had remained loyal to class principles. On the whole, the best tendencies within anarchism have not gone far enough in this self-critique, and certainly not as far as the communist left in analysing the successive failures of social democracy, the Russian revolution, and the Communist International. The majority – and this was certainly the case with the Friends of Durruti, the Berneris and Richards - have tried to preserve the core of anarchism when it is precisely this core which reflects the petty-bourgeois origins of anarchism and its resistance to the coherence and clarity of the “Marx party” (in other words, the authentically marxist tradition). Rejection of the historical materialist method prevented them from developing a clear perspective in the period of capitalism’s ascendancy, and then from understanding the changes in the life of the enemy class and of the proletarian struggle in the epoch of capitalist decay. And it still prevents them from reaching an adequate theory of the capitalist mode of production itself – its motor forces and its trajectory towards crisis and collapse. Perhaps most crucially of all, anarchism is unable to develop a materialist theory of the state – its origins, nature, and historical modifications - and of the organisational means the proletariat needs to overthrow it: the workers’ councils and the revolutionary party. In the final analysis, anarchist ideology is an obstacle to the task of elaborating the political, economic and social content of the communist revolution.

CDW


2. The definitive work on this group, and one written from a clearly proletarian standpoint, is by Agustin Guillamon The Friends of Durruti Group 1937-39 (AK Press, 1996), which we shall refer to throughout this part of the article. See also the ICC article on Durrutti.

3. Guillamon, The Friends of Durruti Group, p 78.

4. Friends, p 92.

5. Towards a fresh revolution, cited in Friends, p 84.

6. Lutte Ouvrière February 24 and March 3, 1939, quoted in Friends, p 98.

7. Cf Friends, p64.

8. Cited in Friends, p 68.

9. Ibid.

10. Cited in Friends, p79.

12. Quoted in the preface to Friends, p vii.

13.Friends, p82.

14. Buenaventura Durruti was born in 1896, the son of a railworker. From the age of 17 he was involved in militant workers’ struggles – first on the railways, then in the mines, and later in the massive class movements that swept through Spain during the post-war revolutionary wave. He joined the CNT around this time. During the reflux of the post-war wave, Durruti was involved in the “pistolero” battles against hired guns of the state and employers, and carried out at least one high-profile assassination. Exiled to South America and Europe during most of the 20s, he was under sentence of death in several countries. In 1931, following the fall of the monarchy, he returned to Spain and became a member of the FAI and of the Nosostros group, both of which were formed with the intention of combating the increasingly reformist tendencies in the CNT. In July 1936, in Barcelona, he took a very active part in the workers’ response to the Franco coup, and then formed the Iron Column, a specifically anarchist militia which went to fight at the front against the Francoists, while at the same time initiating or supporting the agrarian collectivisations. In November 1936 he went to Madrid with a large contingent of militiamen to try to relieve the besieged city, but was killed by a stray bullet. 500,000 people attended his funeral. For these and many more Spanish workers, Durruti was a symbol of courage and dedication to the cause of the proletariat. A short biographical sketch of Durruti can be found here: https://www.libcom.org/library/buenaventura-durruti-peter-newell.

15. A term coined during the First World War to describe those who insisted that the war must be fought “to the bitter end”.

16. Cf Friends, p71.

17. Friends, p108.

18. Ibid, p 10.

20. In particular, their insistence that the party could not become entangled with the transitional state, a mistake which they saw as having proved fatal for the Bolsheviks in Russia. See an earlier article in this series: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition.

21. Camillo Berneri was born in northern Italy in 1897, son of a civil servant and a school teacher. Berneri himself worked for a while as a teacher and at a teacher training college. He joined the Italian Socialist Party during his teenage years, and during the 1914-18 war, along with Bordiga and others, took an internationalist position against the party’s centrist wavering and against the outright treason of the likes of Mussolini. But by the end of the war he had become an anarchist and was close to the ideas of Errico Malatesta. Driven into exile by the fascist regime, he remained a target of the machinations of the fascist secret police, the OVRA. It was during this period that he wrote a number of contributions on the psychology of Mussolini, on anti-Semitism and the regime in the USSR. On hearing of the workers’ uprising in Barcelona, he went to Spain and fought on the Aragon front. Returning to Barcelona, he was a consistent critic of the opportunist and openly bourgeois tendencies in the CNT, writing for Guerra di Classe and making contact with the Friends of Durruti. As recounted in this article, he was assassinated by Stalinist killers during the 1937 May Days. See the short biographical sketch here: https://www.libcom.org/history/berneri-luigi-camillo-1897-1937.

24. Friends, p 82.

25. “Interventionists” refers to those who were in favour of Italy joining the First World War on the side of the Entente.

26. Also known as “Between the war and the revolution”, https://libcom.org/history/between-war-revolution.

27. This dangerous position is even more explicit in other articles: eg “Non-intervention and international involvement in the Spanish civil war”, an article first published in Guerra di Class, 7, July 18 1937.

31. ibid.

32. Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, 1995 edition by Freedom Press, p.14.

33. Lessons, p. 153-4.

34. Lessons p. 179-80

35. Lessons p. 213

36. Richards’ concern for the truth also means that the book is far from being an apology for the anarchist collectives, which for some were proof that the “Spanish revolution” far outstripped the Russian in terms of the its social content. What Richards really shows is that while decision-making by assemblies and experiments in money-less distribution lasted longer in the countryside, above all in more or less self-sufficient areas, any challenge to the norms of capitalist management were very quickly eliminated in the factories, which were more immediately dominated by the needs of war production. A union-managed form of state capitalism very soon re-imposed discipline over the industrial proletariat.

37. Lessons, p. 211.

38. Lessons, p. 181.

39. Lessons p 161. Marc Chirik, a founding member of the Gauche Communiste de France and of the ICC, was part of the delegation of the majority of the Fraction that went to Barcelona. In later years he talked about the extreme difficulty of the discussions with most of the anarchists and felt that some of them would be quite capable of shooting him and his comrades for questioning the validity of the anti-fascist war. This attitude was a clear reflection of the calls in the CNT press for the shooting of deserters.

40. See for example “Syndicalism and anarchism”, 1925.

41. See for example Lessons, p. 196.

 

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Anarchism and War

The war in Spain exposes anarchism’s fatal flaws

Part One: programme and practice

The previous article in the series took us into the work of the revolutionary movement as it emerged from the catastrophe of the Second World War. We showed how, despite this catastrophe, the best elements in the marxist movement continued to hold on to the perspective of communism. Their conviction in this perspective had not faded even though the world war had not, as many revolutionaries had predicted, provoked a new upsurge of the proletariat against capitalism, and had indeed deepened the already terrible defeat that had descended on the working class during the 1920s and 30s. We focused in particular on the work of the Gauche Communiste de France, which was probably the only organisation to understand that the tasks of the hour remained those of a fraction, of preserving and deepening the theoretical acquisitions of marxism in order to construct a bridge to future proletarian movements which would create the conditions for the reconstitution of a real communist party. This had been the project of the Italian and Belgian left fractions before the war, although a significant part of this International Communist Left had lost sight of this in the short-lived euphoria of the revival of workers’ struggles in Italy in 1943 and the declaration of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy.

As part of this effort to build on the work of the pre-war left fractions, the GCF had carried on the work of drawing the lessons of the Russian revolution and of examining the problems of the transitional period: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transitional state, the role of the party, and the elimination of the capitalist mode of production. We therefore republished and introduced the GCF’s theses on the role of the state, which would serve as the basis for future debates on the period of transition within the renascent revolutionary milieu of the early 1970s.

But before proceeding to a survey of those debates, we need to take a historical step back – to a major landmark in the history of the workers’ movement: Spain 1936-37. As we shall argue, we are not among those who see these events as providing us with a model of proletarian revolution which goes far deeper than anything achieved in Russia in 1917-21. But there is no question that the war in Spain has taught us a great deal, even if most of its lessons are negative ones. In particular, it offers us a very sharp insight into the inadequacies of the anarchist vision of the revolution and a striking reaffirmation of the vision that has been preserved and developed by the authentic traditions of marxism. This is particularly important to affirm given the fact that over the last few decades these traditions are frequently derided as being out of date and unfashionable, and that, among the politicised minority of the current generation, anarchist ideas in various forms have gained an undeniable influence.

This series has always been premised on the conviction that marxism alone provides a coherent method for understanding what communism is and why it is necessary, and for mining the historical experience of the working class for evidence that it is also a real possibility and not a mere wish for a better world. This is why such a large part of this series has been taken up with the study of the advances and the errors made by the marxist wing of the workers’ movement in its effort to comprehend and elaborate the communist programme. For the same reason, it is only at certain moments that it has looked at the attempts of the anarchist movement to work out its notion of the future society. In the article ‘Anarchism or communism’ (volume one of the present series, in International Review 79) we pointed out that at the historic origins of the anarchist vision lay the resistance of petty bourgeois strata such as the artisans and small peasants to the process of proletarianisation, which was an inevitable product of the emergence and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Although a number of anarchist currents are clearly part of the workers’ movement, none of them have succeeded in entirely effacing these petty bourgeois birthmarks. The article in IR 79 demonstrates how, in the period of the First International, this essentially backward-looking ideology was behind the resistance of the clan around Bakunin to the theoretical gains of marxism at three crucial levels: in its conception of the organisation of revolutionaries, which was deeply infected by the conspiratorial methods of outmoded sects; in its rejection of historical materialism in favour of a voluntarist and idealist assessment of the possibilities of revolution; and in its conception of the future society, seen as a network of autonomous communes linked by commodity exchange.

Nevertheless, with the development of the workers’ movement in the latter part of the 19th century, the most important trends in anarchism tended to become more firmly integrated into the struggle of the proletariat and its perspective for a new society, and this was particularly true of the anarcho-syndicalist current (although, simultaneously, the dimension of anarchism as a manifestation of petty bourgeois rebellion was kept alive in the ‘exemplary acts’ of the Bonnot gang and others)1.The reality of this proletarian trend was demonstrated in the capacity of certain anarchist currents to take up internationalist positions faced with the First World War (and to a lesser extent the Second), and in the will to develop a clearer programme for their movement. The period from the late 19th century to the 1930s thus saw various attempts to develop documents and platforms which could be a guide to the establishment of ‘libertarian communism’ through social revolution. An obvious example of this was Kroptotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, which first appeared as an integral work in French in 1892 and was published over a decade later in English2. Despite Kropotkin’s abandonment of internationalism in 1914, this and other writings by him are part of the classical canon of anarchism and deserve a much more developed critique than is possible in this article.

In 1926 Makhno, Arshinov and others published the Platform of the General Union of Anarchists3. This is the founding document of the ‘platformist’ current in anarchism, and it too calls for a more thorough examination, along with an analysis of the historical trajectory of platformism from the late 1920s to the present. Its principal interest lies in the conclusions it draws from the failure of the anarchist movement in the Russian revolution, notably the idea that anarchist revolutionaries need to regroup in their own political organisation, based on a clear programme for the establishment of the new society. It was this idea in particular that drew the fire of other anarchists – not least Voline and Malatesta - who saw it as expressing a kind of anarcho-Bolshevism.

In this article, however, we are most concerned with the theory and practice of the anarcho-syndicalist tendency during the 1930s. And here again there is no dearth of material. In our most recent series on the decadence of capitalism published in this Review, we mentioned the text by the exiled Russian anarcho-syndicalist Gregory Maximoff, My Social Credo. Written in the depth of the Great Depression, it showed a remarkable degree of clarity about the decadence of the capitalist system, something almost never displayed by the anarchists of today4. The text also contains a section outlining Maximoff’s ideas about the organisation of the new society. During this period there were also significant debates about how to get from capitalism to libertarian communism within the anarcho-syndicalist ‘International’ established in 1922, the International Workers’ Association. And probably most relevant of all was Isaac Puente’s pamphlet ‘Libertarian Communism’. Published in 1932, it was to serve as the basis for the CNT’s platform at the 1936 Zaragoza Congress, and can thus be considered as a factor influencing the policies of the CNT during the ensuing ‘Spanish revolution’. We will come back to this, but first we want to look at some of the debates in the IWA, which are brought to light in Vadim Damier’s very informative work Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20th century5

One of the key debates – no doubt in reaction to the spectacular rise of Fordist/Taylorist mass production techniques in the 1920s – was centred on the question of whether or not this kind of capitalist rationalisation, and indeed the whole process of industrialisation, was an expression of progress, making a libertarian communist society a more tangible perspective, or merely an intensification of humanity’s enslavement by the machine. Different tendencies brought different nuances to this discussion, but broadly speaking the split was between the anarcho-communists who took the latter view and connected their stance with a call for an immediate transition to communism; this was seen as being possible even - or perhaps especially – in a predominantly agrarian society. The alternative position was more generally held by tendencies connected to the revolutionary syndicalist tradition, who took a more ‘realistic’ view of the possibilities offered by capitalist rationalisation while at the same time arguing that there would have to be some kind of transitional economic regime in which monetary forms would continue to exist.

These divergences traversed various national sections (such as the German FAUD), but the Argentine FORA6 seems to have had a more unified view which they defended with some conviction, and they were at the forefront of the ‘anti-industrialist’ outlook. They openly rejected the premises of historical materialism, at least as they saw it (for most of the anarchists ‘marxism’ was a catch-all term defining everyone from Stalinism and Social Democracy to Trotskyism and left communism) in favour of a view of history in which ethics and ideas were no less significant than the development of the productive forces. They categorically rejected the idea that the new society could be formed on the basis of the old, which is why they criticised not only the project of building libertarian communism on the foundations of the existing industrial structure, but also the syndicalist project of organising workers in industrial unions that would, come the revolution, take over this structure and wield it on behalf of the proletariat and humanity. They envisaged a new society organised in a federation of free communes; the revolution would be a radical break with all the old forms and would proceed immediately to the stage of free association. A declaration from the 5th Congress of the FORA in 1905 – which according to Eduardo Columbo’s account was to become the basic policy for many years – outlined the FORA’s criticisms of the union form:

We must not forget that a union is merely an economic by-product of the capitalist system, born from the needs of this epoch. To preserve it after the revolution would imply preserving the system which gave rise to it. The so-called doctrine of revolutionary syndicalism is a fiction. We, as anarchists, accept the unions as weapons in the struggle and we try to ensure that they should approximate as closely as possible to our revolutionary ideals...That is to say, we do not intend to be mentally dominated by the unions; we intend to dominate them. In other words, to make the unions serve the propagation, the defence, and the affirmation of our ideas among the proletariat”7

However, the differences between the ‘Forists’ and the syndicalists on the union form remained rather obscure in many ways: on the one hand, the FORA saw itself as an organisation of anarchist workers rather than a union “for all workers” but at the same time it emerged and developed as a union-type formation that organised strikes and other forms of class action.

Despite the unclear nature of these divergences, they led to heated clashes at the 4th Congress of the IWA in Madrid in 1931, with the two approaches being defended mainly by the French CGT-SR8 on the one hand and the FORA on the other. Damier makes the following remarks about the FORA’s views:

The conceptions of the FORA contained a critique of the alien and destructive character of the industrial-capitalist system which was brilliant for its time – the FORA’s proposals anticipated by half a century the recommendations and prescriptions of the contemporary ecological movement. Nevertheless their critique had a point of vulnerability – a categorical refusal to elaborate more concrete notions about the future society, how to get to it and how to prepare for it. According to the thinking of the Argentine theoreticians, to do so would be to infringe on revolutionary spontaneity and the improvisations of the masses themselves. The achievement of socialism was not a matter of technical and organisational preparation, but rather the dissemination of feelings of freedom, equality and solidarity – insisted the Argentine worker-anarchists”(pp110-111).

The FORA’s insights into the nature of capitalist social relations – like those into the trade union form – are certainly interesting, but what strikes one most about these debates is their flawed starting point, their lack of method flowing from the rejection of marxism or even any willingness to discuss with the authentic marxist currents of the day. The FORA’s criticism of historical materialism looks more like a criticism of a rigidly deterministic version of marxism, typical of the Second International and the Stalinist parties. Again, they were right to attack the alienated nature of capitalist production and to repudiate the idea that capitalism was progressive in itself - above all in a period where capitalist social relations had already proved themselves to be a fundamental obstacle to human development - but their apparent rejection of industry as such was equally abstract and resulted in a backward-looking nostalgia for localised rural communes.

Perhaps more significant was the lack of any connection between these debates and the most important experiences of the class struggle in the new epoch inaugurated by the mass strikes in Russia in 1905 and the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23. These world-historic developments, which also of course included the first world imperialist war, had already demonstrated the obsolescence of the old forms of workers’ organisation (mass parties and trade unions)and given rise to new ones: the soviets or workers’ councils on the one hand, formed in the heat of the struggle rather than as a pre-existing structure, and the organisation of the communist minority, no longer seen as a mass party acting primarily on the terrain of the struggle for reforms, on the other. The formation of revolutionary or industrial trade unions in the last part of the 19th century and in the decades that followed was to a large extent an attempt by a radical fraction of the proletariat to attempt to adapt to the new epoch without really abandoning the old trade unionist (and even social democratic) conceptions of incrementally building up a mass workers’ organisation inside capitalism, with the ultimate aim of taking control of society in a phase of acute crisis. The FORA’s suspicion of the idea of building the new society in the shell of the old was justified. However, without any serious reference to the experience of the mass strike and the revolution, whose essential dynamic had been brilliantly analysed by Rosa Luxemburg in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, written in 1906, or to the new forms of organisation which Trotsky, for example, had recognised as a crucially important product of the 1905 revolution in Russia, the FORA fell back into a diffuse hope of a sudden and total transformation and seemed unable to examine the real links between the defensive struggles of the proletariat and the struggle for revolution.

Isaac Puente’s ‘Libertarian Communism’ pamphlet

In the 1931 debates the majority of the Spanish CNT sided with the more traditional anarcho-syndicalists. But ‘communitarian’ ideas persisted and the 1936 Zaragoza programme, based on Puente’s pamphlet, contained elements of both.

Puente’s pamphlet9 clearly expresses a proletarian standpoint and its ultimate aim – ‘libertarian’ communism – is what we would simply call communism, a society based on the principle, as Puente puts it, “from each according to his/her abilities, to each according to his/her needs”. At the same time, it is a rather clear manifestation of the theoretical poverty at the heart of the anarchist world-view.

A long section at the beginning of the text is devoted to arguing against all prejudices which argue that the workers are ignorant and stupid, incapable of emancipating themselves, contemptuous of science, art and culture, that they need an intellectual elite, a “social architect”, or a police power to run society on their behalf. This polemic is perfectly justified. And yet when he writes that “what we call common sense, a quick grasp of things, intuitive ability, initiative and originality are not things that can be bought or sold in the universities”, we are reminded of the fact that revolutionary theory is not simple common sense, that its propositions, being dialectical, are generally seen as outrageous and nonsensical from the viewpoint of the ‘good old common sense’ which Engels ridiculed in Anti-Dühring 10. The working class does not need educators from on high to free itself of capitalism, but it does need a revolutionary theory that can go beyond mere appearance and understand the deeper processes at work in society.

Anarchism’s inadequacies at this level are revealed in all the principal theses put forward in Puente’s text. Regarding the forms that the working class will use to confront and overthrow capitalism, like the debates in the IWA at the time, Puente ignores the whole dynamic of the class struggle in the epoch of revolution, brought to the surface by the mass strike and the emergence of the council form. Instead of seeing that the organisations that will carry out the communist transformation express a radical rupture with the old class organisations that have been incorporated into bourgeois society, Puente insists that “libertarian communism is based on organisations that already exist, thanks to which economic life in the cities and villages can be carried on in the light of the particular needs of each locality. Those organisms are the union and the free municipality”. This is where Puente combines syndicalism with communitarianism: in the cities, the syndicates will take control of public life, in the countryside it will be the traditional village assemblies. The activities of these organs are envisaged mainly in local terms: they can also federate and form national structures where necessary, but Puente sees the surplus product of local economic units being exchanged with that of others. In other words, this libertarian communism can co-exist with value relations, and it is not clear whether this is a transitional measure or something that will exist in perpetuity.

Meanwhile, this transformation takes place through “direct action” and not through any engagement in the sphere of politics, which is entirely identified with the existing state. In a comparative chart between “organisation based on politics, which is a feature common to all regimes based on the state, and organisations based on economics, in a regime which shuns the state”, Puente draws out the hierarchical and exploitative character of the state and opposes to it the democratic life of the unions and free municipalities, based on decisions reached by assemblies and on common needs. There are two fundamental problems with this approach: first of all, it fails entirely to explain that the unions – and this was even to include anarcho-syndicalist unions like the CNT - have never been models of self-organisation or democracy but are subjected to a powerful pressure to integrate themselves into capitalist society, to themselves become bureaucratic institutions that tend to merge with the state. And secondly it ignores the reality of revolution, in which the working class is necessarily faced with a nexus of problems which are unavoidably political: the organisational and theoretical autonomy of the working class from the parties and ideologies of the bourgeoisie, the destruction of the capitalist state, and the consolidation of its own organs of power. These deep lacunae in the libertarian programme were to be brutally exposed by the reality of the war that broke out in Spain soon after the Zaragoza Congress.

But there is another and no less decisive problem: the text’s failure to consider the international dimension, and indeed its narrowly national outlook. It’s true that the first of many “prejudices” refuted in the text is “the belief that the crisis is merely temporary”. Like Maximoff, the Great Depression of the 30s seems to have convinced Puente that capitalism was a system in decline, and the paragraph under this sub-heading at least has something of a global ring to it, mentioning the situation of the working class in Italy and in Russia. But there is no attempt whatever to assess the balance of class forces, a primordial task for revolutionaries after a period of a mere 20 years which had seen world war, an international revolutionary wave, and series of catastrophic defeats for the proletariat. And when it comes to examining the potential for libertarian communism in Spain, it is almost as if the outside world does not exist: there is a long section given over to estimating the economic resources of Spain, down to its oranges and potatoes, its cotton, timber, and oil. The whole aim of these calculations is to show that Spain could exist as a self-sufficient island of libertarian communism. Certainly Puente considers that “the introduction of libertarian communism in our country, alone of the nations of Europe, will bring with it the hostility of the capitalist nations. Using the defence of its subjects’ interests as a pretext, bourgeois imperialism will attempt to intervene by force of arms to crush our system at its birth”. But such intervention will be hampered by the threat that it will provoke either social revolution in the intervening power or world war against other powers. The foreign capitalists might therefore prefer to employ mercenary armies rather than their own armies, as they did in Russia: in either case the workers will have to be ready to defend their revolution arms in hand. But the other bourgeois states might also seek to impose an economic blockade, backed up by warships. And this could be a real problem because Spain lacks some crucial resources, in particular petroleum, and would normally be obliged to import it. The solution to a blockade on imports however, is not hard to find: “it would be vital that we pour all our energies into sinking new wells in search of petroleum...petroleum may (also) be obtained by distilling soft coal and lignite, both of which we have in abundance in this country”.

In sum: to create libertarian communism, Spain must become autarchic. It is a pure vision of anarchy in one country11. This inability to begin from the standpoint of the world proletariat would become another fatal flaw when Spain became the theatre of a global imperialist conflict.

The events of 36-37: social revolution or imperialist war?

The anarcho—syndicalist model of revolution as expounded in Puente’s text and the Zaragoza programme was to be definitively exposed and refuted by the momentous historic events sparked off by Franco’s military coup in July 1936.

This is certainly not the place to write a blow by blow account of these events. We can only limit ourselves to recalling their overall pattern, with the aim of reaffirming the view of the communist left at the time: that the congenital incoherence of anarchist ideology had now become a vehicle for the betrayal of the working class.

There is no better analysis of the first moments of the war in Spain than the article published in the journal of the Italian Left Fraction, Bilan 36, October-November 1936, and republished in International Review 6. Written almost immediately after the events, and no doubt after sifting through a mass of very confused and confusing information, it is remarkable how the comrades of Bilan managed to slice through the dense fog of mystifications surrounding the ‘Spanish revolution’, whether in the version that was most publicised at the time by the powerful media controlled by democrats and Stalinists– as a kind of bourgeois democratic revolution against the feudal-fascist reaction – or the picture painted by the anarchists and Trotskyists, which, while presenting the struggle in Spain as a social revolution that had gone much further than anything achieved in Russia in 1917, also served to reinforce the dominant view of the struggle as a people’s barrier against the advance of fascism in Europe.

The Bilan article recognises without hesitation that, faced with the attack from the right, the working class, above all in its Barcelona stronghold, responded with its own class weapons: the spontaneous mass strike, street demonstrations, fraternisation with the soldiers, the general arming of the workers, the formation of neighbourhood based defence committees and militias, the occupation of the factories and the election of factory committees. Bilan also recognised that it was the militants of the CNT-FAI who had everywhere played a leading role in this movement, which, however, had embraced the majority of the working class of Barcelona.

And yet it was precisely at this moment, when the working class was on the brink of taking political power into its own hands, that anarchism’s programmatic weaknesses, its theoretical inadequacy, were to prove a deadly handicap.

First and foremost, anarchism’s failure to understand the problem of the state led it not only to quaver at the possibility of a proletarian dictatorship – because anarchism is ‘against all kinds of dictatorship’ – but perhaps even more crucially, it was utterly disarmed in the face of the manoeuvres of the ruling class, which was able to reconstitute a state power with new and ‘radical’ forms, given that its more traditional forces had been paralysed by the proletarian upsurge. Key instruments in this process were the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias and the Central Council of the Economy:

The constitution of the Central Committee of the Militias gave the impression that a period of proletarian power had begun; while the setting up of the Central Council of the Economy gave rise to the illusion that the proletariat was now managing its own economy.

However, far from being organs of dual power, these organs had a capitalist nature and function. Instead of constituting a base for the unification of the proletarian struggle – for posing the question of power – they were from the beginning organs of collaboration with the capitalist state.

In Barcelona the Central Committee of the militias was a conglomeration of workers’ and bourgeois parties and trade unions; not an organ of the soviet type arising spontan­eously on a class basis and capable of pro­viding a focus for the development of prole­tarian consciousness. The Central Committee was connected to the Generalidad and disap­peared with the passing of a simple decree when the new government of Catalonia was formed in October.

The Central Committee of the militias repre­sented a superb weapon of capitalism for leading the workers out of their towns and localities to fight on the territorial fronts where they are being ruthlessly mas­sacred. It is the organ that established order in Catalonia, not in conjunction with the workers, but against the workers who had been dispersed to the fronts. It is true that the regular army was practically dissolved, but it is gradually being recon­stituted within the militia columns whose general staff – Sandino, Villalba and Co. – are clearly bourgeois. The columns are made up of volunteers and this will probably remain the case until the intoxication and illusion in the ‘revolution’ is over and capitalist reality is restored. Then we will soon see the official re-establishment of a regular army and obligatory service”.

The immediate participation of the CNT and the POUM (‘Marxist Party of Workers Unification’, situated somewhere between left social democracy and Trotskyism) in these bourgeois institutions was a blow against the possibility of the class organs created in streets and the factories during the July days centralising themselves and establishing an authentic dual power. On the contrary, the latter were quickly emptied of their proletarian content and incorporated into the new structures of bourgeois power.

Secondly, a burning political question of the day was not confronted and, lacking any analysis of the historic trends at work within capitalist society, the anarchists had no method for confronting: the nature of fascism and what Bordiga called its “worst product”, anti-fascism. If the rise of fascism was one expression of a series of historic defeats for the proletarian revolution, preparing bourgeois society for a second inter-imperialist massacre, anti-fascism was no less a rallying cry for imperialist war, no less a call for workers to give up the defence of their own class interests in the name of a sacred ‘national unity’. It was above all this ideology of anti-fascist unity which enabled the bourgeoisie to avert the danger of proletarian revolution by diverting the class war in the cities into a military conflict at the front. The call to sacrifice everything for the struggle to defeat Franco led even the most passionate advocates of libertarian communism, such as Durruti, to accept this grand manoeuvre. The militias, by being incorporated into an organ like the CCAM, dominated by parties and unions such as the Republican and nationalist left, the Socialists and the Stalinists, which were openly opposed to the proletarian revolution, became instruments in a war between two capitalist factions, a conflict which almost immediately turned into a global inter-imperialist battlefield, a rehearsal for the next world war. Their democratic forms - such as the election of officers – did not fundamentally alter this. It’s true that the leading forces of bourgeois order – the Stalinists and Republicans – were never comfortable with these forms and later insisted on them being fully subsumed into a traditional bourgeois army, as Bilan had predicted. But as Bilan also realised, the fatal blow had already been struck in the first weeks after the military coup.

It was the same with the most obvious example of the bankruptcy of the CNT – the decision of four of its best-known leaders, including the former radical Garcia Oliver, to become ministers in the central Madrid government, and to compound this act of treason with their infamous claim that thanks to their participation in the ministries, the Republican state “had ceased to be an oppressive force against the working class, just as the state no longer represents the organism which divide society into classes. And both will tend even less to oppress the people as a result of the intervention of the CNT”12. This was the final step in a trajectory that had been prepared a long time in advance by the slow degeneration of the CNT. In a series of articles on the history of the CNT, we showed that the CNT, despite its proletarian origins and the deeply held revolutionary convictions of many of its militants, was unable to resist a remorseless tendency in capitalism in its epoch of state totalitarianism – the tendency for all permanent mass workers’ organisations to be integrated into the state. This had already been shown long before the July events , such as during the elections of February 1936, when the CNT abandoned its traditional abstentionism in favour of tactically supporting a vote for the Republic13. And in the period immediately after Franco’s coup, when the central Republican government was in utter disarray, the process of anarchist participation in the bourgeois state accelerated at all levels. Thus well before the scandal of the four anarchist ministers, the CNT had already joined the regional government of Catalonia, the Generalidad, and at the local level – no doubt in line with its rather vague notion of ‘free municipalities’ – anarchist militants became representatives and officials of the organs of local government, i.e. the base units of the capitalist state. As with the betrayal of social democracy in 1914, this was not just a matter of a few bad leaders, but the product of a gradual process of the integration of an entire organisational apparatus into bourgeois society and its state. Certainly within the CNT-FAI, and in the wider anarchist movement inside and outside Spain, there were proletarian voices raised against this trajectory, although as we will see in the second part of this article, few managed to call into question the underlying theoretical roots of the betrayal.

Ah, but what about the collectivisations? Didn’t the most dedicated and courageous anarchists, like Durruti, insist that deepening the social revolution was the best way to defeat Franco? Wasn’t it above all the examples of self-managed factories and farms, the attempts to get rid of the wage form in numerous villages throughout Spain, which convinced many, even marxists like Grandizo Munis14, that the social revolution in Spain reached heights never attained in Russia, with its rapid descent into state capitalism?

But Bilan rejected any idealisation of the factory occupations:

When the workers went back to work in the factories where the bosses had fled or had been shot by the masses, factory councils were set up as an expression of the expro­priation of these companies by the workers.

Here the trade unions intervened very quickly, setting up a procedure that would allow proportional representation in places where the CNT and the UGT had members. Moreover, although the workers returned to work on condition that they would be getting a 36 hour week and a wage increase, the unions intervened to defend the need to work at full output for the war effort, without worrying too much about the regula­tion of work or about wages.

The factory committees and the committees for the control of industries which were not expropriated (out of consideration for foreign capital or for other reasons) were thus immediately smothered; transformed into organs for stimulating production, they lost their class content. They were not organs created during an insurrectionary strike in order to overthrow the state; they were organs whose function was the organiza­tion of the war, and this was an essential precondition for the survival and reinforce­ment of the state” (ibid).

Damier does not dwell too much on the conditions in the ‘worker-controlled’ factories. It is significant that he gives more space to examining the democratic forms of the village collectives, their deep concern for debate and self-education through regular assemblies and elected committees, their attempts to do away with the wages system. These were indeed heroic efforts but the conditions of rural isolation made it less urgent for the capitalist state to launch a direct assault – by guile or outright force – on the village collectives. In sum these changes in the countryside did not alter the general process of bourgeois recuperation which was focused on the cities and the factories, where work discipline for a state capitalist war economy was imposed in a more ruthless and rapid manner and could not have been imposed without the fiction of ‘union control’ via the CNT

The most interesting fact here is this. Following the expropriation of companies in Catalonia, their co-ordination through the Council of the Economy in August, and the government decree of October laying down the norms for ‘collectivization’, after each one of these steps came new measures for disciplining the workers in the factories – discipline they would never have put up with under the old bosses. In October the CNT issued an order forbidding defensive struggle of any kind and stating that the workers’ most sacred duty was to increase production. Apart from the fact that we have already rejected the Soviet fraud, which consists of the physical assassination of the workers in the name of “building socialism”, we declare openly that for us the struggle in the factories cannot cease for a moment as long as the domination of the capitalist state continues. Certainly the workers will have to make sacrifices after the proletarian revolution, but a revolutionary will never advocate the cessation of defen­sive struggles as a way of achieving socialism. Even after the revolution we will not deprive the workers of the strike weapon, and it goes without saying that when the proletariat is not in power – as is the case in Spain – the militarization of the factories is the same as the mili­tarization of the factories in any capitalist state at war” (Bilan, op cit).

Bilan here is basing itself on the axiom that social revolution and imperialist war are diametrically opposed tendencies in capitalist society. Defeat of the working class opens the way to imperialist war – ideological in 1914, physical and ideological in the 1930s. Class war on the other hand can only be waged at the expense of the war economy. Strikes and mutinies do not strengthen the national war effort. It was the revolutionary outbreaks of 1917 and 1918 which forced the warring imperialisms to bring their hostilities to an immediate end.

There is such a thing as revolutionary war. But it can only be waged once the working class is in power – on this Lenin and those who rallied to him in the Bolshevik party were very clear in the period February to October 1917. And even then, the demands of a revolutionary war fought on the territorial fronts do not create the best conditions for the flowering of class power and for a radical social transformation- far from it. Thus between 1917 and 1920 the Soviet state defeated the internal and external counter-revolutionary forces at the military level, but at a very high price: the erosion of political control by the working class and the autonomisation of the state apparatus.

This fundamental opposition between imperialist war and social revolution was doubly confirmed by the events of May 37.

Here again – this time faced with a provocation by the Stalinists and other state forces, who attempted to seize the Barcelona telephone exchange from the workers who controlled it – the Barcelona proletariat responded en masse and with its own methods of struggle: mass strike and barricades. The ‘revolutionary defeatism’ advocated by the Italian left, castigated as insane and traitorous by virtually every political tendency from the liberals to ‘left communist’ groups like Union Communiste – was put into practice by the workers of Barcelona. This was essentially a defensive reaction to an attack by the repressive forces of the Republican state, but it once again pitted the workers against the whole state machine, whose most brazen mouthpieces did not hesitate to denounce them as traitors, as saboteurs of the war effort. And implicitly, this was indeed a direct challenge to the anti-fascist war, no less than the Kiel mutiny of 1918 was a challenge to the war effort of German imperialism and, by extension, to the whole inter-imperialist conflict.

The open defenders of bourgeois order were to respond with brutal terror against the workers. Revolutionaries were arrested, tortured, shot. Camillo Berneri, the Italian anarchist who had openly expressed his criticisms of the CNT policy of collaboration, was among the many militants kidnapped and killed, in the majority of cases by the thugs of the ‘Communist’ party. But the repression really only descended on the workers once they had been persuaded to lay down their arms and go back to work by the spokespeople of the ‘left’ , of the CNT and the POUM, who were above all terrified of a fracture in the anti-fascist front. The CNT – like the SPD in the German revolution 1918 – was indispensable in the restoration of bourgeois order.

C D Ward

In the second part of this article we will look at some of the anarchist tendencies which denounced the betrayals of the CNT during the war in Spain, in particular the Friends of Durruti and Camillo Berneri. We shall try to show that while these were healthy proletarian reactions, they rarely called into question the underlying weaknesses of the anarchist ‘programme’.


1In our article in International Review 120, ‘Anarcho-syndicalism faces a change in epoch: the CGT up to 1914’ we pointed out that this orientation of certain anarchist currents towards the unions was based more on the search for a more receptive audience for their propaganda than a real understanding of the revolutionary nature of the working class.

4 See the article on the Great Depression in International Review 146

5 Black Cat Press, Edmonton, 2009. Originally published in Russian in 2000. Damier is a member of the KRAS, the Russian section of the IWA. The ICC has published a number of its internationalist statements on the wars in the former USSR.

6Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina

7‘Anarchism in Argentina and Uruguay’ in Anarchism Today, edited by David Apter and James Joll,Macmillan, 1971, p 185. Available online at https://www.libcom.org/files/Argentina.pdf

8This organisation – the SR stands for ‘Revolutionary Syndicalist’ – was the result of a split in 1926 with the ‘official’ CGT, which at the time was dominated mainly by the Socialist Party. It remained a rather small group and disappeared under the Petain regime during the Second World War. Its main spokesman at the Zaragoza Congress was Pierre Besnard.

10At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and even necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees”. Anti-Dühring, Introduction

11Our article on the CGT cited in footnote 2 makes the same point about a book produced by two leading militants of the French anarcho-syndicalist organisation in 1909: “The book by Pouget and Pataud, which we have already quoted (Comment nous ferons la revolution), is very instructive in this respect, since the revolution that it describes is in fact purely national. The two anarcho-syndicalist authors did not wait for Stalin to envisage the construction of ‘anarchism in a single country’: once the revolution has been successful in France, a whole chapter of the book is devoted to describing the system of foreign trade, which is to continue commercial operations abroad while production is organised on communist principles within French borders”

12Quoted in Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, London, Freedom press1983 (first published in 1953) chapter VI, p 69

13See the series on the history of the CNT in IRs 129-133, in particular the last article, ‘Anti-fascism, the road to the betrayal of the CNT’.

14 Munis was a leading figure in the Bolshevik-Leninist group in Spain which was linked to Trotsky’s tendency. He later broke with Trotskyism over its support for the Second World War and evolved towards many of the positions of the communist left. We have published polemics with the group later founded by Munis, Fomento Obrera Revolucionario, on its view of the Spanish war.

 

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Communism is not just a nice idea

World War I - Special Issue

100 years of capitalist decadence

For a century now, humanity has stood at a crossroads in its history. Already in the 19th century the working class starkly outlined this historical watershed in the expression: "socialism or barbarism". The lucid marxist analysis revealed and expressed in this slogan cannot however be reduced to an empty slogan. Hence we want here to insist briefly on its historical importance and depth.

When we look at the human species' distant, obscure beginnings, we cannot help but be astounded at the immense steps forward that have marked mankind's emergence from the animal realm and marked its development since then: language, dance, art, architecture, the production of an immense wealth of material goods, and the ability to create a wealth and diversity of cultural, moral, and intellectual needs – all this represents a historical acceleration which takes the breath away.

Yet, when we focus our attention on the different epochs of human history, we must also acknowledge that mankind's development has never been a smooth progression. Still less has this been the case since the emergence of class society and the first great civilisations, all of which have long disappeared: only a very few of them have been able to transform themselves into something new. History reveals to us many epochs of cultural regression, the loss of skills and knowledge, generally accompanied by moral stultification and a brutalisation of human relationships.

The foundation of man's progress lies in his ability to transform nature with a view to the satisfaction of his own needs, and in the first place of his material needs, through the improvement and development of his tools and techniques – what Marx called "the productive forces". Fundamentally, it is the degree of development of these productive forces, and of the division of labour that they imply, which determine the way that society is organised to put them into operation: the "relations of production". When the framework provided by these relations allows the development of the productive forces, then society flourishes, not just on the material but also on the moral and cultural levels. But when the relations of production become a barrier to the continued development of the productive forces, then society undergoes repeated and worsening convulsions: it is threatened with a return to barbarism. To take just one historical example: one of the pillars of the Roman Empire was the exploitation of slave labour, especially in agriculture. The appearance of new farming techniques which could not be put into operation by producers whose status was lower than cattle was one of the causes of the Empire's decadence and final collapse.

The steps forward achieved by human culture,1 from the Neolithic revolution to the Renaissance, the emergence of humanism, and the Russian revolution, appear to us today as a grandiose prelude to the world revolution. These giant strides of human culture have always been the product of long periods of struggle, where new social relationships overcame and replaced the old. Today, they carry us towards a new leap forward: socialism, the first conscious and worldwide socialisation of the human species! Marxism, the theory that the proletariat adopted to light the way in its struggle against capitalism, is able to study this history with lucidity, free from mystification, and to recognise its major tendencies. This has nothing to do with crystal-ball gazing. We cannot predict when, or even whether, the world revolution will take place. What we can do is to understand in depth – and defend against all comers, including the incomprehension of some revolutionaries – the immense historical importance of capitalism's entry into its decadence. For 100 years, we have been faced with an alternative which can be summed up thus: either we succeed with the next social and cultural leap forward to socialism, or we fall back into barbarism.

The gravity of this alternative is greater than ever before in history, because today the growth in the contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production has reached a point where it threatens humanity not just with social and cultural decline, but with complete destruction. For the first time in history, a mode of production's decadence is a menace for the very survival of the human species. Yet at the same time, it bears with it immense, historic possibilities for its future development: the beginning of humanity's truly conscious history.

The capitalist model of socialisation is the most successful in human history. Capitalism has absorbed – when it has not simply destroyed – all previous social and cultural milieux, and has for the first time created a worldwide human society. Its basic form of exploitation is wage labour, which makes possible the appropriation and the accumulation of surplus labour, as well as the unpaid appropriation of the enormous productive capacity created by associated, socialised labour. This is what explains the unparalleled technical and scientific explosion which is part and parcel of capitalism's rise. But one of capitalist socialisation's specificities is that it is carried out unconsciously. It is determined by laws which – although they are the expression of given human social relationships based on the exchange of labour power for wages, between the producers and the owners of the means of production – appear to be "natural" and "unchangeable", and so beyond the reach of human will. In this mystified – reified – view of reality, where human beings and the relations between them have become mere objects, the enormous increase in material resources and productive power appears as the product of capital rather than of human labour. Capitalism set out to conquer the world, but it turns out that the world is round. A world market has been created (on the ruins of alternative forms of production, like the textiles of China, India, or the Ottoman Empire for example). The success of the capitalist mode of production is a progressive step in human history; nonetheless for the vast majority of the population at the heart of capitalism the industrial revolution meant the destruction of previous ways of life and ferocious exploitation, while in much of the rest of the world it meant famine, epidemics and slavery. Capitalism is undoubtedly the most modern form of exploitation, but in the end it is every bit as parasitic as its predecessors. To keep the machine of accumulation going, capitalist socialisation demands ever more raw material and markets, and must constantly dispose of a reserve of human beings forced to sell their labour power to survive. This is why its victory over previous modes of production meant the ruin and starvation of the previous producers.

Capitalism presents itself as the aim and apogee of human development. If we are to believe its ideology, there is nothing beyond capitalism. But this means that capitalist ideology must hide two things: first, that historically capitalism is largely dependent on an environment and relations of production outside itself; second, that capitalist socialisation, like all the social forms that have preceded it, is only a stage in the process of humanity's coming to consciousness. The driving force of capitalist accumulation constantly creates internal contradictions which erupt in crises. During capitalism's ascendant phase, these crises were overcome by the destruction of excess capital and the conquest of new markets. With the new equilibrium thus achieved came a further extension of capitalist social relations – but once the world market had been shared out among the central capitalist powers the limits of this extension were reached. At this point, the great nation states can only pursue their world conquest at each other's expense. Since all the cake has been shared out, each can only increase his share by taking from the others.

The nation states plunge into an arms race and hurl themselves at each others' throats in the First World War. In a world wide slaughter, the productive forces chained in by historically obsolete relations of production are transformed into a destructive force of enormous power. With capitalism's entry into decadence, warfare becomes a matter of equipment, and subjects the best part of production to military needs. The blind machine of annihilation drags the whole world down into the abyss.

Well before 1914, the left wing of the Socialist International, the revolutionary forces around Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, fought with all their strength against the threat of imperialist war. Living marxism – the only real marxism – which is not enclosed in dogmas and formulae supposedly valid for all time, realised that this was not just another war between the nations like those before it, but that it marked the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase. The marxists knew that we were then, as we still are today, at a historical crossroads which threatens for the first time to become a struggle for the very survival of the human species. Capitalism's entry into decadence 100 years ago is irreversible, but this does not mean that the productive forces have come to a halt. In reality, these forces are so enchained and compressed by the logic of capitalist exploitation that society's development is dragged down into an ever more barbaric maelstrom. Only the working class can give history a different direction and build a new society. We have seen just what capitalism's unadulterated brutality is capable of after the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge in the years 1917-23. The course towards a new world war was opened, men reduced to ciphers, shut up in camps destined to murderous exploitation or plain extermination. Stalinist mass murder was surpassed by the annihilating madness of the Nazis; nor did the "civilised" ruling classes intend to miss the festivities of barbarism: the "democratic" atom bombs wiped two Japanese cities from the map and inflicted hideous suffering on the survivors.

The state capitalist machine may have learnt from history to the point of avoiding its own self-destruction – the bourgeois class will not simply commit suicide and abandon the historical stage to the proletariat – but only the return of the working class after 1968 offers any guarantee against a new course towards war. However, if the working class has proven capable of barring the road to a new world holocaust, it has not so far been able to impose its own perspective. In this situation, where neither of its two determining classes are capable of imposing a decisive response to an irreversible and ever deeper economic crisis, society is more and more rotting where it stands; a growing social decomposition makes it ever more difficult for the working class to achieve a clear awareness of its historical perspective – a historical perspective which a century ago was widely shared in the workers' ranks.

One hundred years ago, the working class faced a gigantic historic task, and so it still does today. The class of associated labour as such bears in itself the whole of human history: it is the central class in the struggle for the abolition of classes, and it must rise up against this barbarism. In the struggle against capitalism's nihilistic and amoral barbarity, the working class is the incarnation of a humanity become conscious of itself. It is the productive force of the future still in chains. Within it lies the potential for a new leap forward in human culture.

In the struggle against capitalism's entry into decadence, a whole generation of revolutionaries worldwide stepped forward, to set against capitalism's perverted and reified socialisation the conscious association of the working class, guided by the beacon of the Communist International.

With the Russian revolution, it took in hand the struggle for world revolution. For us today, one hundred years later, this great task of taking up our responsibilities for humanity's future remains an electrifying prospect. Even in the face of general stultification, a moral indignation arises in the heart of the working class, which gives us our bearings today. The working class suffers with the rest of humanity under the burden of decadence. Atomisation and the absence of perspective for the future attack our very identity. In the confrontations to come the working class will show whether it is capable of becoming conscious once again of its historical duty.

In the sweep of history, it is only a short step from moral indignation to the politicisation of an entire generation. A new leap forward in the history of human culture is both possible and vital. This is what living historical experience tells us.

ICC


1It should be clear that when we use the term "culture" here, we do so in the scientific sense, englobing the whole production of human society: technical and material of course, but also artistic, organisational, philosophical, moral, etc.

 

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World War I

1914: how the bloodletting began

2014: a year of forgetting

Even today the war that began in August 1914 goes by the name of the Great War, despite the fact that the Second World War that followed it in 1939 killed more than twice as many people, and despite the fact that the unending worldwide warfare since 1945 has been responsible for even more death and destruction than World War II.

To understand why 1914-18 is still the “Great War”, we need only visit any village in France, even the most isolated lost in its Alpine pastures, and read the roll-call of the dead on the war memorials: whole families are there – brothers, fathers, uncles, sons. These mute witnesses to horror stand not just in the towns and villages of the European belligerent nations, but even on the other side of the world: the memorial in the tiny settlement of Ross on the Australian island of Tasmania bears the names of 16 dead and 44 survivors, presumably of the Gallipoli campaign. Humanity was no stranger to war, but 1914 was the first time it had been involved in World War.

For two generations after the war ended, 1914-18 was synonymous with senseless carnage, driven by the uncaring blind stupidity of an aristocratic ruling caste, and the unbridled greed of imperialists, war profiteers and arms manufacturers. Despite all the official ceremonies, the laying of wreaths and (in Britain) the symbolic wearing of poppies on Memorial Day, this view of World War I passed into popular culture in the belligerent nations. In France, Gabriel Chevalier's autobiographical novel of life in the trenches Fear (La Peur), published in 1930, had an enormous success, to the point where the book was briefly banned by the authorities. In 1937, Jean Renoir's anti-war movie The Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion), played continuously at the Marivaux cinema in Paris from 10 in the morning till two at night, beating every previous box office record: in New York it played for 36 weeks.1

In 1920s Germany, George Grosz’s satirical cartoons lambasted the generals, politicians and profiteers who had done well out of the war. The war veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s All quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) was published in 1929 and 18 months later had sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages; the 1930 film version by Universal Studios was a smash hit in the USA, winning an Oscar for best picture.2

In its disintegration, the Austro-Hungarian empire bequeathed to the world one of the greatest anti-war novels: Jaroslav Hašek's The good soldier Svejk (Osudy dobrélo vojáka Švejk za světové války), published in 1923 and since translated into 58 languages – more than any other work in Czech.

The revulsion at the memory of World War I survived the still greater bloodletting of World War II. Compared to the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima the barbarity of Prussian militarism and Tsarist oppression – not to mention French or British colonialism – which had provided the justification for war in 1914, almost paled into insignificance, making the slaughter in the trenches seem still more monstrous and absurd: World War II could be portrayed as, if not exactly a “good war” then at least as a just and necessary war. Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in Britain, where a stream of heroic “good war” movies (Dambusters in 1955, 633 Squadron in 1964, etc) filled the cinema screens in the 1950s and 60s, while at the same time the anti-war writings of war poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves were required reading for 15-year old school students.3 Perhaps the finest composition of Benjamin Britten, the 20th century's best known British composer, was his War Requiem (1961) which set Owen's poetry to music, while in 1969 two very different films hit the silver screen: Battle of Britain, in the patriotic vein, and the viciously satirical Oh What a Lovely War!, which succeeded in creating a musical denunciation of the First World War using original soldiers' songs from the trenches.

Two generations later, we stand on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of war on 4th August 1914. Given the symbolic importance of round number anniversaries, and still more of centenaries, preparations are under way to commemorate (“celebrate” is perhaps hardly the word) the war. In Britain and France, budgets of tens of millions (euros or sterling) have been set aside; in Germany, for obvious reasons, preparations are more discreet and have no official government benediction.4

“He who calls the piper pays the tune”, so what are the ruling classes getting for the tens of millions they have budgeted to “commemorate the war”?

Look at the websites of the organisations responsible for the commemoration (in France, a special body set up by the government; in Britain – appropriately – the Imperial War Museum) and the answer seems clear enough: they are buying one of history's most expensive smokescreens. In Britain, the Imperial War Museum is devoting itself to bringing together the stories of individuals who lived during the war and turning them into podcasts.5 The Centenary Project's website (1914.org) offers such crucial events as the Museum display of “JRR Tolkien's First World War revolver” (we're not joking – presumably the aim is to cash in on the success of the Lord of the Rings movies); the commemoration of a Surrey war playwright, the London Transport Museum collecting World War I bus stories (seriously!); Nottingham City and County's “major program of events and activities (...) will highlight how the conflict was a catalyst for huge social and economic change in the communities of Nottinghamshire”. The BBC have produced a “groundbreaking” documentary: “The First World War from above” – photos and film footage taken from aircraft and observation balloons. The pacifists will get a look-in with commemorations of conscientious objectors. In short, we are going to be drowned in an ocean of detail, and even of trivia. According to the Imperial War Museum's Director-General “Our ambition is that a lot more people will understand that you can’t understand the world today unless you understand the causes, course and consequences of the First World War6 and we would agree 100%. But the reality is that everything possible is being done – including by the honourable Director-General – to prevent us from understanding those causes and consequences.

In France, the centenary website carries the impeccably official “Report to the President on commemorating the Great War” dated September 20117 which begins with these words from General de Gaulle's speech at the 50th anniversary in 1964: “On 2nd August 1914, the day mobilisation was announced, the whole French people came to their feet as one. This had never been seen before. Every region, every district, every category, every family, every living being, suddenly found common cause. In an instant, political, social, religious quarrels that had divided the country, disappeared. From one end of the nation to the other, words, songs, tears, and above all the silence, expressed a single resolve”. And in the report itself we read that “While the Centenary will provoke amongst our contemporaries dread at the mass slaughter and the immense sacrifices that were accepted, it will also send a shiver through French society, reminding us of the unity and national cohesion that the French displayed in the face of the trial of World War I”. It seems unlikely then, that the French ruling class intends to tell us anything about the brutal police repression of workers' anti-war demonstrations during July 1914, or about the infamous “Carnet B” (the government's list of socialist and syndicalist anti-militarist militants to be rounded up and interned or sent to the front at the outbreak of war – the British had their own equivalents), and still less about the circumstances in which anti-war socialist leader Jean Jaurès was assassinated on the very eve of the conflict, or about the mutinies in the trenches8...

As ever the propagandists can count on the support of the learned gentlemen of Academe to provide them with themes and material for their talk-shows and TV programmes. We will take just one example which seems to us emblematic: Cambridge University historian Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, first published in 2012, published in paperback in 2013, and already translated into French (Les Somnambules) and German (Die Schlafwandler).9 Clark is an unashamed empiricist, And his Introduction sets out his intentions quite openly: “This book (...) is concerned less with why the war happened than with how it came about. Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question of how invites us to look closely at sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invites us to go in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilisation”. Missing from Clark's list of course is “capitalism”. Could capitalism as such generate war? Could war be not just “politics by other means” (to use von Clausewitz's famous expression), but the ultimate expression of the competition inherent in the capitalist mode of production? Oh no, no, no: perish the thought! Clark sets out then, to lay before us “the facts” on the road to war, and this he does with immense erudition and in enormous detail right down to the colour of the ostrich feathers on Archduke Franz Ferdinand's helmet on the day of his assassination (they were green). Had anyone bothered to note down the colour of his assassin Gavrilo Princip's underwear that day, it too would be in this book.

The book's length, its overwhelming mastery of detail, makes one huge omission all the more striking: despite devoting whole sections to “public opinion”, Clark has nothing whatever to say about the one part of “public opinion” that really mattered – the stand adopted by the organised working class. Clark cites extensively from newspapers like the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Mail, or Le Matin, and others long since deservedly forgotten, but not once does he cite Vorwärts or L'Humanité (the press respectively of the German and French Socialist Parties), nor La Vie Ouvrière, the quasi-official organ of the French syndicalist CGT,10 nor its Bataille Syndicaliste. These were not minor publications: Vorwärts was only one of the SPD's 91 dailies, with a total circulation of 1.5 million (by comparison, the Daily Mail claimed a circulation of 900,000),11 and the SPD itself was the largest political party in Germany. Clark mentions the SPD's 1905 Jena Congress and its refusal to call for a general strike in the event of war, but there is no mention of the anti-war resolutions adopted by the Socialist International's congresses at Stuttgart (1907) and Basel (1912). The only leader of the German SPD to merit a mention is Albert Südekum, a relatively insignificant figure on the right of the SPD who is given a walk-on part reassuring German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg on 28th July that the SPD will not oppose a “defensive” war.

On the struggle between left and right in the socialist and broader working class movement, there is silence. On the political combat of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Domela Nieuwenhuis, John MacLean, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Pierre Monatte and many others, there is silence. On the assassination of Jean Jaurès there is silence, silence, silence...

Clearly, the proletarians cannot rely on bourgeois historiography truly to understand the causes and consequences of the Great War. Let us then turn instead to two outstanding militants of the working class: Rosa Luxemburg, arguably the finest theoretician of the German Social-Democracy, and Alfred Rosmer, a stalwart militant of the pre-war French CGT. In particular, we will draw here on Luxemburg's Crisis in the German Social-Democracy12 (better known as the “Junius Pamphlet”), and on Rosmer's Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la Première Guerre mondiale13 (The workers' movement during the First World War). The two works are very different: Luxemburg's pamphlet was written in 1916, in prison (no privileged access to libraries and government archives for her, and the power and clarity of her analysis is all the more impressive for that); the first volume14 of Rosmer's work, where he deals with the period leading up to war, was published in 1936, and is the fruit both of his painstaking dedication to historical truth and his passionate defence of internationalist principle.

World War I: its importance and its causes

Some might ask whether it really matters. It was all a long time ago, the world has changed, what can we really learn from these writings from the past?

We would answer that understanding World War I is vital for three reasons.

First, because World War I opened a new historical epoch: we are still living in a world shaped by the consequences of that war.

Second, because the underlying causes of the war are still very much present and operational: there is an all too striking parallel to be drawn between the rise of Germany as a new imperialist power prior to 1914, and the rise of China today.

Finally – and perhaps most importantly, because this is what the government propagandists and the historians really want to hide from us – because there is only one force that can put a stop to imperialist war: the world working class. As Rosmer says: “the governments know very well that they cannot undertake the dangerous adventure of war - this war above all - unless they have behind them the virtually unanimous support of public opinion, and above all of the working class; to get it, they must deceive, dupe, mislead, excite”.15 Luxemburg quotes “the well-known words of [German Chancellor] Bülow: 'They are trying to put off the war chiefly because they fear the Social-Democracy.'”; she also quotes from General Bernhardi's Vom Heutigen Krieg: “when great, compact masses once shake off their leaders (...) then the army becomes not only ineffectual against the enemy, it becomes a menace to itself and to its leaders. When the army bursts the bands of discipline, when it voluntarily interrupts the course of military operation, it creates problems that its leaders are unable to solve”. And Luxemburg continues: “capitalist politicians and military authorities alike believe war, with its modern mass armies, to be a dangerous game. And therein lay for the Social-Democracy the most effectual opportunity to prevent the rulers of the present day from precipitating war and to force them to end it as rapidly as possible. But the position of the Social-Democracy in this war cleared away all doubts, has torn down the dams that held back the storm-flood of militarism (...) And so the thousands of victims that have fallen for months on battlefields lie upon our conscience”.16

 

The outbreak of generalised, world wide imperialist war (we are not talking here about localised conflicts, even major ones like the Korean or Vietnam wars, but about mass mobilisation of the proletariat in the heart of capitalism) is determined by two opposing forces: the drive toward war, toward a new division of the world among the great imperialist powers, and the struggle to defend their own existence by the working masses who must provide both the cannon fodder and the industrial army without which modern war is impossible. The Crisis in the Social-Democracy, and especially in its most powerful fraction, the German Social-Democracy – a crisis systematically ignored by the tame historians of Academe – is thus the critical factor that made war possible in 1914.

We will look at this in more detail in a later article in this series, but here we propose to take up Luxemburg's analysis of the shifting imperialist rivalries and alliances that drove the great powers inexorably into the bloodbath of 1914.

Two lines of development in recent history lead straight to the present war. One has its origin in the period when the so-called national states, i.e., the modern states, were first constituted, from the time of the Bismarckian war against France. The war of 1870, which, by the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, threw the French republic into the arms of Russia, split Europe into two opposing camps and opened up a period of insane competitive armament, first piled up the firebrands for the present world conflagration (...) Thus the war of 1870 brought in its wake the outward political grouping of Europe about the axes of the Franco-German antagonism, and established the rule of militarism in the lives of the European peoples. Historical development has given to this rule and to this grouping an entirely new content.

The second line that leads to the present world war, and which again brilliantly justifies Marx’s prophecy,17 has its origin in international occurrences that Marx did not live to see, in the imperialist development of the last twenty-five years”.18

The last 30 years of the 19th century thus saw a rapid expansion of capitalism throughout the world, but also the emergence of a new, dynamic, expanding and confident capitalism in the heart of Europe: the German Empire, which had been declared in Versailles in 1871 after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, which Prussia entered as merely the most powerful of a multitude of German statelets and principalities, and emerged from as the dominant component of a new, united Germany. “It is obvious”, writes Luxemburg, “that this live, unhampered imperialism, coming upon the world stage at a time when the world was practically divided up, with gigantic appetites, soon became an irresponsible factor of general unrest”.19

By one of those quirks of history which allow us to symbolise a shift in the historical dynamic with a single date, the year 1898 witnessed three events which mark one such shift.

The first was the “Fashoda Incident”, a tense face-off between British and French troops for control of the Sudan. At the time, there seemed to be a real risk that France and Britain would go to war for the control of Egypt and the Suez Canal, and for dominance in Africa. Instead, the incident ended with an improvement in Franco-British relations which was formalised in the “Entente Cordiale” of 1904, and a growing tendency for Britain to back France against a Germany that both saw as a threat. The two “Moroccan crises” of 1905 and 191120 showed that henceforth Britain would block German ambitions in North Africa (though it was prepared to leave Germany some titbits: Portugal's colonial possessions).

The second event was Germany's seizure of the Chinese port of Tsingtao (today's Qingdao),21 which announced Germany's arrival on the imperialist stage as a power with world wide, not merely European aspirations – a Weltpolitik as it was called at the time in Germany.

Appropriately, 1898 also saw the death of Otto von Bismarck, the great Chancellor who had guided Germany through unification and rapid industrialisation. Bismarck had always opposed colonialism and naval construction, his main foreign policy concern being to avoid the emergence of anti-German alliances amongst other European powers jealous – or fearful – of Germany's rise. But by the turn of the century Germany had become a world class industrial power second only to the United States, with world class ambitions to match. Luxemburg quotes then Foreign Secretary von Bülow on 11th December 1899: “When the English speak of ‘a greater Britain’, when the French talk of ‘The New France’, when the Russians open up Asia for themselves, we too have a right to aspire to a greater Germany. If we do not create a navy sufficient to protect our trade, our natives in foreign lands, our missions and the safety of our shores, we are threatening the most vital interests of our nation. In the coming century the German people will be either the hammer or the anvil.” And she comments: “Strip this of its coastal defence ornamentation, and there remains the colossal program: greater Germany, as the hammer upon other nations”.

In the early 20th century, having a Weltpolitik meant having a world class navy. As Luxemburg points out very clearly, Germany had no immediate economic need for a navy: nobody planned to seize its possessions in China or Africa. A navy was above all a matter of prestige: to continue its expansion Germany had to be seen as a serious player, a power to be counted with, and for this a “first-class aggressive navy” was a prerequisite. In Luxemburg's unforgettable words, it was “a challenge not only to the German working class, but to other capitalist nations as well, a challenge directed to no one in particular, a mailed fist shaken in the face of the entire world...”.

The parallel between the rise of Germany at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and that of China 100 years later, is obvious. Like Bismarck, Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy went to great lengths to avoid alarming both China's neighbours and the world hegemon, the United States. But with its rise to the status of second world economic power, China's prestige demands that it should be able, at a minimum, to control its maritime boundaries and protect its sea-lanes: hence its naval build-up, construction of submarines and an aircraft carrier, and recent declaration of an “Air Defence Identification Zone” covering the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

The parallel between Germany in 1914 and China today is not of course an identity, for two reasons in particular: firstly, Germany in the early 20th century was not only the world's second industrial power after the United States, it was also in the forefront of technical progress and innovation (as can be judged, for example, by the numbers of German Nobel prize winners and German innovation in steel, electrical machinery, and chemical industries); secondly, Germany could project military power globally in a way that China cannot, at least not yet.

And just as the United States today is bound to meet China's threat to its own prestige and to the security of its allies (Japan, South Korea and the Philippines in particular), so Britain could only see Germany's naval build-up as a threat, and an existential threat at that, directed against the vital artery of Channel shipping and its own coastal defences.22

Whatever its naval ambitions, however, the natural direction for a land power like Germany to expand, was towards the East, and specifically towards the decaying Ottoman Empire; this was all the more true when its ambitions in Africa and the Western Mediterranean were blocked by the British and French. Money and militarism went hand in hand, as German capital poured into Turkey,23 fighting for elbow room with its French and British competitors. A large share of this German capital went to financing the Baghdad railway: this was in fact a network of lines intended to link Berlin to Constantinople and then on to the south of Anatolia, Syria, and Baghdad, but also to Palestine, the Hejaz and Mecca. In a day when troop movements depended on railways, this would make it possible for a Turkish army, equipped with German guns and trained by German instructors, to send troops by rail to threaten both Britain's oil refinery at Abadan (Persia, modern Iran),24 and British control of Egypt and the Suez Canal: here again was a direct German threat to Britain's vital strategic interests. During much of the 19th century, the main security threat to the British Empire had been Russian expansion into Central Asia, bringing it to the border of Persia and posing a menace to India; but Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 had dampened its Eastern ambitions such that an Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907 had – at least for a time – resolved disputes between the two countries in Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet. Germany was now the rival to be opposed.

Germany's Eastern policy necessarily gave it a strategic interest in the Balkans, the Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles. The fact that the route of the Berlin-Constantinople railway was planned to run through Vienna and Belgrade made control over Serbia, or at least Serbian neutrality, a matter of great strategic importance to Germany. This in turn could only bring it into conflict with a country which in Bismarck's day had been a bastion of autocratic reaction and solidarity, and hence Prussia and Imperial Germany's firm ally: Russia.

Ever since the reign of Catherine the Great, Russia had established itself (in the 1770s) as the dominant power on the Black Sea coast, displacing the Ottomans. Russian industry and agriculture's increasingly important Black Sea trade depended on free passage through the Bosphorus straits controlled by Constantinople, and Russian ambition looked to the Dardanelles and control over maritime traffic between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (Russian designs on the Dardanelles had already led to war with Britain and France in the Crimea in 1853). Luxemburg sums up the dynamics within Russian society driving its imperialist policies: “On the one hand, the traditional tendencies of a conquest-loving Czardom, ruling over a mighty nation whose population today consists of 172 millions of human beings, demand free access to the ocean, to the Pacific Ocean on the East, to the Mediterranean on the South, for industrial as well as for strategic reasons. On the other hand, the very existence of absolutism, and the necessity of holding a respected place in the world-political field, and finally the need of financial credit in foreign countries without which Czarism cannot exist, all play their important part (…) But modern capitalist interests are becoming more and more a factor in the imperialist aims of the Czarist nation. Russian capitalism, still in its earliest youth, cannot hope to perfect its development under an absolutist regime. On the whole it has advanced little beyond the primitive stage of home industry. But it sees a gigantic future before its eyes in the exploitation of the nation’s natural resources (...) It is this hope, and the appetite for foreign markets that will mean increased capitalistic development even at the present time, that has filled the Russian bourgeoisie with imperialistic desires and led them to eagerly voice their demands in the coming division of the world’s resources”.25 Rivalry between Germany and Russia over control of the Bosphorus thus inevitably found its nexus in the Balkans, where the rise of nationalist ideology characteristic of developing capitalism, had created a situation of permanent tension and intermittent bloody warfare between the three new states broken off from the decaying Ottoman Empire: Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. These three countries fought a First Balkan War as allies against the Ottomans, then a Second Balkan War among themselves to re-divide the plunder from the First, especially in Macedonia and Albania.26

The rise of aggressive new nation states in the Balkans could hardly be a matter of indifference to the region's other decaying dynastic empire: Austria-Hungary. “Not the political expression of a capitalist state, but a loose syndicate of a few parasitic cliques, striving to grasp everything within reach, utilizing the political powers of the nation so long as their weakened edifice still stands”,27 Austria-Hungary was under constant threat from the ambitious new nations around it, all of which shared ethic populations with parts of the Empire: hence Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was part of a constant concern to prevent Serbia from gaining access to the Mediterranean.

By 1914, the situation in Europe had developed into a lethal Rubik's cube, its different pieces so interlocked that moving one must necessarily displace all the others.

The wide-awake sleepwalkers

Does this mean that the ruling classes, the governments, did not know what they were doing? That – as the title of Christopher Clark's book The Sleepwalkers implies – they somehow walked into war by accident, that World War I was just some terrible mistake?

Not a bit of it. Certainly, the historical forces that Luxemburg describes, in what is probably the most profound analysis of the outbreak of war ever written, held society in their grip: in this sense the war was the inevitable result of interlocking imperialist rivalries. But historical situations call forth the men to match them, and the governments that took Europe, and the world, into war not only knew very well what they were doing, they did it deliberately. The years from the turn of the century to the outbreak of war had been marked by repeated war scares, each one more serious than the last: the Tangier Crisis in 1905, the Agadir Incident in 1911, the First and Second Balkan Wars. Each of these incidents brought the pro-war faction in each ruling class more to the fore, heightened the sense that war was anyway inevitable. The result was an insane arms race: German launched its naval construction programme and Britain followed suit; France increased the length of military service to three years; huge French loans financed the modernisation of Russian railways designed to carry troops to the Western Front, as well as the modernisation of Serbia's small but effective army. All the continental powers increased the number of men under arms.

Convinced as they increasingly were that war was inevitable, the question for the governments of Europe became simply a matter of “when?”. When would each nation's military preparedness be at its height compared to that of its rivals? Because this moment would be the “right” moment for war.

If Luxemburg saw a rising Germany as the new “irresponsible element” in the European situation, does this mean that the powers of the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia) were the innocent victims of German expansionist aggression? This is the thesis of certain “revisionist” historians today: not only that the struggle against German expansionism was justified in 1914, but that in essence 1914 is nothing but a precursor of the “good war” in 1939. This is undoubtedly the case, but the Triple Entente were anything but innocent victims and the idea that Germany was uniquely “expansionist” and “aggressive” is laughable if we compare the size of Britain's empire – the result of British expansionist aggression – with that of Germany: somehow this never seems to cross the minds of Britain's tame historians.28

In fact, the Triple Entente (Britain, Russia, France) had been preparing for years a policy of encirclement of Germany (just as the US developed a policy of encircling the USSR during the Cold War and is trying to do the same with China today). Rosmer demonstrates this with inexorable clarity, on the basis of the secret diplomatic correspondence among the Belgian ambassadors in the different European capitals.29

In May 1907, the ambassador in London writes that “It is obvious that official Britain is pursuing an underhand and hostile policy which tends towards the isolation of Germany, and that King Edward [ie Edward VII] has unhesitatingly put his own personal influence into the balance in favour of this idea.30 In February 1909, we hear from the ambassador in Berlin: “The King of England asserts that the preservation of peace has always been his goal; he has repeated this over and over since he began his successful campaign to isolate Germany; but one cannot help remarking that world peace has never been in greater danger than since the King of England set about defending it”.31 From Berlin again, in April 1913 we read: “...the arrogance and contempt with which [the Serbs] receive the protests of the government in Vienna can only be explained by the support they expect from St Petersburg. The Serbian chargé d'affaires said here recently that his government would never have taken such risks, taking no account of Austria's threats, if it had not been encouraged by the Russian ambassador Mr Hartwig...”.32

In France, the conscious development of an aggressive chauvinist policy was perfectly clear to the Belgian ambassador in Paris (January 1914): “I have already had the honour to inform you that it is Messrs Poincaré, Delcassé, Millerand and their friends who have invented and put into practice the nationalist, jingoistic and chauvinist policy whose rebirth we are seeing today (…) I see here the greatest danger for European peace (…) because the attitude adopted by the Barthou government is, in my view, the determining cause of the increasing militarist tendencies in Germany”.33

The re-introduction by France of the three year military service was not a policy of defence, but a deliberate preparation for war. Here is the ambassador in Paris again (June 1913): “The cost of the new law will weigh so heavily on the population, the resulting expenses will be so exorbitant, that the country will soon protest, and France will be faced with the dilemma: either a climb-down which it could not tolerate or war in the short term”.34

How to declare war

Two factors entered into the calculations of statesmen and politicians in the years leading to war: the first was their estimation of their own and their adversaries' military preparedness, but the second – equally important, even in autocratic Tsarist Russia – was the need to appear to the world and their own populations, especially the workers, as the injured party, acting solely in self-defence. All the powers wanted to enter a war that had been started by someone else: “The game consisted in leading one's adversary into committing an act which could be used against him, or making use of a decision he had already taken”.35

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand which provided the spark that set off the war was hardly the work of an isolated individual: Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shot, but he was only one of a group of assassins, themselves organised and armed by one of the networks organised by the ultra-nationalist Serbian groups “Black Hand” and Narodna Odbrana (“National Defence”), which formed almost a state within a state and whose activities were undoubtedly known to the Serbian government and in particular its Prime Minister Nicolas Pasič. Relations between the Serbian and Russian governments were extremely close, and it is certain that the Serbs would not have undertaken such a provocation had they not been assured of Russian support against an Austro-Hungarian reaction.

For the Austro-Hungarian government, the assassination seemed a chance too good to miss, to bring Serbia to heel.36 The police investigation had little difficulty pointing the finger at Serbia, and the Austrians counted on the shock provoked among Europe's ruling classes to gain support, or at least neutrality, when they attacked Serbia. In effect, Austria-Hungary had no choice but to attack, or humiliate Serbia: anything less would have been a devastating blow to its prestige and influence in the critical region of the Balkans, leaving it completely in the hands of its Russian rival.

The French government saw a “Balkan war” as the ideal scenario for their attack on Germany: if Germany could be forced into war in defence of Austria-Hungary, and Russia came to the defence of Serbia, then French mobilisation could be presented as a precautionary measure against the threat of German attack. Moreover, it was extremely unlikely that Italy, nominally an ally of Germany but with its own interests in the Balkans, would go to war to defend Austria-Hungary's position in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Given the alliance ranged against it, Germany found itself in a position of weakness with Austria-Hungary, that “organised heap of decay” to use Luxemburg's words, as its only ally. The war preparations in France and Russia, the development of their Entente with Britain, led German strategists increasingly to the conclusion that war would have to be fought sooner rather than later, before their adversaries were fully prepared. Hence the remark of the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg that “Should the conflict [between Serbia and Austria-Hungary] spread, then it is absolutely necessary that Russia should bear the responsibility”.37

The British population was hardly likely to go to war to defend Serbia, or even France. Britain too needed “a pretext to overcome the resistance of a large part of its public opinion. Germany provided an excellent one, by launching its armies through Belgium”.38 Rosmer quotes Viscount Esher's Tragedy of Lord Kitchener to the effect that “The German invasion of Belgium, although it made no vital difference to the resolve already taken by [Prime Minister] Asquith and [Foreign Secretary] Grey, preserved the unity of the nation, if not the integrity of the government”. 39 In reality, British plans for an attack on Germany, prepared in concert with the French military for several years, had long intended to violate Belgian neutrality...

All the belligerent nations' governments thus had to deceive their “public opinion” into thinking that the war which they had prepared and deliberately sought for years, had been forced unwillingly upon them. The critical element in this “public opinion” was the organised working class, with its trade unions and Socialist Parties, which for years had stated clearly its opposition to war. The single most important factor that opened the road to war was therefore the betrayal of the Social-Democracy, and its support for what the ruling class falsely portrayed as a “defensive war”.

The underlying causes of this monstrous betrayal of Social-Democracy's most elementary internationalist duty will be the object of a future article. Suffice it to say here that the French bourgeoisie's claim today that the “political, social, religious quarrels that had divided the country, disappeared....in an instant” is a bare-faced lie. On the contrary, Rosmer's account of the days before the outbreak of war is one of constant working-class demonstrations against war, brutally repressed by the police. On 27th July, the CGT called a demonstration, and “from 9 o'clock to midnight (…) an enormous crowd flowed without a break along the Boulevards. Huge numbers of police were mobilised (…) But the workers who came to the city centre from the outskirts were so numerous that the police tactics [of splitting up the workers] led to an unexpected result: there were soon as many demonstrations as there were streets. Police violence and brutality failed to dampen the crowds' combativeness; throughout the evening, the cry of 'Down with war' resounded from Opéra to the Place de la République”.40 The demonstrations continued the following day, and spread to the major towns in the provinces.

The French bourgeoisie was faced with another problem: the attitude of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès. Jaurès was a reformist, at a moment in history when reformism became an untenable middle ground between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but he was profoundly attached to the defense of the working-class (and his reputation and influence among the workers was for this reason very great), and passionately opposed to war. On 25th July, when Serbia's rejection of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum was reported in the press, Jaurès was due to speak at an electoral meeting in Vaise, near Lyon: his speech was devoted not to the election, but to the terrible danger of war. “Never in forty years has Europe been confronted with a more threatening and tragic situation (…) A terrible danger menaces peace, and the lives of men, against which the proletarians of Europe must make the supreme effort of solidarity of which they are capable”.41

At first, Jaurès believed the French government's fraudulent assurances that it was working for peace, but by the 31st July he was disillusioned and in Parliament was once again calling on the workers to resist war to the utmost. Rosmer takes up the story: “the rumour spread that the article he was shortly to write for the Saturday issue of L'Humanité would be a new 'J'accuse!'42 denouncing the intrigues and lies that had brought the world to the brink of war. In the evening, (…) he led a delegation of the Socialist [parliamentary] group to the Quai d'Orsay43. [Foreign Minister] Viviani was absent, and the delegation was received by under-secretary of state Abel Ferry. After hearing Jaurès out, he asked what the socialists intended to do in the situation. 'Continue our campaign against the war' replied Jaurès. To which Ferry answered: 'That you will never dare, for you will be killed on the next street corner'.44 Two hours later, Jaurès was about to return to his office at L'Humanité to write the dreaded article, when he was shot down by the assassin Raoul Villain; two revolver shots at point-blank range caused his instant death”.45

Decidedly, the French ruling class was leaving nothing to chance in order to ensure “unity and national cohesion”!

No war without workers

So when the wreaths are laid, when the great and the good bow their heads in sorrow during the commemorations that our rulers are buying at the cost of millions of pounds or euros, when the trumpets sound the last call at the end of these solemn ceremonies, when the documentaries unfold on the TV screens and the learned historians discourse on all the reasons for war except the one that really matters, and on all the factors that might have prevented the war except the one that could really have weighed in the balance, then let the proletarians of the world remember.

Let them remember that World War I was caused not by historical happenstance, but by the inexorable workings of capitalism and imperialism, that the world war opened a new period in history, an “epoch of wars and revolutions” as the Communist International called it. This period is still with us today, and the same forces that drove the world to war in 1914 are responsible today for the endless massacres in the Middle East and Africa, for the ever more dangerous tensions between China and its neighbours in the South China Sea.

Let them remember that wars cannot be fought without workers, as cannon fodder and to man the factories. Let them remember that the ruling class must have national unity for war, and that they will stop at nothing to get it, from police repression to bloody assassination.

Let them remember that it is those very same “Socialist” parties that today stand to the forefront of every pacifist campaign and humanitarian protest, who betrayed their forebears' trust in 1914, leaving them unorganised and defenceless to face capitalism's machinery of war.

And finally, let them remember that, if the ruling class had to make such an effort to neutralise the working class in 1914 it is because only the world proletariat can stand as an effective barrier to imperialist war. Only the world proletariat bears within itself the hope of overthrowing capitalism, and the danger of war, once and for all.

One hundred years ago, humanity stood before a dilemma whose solution lies in the hands of the proletariat alone: socialism or barbarism. That dilemma is still with us today.

Jens


1Ironically perhaps, the film's title was taken from a pre-war book by British economist Norman Angell, which argued that war between the developed capitalist powers had become impossible because their economies were too closely integrated and interdependent – precisely the same kind of argument that we hear today in relation to China and the United States.

2Needless to say, like all the other works we have mentioned, All quiet on the Western Front was banned by the Nazis after 1933. It was also banned from 1930 to 1941 by the Australian film censorship.

3In striking contrast, Britain's best-known patriotic war poet Rupert Brooke never actually saw combat, falling sick and dying en route for the assault on Gallipoli.

4 This has been the object of some polemic in the German press.

5A worthy project in its own right, no doubt, but not one that will contribute much to an understanding of why war broke out.

7 “Commémorer la Grande Guerre (2014-2020) : propositions pour un centenaire international” by Joseph Zimet of the “Direction de la mémoire, du patrimoine et des archives”.

8It is striking that the great majority of executions for military disobedience in the French army took place during the first months of war, which suggests a lack of enthusiasm which had to be crushed from the outset. See the report presented to the Minister for War Veterans Kader Arif in October 2013: https://centenaire.org/sites/default/files/references-files/rapport_fusi...

9It is worth mentioning here that the title The Sleepwalkers is taken from Hermann Broch’s trilogy of the same name, written in 1932. Broch was born 1886 in Vienna to a Jewish family, but converted in 1909 to Roman Catholicism. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria, he was arrested by the Gestapo. However, with the help of friends (including James Joyce, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann) he was allowed to emigrate to the US where he lived until his death in 1951. Die Schlafwandler is the story of three individuals from 1888, 1905 and 1918 respectively, and examines the questions of the decomposition of values and subordination of morality to the laws of profit.

10Confédération Générale du Travail. See "Anarcho-syndicalism faces a change in epoch: the CGT up to 1914", in International Review n°120.

11 See Hew Strachan, The First World War, volume 1

12 See The Junius Pamphlet on marxists.org

13 Editions d'Avron, May 1993.

14 The second volume was published after World War II and is much shorter, since Rosmer had to flee Paris during the Nazi occupation, and his archives were seized and destroyed during the war.

15 Rosmer, p84

16 Junius, Chapter 6

17Luxemburg quotes here a letter from Marx to the Braunschweiger Ausschuss: “He who is not deafened by the momentary clamour, and is not interested in deafening the German people, must see that the war of 1870 carries with it, of necessity, a war between Germany and Russia, just as the war of 1866 bore the war of 1870. 1 say of necessity, unless the unlikely should happen, unless a revolution breaks out in Russia before that time If this does not occur, a war between Germany and Russia may even now be regarded as un fait accompli. It depends entirely upon the attitude of the German victor to determine whether this war has been useful or dangerous. If they take Alsace-Lorraine, then France with Russia will arm against Germany. It is superfluous to point out the disastrous consequences”.

19Idem.

20The first Moroccan crisis in 1905 was provoked by the Kaiser's visit to Tangier, supposedly to support Moroccan sovereignty but in reality in an attempt to counter French influence in the country. Military tension was extreme: the French cancelled all military leave and advanced troops to the border with Germany, while Germany began to call up reservists. In the end the French backed down and accepted the German proposal of a multi-national conference, held in Algeciras in 1906. Here, the Germans had a shock when they found themselves abandoned by all the participating European powers, especially the British, and could only get the support of Austria-Hungary. The second Moroccan crisis came in 1911 when a rebellion against the Sultan Abdelhafid gave France the pretext for dispatching troops to the country under the pretext of protecting European citizens. The Germans seized on the same pretext to send the gunboat Panther to the Atlantic port of Agadir. This the British saw as a prelude to the installation of a German naval facility on the Atlantic coast directly threatening Gibraltar. Lloyd George's Mansion House speech (cited by Rosmer) was a barely veiled declaration that Britain would go to war if Germany did not back down. In the end, Germany recognised the French “protectorate” in Morocco, in exchange for some swampland at the mouth of the Congo.

21The Germans established the brewery which now produces “Tsingtao” beer.

22The idea put forward by Clark, but also by Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, that Germany remained far behind Britain in the naval arms race, is absurd: Britain's navy, unlike Germany's, had to protect worldwide shipping, and it is hard to see how Britain could not feel threatened by the construction of at least a major naval force less than 500 miles from its capital city and closer still to its coast.

23Although, in European texts of the period, Turkey is used interchangeably with the term “Ottoman Empire”, it is important to remember that the latter is more accurate: at the beginning of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire covered not only Turkey but also present-day Libya, Syria, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, a large part of Greece and the Balkans.

24This refinery was important above all for military reasons: Britain's fleet had been converted from coal-fired to oil-fired engines, and while Britain had coal in abundance it had no oil. The search for oil in Persia was prompted above all by the Royal Navy's need to secure a constant oil supply for the fleet.

25Junius, Chapter 4

26The First Balkan War broke out in 1912, when the members of the Balkan League (Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro), with the tacit support of Russia, attacked the Ottoman Empire. Although not part of the Balkan League, Greece also joined in the fighting, at the end of which the Ottoman armies had been largely defeated: the Ottoman Empire lost most of its European territory for the first time in 500 years. The Second Balkan War broke out immediately afterwards, in 1913, when Bulgaria attacked Serbia which had occupied, in connivance with Greece, a large part of Macedonia that it had originally promised to Bulgaria.

27Junius

29These documents were seized by the Germans, who published substantial extracts after the war. As Rosmer points out, “The evaluations by Belgium's representatives in Berlin, Paris and London have a special value. Belgium is neutral, and they can thus be more open-minded in evaluating events; moreover they are well aware that should war break out between the two great opposing blocs, their little country will find itself in serious danger, in particular of serving as a battle-field” (ibid, p68).

30Ibid, p69.

31Ibid, p70.

32Ibid, p71.

33Ibid, p73.

34Ibid, p72.

35Rosmer, p87.

36Indeed, the government had already attempted to bring pressure to bear by leaking fake documents purporting to reveal a Serbian plot against Bosnia-Herzegovina to the historian Heinrich Friedjung (cf Clark, loc 1890).

37Quoted by Rosmer, p87, from German documents published after the war.

38Rosmer, p87.

40Rosmer, p102.

41Ibid, p84.

42A reference to Emile Zola's devastating attack on the government during the Dreyfus affair

43The Foreign Ministry

44Rosmer, p91. The conversation is reported in Charles Rappoport's biography of Jaurès, and confirmed in Abel Ferry's own papers. Cf Alexandre Croix, Jaurès et ses détracteurs, Editions Spartacus, p313.

45Jaurès was shot while eating at the Café du Croissant, opposite the offices of L'Humanité. Raoul Villain was in some ways similar to Gavrilo Princip: unstable, emotionally fragile, given to political or religious mysticism – in short, precisely the kind of character that the secret services use as expendable provocateurs. After the murder, Villain was arrested and spent the war in the security, if not the comfort, of prison. At his trial, he was acquitted and Jaurès' widow was ordered to pay costs.

 

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World War I

1914: how German socialism came to betray the workers

Of all the parties federated in the 2nd International, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) was by far the most powerful. In 1914, the SPD had more than one million members, and had won more than four million votes in the 1912 parliamentary elections:1 it was, in fact, the only mass party in Germany and the biggest single party in the Reichstag – although under the autocratic imperial regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II it had no chance of actually forming a government.

For the other parties of the 2nd International, the SPD was the party of reference. Karl Kautsky,2 editor of the Party's theoretical journal Neue Zeit, was the acknowledged "pope of marxism", the International's leading theoretician; at the 1900 Congress of the International, Kautsky had drawn up the resolution condemning the participation of the French socialist Millerand in a bourgeois government, and the SPD's Dresden Congress of 1903, under the leadership of its chairman August Bebel,3 had roundly condemned the revisionist theories of Eduard Bernstein and reasserted the SPD's revolutionary goals; Lenin had praised the SPD's "party spirit" and its immunity to the petty personal animosities that had led the Mensheviks to split the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) after its 1903 congress.4 To cap it all, the SPD's theoretical and organisational supremacy was clearly crowned by success on the ground: no other party of the International could claim anything close to the SPD's electoral success, and when it came to trade union organisation only the British could rival the Germans in the numbers and discipline of their members.

In the Second International the German ‘decisive force’ played the determining role. At the [international] congresses, in the meetings of the international socialist bureaux, all awaited the opinion of the Germans. Especially in the questions of the struggle against militarism and war, German Social Democracy always took the lead. ‘For us Germans that is unacceptable’ regularly sufficed to decide the orientation of the Second International, which blindly bestowed its confidence upon the admired leadership of the mighty German Social Democracy: the pride of every socialist and the terror of the ruling classes everywhere”.5

It was obvious therefore, as the storm clouds of war began to gather in the month of July 1914, that the attitude of the German Social Democracy would be critical in deciding the outcome. The German workers – the great masses organised in the Party and the unions, which the workers had fought so hard to build – were placed in a position where they alone could tip the scales: towards resistance, the fighting defence of proletarian internationalism, or towards class collaboration and betrayal, and years of the bloodiest slaughter humanity had ever witnessed.

And what did we in Germany experience when the great historical test came? The most precipitous fall, the most violent collapse. Nowhere has the organization of the proletariat been yoked so completely to the service of imperialism. Nowhere is the state of siege borne so docilely. Nowhere is the press so hobbled, public opinion so stifled, the economic and political class struggle of the working class so totally surrendered as in Germany.”6

The betrayal of German Social Democracy came as such a shock to revolutionaries that when Lenin read in Vorwärts7 that the SPD parliamentary fraction had voted in favour of war credits, he at first took the issue for a fake, black propaganda put out by the Imperial government. How was such a disaster possible? How, in a matter of days, could the proud and powerful SPD renege on its most solemn promises, transforming itself overnight from the jewel in the crown of the workers’ International to the most powerful weapon in the armoury of the war-mongering ruling class?

As we try, in this article, to answer this question, it might seem paradoxical to concentrate in large part on the writings and actions of a relatively small number of individuals: the SPD and the unions were after all mass organisations, capable of mobilising hundreds of thousands of workers. It is justified however, because individuals like Karl Kautsky or Rosa Luxemburg represented, and were seen at the time to represent, definite tendencies within the Party; in this sense, their writings gave voice to political tendencies with which masses of militants and workers – who remain anonymous to history – identified. It is also necessary to take account of these leading figures’ political biographies if we are to understand the weight they had in the Party. August Bebel, chairman of the SPD from 1892 until his death in 1913, was one of the Party's founders and had been imprisoned, along with his fellow Reichstag deputy Wilhelm Liebknecht, for their refusal to support Prussia's war against France in 1870. Kautsky and Bernstein had both been forced into exile in London by Bismarck's anti-socialist laws, where they had worked under Engels’ direction. The prestige, and the moral authority, that this gave them in the Party was immense. Even Georg von Vollmar, one of the leaders of South German reformism, first came to prominence as a left-winger and a vigorous and talented underground organiser, suffering repeated prison sentences as a result.

This then was a generation which had come to political activity through the years of the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, through the years of clandestine propaganda and agitation in the teeth of Bismarck's anti-socialist laws (1878-1890). Of a very different stamp were men like Gustav Noske, Friedrich Ebert, or Philipp Scheidemann, all members of the right wing in the parliamentary fraction of the SPD who voted for war credits in 1914 and played a key role in the suppression of the 1919 German Revolution – and in the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the Freikorps. Rather like Stalin, these were men of the machine, working behind the scenes rather than actively participating in public debate, the representatives of a Party which, as it grew, tended more and more to resemble and identify with the German state whose downfall was still its official goal.

The revolutionary left ranged against the growing tendency within the Party to make concessions to "practical politics" and was, strikingly, in large part both foreign and young (one notable exception being the old Franz Mehring). Apart from the Dutchman Anton Pannekoek, and Wilhelm Liebknecht's son Karl, men like Parvus, Radek, Jogiches, Marchlewski, all came from the Russian empire and were forged as militants under the harsh conditions of Tsarist oppression. And of course, the outstanding figure on the left was Rosa Luxemburg, an outsider in the German Party in every possible way: young, female, Polish, and Jewish, and – perhaps worst of all from the point of view of some of the German leadership – standing intellectually and theoretically head and shoulders above the rest of the Party.

The foundation of the SPD

The Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP – German Workers’ Party), later to become the SPD, was founded in 1875 in Gotha, by the merger of two socialist parties: the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP),8 led by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, and the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV), originally established by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.

The new organisation thus sprang from two very different sources. The SDAP had only been in existence for six years; through Marx and Engels’ longstanding relationship with Liebknecht – although Liebknecht was no theoretician he played an important role in introducing men like Bebel and Kautsky to Marx's ideas – they had played an important part in the SDAP's development. In 1870, the SDAP adopted a resolutely internationalist line against Prussia's war of aggression on France: at Chemnitz, a meeting of delegates, representing 50,000 Saxon workmen, adopted unanimously a resolution to this effect: “In the name of German Democracy, and especially of the workmen forming the Democratic Socialist Party, we declare the present war to be exclusively dynastic... We are happy to grasp the fraternal hand stretched out to us by the workmen of France... Mindful of the watchword of the International Working Men’s Association: Proletarians of all countries, unite, we shall never forget that the workmen of all countries are our friends and the despots of all countries our enemies.”.9

The ADAV, by contrast, had remained faithful to its founder Lassalle's opposition to strike action, and his belief that the workers' cause could be advanced by an alliance with the Bismarckian state, and more generally through the recipes of “state socialism”.10 During the Franco-Prussian war, the ADAV remained pro-German, its then President, Mende, even pushing for French war reparations to be used to set up state workshops for German workers.11

Marx and Engels were deeply critical of the merger, although Marx's marginal notes on the programme was not made public until much later,12 Marx considering that “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes”.13 Although they refrained from open criticism of the new Party, they made their views clear to its leading members, and in writing to Bebel, Engels highlighted two weaknesses which, untreated, were to sow the seeds of the 1914 betrayal:

  • the principle that the workers’ movement is an international one is, to all intents and purposes, utterly denied in respect of the present, and this by men who, for the space of five years and under the most difficult conditions, upheld that principle in the most laudable manner. The German workers’ position in the van of the European movement rests essentially on their genuinely international attitude during the war; no other proletariat would have behaved so well. And now this principle is to be denied by them at a moment when, everywhere abroad, workers are stressing it all the more by reason of the efforts made by governments to suppress every attempt at its practical application in an organisation! (...)

  • as its one and only social demand, the programme puts forward — Lassallean state aid in its starkest form, as stolen by Lassalle from Buchez. And this, after Bracke has so ably demonstrated the sheer futility of that demand; after almost all if not all, of our party speakers have, in their struggle against the Lassalleans, been compelled to make a stand against this “state aid"! Our party could hardly demean itself further. Internationalism sunk to the level of Amand Goegg, socialism to that of the bourgeois republican Buchez, who confronted the socialists with this demand in order to supplant them!14

These fault-lines in practical politics were hardly surprising given the new Party's eclectic theoretical underpinnings. When Kautsky founded the Neue Zeit in 1883, he intended it to be “published as a Marxist organ which had set itself the task of raising the low level of theory in German social democracy, destroying eclectic socialism, and achieving victory for the Marxist programme”; he wrote to Engels: “I may be successful in my attempts to make the Neue Zeit the rallying point of the Marxist school. I am winning the collaboration of many Marxist forces, as I am getting rid of eclecticism and Rodbertussianism”.15

From the outset, including during its underground existence, the SAP was thus a battleground of conflicting theoretical tendencies – as is normal in any healthy proletarian organisation. But as Lenin once remarked “Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice”, and these different tendencies, or visions, of the organisation and of society, were to have very practical consequences.

By the mid 1870s the SAP had some 32,000 members in more than 250 districts, and in 1878 the Chancellor Bismarck imposed an “anti-socialist” law with a view to hamstringing the Party's activity. Scores of papers, meetings, organisations were banned, and thousands of militants were sent to jail or fined. But the socialists' determination remained unbroken by the anti-socialist law. Indeed, the SAP's activity thrived under the conditions of semi-illegality. Being outlawed compelled the party and its members to organise themselves outside the channels of bourgeois democracy – even the limited democracy of Bismarckian Germany – and to develop a strong solidarity against police repression and permanent state surveillance. Despite constant police harassment, the party managed to maintain its press and expand its circulation, to the point where the satirical paper Der wahre Jacob (founded in 1884) alone had 100,000 subscribers.

Despite the anti-socialist laws, one public activity remained open to the SAP: it was still possible for SAP candidates to compete in elections to the Reichstag as unaffiliated independents. Hence a large part of the Party's propaganda centred around electoral campaigns at national and local levels, and this may account both for the principle that the parliamentary fraction should remain strictly subordinated to the Party Congresses and the Party's central organ (the Vorstand),16 and for the increasing weight of the parliamentary fraction with the Party as its electoral success grew.

Bismarck's policy was a classic "carrot and stick". While the workers were prevented from organising themselves, the Imperial state tried to cut the ground from under the feet of the socialists by introducing social insurance payments, in the case of unemployment, sickness or retirement, from 1883 onwards – a full twenty years before the French law on workers' and peasants' pensions (1910) and the British National Insurance Act (1911). By the end of the 1880s some 4.7 million workers received payments from the social security.

Neither the anti-socialist laws nor the introduction of social security achieved the desired effect of reducing support for Social-Democracy. On the contrary, between 1881 and 1890 the SAP's electoral score rose from 312,000 to 1,427,000 votes, making the SAP the biggest party in Germany. By 1890 its membership had risen to 75,000 and some 300,000 workers had joined trade unions. In 1890 Bismarck was dropped from the government by the new Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the anti-socialist laws were allowed to lapse.

Emerging from clandestinity, the SAP was refounded as a legal organisation, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD – German Social-Democratic Party), at its Erfurt Congress in 1891. The Congress adopted a new programme, and although Engels considered the Erfurt programme an improvement on its Gotha predecessor he nonetheless felt it necessary to attack the tendency towards opportunism: “somehow or other, [absolutism] has to be attacked. How necessary this is is shown precisely at the present time by opportunism, which is gaining ground in a large section of the SocialDemocratic press. Fearing a renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law, or recalling all manner of over-hasty pronouncements made during the reign of that law, they now want the party to find the present legal order in Germany adequate for putting through all party demands by peaceful means (…) In the long run such a policy can only lead one’s own party astray. They push general, abstract political questions into the foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete questions, which at the moment of the first great events, the first political crisis automatically pose themselves. What can result from this except that at the decisive moment the party suddenly proves helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the most decisive issues reign in it because these issues have never been discussed? (…) This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all!”.17

Engels was remarkably prescient here: public declarations of revolutionary intent were to prove impotent without any concrete plan of action to back them up. In 1914, the party did indeed find itself “suddenly helpless”.

Nonetheless, the SPD's official slogan remained "Not a man nor a penny for this system", and its Reichstag deputies systematically refused all support for government budgets, especially for military spending. Such principled opposition to any class compromise remained a possibility within the parliamentary system because the Reichstag had no real power. The government of the Wilhelmine German Empire was autocratic, not unlike that of Tsarist Russia,18 and the SPD's systematic opposition therefore had no immediate practical consequences.

In South Germany, things were different. Here, the local SPD under the leadership of men like Vollmar, claimed that "special conditions" applied, and that unless the SPD was able to vote meaningfully in the Länder legislatures, and unless it had an agrarian policy able to appeal to the small peasantry, then it would be doomed to impotence and irrelevance. This tendency appeared as soon as the Party was legalised, at the 1891 Erfurt Congress, and as early as 1891 the SPD deputies in the provincial parliaments of Württemberg, Bavaria and Baden were voting in favour of government budgets.19

The Party's reaction to this direct attack on its policy, as expressed in repeated Congress resolutions, was to sweep it under the carpet. An attempt by Vollmar to put forward a special agrarian programme was voted down by the 1894 Frankfurt Congress, yet the same congress also rejected a resolution banning any vote by any SPD deputy in favour of any government budget. As long as reformist policy could be limited to south German "exceptionalism" it could be tolerated.20

Legality saps the SPD’s fighting spirit

Soon, the experience of the working class with a dozen years of semi-illegality began to be undermined by the poison of democracy. By its very nature bourgeois democracy and individualism, which go hand in hand, undermines any attempt by the proletariat to develop a vision of itself as a historical class with its own perspective antagonistic to that of capitalist society. Democratic ideology constantly drives a wedge into workers' solidarity, because it splits up the working class into a mere mass of atomised citizens. At the same time, the party's electoral success, both in terms of votes and seats in parliament grew rapidly, while more and more workers organised in the Trades Unions and were able to improve their material conditions. The growing political strength of the SPD, and the industrial strength of the organised working class, gave birth to a new political current, which began to theorise the idea not only that it was possible to build socialism within capitalism, to work towards a gradual transition without the need of having to overthrow capitalism through a revolution, but that the SPD should have a specifically German expansionist foreign policy: this current crystallised in 1897 around the Sozialistische Monatshefte, a review outside SPD control, in articles by Max Schippel, Wolfgang Heine, and Heinrich Peus.21

This uncomfortable, but bearable, state of affairs was exploded in 1898 with the publication of Eduard Bernstein's Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Preconditions of socialism and the tasks of Social-Democracy). Bernstein's pamphlet explained openly what he and others had been suggesting for some time: “Practically speaking, we are no more than a radical party; we have been doing no more than the bourgeois radicals do, with this difference that we hide it under a language out of all proportion to our acts and our capacities”.22 Bernstein's theoretical position attacked the very foundations of marxism in that he rejected the inevitability of capitalism's decline and final collapse. Basing himself on the booming prosperity of the 1890s, coupled with capitalism's rapid colonialist expansion across the planet, Bernstein argued that capitalism had overcome its tendency towards self-destructive crisis. In these conditions, the goal was nothing, the movement was everything, quantity was to prevail over quality, the antagonism between the State and the working class could supposedly be overcome.23 Bernstein proclaimed openly that the basic tenet of the Communist Manifesto, according to which workers have no fatherland, was “obsolete”. He called upon the German workers to give their support to the Kaiser's colonial policy in Africa and Asia.24

In reality, a whole period, that of the expansion and ascension of the capitalist system, was drawing to a close. For revolutionaries such periods of profound historical transformation always pose a major challenge since they must analyse the characteristics of the new period, and develop a theoretical framework for understanding the fundamental changes taking place, as well as adapting their programme if necessary, all the time continuing to defend the same revolutionary goal.

The rapid expansion of capitalism across the globe, its massive industrial development, the new pride of the ruling class and its imperial posture – all this made the revisionist current believe that capitalism would last forever, that socialism could be introduced from within capitalism, and that the capitalist state could be used in the interests of the working class. The illusion of a peaceful transition showed that the revisionists had in fact become prisoners of the past, unable to understand that a new historic period was on the horizon: the period of capitalism's decadence and of the violent explosion of its contradictions. Their inability to analyse the new historical situation and their theorisation of the “eternity” of the conditions of capitalism at the end of the 19th century also meant that the revisionists were unable to see that the old weapons of the struggle, parliamentarism and the trade union struggle, no longer worked. The fixation on parliamentary work as the axis of their activities, the orientation on struggling for reforms within the system, the illusion of a “crisis-free capitalism” and the possibility of introducing socialism peacefully within capitalism, meant that in effect large parts of the SPD leadership had identified with the system. The openly opportunist current in the party expressed a loss of confidence in the historical struggle of the proletariat. After years of defensive struggles for the “minimum” programme, bourgeois democratic ideology had penetrated the workers’ movement. This meant that the existence and the characteristics of social classes were put into question, an individualistic view tended to dominate and dissolve the classes in “the people”. Opportunism thus threw overboard the marxist method of analysing society in terms of class struggle and class contradictions; in fact opportunism meant the lack of any method, of any principles whatever and the lack of any theory.

The left fights back

The reaction of the Party leadership to Bernstein's text was to downplay its importance (Vorwärts welcomed it as a “stimulating contribution to debate”, declaring that all currents within the Party should be free to express their opinions), while regretting in private that such ideas should be expressed so openly. Ignaz Auer, the Party secretary, wrote to Bernstein: “My dear Ede, one does not formally make a decision to do the things you suggest, one doesn’t say such things, one simply does them”.25

Within the SPD Bernstein was opposed in the most determined manner by those forces who had not been accustomed to the long period of legality following the end of the anti-socialist laws. It is no coincidence that the clearest and most outspoken opponents to Bernstein’s current were militants of foreign origin, and specifically from the Russian Empire. The Russian born Parvus, who had moved to Germany in the 1890s and in 1898 was working as the editor of the SPD press in Dresden, the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung26 launched a fiery attack on Bernstein’s ideas and was backed by the young revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who had moved to Germany in May 1898 and who had experienced repression in Poland. As soon as she settled in Germany, she started to spearhead the struggle against the revisionists with her text Reform or revolution written in 1898-99 (in which she exposed the method of Bernstein, refuted the idea of the establishment of socialism through social reforms, exposing the practice and theory of opportunism). In her reply to Bernstein, she underlined that the reformist trend had come into full swing since the abolition of the anti-socialist law and the possibility to work legally. Vollmar’s state socialism, the Bavarian budget approval, south-German agrarian socialism, Heine’s compensations proposals, Schippel’s position on customs and militia were elements in a rising opportunist practice. She underlined the common denominator of this current: hostility towards theory. “What distinguishes [all the opportunist tendencies in the party] on the surface? The dislike of ‘theory’, and this is natural since our theory, i.e. the bases of scientific socialism, sets our practical activity clear tasks and limits, both in relation to the goals to be attained as much as in regard to the means to be used and finally in the method of the struggle. Naturally those who only want to chase after practical achievements soon develop a desire to liberate themselves, i.e. to separate practice from theory’ to make themselves free of it.27

The first task of revolutionaries was to defend the final goal. “the movement as such without any link to the final goal, the movement as a goal in itself is nothing, the final goal is what counts.28

In a 1903 text Stagnation and progress of marxism, Luxemburg considers the theoretical inadequacy of the Social-Democracy in these terms: “The scrupulous endeavour to keep ‘within the bounds of Marxism’ may at times have been just as disastrous to the integrity of the thought process as has been the other extreme – the complete repudiation of the Marxist outlook, and the determination to manifest ‘independence of thought’ at all hazards”.

In attacking Bernstein, Luxemburg also demanded that the Party’s central press organ should defend the positions decided by Party congresses. When in March 1899 Vorwärts replied that Luxemburg’s critique of Bernstein’s position (in an article Eitle Hoffnungen – Vain hopes),was unjustified. Luxemburg countered that Vorwärtsis in the fortunate situation of never being in danger of having a mistaken opinion or changing its opinion, a sin which it likes to find in others, simply because it never has or defends an opinion.29

She continued in the same vein: “There are two kinds of organic creatures: those with a spine and which can walk upright, sometimes even run; and there are others who have no spine and therefore can only creep and cobble to something.” To those who wanted the Party to drop any programmatic positions and political criteria, she replied at the 1899 Party conference in Hannover: “If this is to mean that the party – in the name of freedom of critique – should not be entitled to take up position and declare through a majority vote. We do not defend such a position, therefore we have to protest against this idea, because we are not a club for discussions, but a political fighting party, which must have certain fundamental views.”30

The swamp wavers

Between the determined left wing around Luxemburg, and the right defending Bernstein's ideas and revisionism in principles, lay a “swamp”, which Bebel described in the following terms at the 1903 Dresden Congress: “It is always the same old and eternal struggle between a left and a right, and in between the swamp. They are the elements who never know what they want or rather who never say what they want. They are the smart-alecks, who usually first listen to see who is saying what, what is being said here and there? They always sense where the majority stands and they usually join the majority. We also have this sort of people in the party (…) the man who defends his position openly, at least I know where he stands; at least I can fight with him. He is victorious or I am, but the lazy elements that always duck out of something and always avoid a clear decision, who always say ‘we all agree, yes we are all brothers’, they are the worst. I fight against them hardest.31

This swamp, unable to take a clear position, wavered between the straightforward revisionist, right and the revolutionary left. Centrism is one of the faces of opportunism. Positioning itself always between the antagonistic forces, between the reactionary and radical currents, centrism tries to reconcile the two. It avoids the open clash of ideas, runs away from debate, always considers that “one side is not completely right, but the other side is not totally right either”, views political debate with clear arguments and polemical tones as “exaggerated”, “extremist”, “trouble-making”, even “violent”. It thinks that the only way to maintain unity, to keep the organisation intact is to allow all political tendencies to coexist, even including those whose aims are in direct contradiction to those of the organisation. It shies away from taking responsibility and positioning itself. Centrism in the SPD tended to ally reluctantly with the left, while regretting the left’s “extremism” and “violence” and effectively preventing firm measures – such as the expulsion from the Party of the revisionists – from preserving the Party’s revolutionary nature.

Luxemburg on the contrary considered that the only way to defend the unity of the Party as a revolutionary organisation was to insist on the fullest exposure and public discussion of opposing opinions:

By covering up the contradictions by the artificial ‘unification’ of incompatible views, the contradictions can only come to a head, until they explode violently sooner or later through a split (…) Those who bring the divergences of view to the fore and fight against the divergent views, work towards the unity of the party. But those who cover up the divergences work towards a real split in the party.”32

The epitome of the centrist current, and its most prestigious representative, was Karl Kautsky.

When Bernstein started to develop his revisionist views, Kautsky initially stayed silent and preferred not to oppose his old friend and comrade in public. He also completely failed to appreciate the extent to which Bernstein’s revisionist theories undermined the revolutionary foundations on which the Party had been built. As Luxemburg pointed out, if once you accept that capitalism can go on forever, that it is not doomed to collapse as a consequence of its own inner contradictions, then you are led inevitably to abandon the revolutionary goal. 33 Kautsky’s failure here – in common with most of the Party press – was a clear sign of the decline of fighting spirit in the organisation: political debate was no longer a matter of life or death for the class struggle, it had become an academic concern of intellectual specialists.

Rosa Luxemburg’s arrival in Berlin in 1898, from Zürich where she had just completed her studies of Polish economic development with distinction, and her reactions to Bernstein’s theories, were to play a major role in Kautsky’s attitude.

When Luxemburg became aware of Bebel’s and Kautsky’s hesitation and unwillingness to fight Bernstein’s views, she criticised this attitude in a letter to Bebel.34 She asked why they did not push for an energetic response to Bernstein, and in March 1899, after she had begun the series of articles which were later to become the pamphlet Reform or revolution, she reported to Jogiches: “As for Bebel in a conversation with Kautsky I complained that he won’t stand up and fight. Kautsky told me that Bebel has lost his drive, he has lost his self-confidence and no longer has any energy. I scolded him again and asked him: Why don’t you [Kautsky] inspire him, give him encouragement and energy? Kautsky replied: ‘You should do this, go and talk to Bebel, you should encourage him…”. When Luxemburg asked Kautsky why he did not react, he replied: “How can I get involved in rallies and meetings now, while I am fully engaged in the parliamentary struggle, this only means there will be clashes, where would this lead to? I do not have any time and no energy for this.”35

In 1899, in Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm. Eine Antikritik (Bernstein and the Social-Democratic programme – an anti-critique) Kautsky at last spoke up against Bernstein’s ideas on Marxist philosophy and political economy and his views on the development of capitalism. But he nevertheless welcomed Bernstein’s book as a valuable contribution to the movement, opposed a motion to expel him from the party and avoided saying that Bernstein was betraying the Marxist programme. In short, as Luxemburg concluded, Kautsky wanted to avoid any challenge to the rather comfortable routine of Party life, and the necessity of criticising his old friend in public. As Kautsky himself admitted privately to Bernstein: “Parvus and Luxemburg already grasped the contradiction of your views with our programmatic principles, while I did not yet want to admit this and believed firmly that all this was a misunderstanding (…) It was my mistake that I was not as farsighted as Parvus and Luxemburg, who already then scented the line of thought of your pamphlet.”36 In fact, in Vorwärts Kautsky minimised and trivialised the attack on Bernstein’s new revisionist theory, saying that it was being blown out of all proportion, in a manner typical of the “absurd imaginings” of a petty bourgeois mentality.37

Friends or class?

Out of loyalty to his old friend, Kautsky felt he had to apologize to Bernstein in private, writing: “It would have been cowardice to stay silent. I do not believe that I caused you any harm now that I have spoken. If I had not told August Bebel that I would answer your declaration, he would have done it himself. You can imagine what he would have said, knowing his temper and his callousness”.38 This meant he preferred to stay silent and blind towards his old friend. He reacted unwillingly, and only after being forced into it by the left. Later he admitted that it had been a “sin” to allow his friendship with Bernstein to dominate his political judgment. “In my life I only sinned once out of friendship, and I still regret this sin to this day. If I had not hesitated so much towards Bernstein, and if I had confronted him right from the start with the necessary sharpness, I would have spared the party many unpleasant problems.39 However, such a “confession” is of no value unless it goes to the root of the problem. Despite confessing his “sin” Kautsky never gave a more profound political explanation why such an attitude, based on personal affinity rather than political principle, is a danger for a political organisation. In reality, this attitude led him to grant the revisionists unlimited “freedom of opinion” within the party. As Kautsky said on the eve of the Hannover Party Congress: “In general we have to leave it up to every Party member to decide whether he still shares the principles of the Party or not. By excluding someone we only act against those who damage the Party; nobody has yet been excluded from the Party because of reasonable criticism, because our Party has always highly valued freedom of discussion. Even if Bernstein had not deserved so much esteem for his part in our struggle, and the fact that he had to go into exile because of his Party activities, we would not consider expelling him”.40

Luxemburg’s answer was clear-cut. “However great our need for self-criticism, and however broadly we set its limits, there must nonetheless remain a minimum of principles which make up our essence, indeed our existence, which found our cooperation as members of a Party. Within our ranks, ‘freedom of criticism’ cannot apply to these principles, which are few and very general, precisely because they are the precondition for all activity and therefore also any criticism directed at this activity. We have no reason to block our ears when these principles are criticised by somebody outside the Party. But as long as we consider them to be the basis of our existence as a Party, we must remain attached to them and not allow our members to call them into question. Here, we can only allow one freedom: to belong to our Party or not. We force no-one to march with us, but as long as he does so voluntarily, we must suppose that he has accepted our principles”.41

The logical conclusion of Kautsky’s “lack of position” was that everyone could stay in the Party and defend what he liked, the programme is watered down, the Party becomes a “melting pot” of different opinions, not a spearhead for a determined struggle. Kautsky’s attitude showed he preferred loyalty to a friend to the defence of class positions. At the same time, he wanted to adopt the pose of a theoretical “expert”. It is true that he had written some very important and valuable books (see below), and that he had enjoyed the esteem of Engels. But, as Luxemburg noted in a letter to Jogiches: “Karl Kautsky limits himself to theory”.42 Preferring to refrain from any participation in the struggle for the defence of the organisation and its programme, Kautsky gradually started to lose any fighting attitude, and this meant that he placed what he saw as his obligations to his friends above any moral obligations to his organisation and its principles. This led to a detachment of theory from practical, concrete action: for example, Kautsky’s valuable work on ethics, including in particular a chapter on internationalism, was not welded to an unwavering defence of internationalism in action.

There is a striking contrast between Kautsky’s attitude towards Bernstein, and Rosa Luxemburg’s attitude towards Kautsky. On her arrival in Berlin, Luxemburg enjoyed close relations with Kautsky and his family. But she quickly came to feel, that the great regard the Kautsky family showed towards her was becoming a burden. Already in 1899 she had complained to Jogiches: “I am beginning to flee their honeyed words. The Kautskys consider me to be part of their family.” (12/11/1899). “All these tokens of affection (he is very well meaning towards me, I can see this), feel like a terrible burden, instead of being a pleasure to me. In fact, any friendship established in adult age, and more over such a ‘party’-based one, is a burden: It imposes on you certain obligations, is a constraint etc. And precisely this side of the friendship is a handicap for me. After the writing of each article I wonder: Will he not be disappointed, will the friendship not cool down?”.43 She was aware of the dangers of an attitude based on affinities, where considerations of personal obligation, friendship, or common tastes, obscure the militant’s political judgment, but also what we may call his moral judgment as to whether a particular line of action is in conformity with the organisation’s principles.44 Luxemburg nonetheless dared to confront him openly: “I had a fundamental row with Kautsky about the whole way of looking at things. He told me in conclusion, that I would be thinking like him in twenty odd years, to which I replied that if so I would be a zombie in 20 years.”45

At the Lübeck party congress of 1901 Luxemburg was accused of distorting the positions of other comrades, an accusation she considered slanderous and demanded to have cleared up in public. She submitted a statement for publication in Vorwärts with this in mind.46 But Kautsky on behalf of Neue Zeit urged her to withdraw her demand for publication of her Statement. She replied to Kautsky: “Of course I am willing to refrain from publishing my declaration in the Neue Zeit but allow me to add a few words of explanation. If I were one of those people, who without consideration for anyone, safeguarded their own rights and interests – and such people are legion throughout our Party – or rather that is the way they all are – I would naturally insist upon publication, for you yourself have admitted that you as editor had certain obligations towards me in this matter. But while admitting this obligation, you at the same time placed a revolver of friendly admonition and request at my breast [to prevent me] from making use of this obligation and thus getting my rights. Well I am sickened at the thought of having to insist upon rights if these are only to be granted amid sighs and gnashing of teeth, and when people not only grab me by the arm and thus expect me to ‘defend’ myself but try in addition to beat me to a pulp, in the hope that I may thus be persuaded to renounce my rights. You have gained what you are after – you are free of all obligations towards me in this case.

But it would seem that you labour under the delusion that you acted solely out of friendship and in my best interests. Permit me to destroy this illusion. As a friend you ought to have said: ‘I advise you unconditionally and at any cost to defend your honour as a writer, for greater writers (…) like Marx and Engels wrote whole pamphlets, conducted endless ink-wars, when anybody dared to accuse them of such a thing as forgery. All the more you, a young writer with many enemies, must try to obtain complete satisfaction…’ That surely is what you should have advised me as a friend.

The friend, however, was soon pushed into the background by the editor of the Neue Zeit, and the latter has only one wish since the Party congress [at Lübeck]; he wants peace, he wants to show that the Neue Zeit has learned manners since the whipping it got, has learned to keep its mouth shut.47 And fur such reasons the essential rights of an associate editor and regular contributor… must be sacrificed. Let a collaborator of Neue Zeit and one at that who by no means does the worst of the work – swallow even a public accusation of forgery as long as peace and quiet is maintained! That is how things are, my friend! And now with best greetings, your Rosa.”.48

Here we see a young, determined revolutionary, and a woman to boot, insisting that the “old”, “orthodox”, experienced, authority should take personal responsibility. Kautsky replied to Luxemburg: “you see, we should not antagonise the people of the parliamentary fraction, we should not leave the impression that we are patronising them. If you want to make them a suggestion, it is better to send them a private letter, which will be much more effective.49 But Rosa Luxemburg tried to “revive” the fighting spirit in him “You must thoroughly hit out with guts and joy, and not as though it was a boring interlude; the public always feels the spirit of the combatants and the joy of battle gives resonance to controversy, and ensures moral superiority.”50 This attitude of not wanting to disturb the normal running of party life, not taking up position in the debate, not pushing for clarification of divergences, running away from debate and tolerating the revisionists, more and more alienated Luxemburg and it brought to the fore how much the fighting spirit, the loss of morality, the loss of conviction, of determination, had become the overriding trait of Kautsky’s attitude.  “I now read his [article]Nationalism and Internationalism, and it was a horror and nauseating. Soon I shall no longer be able to read any of his writings. I feel as if a nauseating spider web is covering my head…”.51Kautsky is becoming more and more brackish. He is more and more fossilising inside, he no longer feels any human concern about anybody except his family. I really feel uncomfortable with him.52

Kautsky’s attitude can also be contrasted to that of Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. After the break-up of her relationship with Leo Jogiches in 1906 (which caused her immense pain and stress, as well as great disappointment in him as a partner) the two remained the closest comrades until the day of her assassination. Despite deep personal grudges, disappointment and jealousies, these profound emotional feelings over the break-up of the relationship never prevented them from standing side by side in the political struggle.

One might object that in the case of Kautsky this reflected the lack of personality and character of Kautsky, but it would be more correct to say that he epitomised the moral rot within the Social-Democracy as a whole.

Luxemburg was forced early on to confront the resistance of the “old guard”. When she criticised revisionist policy at the 1898 Stuttgart Congress, “Vollmar reproached me bitterly that I as youngster of the movement want to give lessons to the old veterans (...) But if Vollmar replies to my factual explanations with ‘you greenhorn, I could be your grandfather’, I only see this as proof that he has run out of arguments.”.53 As regards the weakening fighting spirit of the more centrist veterans, in an article written after the 1898 congress she declared that: “We would have preferred it if the veterans had taken up the struggle from the very beginning of the debate (…) If the debate did get off the ground this did not happen because of but despite of the behaviour of the Party leaders (…) Abandoning the debate to its fate, watching passively for two days to see how the wind is blowing and only intervening when the mouthpieces of opportunism have been forced to come out in the open, then making snide remarks about the ‘sharp tone’ of those whose point of view you then defend, is a tactic which does not cast a good light on the Party leaders. And Kautsky’s explanation as to why he has not made a public statement so far about Bernstein’s theory, because he wanted to reserve his right to say the final word in a possible debate, does not really look a good excuse. In February he published Bernstein’s article without any editorial comment in Neue Zeit, then he stays silent for 4 months, in June he opens the discussions with some compliments to the ‘new’ point of view of Bernstein, this new poor copy of the lecture-room socialist [a term used by Engels in his Anti-Dühring], then he stays silent again for 4 months, lets the Party congress begin then declares during the course of the debate that he would like to make the concluding remarks. We would prefer that the theoretician ex officio should always intervene in the debates and not just make the conclusion in such crucial matters, and that he should not give the wrong and misleading impression of not having known for a long time what he should have said.54

Thus many of the old guard, who had fought under conditions of the anti-Socialist law, had been disarmed by the weight of democratism and reformism. They had become unable to understand the new period and started to theorise instead the abandonment of the socialist goal. Instead of passing on the lessons of the struggle under the conditions of the anti-Socialist law to a new generation, they had lost their fighting spirit. And the centrist current which was hiding and avoiding the combat, by running away from an open battle with the opportunists, paved the way for the rise of the right.

While the centrists were avoiding the struggle, the left wing around Luxemburg showed its combative spirit and was ready to take over responsibility. Seeing that in reality “Bebel himself has already become senile, and lets things slide; he feels relieved if others struggle, but he himself has neither the energy nor the drive to take the initiative. K [Kautsky] restricts himself to theory, nobody takes on any responsibility.”55This means the party is in a bad way (…) Nobody leads it, nobody takes on responsibility.” The left wing aimed at gaining more influence and was convinced of the need to act as the spearhead. Luxemburg wrote to Jogiches: “Only one year of perseverant, positive work, and my position will be great. At the moment I cannot restrict the sharpness in my speeches, because we have to defend the most extreme position”.56 This influence, however, was not to be achieved at the price of a watering down of positions.

Convinced of the need for a determined leadership, and recognising that she would be facing the resistance of the hesitant, she wanted to push the party. “A person, moreover who does not belong to the ruling clique [Sippschaft], who won’t rely on anyone’s support but uses nothing but her own elbows, a person feared for the future not only by obvious opponents like Auer and Co. but even by allies (Bebel, Kautsky, Singer), a person best kept at arm’s length because she may grow several heads too tall? (…) I have no intention of limiting myself to criticism. On the contrary, I have every intention and urge to ‘push’ positively, not individuals but the movement as a whole… point out new ways, fighting, acting as a gadfly – in a word, a chronic incentive for the whole movement”.57 In October 1905 Luxemburg was offered the opportunity to participate in the editorial board of Vorwärts. She was intransigent on a possible censorship of her positions. “If because of my articles there is a conflict with the leadership or with the editorial board, then I should not be the only one to leave the editorial board, but the whole left would show solidarity and leave Vorwärts, then the editorial board would be blown up”. For a short spell the left gained some influence.

The decline of proletarian life in the SPD

The process of degeneration of the Party was not only marked by open attempts to abandon its programmatic positions, and by the lack of fighting spirit in broad sections of the Party. Beneath the surface lay a constant under-current of petty spite and personal denigration directed at those who defended most intransigently the organisation’s principles and disturbed the façade of unity. Kautsky’s attitude towards Luxemburg’s criticism of Bernstein, for example, was ambivalent. Despite his friendly relations with Luxemburg he could nonetheless write to Bernstein: “That spiteful creature Luxemburg is unhappy with the truce until the publication of your pamphlet, every day she presents another pinprick on ‘tactics’”.58

At times, as we will see, this under-current would break through the surface in slanderous accusations and personal attacks.

It was above all the right which reacted by personalising and scapegoating the “enemy” within the party. When a clarification of the profound divergences through an open confrontation was needed, the right – instead of coming forward with arguments in a debate, shied away and instead began slandering the most prominent members of the left.

Showing a clear feeling of inferiority on a theoretical level, they spread slanderous innuendo about Luxemburg in particular, making male chauvinist comments and insinuations about her “unhappy” emotional life and social relations (her relationship with Leo Jogiches was not known to the party): “this clever spiteful old maid will also come to Hanover. I respect her and consider her to be stronger than Parvus. But she hates me from the bottom of her heart.59

The right wing party secretary Ignaz Auer admitted to Bernstein: “Even if we are not equal to our opponents, because not everyone is able to play a big role, we stand our ground against the rhetoric and the rude remarks. But if there was a ‘clean’ divorce, which nobody by the way considers seriously, Clara [Zetkin] and Rosa would be left on their own. Not even their [lovers] would take their defence, neither their former nor their present ones.60

The same Auer did not hesitate to use xenophobic tones, saying that the “main attacks against Bernstein and his supporters and against Schippel were not by German comrades, and did not come out of the German movement. The activities of these people, in particular of Mrs. Rosa Luxemburg were disloyal, and not nice amongst comrades”.61 These kinds of xenophobic tones – especially against Luxemburg, who was of Jewish origin – became a permanent feature in the right’s campaign, which was to become increasingly vicious in the years leading up to World War I.62

The right wing of the party even wrote satirical comments or texts on Luxemburg.63 Luxemburg and other figures on the left had already been targeted in a particularly vile manner in Poland. Paul Frölich reports in his biography of Luxemburg, that many slanders were levelled against left figures such as Warski and Luxemburg. Luxemburg was accused of being paid by the Warsaw police officer Markgrafski, when she published an article on the question of national autonomy; she was also accused of being a paid agent of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police.64

Rosa Luxemburg started to feel sickened by the atmosphere in the party. “Each closer contact with the gang of the Party creates such a feeling of unease, that each time I am determined to say: three sea miles away from the lowest point of low-tide! After having been together with them I smell so much dirt, I sense so much weakness of character, so much shabbiness, that I rush back to my mouse hole.”65

This was in 1899, but 10 years later, her opinion of the behaviour of some of the party's leaading figures had not improved: “After all, try to remain calm and do not forget that apart from the Party leadership and the scoundrels (canaille) of the Zietz type. there are still many beautiful and pure things. Apart from the immediate inhumanity he [Zietz] appears as a painful symptom of general wretchedness, into which our ‘leadership’ has sunk, a symptom of a frightening terribly poor mental state. Some other time this rotting seaweed will hopefully be swept away by a foaming wave”.66 And she frequently expressed her indignation at the stifling bureaucratic atmosphere in the party: “I sometimes feel really miserable here and I feel like running away from Germany. In any Siberian village you care to name there is more humanity than in the whole of German Social Democracy.67 This attitude of scapegoating and trying to destroy the reputation of the left was sowing the seeds for her later physical assassination by the Freikorps, who killed Luxemburg in January 1919 under the orders of the SPD. The tone employed against her within the Party prepared the pogrom atmosphere against revolutionaries in the revolutionary wave of 1918-1923. The character assassination which gradually seeped into the Party, and the lack of indignation about it, in particular from the centre, contributed to disarming the party morally.

Censuring and silencing the opposition

In addition to the scapegoating, personalisation and xenophobic attacks the different instances of the party under the influence of the right began to censure the articles of the left, and of Luxemburg in particular. Above all after 1905, when the question of mass action was on the agenda (see below), the Party increasingly tried to muzzle her and prevent her articles on the question of the mass strike and the Russian experience from being published. Although the left had strongholds in some cities,68 the whole right wing of the party apparatus was trying to prevent her from spreading her positions in the Party’s central organ Vorwärts: “We have regretfully to decline your article since, in accordance with an agreement between the Party executive, the executive commission of the Prussian provincial organization [of the SPD], and the editor, the question of the mass strike is not to be dealt with in Vorwärts for the time being.”69

As we shall see the consequences of the moral decline and the decline in solidarity within the Party were to have a noxious effect when imperialist tensions sharpened and the left insisted on the need to respond with mass action .

Franz Mehring, a well-known and respected figure of the left, was also often attacked. But unlike Rosa Luxemburg he was easily offended, and tended to retire from the struggle when he felt he had been unjustly attacked. For example, before the Party congress in Dresden 1903, Mehring criticised Social Democrats writing in the bourgeois press as being incompatible with Party membership. The opportunists launched a campaign of slander against him. Mehring asked for a Party tribunal, which met and adopted a “mild judgement” against the opportunists. But more and more, as he came under increasing pressure from the right, Mehring tended to withdraw from the Party press. Luxemburg insisted that he should stand up to the pressure from the right and to their slanders: “You will surely feel that we are increasingly approaching times when the masses in the Party will need energetic, ruthless and generous leadership, and that without you our powers-that-be – executive, central organ, Reichstag caucus, and the ‘scientific paper’, will become continually more wretched, small-minded and cowardly. Clearly we shall have to face up to this attractive future, and we must occupy and hold all those positions which make it possible to spike the official leadership’s guns by exercising the right to criticise. (…) This makes it our duty to stick it out and not do the official Party bosses the favour of packing up. We have to accept continual struggles and friction, particularly when anyone attacks that holy of holies, parliamentary cretinism, as strongly as you have done. But in spite of all – not to give an inch seems to be the right slogan. Neue Zeit must not be handed over entirely to senility and officialdom.70

The watershed of 1905

As the new century opened, the foundation on which revisionists and reformists alike had built their theory and practice began to crumble.

Superficially, and despite occasional setbacks, the capitalist economy still appeared to be in robust health, continuing its unstoppable expansion across the last regions still unoccupied by the imperialist powers, notably Africa and China. The expansion of capitalism across the globe had reached a stage where the imperialist powers could only expand their influence at the cost of their rivals. All the great powers were increasingly involved in an unprecedented arms race, with Germany in particular engaged in a massive programme of naval expansion. Though few realised at the time, the year 1905 marked a watershed: a dispute between two great powers led to large-scale war, and the war in turn led to the first massive revolutionary upsurge of the working class.

The war, begun in 1904, was fought between Russia and Japan for control of the Korean peninsula. Russia suffered a humiliating defeat, and the strikes of January 1905 were a direct reaction against the effects of the war. For the first time in history, a gigantic wave of mass strikes shook an entire country. The phenomenon was not confined to Russia. Although not as massively and with a different background and different demands, similar strike movements broke out in a series of other European countries: 1902 in Belgium, 1903 in the Netherlands, 1905 in the Ruhr area in Germany. A number of massive wildcat strikes also took place in the United States between 1900 and 1906 (notably in the Pennsylvania coal mines). In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg – both as a revolutionary agitator and journalist for the German Party, and as a member of the SDKPiL’s Central Committee71 - had been following attentively the struggles in Russia and Poland.72 In December 1905, she felt that she could no longer remain in Germany as a mere observer, and left for Poland to participate directly in the movement. Closely involved in the day-to-day process of class struggle and revolutionary agitation, she witnessed at first hand the newly unfolding dynamic of the mass strikes.73 Together with other revolutionary forces she began to draw the lessons. At the same time as Trotsky wrote his famous book on 1905 where he highlighted the role of the workers’ councils, Luxemburg in her text Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions74 underlined the historical significance of the “birth of the mass strike” and its consequences for the working class internationally. Her text on the mass strike was a first programmatic text of the left currents in the 2nd International, aimed at drawing the broader lessons and highlighting the importance of autonomous, massive action of the working class.75

Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike went completely against the vision of class struggle generally accepted by the Party and the trade unions. For the latter, class struggle was almost like a military campaign, in which confrontation should only be sought once the army had built up an overwhelming strength, while the Party and union leaderships were to act as a general staff with the masses of workers manoeuvring according to orders. This was a long way from Luxemburg’s insistence on the creative self-activity of the masses, and any idea that the workers themselves might act independently of the leadership was anathema to the union bosses, who in 1905 were faced for the first time with the prospect of being overrun by just such a massive wave of autonomous struggles. The reaction of the right wing of the SPD and the union leadership was simply to ban any discussion of the issue. At the unions’ May 1905 Congress in Köln they rejected any discussion on the mass strike as “reprehensible76 (verwerflich) and went on to say that “The TU congress recommends all organised workers to energetically oppose this [propagation of the mass strike]”. This heralded the cooperation between the ruling class and the SPD and unions in fighting revolution.

The German bourgeoisie had also followed the movement attentively, and wanted above all to prevent German workers from “copying the Russian example”. Because of her speech on the mass strike at the SPD’s 1905 Congress in Jena, Rosa Luxemburg was accused of “incitation to violence” (Aufreizung zu Gewalttätigkeit) and was sentenced to two months in prison. Kautsky meanwhile tried to play down the significance of the mass strikes, insisting they were above all a product of primitive Russian conditions, which could not be applied to an advanced country like Germany. He used “the term ‘Russian method’ as a symbol for lack of organisation, primitiveness, chaos, wildness”.77 In his 1909 book The Road to Power, Kautsky claimed that “mass action is an obsolete strategy of overthrowing the enemy” and contrasted it with his proposed “strategy of attrition” (Ermattungsstrategie).78

The mass party against the mass strike

Refusing to consider the mass strike as a perspective for the working class across the world, Kautsky attacked Luxemburg’s position as if it were merely a personal whim. Kautsky wrote to Luxemburg: “I do not have the time to explain to you the reasons which Marx and Engels, Bebel and Liebknecht accepted as substantive. Briefly, what you want is a totally new kind of agitation, which we have always rejected so far. But this new agitation is of such a kind that it is not advisable to debate this in public. If we publish the article you would act on your own account, as an individual person, and proclaim a totally new agitation and action, which the Party has always rejected. A single person, no matter how high her standing may be, cannot act on her own account and make a fait accompli, which would have unpredictable consequences for the Party.”.79

Luxemburg rejected the attempt to present the analysis and importance of the mass strike as a “personal policy”.80 Even though revolutionaries must acknowledge the existence of different conditions in different countries, they must above all grasp the global dynamic of the changing conditions of the class struggle, in particular those tendencies which herald the future. Kautsky opposed the “Russian experience” as an expression of Russia’s backwardness, indirectly refusing international solidarity and spreading a viewpoint imbued with national prejudice, pretending that the workers in Germany with their powerful trade unions were more advanced and their methods “superior” … i.e. at a time, when the trade union leadership was already blocking the mass strike and autonomous action! And when Luxemburg was sent to jail for propagating the mass strike, Kautsky and his followers showed no sign of outrage and did not protest.

Luxemburg, who could not be silenced by such attempts at censorship, reproached the party leadership for focussing their entire attention on preparing the elections. “All questions of tactics should be drowned out by the delirium of joy over our present and future electoral successes? Does Vorwärts really believe that the political deepening and reflection of large layers of the Party could be fostered with this permanent atmosphere of hailing future electoral success a year,, possibly a year and a hal, before the elections and by silencing any self-critique in the Party?81

Apart from Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek was the most vocal critic of Kautsky’s “strategy of attrition”. In his book “Tactical differences/ in the workers’ movement”82 Pannekoek undertook a systematic and fundamental critique of the “old tools” of parliamentarism and the trade union struggle. Pannekoek was also to be the victim of censorship and repression within the Social Democratic and trade union apparatus, and lost his job at the Party school as a result. Increasingly, both Luxemburg’s and Pannekoek’s articles were censored by the Party press. In November 1911 Kautsky for the first time refused to publish an article by Pannekoek in Neue Zeit.83

Thus the mass strikes of 1905 forced the SPD leadership to show its real face and oppose any mobilisation of the working class that tried to take up the “Russian experience”. Already, years before the unleashing of the war,, the trade union leadership had become a bulwark for capitalism. Under the pretext of taking different conditions of the class struggle into account, in reality this was used to reject international solidarity, with the right wing forces within Social Democracy trying to provoke fears and even whip up national resentment about “Russian radicalism” This was going to be an important ideological weapon in the war which started a few years later. Thus after 1905 the centre, which had been wavering until then, gradually became more and more pulled over towards the right. The inability and unwillingness of the centre to support the struggle of the left in the party meant that the left became more and more isolated within the Party.

As Luxemburg pointed out, “The practical effect of comrade Kautsky’s intervention is reduced to this: he has provided a theoretical cover to those in the Party and the unions who observe the impetuous growth of the mass movement with growing unease, and would like to bring it to a halt as soon as possible and return the struggle to well-worn and comfortable old rut of union and parliamentary activity. Kautsky has provided them with a remedy to their scruples of conscience, under the aegis of Marx and Engels; at the same time he has offered them a means to break the back of a movement of demonstrations that he supposedly wanted to make ‘ever more powerful’”.84

The threat of war and the International

The 2nd International’s 1907 Stuttgart Congress tried to draw the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war and to throw the weight of the organised working class into the balance against the growing menace of war. Some 60,000 people took part in a demonstration – with speakers from more than a dozen countries warning of the danger of war. August Bebel proposed a resolution against the danger of war, which avoided the question of militarism as an integral part of the capitalist system and made no mention the struggle of the workers in Russia against war. The German Party intended to avoid being tied by any prescriptions as to its action in the event of war, in the form of a general strike above all. Lenin, Luxemburg and Martov together proposed a more robust amendment to the resolution: “Should war break out in spite of all this, it is [the Socialist Parties’] duty to intercede for its speedy end, and to strive with all their power to make use of the violent economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people, and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.”.85 The Stuttgart congress voted unanimously for this resolution, but afterwards the majority of the 2nd International failed to strengthen their opposition to the increasing war preparations. The Stuttgart Congress entered into history as an example of verbal declarations without action by most of the attending parties.86 But it was an important moment of cooperation amongst the left wing currents, who despite their differences on many other questions took up a common stand against the question of war.

In February 1907 Karl Liebknecht published his book Militarism and Anti-militarism with special attention to the international youth movement, in which he denounced in particular the role of German militarism. In October 1907 he was sentenced to 18 months of imprisonment for high treason. Yet in the same year, the leading right wing figure in the SPD, Noske, declared in a speech in the Reichstag, that in case of a “war of defence” Social Democracy would support the government and “defend the fatherland with great passion..Our attitude towards the military is determined by our view on the national question. We demand the autonomy of each nation. But this means that we also insist on the preservation of the autonomy of the German people. We are fully aware that it is our duty and obligation to make sure that the German people are not pushed against the wall by some other people.87 This was the same Noske who in 1918 was to become the bloodhound of SPD-led repression against the workers.

Selling internationalism for electoral success

In 1911 Germany’s despatch of the destroyer Panther to Agadir provoked the second Moroccan Crisis with France. The SPD leadership renounced any anti-militarist action in order to avoid putting at risk its electoral success in the upcoming 1912 election. When Luxemburg denounced this attitude, the SPD leadership accused her of betraying Party secrets. In August 1911 after much hesitation and attempts to avoid the question, the Party leadership distributed a leaflet which was meant to be a protest against the Morocco policy of German imperialism. The leaflet was strongly criticised by Luxemburg in her article “Our leaflet on Morocco”,88 unaware as she wrote that Kautsky was the author. Kautsky replied with a very personalised attack. Luxemburg fought back: Kautsky, she said, had presented her critique as “a malicious, back-stabbing, perfidious attack against [Kautsky] as a person. (…) Comrade Kautsky will hardly be able to doubt my courage to face someone in an open manner, to criticise or fight against someone directly. I have never attacked a person from ambush and I strongly reject the suggestion of comrade Kautsky that I knew who had written the leaflet and that I had – without naming him – targeted him. (…) but I would have taken care not to begin an unnecessary polemic with a comrade who overreacts with such a flood of personal vituperation, bitterness and suspicion against a strictly factual, although strong critique, and who suspects a personal, nasty, bitchy intention behind each word of critique.”89 At the Jena Party congress in September 1911, the Party leadership circulated a special pamphlet against Rosa Luxemburg, full of attacks against her, accusing her of breaching confidentiality and of having informed the International Socialist Bureau of the 2nd International of the SPD’s internal correspondence.

Kautsky deserts the struggle against war

Although in his 1909 book on The Road to Power Kautsky warned that “the world war is coming dangerously close”, in 1911 he predicted, that “everyone will become a patriot” once war breaks out. And that if Social Democracy decided to swim against the current, it would be torn apart by the enraged mob. He placed his hopes for peace on the “countries representing European civilisation” forming a United States of Europe. At the same time he began to develop his theory of “super-imperialism”; underlying this theory was the idea that imperialist conflict was not an inevitable consequence of capitalist expansion but merely a “policy” which enlightened capitalist states could choose to reject. Kautsky already thought that the war would relegate class contradictions to the background and the proletariat’s mass action would be doomed to failure, that – as he would say when war broke out – the International was only good for peace time. This attitude of being aware of the danger of war but bowing to the dominant nationalist pressure and shying away from a determined struggle disarmed the working class and paved the way for the betrayal of the interests of the proletariat. Thus on the one hand Kautsky minimised the real explosiveness of imperialist tensions in his theory of “super-imperialism” and so completely failed to perceive the ruling classes’ determination to prepare for war; while on the other he pandered to the nationalist ideology of the government (and increasingly of the right wing in the SPD also) rather than confronting it, out of fear for the SPD’s electoral success. His backbone, his fighting spirit, had disappeared.

When a determined denunciation of the war preparations was needed, and while the left wing did its best to organise anti-war public meetings which attracted participants in their thousands, the SPD leadership was mobilising to the hilt for the upcoming 1912 parliamentary elections. Luxemburg denounced the self-imposed silence on the danger of war as an opportunistic attempt to score more parliamentary seats, sacrificing internationalism in order to gain more votes.

In 1912 the threat to peace posed by the Second Balkan War led the ISB to organise an emergency special Congress held in November in Basel, Switzerland, with the specific aim of mobilising the international working class against the imminent danger of war. Luxemburg criticised the fact that the German Party had merely tail-ended the German unions who had organised a few low-key protests, arguing that the Party as a political organ of the working class had done no more than pay lip-service to the denunciation of war. Whereas a few parties in other countries had reacted more vigorously, the SPD, the biggest workers’ party in the world, had essentially withdrawn from the agitation and abstained from mobilising further protests. The Basel congress, which once again ended with a big demonstration and appeals for peace, in fact masked the rottenness and future betrayal of many of its member parties.

On June 3rd 1913, the SPD parliamentary fraction voted in favour of a special military tax: 37 SPD deputies who opposed the vote in favour were reduced to silence by the principle of the discipline of the parliamentary fraction. The open breach with the previous motto of “not a single man, not a single penny” for the system prepared the parliamentary fraction’s vote for war credits in August 1914.90 The moral decline of the party was also revealed through Bebel’s reaction. In 1870/71 August Bebel – together with Wilhelm Liebknecht (Karl Liebknecht’s father) – distinguished himself by his determined opposition to the Franco-Prussian war. Now, four decades later, Bebel failed to take up a resolute stand against the danger of war.91

It was becoming increasingly clear that not only was the right going to betray openly, but also that the wavering centrists had lost all fighting spirit and would fail to oppose the preparation for war in a determined manner. The attitude defended by the most famous representative of the “centre”, Kautsky, according to which the Party should adapt its position on the question of war following the reactions of the population (passive submission if the majority of the country assented to nationalism or a more resolute stand if there was increasing opposition to war), was justified by the danger of “isolating oneself from the bulk of the Party”. When after 1910 the current around Kautsky claimed to be the “Marxist centre” in contrast to the (extremist, radical, unmarxist) left, Luxemburg labelled this “centre” as representatives of cowardice, cautiousness and conservatism.

Their desertion from the struggle, their inability to oppose the right and to follow the left in their determined struggle, helped to disarm the workers. Thus the betrayal of August 1914 by the Party leadership came as no surprise; it was prepared little by little in a piecemeal process. The support for German imperialism became tangible in several votes in parliament to support war credits, in the efforts to curb any protests against the war, in the whole attitude of taking sides with German imperialism and chaining the working class to nationalism and patriotism. The process of muzzling the left wing was crucial in the abandonment of internationalism and prepared the repression of revolutionaries in 1919.

Blinded by numbers

While the SPD leadership had been focussing its activities on parliamentary elections, the Party itself was blinded by electoral success and lost sight of the final goal of the workers’ movement. The Party hailed the apparently uninterrupted growth in voters, in the number of deputies and in the readership of the Party press. The growth was indeed impressive: in 1907 the SPD had 530,000 members; by 1913 the figure had doubled to almost 1.1 million. The SPD in reality was the only mass party of the 2nd International and the biggest single party in any European parliament. This numerical growth gave the illusion of great strength. Even Lenin was remarkably uncritical about the “impressive figures” of members, voters and the impact of the party.92

Although it is impossible to establish a mechanical relationship between political intransigence and electoral scores, the 1907 elections, when the SPD still condemned the barbaric repression of German imperialism against the Herero risings in South-West Africa, led to an electoral “set-back”, as the SPD lost 38 parliamentary seats and was left with 43 seats ‘only’. Despite the fact that the SPD’s share of the overall vote had actually risen, in the eyes of the Party leadership this electoral set-back meant that the Party had been punished by the voters, and above all by the voters of the petty bourgeoisie, because of its denunciation of German imperialism. The conclusion they drew was that the SPD should avoid opposing imperialism and nationalism too strongly, as this would cost votes. Instead the Party would have to focus all its forces on campaigning for the next elections, even if this meant censuring its discussions and avoiding anything which might put its electoral score at risk. In the 1912 elections the party scored 4.2 million votes (38.5% of the votes cast) and won 110 seats. It had become the biggest single parliamentary group, but only by burying internationalism and the principles of the working class. In the local parliaments it had more than 11,000 deputies. The SPD boasted 91 newspapers and 1.5 million subscribers. In the 1912 elections, the SPD’s integration into the game of parliamentary politics went one step further when it withdrew candidates in several constituencies to the benefit of the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (Progressive People’s Party), even though this party supported unconditionally the policy of German imperialism. Meanwhile the Sozialistische Monatshefte (in principle a non-Party publication, but in effect the revisionists’ theoretical organ) openly supported Germany’s colonial policy and the claims of German imperialism for a redistribution of colonies.

Gradual integration into the state

In fact the full mobilisation of the party for parliamentary elections went hand in hand with its gradual integration into the state apparatus. The indirect vote for the budget in July 1910,93 the increasing cooperation with bourgeois parties, (which had up to then been anathema), such as abstaining from nominating candidates in some constituencies in order to make possible the election of MPs of the bourgeois Fortschrittliche Volkspartei, the nomination of a candidate for the mayoral elections in Stuttgart – these were some of the steps on the road to the SPD’s direct participation in running the state administration.

This whole trend towards a growing interconnection between the SPD’s parliamentary activities and its identification with the state was castigated by the left, in particular by Anton Pannekoek and Luxemburg. Pannekoek dedicated a whole book to the Tactical differences within the worker’ movement. Luxemburg, who was extremely alert to the suffocating effect of parliamentarism, pressed for initiative and action from the rank and file: “the most ideal party executive would be able to achieve nothing, would involuntarily sink into bureaucratic inefficiency, if the natural source of its energy, the will of the Party, does not make itself felt, if critical thought, the initiative of the mass of the Party’s membership is sleeping. In fact it is more than this. If its own energy, the independent intellectual life of the mass of the Party, is not active enough, then the central authorities have the quite natural tendency to not only bureaucratically rust but also to get a totally wrong idea of their own official authority and position of power with respect to the Party. The most recent so-called ‘secret decree’ of our Party executive to the Party editorial staffs can serve as fresh proof, an attempt to make decisions for the Party press, which cannot be sharply enough rejected. However, here also it is necessary to make it clear: against both inefficiency and excessive illusions of power of the central authorities of the labour movement there is no other way except one’s own initiative, one’s own thought, and the fresh, pulsating political life of the broad mass of the Party.”94

Indeed, Luxemburg constantly insisted on the need for the mass of the Party members to “wake up” and take up their responsibility against the degenerating Party leadership. “The big masses [of the Party] have to activate themselves in their own way, must be able to develop their own mass energy, their own drive, they have to become active as a mass, act, show and develop passion, courage and determination.”95

Every step forward in the struggle for emancipation of the working class must at the same time mean a growing intellectual independence of its mass, its growing self-activity, self-determination and initiative (…) It is vitally important for the normal development of the political life in the Party, to keep the political thought and the will of the mass of the Party awake and active,.. We have, of course, the yearly Party conference as the highest instance which regularly fixes the will of the whole party. However, it is obvious that the Party conferences can only give general outlines of the tactics for the Social Democratic struggle. The application of these guidelines in practice requires untiring thought, quick-wittedness and initiative (…) To want to make a Party executive responsible for the whole enormous task of daily political vigilance and initiative, on whose command a Party organisation of almost a million passively waits, is the most incorrect thing there is from the standpoint of the proletarian class struggle. This is without doubt that reprehensible ‘blind obedience’ which our opportunists definitely want to see in the self-evident subordination of all to the decisions of the whole party”.96

Fraction discipline strangles individual responsibility

On 4th August 1914, the SPD parliamentary fraction voted unanimously for war credits. The Party leadership and parliamentary fraction had demanded “fraction discipline”. The censorship (state censorship or self-censorship?) and false unity of the Party followed their own logic, the very opposite of personal responsibility. The process of degeneration meant that the capacity for critical thinking and opposition to the false unity of the Party had been sapped. The moral values of the Party were sacrificed on the altar of capital. In the name of Party discipline the Party demanded the abandoning of proletarian internationalism. Karl Liebknecht, whose father had dared to reject the support for the war credits in 1870, now bowed to Party pressure. It was only a few weeks later, following a first regrouping of comrades who had remained loyal to internationalism, that he dared to express openly his rejection of the mobilisation for war by the SPD leadership. But the vote for war credits by the German SPD had triggered off an avalanche of submission to nationalism in other European countries. With the betrayal of the SPD the 2nd International signed its death warrant and disintegrated.

The rise of the opportunistic and revisionist current, which had appeared most clearly in the biggest Party of the 2nd International, and which abandoned the goal of the overthrow of capitalist society, meant that proletarian life, fighting spirit and moral indignation disappeared within the SPD, or at least in the ranks of its leadership and its bureaucracy. At the same time this process was inseparably linked to the SPD’s programmatic degeneration, visible in its refusal to adopt the new weapons of the class struggle, the mass strike and workers’ self-organisation, and the gradual abandonment of internationalism. The process of degeneration of German Social-Democracy, which was not an isolated phenomenon in the 2nd International, led to its betrayal in 1914. For the first time a political organisation of the workers had not only betrayed the interests of the working class, it became one of the most effective weapons in the hands of the capitalist class. The ruling class in Germany could now count on the SPD’s authority, and the loyalty it inspired in the working class, to unleash war and then to crush the workers’ revolt against war. The lessons of the degeneration of Social Democracy thus remain crucially important for revolutionaries today.

Heinrich / Jens


1 With 38.5% of the votes cast, the SPD had 110 seats in the Reichstag.

2 Karl Kautsky was born in Prague in 1854; his father was a set designer and his mother an actress and writer. The family moved to Vienna when Kautsky was aged 7. He studied at Vienna University and joined the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ) in 1875. In 1880 he was in Zürich, helping to smuggle socialist literature into Germany.

3 August Bebel was born in 1840, in what is now a suburb of Cologne. Orphaned at 13, he was apprenticed to a carpenter and as a young man travelled extensively in Germany. He met Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1865, and was immediately impressed by Liebknecht’s international experience; in his auto-biography, Bebel remembers exclaiming “That is a man you can learn something from” (“Donnerwetter, von dem kann man das lernen”, Bebel, Aus Meinen Leben, Berlin 1946, cited in James Joll, The Second International). Together with Liebknecht, Bebel became one of German Social-Democracy’s outstanding leaders in its early years.

4 This is clearly visible in Lenin’s One step forward, two steps back, concerning the crisis in the RSDLP in 1903. Speaking of the future Mensheviks he writes: “Their narrow circle mentality and astonishing immaturity as Party members, which cannot stand the fresh breeze of open controversy in the presence of all, is here clearly revealed (...) Can you imagine such an absurdity, such a squabble, such a complaint about ‘false accusations of opportunism’ in the German party? There, proletarian organisation and discipline weaned them from such intellectualist flabbiness long ago (...) Only the most hidebound circle mentality, with its logic of ‘either coats off, or let’s have your hand’, could give rise to hysterics, squabbles, and a Party split because of a 'false accusation of opportunism against the majority of the Emancipation of Labour group

5 Rosa Luxemburg, The crisis in the German SocialDemocracy (better known as the Junius pamphlet), chapter 1. Luxemburg's pamphlet is required reading for anyone trying to understand the underlying causes of the First World War.

6 Luxemburg, ibid.

7 The SPD central press organ.

8 Also known as the Eisenacher party, from the city of its foundation.

9 Marx, First Address of the IWA General Council on the Civil War in France.

10 A similar tendency survived in French socialism out of nostalgia for the "national workshops" programme that had followed the revolutionary movement of 1848.

11 Cf Toni Offerman, in Between reform and revolution: German socialism and communism from 1840 to 1990, Berghahn Books, 1998, p96.

12 It is known today under the title Critique of the Gotha Programme

13 Marx to Bracke, 5th May 1875

14 Engels to Bebel, March 1875

15 Quoted in Georges Haupt, Aspects of international socialism 1871-1914, Cambridge University Press & Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.

16 The parliamentary vote for war credits in 1914 was thus in clear violation of the SPD's statutes and Congress decisions, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out.

17 Kritik des sozialdemokratischen Programmentwurfs, Marx Engels Werke, Bd. 22, Berlin 1963, S. 233-235)

18 Though it should not be forgotten that Russian autocracy was more extreme: the Russian equivalent to the Reichstag, the State Duma, was only called under pressure from the revolutionary movement of 1905.

19 Cf JP Nettl's remarkable biography of Rosa Luxemburg, p81 (Schocken Paperback edition of the 1969 Oxford University Press abridged edition, with an introductory essay by Hannah Arendt). Throughout this article, we have quoted both from the abridged and the unabridged editions.

20 It is significant that while the Party tolerated right-wing reformism, the "Jungen" ("Youth") circle, who violently criticised the shift towards parliamentarism, were expelled from the Party at the Erfurt Congress. It is true that this group was essentially an intellectual and literary opposition with anarchist tendencies (a number of its members drifted into anarchism after leaving the SPD). It is nonetheless characteristic that the Party reacted much more harshly towards a criticism from the left than towards out and out opportunist practice on the right.

21 Cf Jacques Droz, Histoire générale du socialisme, p41, Editions Quadrige/PUF, 1974.

22 Letter to Kautsky, 1896, quoted by Droz, op.cit., p42.

23 Bernstein’s revisionist current was by no means an isolated exception. In France the socialist Millerand joined the government of Waldeck-Rousseau alongside General Gallifet, the hangman of the Paris Commune; a similar tendency existed in Belgium; the British Labour movement was completely dominated by reformism and a narrow-minded nationalist trade unionism.

24the colonial question (…) is a question of the spread of culture and, as long as there are big cultural differences, it is a question of the spread, or rather the assertion, of the higher culture. Because sooner or later it inevitably comes to pass that higher and lower cultures collide, and with regard to this collision, this struggle for existence between cultures, the colonial policy of the cultured peoples must be rated as a historical process. The fact that it is usually pursued from other motives and with means, as well as in forms that we Social Democrats condemn, may lead us in specific cases to reject it and fight against it, but this cannot be a reason for us to change our judgment about the historical necessity of colonisation” (Bernstein, 1907, quoted in Discovering Imperialism, 2012, Haymarket Books, p41).

25 Cf Nettl, op.cit., p101.

26 Parvus, also known as Alexander Helphand, was a strange and controversial figure in the revolutionary movement. After some years on the left of the Social-Democracy in Germany, then in Russia during the 1905 revolution, he moved to Turkey where he set up an arms trading company, becoming wealthy on the proceeds of the Balkan Wars, and simultaneously setting up as financial and political adviser to the Young Turks nationalist movement and editing the nationalist publication Turk Yurdu. During the war, Parvus became an open supporter of German imperialism, much to the distress of Trotsky whose ideas on “permanent revolution” he had strongly influenced (cf Deutscher, The prophet armed, “War and the International”).

27 Quoted in Nettl, op.cit., p133

28 Parteitag der Sozialdemokratie, Oktober 1898 in Stuttgart, Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd 1/1 p241

29 Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Bd 1/1, p. 565, 29.9.1899

30 Rosa Luxemburg, 1899, Ges. Werke Bd 1/1, S. 578, 9.-14. Oktober

31 August Bebel, Dresden, 13.-20.1903, quoted by Luxemburg After the Jena Party congress, Ges. Werke, Bd 1/1, S. 351

32 “Unser leitendes Zentralorgan”, Leipziger Volkszeitung, 22.9.1899, Rosa Luxemburg in Ges. Werke, Bd. 1/1, p. 558.

33 Moreover, Bernstein “began by abandoning the final aim and supposedly keeping the movement. But as there can be no socialist movement without a socialist aim he ends by renouncing the movement” (Reform or revolution, “Collapse”).

34I am very grateful for the information, which helps me to understand better the orientations of the party. It was of course clear to me that Bernstein with his ideas presented so far is no more in line with our programme, but it is painful that we can no longer count on him altogether. But if you and comrade Kautsky had this assessment, I am surprised that that you and comrade Kautsky did not use the favourable atmosphere at the congress to launch immediately an energetic debate, but that you wanted to encourage Bernstein to write a pamphlet, which will only delay the discussion much more.” (Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 210, letter to Bebel, 31.10.1898

35 Rosa Luxemburg, , Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, P. 289, letter to Leo Jogiches, 11. März 1899

36 Kautsky to Bernstein, 29.7.1899, IISG-Kautsky-Nachlass, C. 227, C. 230, quoted in Till Schelz-Brandenburg, Eduard Bernstein und Karl Kautsky, Entstehung und Wandlung des sozialdemokratischen Parteimarxismus im Spiegel ihrer Korrespondenz 1879 bis 1932, Köln, 1992.

37 Rosa Luxemburg, “Parteifragen im Vorwärts”, Gesammelte Werke Bd 1/1, p. 564, 29.9.1899

38 Laschitza, Im Lebensrausch, Trotz Alledem, p.104, 27.Okt. 1898, Kautsky-Nachlass C 209: Kautsky an Bernstein

39 Karl Kautsky to Victor Adler, 20.7.1905, in Victor Adler Briefwechsel, a.a.O. S. 463, quoted by Till Schelz-Brandenburg, p. 338).

40 Rosa Luxemburg – Ges. Werke, Bd 1/1, p. 528, quoting “Kautsky zum Parteitag in Hannover”, Neue Zeit 18, Stuttgart 1899-1900, 1. Bd. S. 12)

41 Translated from the French version, Freedom of criticism and science

42 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, p. 279, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 3. 3. 1899

43 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 426, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 21.12.1899

44 Luxemburg made it a point of honour to give her entire support as an agitator (she was much in demand as a public speaker) even to those Party members she criticised most sharply, for example during the electoral campaign of the revisionist Max Schippel.

45 Rosa Luxemburg Ges. Briefe, Bd. 1, p. 491, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 7.7.1890

46 Rosa Luxemburg, Erklärung, Ges. Werke Bd 1/2 , p 146, 1.10.1901

47 At the Lübeck party congress the Neue Zeit and Kautsky as its editor had been heavily attacked by the opportunists because of the controversy over revisionism.

48 JP Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Vol 1, p. 192 (the quote here is taken from the unabridged edition), Rosa Luxemburg, letter to Kautsky, 3.10.1901

49 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1,. P. 565, Letter to Jogiches, 12.1.1902

50 Quoted in Nettl, op.cit., p127

51 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe Bd 3, p. 358, Letter to Kostja Zetkin, 27. June 1908

52 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe Bd 3, p. 57, Letter to Kostja Zetkin, 1.August 1909

53 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, 1/1, p. 239, p. 245, - Parteitag der Sozialdemokratie 1898 in Stuttgart, Oktober 1898

54 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke BDI 1/1, S. 255, Nachbetrachtungen zum Parteitag 12-14. Oktober 1898, Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung Dresden

55 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 279, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 3.3.1899

56 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe Bd 1, p. 384, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 24.9.1899

57 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 322, Letter to Jogiches, 1.5.1899

58 Kautsky to Bernstein, 29.10.1898, IISG, Amsterdam, Kautsky-Nicholas, C 210.

59 Laschitza, ibid, p. 129, (Ignatz Auer in a letter to Bernstein). In his Histoire générale du socialisme, Jacques Droz describes Auer as follows: “He was a ‘practical’, a ‘reformist’ in practice who gloried in knowing nothing about theory, but nationalist to the point of praising the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine before socialist audiences and opposing the reconstitution of Poland, cynical to the point of rejecting the authority of the International; in reality he cautioned line of the Sozialistische Monatshefte and actively encouraged the development of reformism” (p41).

60 Laschitza, ibid, p. 130 .

61 Laschitza, ibid, p. 136, in Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, 29.11. 1899

62 Rosa Luxemburg was aware of the hostility towards her at a very early stage. At the Hanover party congress in 1899 the leadership had not wanted to let her speak on the question of customs. She described their attitude in a letter to Jogiches: “We had better have this sorted out in the Party, i.e. in the clan. This is the way things work with them: If the house is burning, they need a scapegoat (a Jew), if the fire has been extinguished, the Jew gets kicked out”. (Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 317, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 27.4.1899). Victor Adler wrote to Bebel in 1910 that he had “sufficiently low instincts to get a certain amount of pleasure from what Karl was suffering at the hands of his friends. But it really is too bad – the poisonous bitch will yet do a lot of damage, all the more because she is as clever as a monkey [blitzgescheit] while on the other hand her sense of responsibility is totally lacking and her only motive is an almost perverse desire for self-justification”. (Nettl, 1, p. 432, unabridged version, Victor Adler to August Bebel, 5.8.1910),

63 The satirical weekly Simplicissimus published a nasty poem directed at Luxemburg: 

Nur eines gibt es was ich wirklich hasse:
Das ist der Volksversammlungsrednerin.
Der Zielbewussten, tintenfrohen Klasse.
Ich bin der Ansicht, dass sie alle spinnen.
Sie taugen nichts im Hause, nichts im Bette.
Mag Fräulein Luxemburg die Nase rümpfen,
Auch sie hat sicherlich – was gilt die Wette? –
Mehr als ein Loch in ihren woll’nen Strümpfen
.”

Laschitza, 136, Simplicissimus, 4. Jahrgang, Nr. 33, 1899/1900, S. 263).

64 Frölich, Paul, “Gedanke und Tat”, Rosa Luxemburg, Dietz-Verlag Berlin, 1990, p. 62

65 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe Bd. 1, S. 316, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 27.April 1899

66 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 3 S. 89, Letter to Clara Zetkin, 29.9.1909

67 Rosa Luxemburg Ges. Briefe, Bd. 3, p. 268, Letter to Kostja Zetkin, 30.11.1910. These lines were provoked by the philistine reaction within the Party leadership to an article she had written on Tolstoy, which was considered both irrelevant (artistic subjects were not important), and undesirable in the Party press because it praised an artist who was both a Russian and a mystic.

68 Since the Party had a large number of papers, most of which were not under the direct control of the Berlin leadership, it often depended on the attitude of the local editorial board whether articles of the left current were published. The left wing had the biggest audience in Leipzig, Stuttgart, Bremen and Dortmund.

69 Nettl 1 p. 421 (unabridged edition)

70 Nettl, I, p. 464 (unabridged edition).

71 Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy – SDKPiL). The Party was formed in 1893 as the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), its best-known leading members being Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Julian Marchlewski, and Adolf Warszawski. It became the SDKPiL following the merger with the Union of Workers in Lithuania led by Feliks Dzerzhinsky among others. One of the SDKPiL’s most important distinguishing characteristics was its steadfast internationalism and its conviction that Polish national independence was not in the workers’ interests, and that the Polish workers’ movement should on the contrary ally itself closely with the Russian Social-Democracy and the Bolsheviks in particular. This set it permanently at odds with the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna – PPS) which adopted a more and more nationalist orientation under the leadership of Josef Pilsudski, later (not unlike Mussolini) to become dictator of Poland.

72 Poland, it should be remembered, did not exist as a separate country. The major part of historic Poland was part of the Tsarist empire, while other parts had been absorbed by Germany and Austria-Hungary.

73 She was arrested in March 1906, together with Leo Jogiches who had also returned to Poland. There were serious fears for her safety, with the SDKPiL making it known that they would take physical reprisals against government agents should any harm befall her. A mixture of subterfuge and help from her family managed to extricate her from the Tsarist gaols, whence she returned to Germany. Jogiches was sentenced to eight years hard labour, but succeeded in escaping from prison.

74 The full text can be found on marxists.org.

75 See the series of articles on 1905 in the International Review nos 120, 122, 123, 125.

76 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd 2, p. 347

77 Rosa Luxemburg, “Das Offiziösentum der Theorie”, Ges. Werke Bd. 3, p. 307, article published in Neue Zeit, 1912.

78 The debate between Kautsky, Luxemburg and Pannekoek has been published in French under the title Socialisme, la voie occidentale, Presses Universitaires de France.

79 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd. 2, S. 380, “Theorie und die Praxis”, published in Neue Zeit, 28. Jg, 1909/1910, in reply to Kautsky’s article “Was nun?”

80 Rosa Luxemburg, “Die Theorie und Praxis”, Ges. Werke, Bd 2, S. 398

81 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd. 3, S. 441 “Die totgeschwiegene Wahlrechtsdebatte” (“The concealed debate about electoral rights”) 17.8.1910

82 Published in English under the title Marxist theory and revolutionary tactics.

83 At the time another major voice of the left in Holland, Herman Gorter, wrote to Kautsky. “Tactical divergences often entail an estrangement between friends. In my case as far as my relationship with you is concerned, this is not true; as you have noticed. Although you often criticised Pannekoek and Rosa, with whom I agree in general (and you thus also criticised me) I have always maintained the same kind of relationship with you.” (Gorter, Letter to Kautsky, Dec. 1914, Kautsky Archive IISG, DXI 283, quote in Herman Gorter, Herman de Liagre Böhl, Nijmegen, 1973, p. 105). “Out of old love and admiration in the Tribune we always abstained as much as possible from fighting against you” (ibid).

84 In Socialisme, la voie occidentale, p123.

85 Nettl, I, p. 401 (unabridged edition)

86 One major weakness of the more militant declarations was the idea of simultaneous action. Thus the Belgian socialist youth guard adopted a resolution: “it is the duty of the socialist parties and trade unions of all countries to oppose war. The most effective means of this opposition are the general strike and insubordination in response to the war mobilisation.” (The danger of war and the Second International, J. Jemnitz, p. 17). But these means were to be made use of only if they were adopted simultaneously in all countries, in other words intransigent internationalism and antimilitaristic action were made conditional on everyone sharing the same position.

87 Fricke, Dieter, Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 1869 bis 1917; Dietz-Verlag, Berlin, 1987, p. 120

88 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd. 3, S. 34, published in Leipziger Volkszeitung, 26.8.1911

89 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges.Werke, Bd. 3, S. 43, published in Leipziger Volkszeitung, 30.8.1911

90 Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd 3, S. 11

91I am in an absolutely preposterous situation – I have to take responsibility thus condemning myself to silence though if I followed my own wishes, I would turn against the leadership myself.” (Jemnitz,  p. 73, Letter from Bebel to Kautsky). Bebel died of a heart-attack while in a Swiss sanatorium, on 13th August.

92 In an article “Partei und breite Schicht” he wrote: “There are about a million Party members in Germany today. The Social Democrats there receive about 4,250,000 votes and there are about 15,000,000 proletarians. (...) One million – that is the party, one million in the party organisations; 4,250,000 is the ‘broad section’”. He stressed that “In Germany, for example, about one-fifteenth of the class is organised in the Party; in France about a hundred-and-fortieth part. In Germany there are four or five Social Democrats of the ‘broad section’ to every Party member; in France there are fourteen”. Lenin added: “The party is the politically conscious, advanced section of the class, it is its vanguard. The strength of that vanguard is ten times, a hundred times, more than a hundred times, greater than its numbers.... Organisation increases its strength tenfold” (September 1913, in “How Vera Sassulitch spreads liquidationism”. Lenin, Collected Works, vol 19)

93 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd 2, p. 378

94 Rosa Luxemburg, “Again on the masses and the leaders”, August 1911, originally published in the Leipziger Volkszeitung

95 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd. 3, S. 253, “Taktische Fragen”, June 1913

96 “Again on the masses and the leaders”, op.cit.

 

Historic events: 

Geographical: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

People: 

Rubric: 

World War I

1914: How the 2nd International failed

For more than ten years, the distant din of war had echoed across Europe - colonial wars in Africa, the Moroccan crises, the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, the Balkan wars - and the workers of Europe had trusted in the International to keep the threat of generalised war at bay. The contours of the war to come - already predicted by Engels in 18871 - had become clearer year by year, so much so that the International's congresses at Stuttgart in 1907, and at Basel in 1912, had denounced them clearly: not a defensive war, but a war of imperialist competition, pillage and rapine. Over and over, the International and its member parties had warned the workers of the danger and threatened the ruling classes with their own overthrow should they dare defy the power of the organised working class and unleash the hounds of war. And yet in August 1914, the International disintegrated, blown away like insubstantial dust, as one after the other its leaders and parliamentary deputies betrayed their most solemn promises, voted war credits and called the workers to the slaughter.2

How could such a disaster happen? Karl Kautsky, once the Second International's foremost theoretician, blamed it on the workers: "who would dare assert that an order given by a handful of parliamentarians is sufficient to make four million class-conscious German proletarians turn right-about face within twenty-four hours, in direct opposition to their former aims? If this were true, it would, of course, be evidence of a terrible collapse, not only of our Party, but also of the masses. [Kautsky’s emphasis] If the masses were such a spineless flock of sheep, we might just as well allow ourselves to be buried”.3 In short, if four million German workers allowed themselves to be marched off to war, it was of their own volition, nothing to do with the parliamentarians who, with the backing of the majority of their parties, voted war credits and (in France and Britain) soon found a place in bourgeois governments of national unity.

To this wretched, cowardly excuse, Lenin gave a stinging retort: “Consider: the only people in a position to express their attitude to the war more or less freely (i.e., without being immediately seized and dragged to the barracks, or the immediate risk of being shot) were a 'handful of parliamentarians' (who were free to vote, with the right to do so; they were quite able to vote in opposition. Even in Russia, no one was beaten up or even arrested for this), a handful of officials, journalists, etc. And now, Kautsky nobly places on the masses the blame for the treachery and the spinelessness of that social stratum of whose links with the tactics and ideology of opportunism Kautsky himself has written scores of times over a number of years!”.4

Betrayed by their leaders, their organisations transformed almost overnight from fighting organisations for workers’ defence to recruiting sergeants for the slaughter, the workers were left to confront the full might of the state’s military machine individually and alone. As one French syndicalist was to write later: “I have only one reproach to make to myself () and it is that I, an anti-patriot and anti-militarist, left with my comrades on the fourth day of mobilisation. I did not have the strength of character not to go, although I did not recognise frontiers or fatherland. I was afraid, its true, of the firing squad. I was afraid... But at the front, thinking of my family, scratching the names of my wife and son on the bottom of the trench I said How is it possible that I, anti-patriot, anti-militarist, who acknowledged only the International, come to be attacking my companions in misery and perhaps shall die for my enemies against my own cause and my own interests?”.5

All over Europe, the workers had had confidence in the International, believed its congresses’ repeated resolutions against the coming war. They trusted the International, that highest expression of the power of the organised working class, to stay the criminal hand of capitalist imperialism.

In July 1914, with the threat of war more and more imminent, an emergency meeting was called in Brussels of the International Socialist Bureau – the nearest thing that the International had to a central organ. The leaders of the parties present found it hard at first to believe that a full-scale war would really break out, but by the time the ISB met on 29th July, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia and imposed martial law. Victor Adler told the meeting that his party was impotent, no attempt was planned to resist mobilisation or the war itself. No plans had been made for the Party to go underground and to continue its activity in clandestinity. The discussion lost itself in deliberation about changing the venue for the upcoming congress of the International, which was to have been held in Vienna: no practical action was considered. Forgetting everything that had been said at earlier congresses, the leaders were still trusting the diplomacy of the great powers to prevent war from breaking out, unaware – or unwilling to see – that this time, all the powers were bent on war. The British delegate Bruce Glasier6 wrote that “although the dread peril of a general eruption of war was the main subject of the deliberations, no one, not even the German representatives, seemed apprehensive of an actual rupture between the great powers taking place until at least the full resources of diplomacy had been exhausted”.7 Jaurès could even declare that “at this moment the French government wants peace and is working for the maintenance of peace. The French government is the best ally in the cause of peace of that admirable English government which has taken the initiative in conciliation”.8

After the ISB meeting, thousands of Belgian workers gathered to hear the leaders of the International speak against the threat of war. Jaurès gave one of his greatest anti-war speeches ever, and the workers cheered him to the rafters. Yet one orator was notably absent from the platform: Rosa Luxemburg, the most clear-sighted and the most indomitable fighter of them all, refused to speak, sick to the heart at the spinelessness and self-delusion she saw all around her: she alone could see the wave of cowardice and betrayal that was to sweep the socialist parties into supporting their national governments’ imperialist ambitions.

Once war had broken out, the socialist traitors in every belligerent country claimed to be fighting a “defensive” war: in Germany the war was to defend German “Kultur” against the Cossack barbarism of Tsarist Russia, in France it was to defend republican France against Prussian autocracy, in Britain it was to defend “little Belgium”.9 Lenin demolished these hypocritical pretentions, reminding his readers of the solemn promises that the leaders of the 2nd International had made at the Congress of Basel in 1912 to oppose, not just war in general but this particular imperialist war which the workers’ movement had long seen in the making: “The Basel resolution does not speak of a national or a people’s war – examples of which have occurred in Europe, wars that were even typical of the period of 1789-1871 – or of a revolutionary war, which Social-Democrats have never renounced, but of the present war, which is the outcome of ‘capitalist imperialism’ and ‘dynastic interests’, the outcome of ‘the policy of conquest’ pursued by both groups of belligerent powers – the Austro-German and the Anglo Franco-Russian. Plekhanov, Kautsky and Co. are flagrantly deceiving the workers by repeating the selfish lie of the bourgeoisie of all countries, which is striving with all its might to depict this imperialist and predatory war for colonies as a people’s war, a war of defence (for any side); when they seek to justify this war by citing historical examples of non-imperialist wars”.10

Without centralisation, no action

How was it that the International, in which the workers placed such confidence, proved incapable of action? In fact, its ability to act was more apparent than real: the ISB was a mere coordinating body whose role was largely restricted to organising congresses and mediating in the disputes within and among the socialist parties themselves. Although the International’s left wing – around Lenin and Luxemburg in particular – considered the congress resolutions against war to be binding undertakings, the ISB had no power to enforce them; it was unable to take action independently – still less against the wishes – of each country’s socialist parties themselves and especially of the most powerful among them: the German SPD. Indeed, although International’s founding congress was held in 1889, the International Socialist Bureau was only constituted at the congress of 1900: until then, the International in effect only existed while the congress was in session. The rest of the time it was little more than a web of personal relationships among the different socialist leaders, many of whom had come to know each other personally during years in exile. There was not even any formal network of correspondence; August Bebel was even to complain to Engels in 1894 that all the SPD’s dealings with other socialist parties remained entirely in the hands of Wilhelm Liebknecht: “To meddle with Liebknecht in his foreign connections is simply impossible. No one knows to whom he writes or what he writes; he talks to no one about that...”.11

The contrast with the First International (the International Workingmen’s Association) is striking. Practically the first act of the IWA following its creation in 1864 by a meeting of largely British and French workers held at St Martin’s Fields in London, was to draft an organisational programme and to form a General Council – the centralising body of the International. Once the statutes were drafted, a broad range of workers’ organisations across Europe (political parties, unions, even cooperatives) joined the organisation on the basis of agreement with the IWA’s statutes. Despite the attempts by Bakunin’s “Alliance” to undermine it, the General Council, elected by the IWA’s congresses, enjoyed all the authority of a true centralising body.

This contrast between the two Internationals was itself the product of a new and different historical situation, and indeed confirmed the prescient words of the Communist Manifesto: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie”.12 Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, the workers’ movement entered a period of fierce repression and contraction especially in France – where thousands of the Communards were shot or exiled to penal servitude in the colonies – and in Germany where the SDAP (the SPD’s predecessor) was driven underground by Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. It was clear that revolution was not on the immediate agenda as many revolutionaries, including Marx and Engels themselves, had hoped and believed during the 1860s. Economically and socially, the thirty years from 1870 to 190013 were to see a period of massive capitalist expansion both internally with the growth of mass production and heavy industry at the expense of the artisan classes, and externally as capitalism spread into new territories both within Europe itself and across the seas, especially in the USA and in the growing number of the Great Powers’ colonial possessions. This in turn meant a huge increase in the numbers of workers: the period was one where the working class had in effect to transform itself from an amorphous mass of displaced artisans and peasants, into a class of associated labour capable of asserting its own historical perspective and defending its own immediate economic and social interests. This process, indeed, had already been proclaimed by the First International: “the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor (...) To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for in England, Germany, Italy, and France, there have taken place simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at the political organisation of the workingmen’s party”.14

By its very nature, given the conditions of the epoch, this self-formation of the working class was to take on forms that were specific to and determined by the historical development of each country. In Germany, the workers struggled at first in the difficult conditions of clandestinity imposed by Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, where the only possible legal action was in parliament, such that the unions grew under the wing of the socialist party. In Britain, still Europe’s most advanced industrial power, the crushing defeat of the great political movement of Chartism in 1848 had all but discredited political action and the workers’ organising energy was largely devoted to building up their trades unions: the socialist parties remained small and insignificant on the political scene. In France, the workers’ movement was fractured between marxists (Jules Guesde’s “Parti ouvrier’ founded in 1882), the Blanquists inspired by the revolutionary tradition of the great Paris Commune (Edouard Vaillant’s “Comité révolutionnaire central”), the reformists (known as “Possibilists”) and the unions grouped in the CGT and strongly influenced by the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism. Inevitably, all these organisations struggled to develop the workers’ organisation and education, and to win union and political rights, against their respective ruling classes and therefore within the national framework.

The development of mass union organisations and a mass political movement also helped to redefine the conditions under which revolutionaries worked. The old Blanquist tradition – the idea of a small, conspiratorial band of professional revolutionaries who would seize power with the more or less passive support of the masses – was outdated, replaced by the need to construct mass organisations which perforce must operate within a certain legal framework. The right to organise, the right of assembly, the right to free speech, all these became objects of vital interest to the mass movement: inevitably all these demands, yet again, were posed within the legal framework specific to each nation. To take just one example: whereas the French socialists could get deputies elected to a Republican parliament which wielded effective legislative power, in Germany the government’s direction depended not on the Reichstag (the Imperial parliament), but on the autocratic decisions of the Kaiser in person. It was thus far easier for the Germans to maintain an attitude of rigorous refusal to ally with bourgeois parties, since they were highly unlikely to be called on to do so; how fragile was this position of principle was shown by the way in which it was ignored by the SPD in South Germany, whose deputies regularly voted in favour of budget proposals in the regional Landtags (Länder parliaments).

Nonetheless, as the workers’ movements in different countries emerged from the period of reaction and defeat, the proletariat’s inherently international nature reasserted itself. In 1887, the German party congress held at St Gallen in Switzerland decided to take the initiative of organising an international congress; in the same year, the British TUC meeting in Swansea voted in favour of an international conference to press for an eight-hour working day.15 The latter led to the holding of an exploratory meeting in November 1888 in London at the invitation of the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee, attended by delegates from several countries, though not from Germany. These two simultaneous initiatives quickly demonstrated a fundamental split within the labour movement, between the reformists led by the British unions and the French Possibilists, and the revolutionary marxists, whose most important organisation was the German SDAP (the British unions, indeed, were opposed to any participation at all in their initiative by political organisations).

In 1889 – the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, still a reference for all those who aspired to the overthrow of the existing order – there were thus not one but two international workers’ congresses held in Paris simultaneously: the first called by the French Possibilists, the second by the marxist Parti Ouvrier16 led by Jules Guesde. The subsequent decline of the Possibilists meant that the marxist congress (known after its meeting-place in the Salle Petrelle) was thereafter considered as the 2nd International's founding congress. Inevitably, the congress was marked by inexperience and a great deal of confusion: confusion over the highly charged question of validating delegates’ mandates, and also over translations which were undertaken by whichever members of the polyglot assembly happened to be available.17 The most important aspects of the Congress were thus not so much its practical decisions but first, the fact that it met at all, and second the roll-call of delegates. From France came Marx’s sons-in-law Paul Lafargue and Charles Longuet, together with Edouard Vaillant, the hero of the Commune; from Germany came Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, together with Eduard Bernstein and Klara Zetkin; Britain’s best-known representative was William Morris, and this was in itself indicative of the political backwardness of British socialism, since the membership of his Socialist League was barely numbered in the hundreds. A highlight of the congress was the handshake between the joint presidents Vaillant and Liebknecht, symbolic of the international fraternity between French and German socialists.

The Gauche Communiste de France were thus right, in 1948, to highlight two major characteristics of the new International. First, it “marked a stage of differentiation between the economic struggle of wage labour and the social, political struggle... [it] was the organisation of the struggle for reforms and of political conquests, for the political affirmation of the proletariat”. At the same time, the fact that the International was founded as an explicitly marxist, revolutionary organisation “marked a higher stage in the ideological demarcation of the proletariat by clarifying and elaborating the theoretical foundations of its historic revolutionary mission”.18

May Day and the difficulty of united action

The 2nd International was founded, but it still had no permanent organisational structure. Existing only for the duration of its congresses, it had no means of enforcing the resolutions that these congresses adopted. This contrast between apparent international unity and national particularities in practice was nowhere more evident than in the campaign for the eight-hour day, centred on the May Day demonstration, which was one of the International’s major preoccupations during the 1890s.

Probably the most important resolution of the 1889 Congress was that proposed by the French delegate Raymond Lavigne: that the workers in every country should take up the campaign for the eight-hour day decided by the 1888 St Louis congress of the American Federation of Labour, in the form of massive demonstrations and a generalised stoppage of work to be held every year on 1st May. Yet it soon became clear that the socialists and the unions in different countries had very different ideas as to what the May Day celebrations should mean. In France, partly as a result of the revolutionary syndicalist tradition in the unions, May Day quickly became the occasion for massive demonstrations leading to clashes with the police: in 1891 at Fourmies in the North of France, troops fired on a workers’ demonstration leaving ten dead, including several children. In Germany on the other hand, difficult economic conditions which encouraged the employers to turn a strike into a lock-out combined with the German unions’ and the SDP’s reluctance to have their action dictated to them by anyone outside Germany, even by the International: as a result, there was a strong tendency within Germany to avoid putting the resolution into practice other than by holding meetings at the end of the working day. This German reluctance was shared by the unions in Britain.

The fact that the strongest socialist party in Europe should sound the retreat in this way alarmed the French and the Austrians in particular, and at the 1893 Congress of the International in Zürich, the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler proposed a new resolution insisting that May Day should be the occasion for a real stoppage of work: the resolution was passed against the votes of the majority of the German delegates.

Yet only three months later, the SPD’s Cologne Congress was reducing the extent of the International’s resolution, by declaring that it should only apply to those organisations who actually felt it possible to join a stoppage.

The history of the May Day stoppages illustrates two important aspects that determined the International’s ability – or inability – to act as a united body. On the one hand, it was impossible to get around the fact that what was possible in one country was not necessarily possible in another: Engels himself was dubious about the May Day resolutions on precisely these grounds, fearing that the German unions might discredit themselves by making commitments that they would in the end be unable to honour. On the other, the very fact of operating in a national framework, combined with the dissolving effects of reformism and opportunism within the movement, tended to make the national parties and unions jealous of their prerogatives: this was especially true of the German organisations since as the largest party they were even more reluctant than others to be dictated to by the smaller parties who ought – so thought many German leaders – to be following the German example.

The difficulties experienced in this first attempt at united international action were to bode ill for the future, when the International would play for higher stakes by far.

The illusion of inevitability

The meeting in the Salle Petrelle not only founded the International, it founded it as an avowedly marxist organisation. The marxism of the 2nd International at its beginnings, dominated as it was by the German party and especially by Karl Kautsky as the editor of the SPD’s theoretical review Neue Zeit, tended strongly towards a vision of historical materialism which emphasised the inevitability of the transformation of capitalism into socialism. This was already evident in Kautsky’s unexpected critique of the Vorstand’s (the Party Executive committee) proposed draft of the SPD’s programme to be adopted at the 1891 Erfurt congress. In an article published in Neue Zeit, Kautsky described communism “as a necessity resulting directly from the historical trend of capitalist production methods”, and criticised the Vorstand’s proposal (drawn up by the veteran SPD leader Wilhelm Liebknecht) for deriving communism “not from the character of current production, but rather from the character of our party (...) The train of thought in the proposal of the Vorstand is as follows: the current method of production creates unbearable conditions; therefore we must eliminate them (...) In our opinion, the correct train of thought is this: the current method of production creates unbearable conditions; it also creates, however, the possibility and necessity of communism”.19 In the end, Kautsky’s proposal insisting on the “inherent necessity” of socialism, became the Erfurt programme’s theoretical preamble.20

To be sure, the evolution of capitalism makes communism a possibility. It is also a necessity for humanity. But in Kautsky’s conception it is also increasingly an inevitability: the growth of the trades unions, the resounding electoral victories of the social-democracy, all appeared as the products of an inevitable force that could be predicted with scientific accuracy. In 1906, following the 1905 revolution in Russia, he could write that “any coalition of European powers against the revolution, such as took place in 1793, is inconceivable () There is no fear of a coalition against the revolution”.21 In his polemic with Pannekoek and Luxemburg titled The new tactics, he argued as follows: “Pannekoek imagines that the destruction of the proletariat’s organisations will be a natural consequence of sharpening class struggle, that they will no longer be protected by law and justice () The attempt, the effort to destroy the organisations of the working class certainly increases as these organisations become stronger and more dangerous to the established order. But the ability of these organisations to resist also increases to the same extent, and yet more so their irreplaceability. To deprive the proletariat of any possibility of organisation has become impossible in the developed capitalist states today () Any destruction of working class organisations today could only be a passing episode”.22

During the last years of the 19th century, with capitalism still in the ascendant – enjoying, indeed, the massive expansion and prosperity that was later to be known, by contrast with the post-1914 era, as the Belle époque – the idea that socialism would be the natural and all but inevitable outcome of capitalism, was undoubtedly a source of strength for the working class. It gave a historical perspective and meaning to the painstaking work of building union and party organisations and it gave the workers a profound confidence in themselves, in their struggle, and in the future – this confidence in the future is one of the most striking differences between the working class at the beginning of the 20th and the 21st centuries.

History, however, is not a linear progression and what had been a strength for the workers as they built their organisations was to be transformed into a dangerous weakness. The illusion of the inevitability of the passage to socialism, the idea that this could be achieved by a gradual build-up of the workers’ organisations until, almost painlessly, they could simply step into a place left vacant by a capitalist class whose “private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their appropriate application and full development” (Erfurt programme), obscured the fact that a profound transformation was under way in the capitalism of the early 20th century. The significance of these changing conditions, especially for the class struggle, was made explosively evident by the Russian revolution of 1905: suddenly, new methods of organisation and struggle – the soviet and the mass strike – burst onto the scene. Whereas the left on the SPD – above all Rosa Luxemburg in her famous pamphlet on the Mass strike, party and unions – saw the significance of these new conditions and began pushing for a debate within the German Party, the right and the unions did everything they could to suppress any discussion of the mass strike: the trades unions' 1905 congress explicitly banned any discussion of the mass strike, while in the SPD it became more and more difficult to have articles on the subject published in the Party press.

On the centre and right of the SPD, confidence in the future had become blindness, to the point where Kautsky could write in 1909 “The proletariat has now grown so strong that it can contemplate a war with more confidence. We can no longer speak of a premature revolution, for it has already drawn so great strength from the present legal basis as to expect that a transformation of this basis would create the conditions for its further upward progress () if war should break out in spite of it, the proletariat is the only class that could confidently await its outcome”.23

Unity obscures division

In the Communist Manifesto Marx reminds us that the "natural condition" of workers in capitalism is that of competing, atomised individuals: it is only through the struggle that they can achieve the unity which itself is the vital precondition for the struggle to succeed. It is therefore no accident that many a 19th century union banner bore the inscription "unity is strength"; the slogan expressed the workers' awareness that unity was something to fight for, and something to guard preciously once achieved.

The same drive towards unity exists within and among the political organisations of the working class, inasmuch as they have no separate interests to defend, either for themselves or within the class itself. Naturally enough, this drive to unity finds its highest expression when the class struggle is historically on the rise, to the point where it becomes possible to create an international party: the IWA in 1864, the 2nd International in 1889, the 3rd International in 1919. The three Internationals themselves expressed a growing political unification within the working class: whereas the IWA had contained a very broad spectrum of political positions - from Proudhonists and Blanquists to Lassalleans to Marxists - the 2nd International was avowedly marxist, while the Third International's 21 Conditions for entry were explicitly intended to restrict membership to communists and revolutionaries and to correct precisely those factors which had caused the failure of the Second, in particular the absence of any centralising authority capable of taking decisions for the whole organisation.

Nonetheless, all the Internationals were real arenas of debate and ideological struggle, including the Third: witness, for example, Lenin’s polemic against Left-wing communism and Herman Gorter’s reply.

The 2nd International was deeply committed to the unity of the different socialist parties, on the grounds that since there was only one proletariat in any country, with the same class interests, so there should only be one socialist party. There were constant efforts to keep the Russian Mensheviks and Bolsheviks united after 1903, but the main issue during the International’s first years was the unification of the various French parties. This came to a head at the 1904 Amsterdam Congress, where Jules Guesde presented a resolution which was in effect no more than a translation of that adopted by the SPD at Dresden the year before, condemning “revisionist tactics [whose result] would be that instead of being a party which works for the most rapid transformation possible of existing bourgeois society into the socialist social order, ie revolutionary in the best sense of the word, the party would become one which is content with reforming bourgeois society”.24 This was an explicit condemnation of Millerand’s25 entry into government, and an implicit one of the reformism of Jean Jaurès’ Parti socialiste français. Guesde’s motion was passed by a massive majority, and the congress went on to pass unanimously a motion demanding the unification of the French socialists: the following April, the Parti socialiste and the Parti ouvrier united to form the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière. It is a measure of Jaurès’ greatness that he accepted the majority vote of the International and gave up his own deeply held convictions26 in the name of the International’s unity.27 This moment was probably the closest the International ever came to imposing unity of action in the name of principle on its member parties.

Unity of action, however necessary for the proletariat as a class, can be a double-edged sword in moments of crisis when the tide of history turns. And the International was entering just one such period of crisis as the increasing tensions between the imperialist powers brought the threat of war closer. As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “By covering up the contradictions by the artificial ‘unification’ of incompatible views, the contradictions can only come to a head, until they explode violently sooner or later through a split (…) Those who bring the divergences of view to the fore and fight against the divergent views, work towards the unity of the party. But those who cover up the divergences work towards a real split in the party.28

Nowhere is this danger more evident than in the resolutions adopted against the looming threat of war. The final paragraphs of the 1907 Stuttgart resolution read as follows: “If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.

In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.

The problem, is that the resolution has nothing to say about how the socialist parties were to intervene in the situation: they are merely to adopt “the means they consider most effective”. This swept under the carpet three major issues.

The first of these was the question of the mass strike, which the left in the SPD had been trying to bring to the fore ever since 1905 against the determined and largely successful opposition of the opportunists in the Party and union leadership. The French socialists, and Jaurès in particular, were fervent supporters of the general strike as a means to prevent war, although by this they meant a strike organised by the unions on the syndicalist model rather than the mass upsurge of proletarian self-action that Luxemburg envisaged, in a movement which the Party should encourage but could in no way launch artificially. It was noteworthy that a joint attempt by the French Edouard Vaillant and the Scot Keir Hardie at the 1910 Copenhagen Congress, to get a resolution passed committing the International to general strike action in the event of war, was voted down by the German delegation.

The second was the attitude the socialists in any particular country could be expected to take should that country be attacked: this was a critical question, since in imperialist war it is invariably the case that one belligerant appears as the “aggressor” and the other the “aggressed”. The period of progressive national wars was still very recent, and national causes such as the independence of Poland or Ireland remained on the socialist agenda: Rosa Luxemburg’s SDKPiL29 was very much a minority even on the left of the International, in opposing Polish independence. In the French tradition, the memory of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune was still active, and tended to identify revolution with the nation: hence Jaurès’ statement that “revolution is necessarily active. And it can only be so if it defends the national existence which serves as its base”.30 For the Germans, the danger of Tsarist Russia as the “barbaric” crutch of Prussian autocracy was equally an article of faith, and in 1891 Bebel could write that “The soil of Germany, the German fatherland belongs to us and the masses as much and more than to the others. If Russia, the champion of terror and barbarism, went to attack Germany (…) we are as much concerned as those who stand at the head of Germany”.31

Finally, for all the threats of proletarian action against war, the leaders of the International (with the exception of the left) continued to believe in the diplomacy of the bourgeois classes to preserve peace. Hence while the Basel Manifesto of 1912 could declare: “Let the governments remember that with the present condition of Europe and the mood of the working class, they cannot unleash a war without danger to themselves”, yet at the same time it could “consider the best means [to bridge the hostility between Britain and Germany] to be the conclusion of an accord between Germany and England concerning the limitation of naval armaments and the abolition of the right of naval booty”. The working classes were called to agitate for peace, not to prepare themselves for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism which alone could guarantee that peace: “The Congress therefore appeals to you, proletarians and Socialists of all countries, to make your voices heard in this decisive hour! (...) See to it that the governments are constantly kept aware of the vigilance and passionate will for peace on the part of the proletariat! To the capitalist world of exploitation and mass murder, oppose in this way the proletarian world of peace and fraternity of peoples!”.

The unity of the International, on which any hope of united action against the threat of war depended, was thus founded on an illusion. The International, in reality was divided between a right wing and a left, the former ready and even eager to make common cause with the ruling class in defence of the nation, the latter preparing to answer war with the revolutionary overthrow of capital. During the 19th century, it was still possible for right and left to exist within the same workers’ movement, and participate in the organisation of the workers as a class aware of its own interests; as the “epoch of wars and revolutions” opened, this unity became an impossibility.

Jens, December 2014


1 "Eight to ten million soldiers will swallow each other up and in doing so eat all Europe more bare than any swarm of locusts. The devastation of the Thirty Years War compressed into the space of three or four years and extending over the whole continent; famine, sickness, want, brutalising the army and the mass of the population; irrevocable confusion of our artificial structure of trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional statecraft, so that crowns will roll by the dozens in the gutter and no one be found to pick them up; it is absolutely impossible to predict where it will all end and who will emerge from the struggle as victor. Only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class" (Engels, Introduction to Sigismund Borkheim's pamphlet Zur Erinnerung für die deutschen Mordspatrioten 1806-1812, 1887, quoted in James Joll, The Second International, p109, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1974).

2 One noteworthy exception was the Serbian Social-Democracy, whose parliamentary deputies refused support for the war even as Austrian shells fell on Belgrade.

3 Cited in Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International, chapter 6.

4 ibid

5 Cited in Édouard Dolléans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier (1871-1936) : tome II.

6 Member of the Independent Labour Party’s National Council, opposed World War I, but fell ill with cancer in 1915 and was unable to play an active role against the war.

7 Cited in James Joll, The Second International, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, p165.

8 Joll, op cit., p168. What Jaurès did not know, because he only returned to Paris on 29th July, was that the French President Poincaré had spent his time on a trip to Russia doing everything possible to bolster Russia’s determination to go to war: Jaurès was to change his mind about the French government’s intentions after his own return to Paris, in the days that preceded his assassination. (version française sur dormirajamais.org/jaures-1 : le gouvernement français veut la paix et travaille au maintien de la paix. Le gouvernement français est le meilleur allié de la paix de cet admirable gouvernement anglais qui a pris l’initiative de la médiation.

9 The British ruling class wins the prize for hypocrisy, since its own war plans included an invasion of Belgium to attack Germany.

10 Lenin, op cit.

11 Cited in Raymond H Dominick, Wilhelm Liebknecht, University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p344.

12 Chapter 1, “Bourgeois and proletarians”.

13 Indeed, this period of economic expansion was to continue right up to the eve of war.

14 From the Inaugural Address of the First International, penned by Marx.

15 See Joll, op cit., p28.

16 By this time, the party had been renamed Parti Ouvrier Français

17 The descriptions of the difficulties over translations are reminiscent of the ICC’s first congresses!

19 See Raymond H Dominick Wilhelm Liebknecht, 1982, University of North Carolina Press, p361.

21 Karl Kautsky, Revolutions, past and present (1906). https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1906/xx/revolutions.htm

22 “La nouvelle tactique” in Socialisme, la voie occidentale (texts by Pannekoek, Luxemburg and Kautsky, Presses universitaires de France), also in Karl Kautsky and the socialist revolution 1880-1938, Massimo Salvadori, Verso editions, p160.

24 Quoted in Joll, op cit., p102

25 Alexandre Millerand was an associate of Clémenceau and acted as an arbitrator in the 1892 Carmaux strike. He was elected to Parliament in 1885 as a radical socialist, and was to become the leader of Jaurès’ Parti socialiste de France faction in Parliament. In 1899 he entered the Weldeck-Rousseau government which was supposed to defend the French republic against the threats of anti-Dreyfusard monarchists and militarists – though how real this threat was, was a matter of debate as Luxemburg pointed out. According to both Millerand and Jaurès, he entered the government on his own initiative and without consulting the party. The affair caused a huge scandal in the International, both because as a Minister in a bourgeois government he bore collective responsibility for the repression of workers’ movements by the government, and because one of his fellow ministers was General Gallifet, who had led the massacre of the Paris Commune in 1871.

26 Jaurès, whatever his disagreements with the manner of Millerand’s entry into the government, was honestly reformist and profoundly convinced of the necessity for the working class to use parliamentary methods to win reforms from the bourgeoisie.

27 This was not the case with others, like Briand and Viviani, who were to leave the party rather than face a future without the hope of a ministerial portfolio.

28 “Unser leitendes Zentralorgan”, Leipziger Volkszeitung, 22.9.1899, Rosa Luxemburg in Ges. Werke, Bd. 1/1, p. 558 (quoted in our article on the degeneration of the SPD).

29 Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.

30 Quoted in Joll, op cit., p115.

31 Quoted in Joll, op cit., p114.

 

Historic events: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

General and theoretical questions: 

People: 

Rubric: 

World War I

Jean Jaurès: a giant of the workers' movement

Hardly a town in the country is without a square or an avenue, or at the very least a street, that bears his name. The ruling class has all but transformed him into a national monument, and yet today Jean Jaurès is almost unknown outside France. It was not always so. At the height of his powers, Jaurès was, together with August Bebel, one of the “twin peaks of the Second International” to use Trotsky’s expression. A giant of a man, physically, mentally, and morally, Jaurès was, along with Rosa Luxemburg, one of the outstanding orators of the International; still more remarkable, he was one of very few French socialists able to address German workers in their own language. For the French ruling class, who all now claim him as one of their own, an exemplary democrat, Jaurès was the object of violent hatred. His assassination, on 31st July 1914, can be said to have cleared the way definitively for France’s entry into war, yet the circumstances surrounding his assassination remain a mystery which has never been completely cleared up.

Who then, was Jean Jaurès? What did he represent – as he still does today – for the international working class? What role did he play in the International and its struggle for the emancipation of the workers and against war? Why, finally, was he murdered?

Jaurès can, it is true, be a very useful person for a ruling class which has transformed his life into a sort of propagandist’s Swiss army knife. Depending on the occasion, they can always find a blade to suit: there is the national hero who lies in the Pantheon alongside the heroes of imperialist war like Jean Moulin for example, or then there is the moderate socialist who disapproved of the violent methods of the revolution, or again the partisan of the parliamentary and national road to socialism; there is a blade in favour of the French Communist Party, and another for the pacifist who broke the ties between the struggle against war and the struggle for proletarian revolution. All these clichés are lies and Lenin’s adage that the best way to deal with a man who is a danger to the established order is to make an inoffensive icon of him has been validated once again.

But who was Jean Jaurès really? Quite simply he was a product of the workers’ movement, the collective and historic product of a particular class of society, one of its most remarkable products given the epoch wherein Jaurès used his talents. Born in 1859 into the provincial petty bourgeoisie of Castres, a small town in the department of the Tarn (south-west France), he proved a brilliant student at school winning a scholarship which allowed him to study for the entrance exam to the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure. Returning to the South he taught high school in Toulouse, and became involved in the political activity of the day to the point where he was elected to parliament on a republican unity list in 1885, at the age of only 25; he lost the seat at the next election in 1889, and returned to teaching and journalism.

His transformation from radical republican to socialist came with the 1892 miners’ strike in Carmaux. The strike was sparked off by the sacking of Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, a miner who had been elected mayor of the town; the miners’ considered, quite rightly, that this was an attempt by the local big bourgeoisie to silence the workers’ efforts to express and defend themselves politically. Jaurès, now aged 34, was greatly impressed by the miners’ struggle and took an active part in it, defending the miners’ cause in the pages of La Dépêche and participating in their meetings. He was also scandalised by the bloody repression of a demonstration at Fourmies in the north where the workers were fighting for the 8-hour day. As a result of the Carmaux struggle, Jaurès threw himself whole-heartedly into the socialist cause, and was elected to parliament as socialist deputy for Carmaux in 1893. Like Marx and many other militant workers, it was the proletariat itself that won Jaurès over to the cause of revolutionary socialism. It was as a martyr to this cause that he was assassinated on the eve of the First World War, after throwing all his strength into the fight against militarism in the hope that the international action of the proletariat would stop the mobilisation for war. Certainly Jaurès belonged to the reformist wing of socialism and as such had several times contributed to a considerable weakening of the working class struggle, but his unconditional devotion to the proletarian cause allowed him to correct his mistakes, unlike his fellow socialist deputies such as Pierre Renaudel, Aristride Briand, René Viviani or Marcel Sembat who were very quickly carried away by the most crass opportunism. The members of the left in the 2nd International fought his ideas vigorously but the majority of them admired his personality, the eminence of his thought and his moral strength. Trotsky wrote in his autobiography: “Politically I had been far removed from him. But one could not help feeling the pull of his powerful personality () With a mighty force as elemental as a waterfall, he combined great gentleness, which shone in his face like a reflection of a higher spiritual culture. He would send rocks tumbling down, he would thunder and bring the earthquake, but himself he never deafened. He stood always on guard, watched intently for every objection, quick to pick it up and parry it. Sometimes he swept all resistance before him as relentlessly as a hurricane, sometimes as generously and gently as a tutor or elder brother1. Rosa Luxemburg, this other great figure of the left, expressed similar sentiments. As Jaurès read German, she offered him a dedicated copy of her doctoral thesis on The industrial development of Poland. Jaurès had the same athletic physique as the sculptor August Rodin, and on the latter’s death, Rosa Luxemburg wrote to Sonia Liebknecht: “His must have been a marvellous personality: frank, natural, overflowing with warmth and human intelligence; he decidedly reminded me of Jaurès2.

So rich and complex a personality can only be understood in the context of his epoch: the final phase of the ascendency of capitalism which unfolded into the First World War. Nor should one ever forget how much he was capable of learning at the school of proletarian struggle and the International. Although he never adopted completely Marx and Engels’ theories, at a conference in Paris on 10th February 1900, he felt the need to express his agreement with all the essential ideas of scientific socialism3.

The constitution of the proletariat as a class

The Paris Commune of 1871 demonstrated that the proletariat was capable of taking power and exercising it through the means of mass assemblies and elected and revocable delegates. It brought a decisive clarification: the working class could not simply take hold of the machinery of the state and use it for its own ends; it must first of all destroy the old bourgeois state edifice then set up a new state specific to the period of transition from capitalism to communism. In his magnificent work State and Revolution, Lenin was to remind those who had forgotten them of these fundamental lessons. But the Paris Commune also demonstrated that the proletariat had not yet the strength to keep power and to engender a revolutionary process at the international level. The proletariat appeared as a distinct class with its own programme at the time of the June 1848 insurrection, but the process through which it could constitute itself as an international force provided with a class consciousness and a political experience was far from complete. This immaturity was matched by a massive development of capitalism which was, precisely, the precondition and the context for the constitution of the proletariat into a class. This was a period of gigantic economic and colonial conquests during which the last “uncivilised” areas of the globe were opened up to the imperialist giants and which witnessed an enormous technical: electricity, the telephone, the automobile to mention but a few.

This period was not without danger for the proletariat, but it had no choice. Only capitalism could create the conditions for the international communist revolution, it alone could produce its own gravediggers. Basing itself on obtaining real reforms in its favour, the working class developed great economic struggles and, with this aim, organised itself into powerful trade unions and social-democratic parties. As the Communist Manifesto says: “It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried4.

The struggles for workers’ legislation, for universal suffrage, including the defence of the bourgeois Republic faced with the forces of reaction, were understood as preparing the conditions for proletarian revolution which would overthrow bourgeois domination. The minimum and maximum programme formed a unity on condition that in the daily struggles, with their inevitable alliances with certain bourgeois and petty bourgeois factions, the proletariat defended its class independence and kept in mind the final revolutionary objective. It was the period par excellence of workers’ parliamentarism and Jean Jaurès, an orator of great talent, gave to it all his energy. Jaurès was part of the massive entry of socialists into parliament following the legislative elections of 1893. According to the clearest political tendencies of the time, workers’ parliamentarism was not an objective in itself but only a support to the general struggle of the proletariat. And indeed, when the socialists spoke in the Chamber of Deputies, they declared themselves to be speaking to those “outside the windows” to make it clear that their aim was not to convince bourgeois deputies but to clarify things for the working class, to encourage it to throw itself into great political struggles which would give it the necessary experience to exercise its future power. In the Considerations of the programme of the French workers’ party, drawn up in 1880 by Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue, Engels and Marx, we find the following significant formulation:

Considering,

That this collective appropriation [of the means of production] can only come out of revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organised in a distinct political party;

That a similar organisation (of society) must be pursued by all the means of which the proletariat disposes, including universal suffrage, transformed thus from an instrument of deception that it has been up to now into an instrument of emancipation (...)5.

Parliamentarism is absolutely not seen here as the means for workers’ emancipation in place of revolution but, if one reads the preceding paragraph attentively, as one of the means for progress towards the great objective of the collective appropriation of the means of production. The unity of means and end is thus clearly asserted. The development of a gigantic international workers’ movement at the end of the 19th century in part fulfilled its promise by building a bridge between the Paris Commune and the revolutionary wave that culminated in Russia 1917 and Germany 1918. This development provoked a nameless dread in the ruling class: their desperate efforts to distort Jean Jaurès are not simply useful to them, they also serve to exorcise their fears.

In the end, opportunism, parliamentary cretinism and reformism gained the upper hand within the Second International; the failure of the workers’ organisations in 1914 and their unity with their bourgeoisie was a catastrophe which had profound repercussions on the workers’ movement. But it is necessary to be clear that this victory of opportunism was not a foregone conclusion and its origins are not to be found principally in the parliamentary fractions, the permanent political and union structures or in the general bureaucracy of these organisations. Even if these were vectors of the rot that ate away at the International, the latter’s fundamental origins are to be found in the lack of vigilance of the workers’ organisations faced with the surrounding atmosphere of the capitalist world. Capitalism’s headlong development during a time of relative peace (at least in the central countries of Europe) finished up by inducing the idea that the transition to communism could be effected in a gradual and peaceful manner. We should remember that the growth of the workers’ movement is not linear and that it is only possible at the price of constant struggle against the penetration of the ideology of the ruling class within the proletariat.

The testimony of Trotsky on this epoch and on the man who embodied it is invaluable, because it covers the transition between the ascendance and decadence of capitalism. This period of some 25 years is at the highest contradictory point where it “drew the spirit by the perfection of its civilisation, the uninterrupted development of technology, of science, of workers’ organisation and seemed at the same time paltry in the conservatism of its political life, in the reformist methods of its class struggle6. In My Life, he underlined the high moral standing of such militants of the workers’ movement as Jean Jaurès and Auguste Bebel, of whom he wrote that “Jaurès’ mind, which was a composite of national traditions, of the metaphysics of moral principles, of love for the oppressed, and of poetic imagination, showed the mark of the aristocrat as clearly as Bebel’s revealed the great simplicity of the plebeian”.7 At the same time he showed their limits: “Jaurès and Bebel were at opposite poles, and yet at the same time they were the twin peaks of the Second International. Both were intensely national, Jaurès with his fiery Latin rhetoric, and Bebel with his touch of Protestant dryness. I loved them both, but with a difference. Bebel exhausted himself physically, whereas Jaurès fell in his prime. But both of them died in time. Their deaths marked the line where the progressive historical mission of the Second International ended8.

Marxism and the heritage of the French revolution of 1789

Ever since the great bourgeois revolution of 1789, France had dominated European history. Whether in 1830 or in 1848, it was France that gave the signal for general upheaval. These circumstances gave to the proletariat in France a great political education and a capacity for action which continues to this day. But these qualities also have their other side. The working class in France has a tendency to underestimate the daily economic struggle which explains why the unions were less developed than in other countries. On the other hand, political struggle was seen in a restrictive sense, limited to the insurrection. On the opposing side, the bourgeoisie and most particularly, the industrial bourgeoisie, quite quickly achieved complete political sovereignty under the regime of the democratic Republic. And it was very proud of this. Thus this great bourgeois revolution led to bombastic, hollow speeches typical of French orations: the country of the Rights of Man granted itself the messianic task of the liberation of peoples from tyranny, understanding by that economic competition between nations and wars of rapine which led to the imperialist war of 1914. For many leaders of the workers’ movement in France this phraseology hid a deep-rooted nationalism.

Jean Jaurès is a classical representative of this republicanism which has weighed heavily on the workers’ movement in an epoch where the bourgeoisie was still progressive and where the form that proletarian power would take was still far from clear. Even for the elements of the left within the 2nd International, the Republic was the only form possible of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Jaurès expressed himself thus in an article in La Dépêche of 22nd October, 1890: “Neither England nor Germany have in their past a democratic Republic such as that proclaimed in France in 1792. Hence the hopes of English and German workers do not take a republican form and this is why the party of popular reforms there more particularly calls itself the socialist party. In France on the contrary, the single word Republic, full of the great dreams of the first republican generations, contains within it alone all the promises of fraternal equality9.

Karl Kautsky was to defend the marxist position on this question. In an article published in Die Neue Zeit in January 1903, he recalls that, despite the historic continuity between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions there is a still more important political break simply because it is a matter of different classes with different political programmes each with specific aims and means: “It is really because of the great strength of the revolutionary tradition within the French proletariat that it is nowhere more important than here to lead it to think in an autonomous fashion by showing it that the social problems, the objects, the methods and the means of struggle are quite another thing today than they were in the epoch of Revolution, that the socialist revolution must be something quite other than a parody or a pursuit of the bourgeois revolution; the proletariat can borrow from it its enthusiasm, its faith in victory and its temperament but certainly not its way of thinking10.

This classic position of revolutionary socialism was based on the work of Marx and Engels who, after the setback of the 1848 Revolutions, had called into question their idea of a permanent revolution based upon an organic unity between bourgeois and proletarian revolution and the growth of one into the other11.

Moreover, against Lassalle, the partisan of state socialism, and against Bakunin, who preached class equality, Marx and Engels always defended the final aim of communism of the abolition of classes, which means the end of the political domination engendered precisely by the existence of antagonistic classes, which implies the withering away of the state. But the end of the state is also an end to democracy which is only a particular form of the state. The ambition of communism, which appears huge but which is in fact the only realistic one faced with the laws of history and the dangerous contradictions of capitalism, consists of a mastering of the productive forces and the social forces at the world level, the only ground on which the contradiction between the general and particular interests, between the collectivity and the individual can be overcome. For the first time it has become possible to make the human community a concrete reality. That does not mean the end of problems and contradictions, but that the abolition of classes and of the political sphere could allow the liberation of all human potential whereas the promise contained in the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, has never been honoured by the democratic bourgeoisie. Communism does not mean the end of history, but the end of prehistory and the beginning of real history. This idea of a passage from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom, in other words the perspective of a society free from commodity production and the state, was not an unknown position during this epoch of workers’ parliamentarism and the struggle for reforms. The clearest political minorities tried hard to defend this, including William Morris in England12 and August Bebel in Germany13.

Like so many others, Jaurès never managed to free himself from this republican tradition, which prevented him from defending working class autonomy against the enemy class.

The Dreyfus Affair

Captain Richard Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army high command, was judged by court martial in December 1894, falsely accused of passing secrets to Germany. This affair of espionage, in a context profoundly marked by anti-Semitism and chauvinism after the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, inflamed the Third Republic right up to 1906, when the Court of Appeal declared Dreyfus innocent and definitively rehabilitated him. It was not merely a matter of judicial error but of the defence of particular reactionary and nationalist factions of the bourgeoisie coming from and supported by military, clerical and monarchist elements. The crisis of the Radical party in power opened the way for them.

After some hesitation, Jean Jaurès threw himself into the battle for to defend Dreyfus and overturn the judgment against him. “And Jaurès was right” wrote Rosa Luxemburg “The Dreyfus Affair had awakened all the latent forces of reaction in France. The old enemy of the working class, militarism, stood completely exposed, and it was necessary to direct all spears against its body. The working class was called upon for the first time to fight out a great political battle. Jaurès and his friends led the workers into the struggle and thereby opened up a new epoch in the history of French socialism14.

The marxist party of Guesde and Lafargue, as well as the party of the ex-Blanquistes of Vallant continued to preach neutrality, in other words political abstention when in fact the working class had to undertake a fight against the reactionary factions of the bourgeoisie including the defence of the bourgeois Republic. It had to seize this opportunity and combine its forces, mature politically while safeguarding its class autonomy. It is on the question of class autonomy that the political weaknesses defended by Jaurès are revealed. The working class supporters of Dreyfus had to keep their independence vis-a-vis his bourgeois supporters such as Emile Zola and Georges Clemenceau. Because he defended a fundamentally republican position, Jaurès engaged in the support of a radical government up to the point of going against the specific positions of the working class. He supported the government on the amnesty law adopted by the Chamber on 19th December 1900, despite the fact that its aim was amnesty for all, including and even especially those officers implicated in the plot against Dreyfus. He refused to launch a direct and systematic attack against militarism through the demand for a popular militia because there was a risk of a split among the various factions supporting Dreyfus. And these capitulations multiplied in the name of a so-called “combined republican work” which carried “the certainty of future victories”. Here is what Luxemburg said about it:

The present attitude of the Jaurès group towards the policies of the government is, in one sense, in direct contradiction to its position during the Dreyfus Affair. But, in another sense, it is nothing but a direct continuation of the previous policy. The same principle – unity with the bourgeois democrats – served as the basis of socialist policy in both cases. It served during two years of unyielding struggle for a solution of the Dreyfus Affair, and, today, because the bourgeois democrats have deserted the fight, it leads the socialists to also liquidate the Dreyfus Affair and to give up all attempts at a fundamental reformation of the army and a change in the relations between Republic and Church.

Instead of making the independent political struggle of the Socialist party the permanent. fundamental element and unity with bourgeois radicals the varying and incidental element, this principle caused Jaurès to adopt the opposite tactic: the alliance with the bourgeois democrats became the constant, and the independent political struggles the incidental element.

Already in the Dreyfus campaign, the Jaurès socialists failed to understand the line of demarcation between the bourgeois and the proletarian camps: If the question presented itself to the friends of Dreyfus as an attack upon the by-products of militarism – as the cleansing of the army and the suppression of corruption – a socialist had to view it as a struggle against the root of the evil – against the standing army itself. And if the bourgeois radicals considered justice for Dreyfus and punishment for the guilty ones as the single central point of the campaign, a socialist had to view the Dreyfus Affair as the basis for an agitation in favor of the militia system. Only thus would the Dreyfus Affair and the admirable efforts of Jaurès and his friends have been a great agitational service to socialism15.

Not only did Jaurès refuse to break with the government at the right moment, but he continued to support unreservedly the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet and the participation of a socialist in government; thus opened the darkest chapter of Jean Jaurès’ political life.

The Millerand Affair

In June 1899, the socialist Alexandre Millerand, alongside General Gaston de Galliffet, the assassin of the Paris Commune, entered the Radical government of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. For Millerand, who belonged to the movement of independent socialists, this was a purely personal decision: he had no mandate from a socialist party. We should take into account that this was at the time of the full-blown Dreyfus Affair where the degraded officer was still suffering the torments of the penal colony in Guyana. Jaurès did his utmost to support socialist participation in government. He saluted the courage of the French socialists who had sent one of their own “into the fortress of bourgeois government”. The whole affair strongly encouraged all the right wing of the International which impatiently waited for the this experience to be repeated in other countries, particularly Germany. The right warmly approved of the arguments of Jaurès according to which the evolution of capitalist society towards socialism engendered an intermediate stage during the course of which political power was exercised in common by both the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In Germany, Eduard Bernstein had just published his revisionist work where he called into question the marxist theory of the crises of capitalism and where he proclaimed: “The final aim, whatever it is, is nothing, the movement is everything”.

Rosa Luxemburg hurled herself into the battle with passion. She replied to Bernstein in a series of articles which later appeared in the celebrated pamphlet Reform or Revolution. At the same time she attacked the arguments of Jaurès. To begin with she recalled the basic principles of scientific socialism: “In bourgeois society, social-democracy, from the fact of its very essence, is destined to play the role of a party of opposition; it can only come to government on the ruins of the bourgeois state16. She particularly emphasised the fundamental difference between the participation of socialists in the parliament of the bourgeois state or in local councils, which had been accepted for a long time, and the participation in the executive of the state. This was for two very simple reasons. Firstly, it was a question of making their claims effective but always on the basis of a critique of the government which persecuted the workers ceaselessly while trying to render null and void any social reforms that it was forced to adopt. This was the principle which motivated the systematic refusal of the socialists to vote for a parliamentary budget. Secondly, whatever party the members of the government belong to, they are required to share joint responsibility for government policy for which they are necessarily considered to be accountable.

The international socialist congress held in Paris from 23rd to 27th September 1900, condemned Millerand’s “governmental socialism”, which demonstrated that the conditions for an offensive of opportunism within the International did not yet exist. The resolution was titled: “The conquest of state power and alliance with bourgeois parties”. It was adopted on the basis of a motion presented by Kautsky and the majority of the members of the permanent commission. The problem was that the resolution’s author tried hard to give it a general theoretical character without confronting the specific case of Millerand. All the most far-fetched interpretations were allowed. That is why this resolution of Kautsky was called the “Rubber Resolution”. Jaurès, Vollmar, Bernstein, all the right including the most avowed revisionists charged into the breach. They presented the outcome of the Congress as favourable to Millerand.

They based themselves specifically on an idea presented in the resolution according to which in certain exceptional cases the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments could appear necessary. And indeed, all the socialist programmes of the day contained the position, which was valid at the time, that in the case of a defensive war (and therefore absolutely not in case of imperialist war) the socialists could participate in government.17 Alternatively, this might be the case should a political crisis threaten to bring down the Republic and its democratic victories. Rosa Luxemburg responded that in these exceptional cases it was not just a question of taking complete responsibility with the whole of government policy. But it was essential to define if the situation really corresponded to one of these exceptional cases. Jaurès declared that it did.

Since about 1885, France had been hit by constant political crises: the Boulanger crisis,18 the Panama scandal,19 the Dreyfus Affair. These revealed the existence of a rowdy nationalism, anti-Semitic outbursts, gross and hateful press campaigns, fighting in the street. The last hour of the Republic seemed to be imminent. But Rosa Luxemburg brilliantly showed that this was not in fact the case. The militarist and clerical reaction and the radical bourgeoisie were fighting for the control of this Republic in the framework of a profound crisis of the Radical Party in power. It was necessary to take part in these political struggles but certainly not by participating in government and pandering to the petty bourgeoisie, the traditional clientele of the Radical Party.

Jaurès invoked certain passages of the Communist Manifesto concerning the alliance of the workers with the bourgeoisie. First of all it is a question of an entirely different historic period where, as in Germany for example, the power of the bourgeoisie was not at all assured in the face of the political forces of feudalism. And above all, he forgot to quote the essential passages on the preservation of the independence of the working class in any circumstances. In particular this on the position of communists: “But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil in the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightaway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political condition that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie may immediately begin20.

Finally, the last argument of Jaurès consisted of underlining the importance of the reforms gained by Millerand for the workers. These were for him, “germs of socialism sown in the capitalist soil which would bear marvellous fruit”. it is enough to examine the reality of these reforms more closely in order to contradict the inordinate enthusiasm which held Jaurès inits grasp. For example, the original intention to shorten the working day ended up with it being lengthened for children and the mere hope of something better in the future. Or again, the guarantee of the right to strike ended up being greatly restricted within narrow legal limits. We have already seen the hypocrisy of the government’s policy over the Dreyfus Affair. To this we should add the hypocrisy of the state’s struggle for secularism, which ended up with charitable donations to the Catholic Church and which served above all as a real war machine against the socialist parties’ growing influence among the workers. Not forgetting that during the whole Millerand experience, troops continued to fire on strikers as they did at Chalons and in Martinique. The era of reforms culminated in the massacre of striking workers.

Rosa Luxemburg saw far and clear when she criticised “ministerialism”. What began in France as a sad farce ended up in Germany in tragedy in 1919 with a social democratic government consciously assuming a counter-revolutionary role. For the moment we can see that Jaurès was capable of learning from experience. Ten years after the beginning of the Millerand affair, he bitterly denounced both Millerand and two other socialist ministers, Briand and Viviani, whom he reproached for being “traitors who allowed themselves to be used by capitalism”.

The foundation of a unified socialist party

We have seen that Jaurès closely followed Bernstein. However it is not possible to place him in the camp of revisionism. Similarly there is no trace in him of the philistinism of Kautsky who succumbed to the sirens of centrism around 1906. We’ve seen the intimate links with the members of the right wing of the workers’ international. His opportunism was one that the workers’ movement of the time had to confront and which is characterised both by an impatience regarding the results of the struggle (preferring to sacrifice the final aim to the profit of, largely illusory, immediate reform) and an adaption to the surrounding capitalist world (being content with the progressive dynamic and the period of peace which increased, relatively and with illusions, the security of the workers, and so sacrificing the interests of the general movement). But his strong personality placed him above other opportunists. After joining the socialist cause, he continued to serve the law, liberty and humanity. But, as Trotsky noted; “That which for the ordinary French disclaimers is only an empty phrase, [Jaurès] fills with a sincere and active idealism”. Trotsky correctly presents him as an ideologue in the positive sense of the term, someone who gripped the idea as a terrible weapon in the practical daily struggle, as opposed to the doctrinaire and the practising opportunist: “The doctrinaire congeals theory and so kills its spirit. The practical-opportunist learns the procedures of the political trade; but should a sudden upheaval occur, he finds himself in a situation of a worker made redundant by the adoption of a new machine. The great ideologue is only impotent at the moment where history disarms him ideologically, but even then he is sometimes capable of rapidly rearming himself, of taking on the idea of a new epoch and continues to play a role at the first level. Jaurès was an ideologue. He drew out of the political situation the idea that it held and, in his service of this idea, never stopped mid-way21.

We have already noted Jaurès’ reticence towards marxism. He saw here in it cold, economic determinism leaving no place for the individual and for human freedom in general. His outlook was turned towards the past and the great days of the bourgeois revolution: “It is to the honour of the French revolution to have proclaimed that in every individual human being, humanity had the same native intelligence, the same dignity and the same rights”, he said22. As a result of his education and the general situation in France at the time, he did not see that the materialism of Marx, often misinterpreted as a form of absolute economic determinism, contained a coherent explanation of human history which, far from smothering them, on the contrary gave both a place – and a foundation – to the action of classes, to the force and the will of the individual which under capitalism had been wiped out in the name of the collective anonymity of the nation. The glorification of the individual under capitalism was in reality the mask of its absolute negation. In his pitiless critique of bourgeois society, Marx revealed its commodity fetishism and its reification. Nor was Jaurès able to recognise the presence in Marx of an authentic proletarian ethic23.

However the devotion of Jaurès to the cause of proletarian emancipation meant that he never turned away from the perspective of a classless, property-less society, where the means of production would be managed in common. He read Marx, admired his work and adhered to the theory of value exposed by Capital. Whereas in France the tendency was towards the underestimation of theoretical discussions, Jaurès participated, with Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, in public discussions on subjects treated in depth. On 12th December 1894, Jaurès responded to an invitation of the Groupe des Etudiants collectivistes who organised a debate on “idealism and materialism in the concept of history”. In his response one feels that he is confronting his own contradictions: “I do not mean that there is a part of history which is governed by economic necessity and another part guided by a pure idea, by a concept, by the idea for example, of humanity, justice and right; I do not want to put the materialist conception on one side and the idealist conception on the other. I maintain that they must penetrate one another, as in the organic life of man the mechanics of the brain and conscious spontaneity inter-penetrate one another”24. Paul Lafargue responded to him on 10th January, 1895. He began thus: “You will understand that it is with hesitation that I have taken on the task of responding to Jaurès whose spirited eloquence knows how to impassion the most abstract of metaphysical theses. While he was talking I said to myself, and you must have felt it, it is fortunate that this devil of a man is with us25. The experience was repeated in 1900, when Jaurès and Guesde confronted one another at the Hippodrome in Lille, where a polemic “The two methods”, the revolutionary and reformist method were confronted.

The decisive moment in Jaurès’ evolution was the congress of the International in Amsterdam in 1904. With all the conviction of which he was capable, he defended his thesis on ministerialism and the defence of the Republic in several speeches. The confrontation with Auguste Bebel was relentless, but he led his arguments with such brio that he aroused the applause of the congress. Jaurès was an adversary who commanded respect. Rosa Luxemburg even translated one of his speeches because of a lack of translators. The congress finally condemned his positions and in a much clearer fashion than at the previous International Congress in Paris. Jaurès submitted to the discipline of the International because he was profoundly attached to the international movement of the proletariat, because he was aware of the traps involved in government participation, and also because he wanted to avoid at all costs a new setback to the unification of the socialists in France. A special motion of the congress, voted on unanimously, demanded that the French Socialists should at last unite. One of the considerations of this motion said: “There can only be one socialist party as there is one proletariat26.

The failure of the Paris Commune, drowned in blood by the bourgeois democratic Republic of Adolphe Thiers, provoked a period of depression in the workers’ movement in France. When it began to recover at the end of the 1870’s, it appeared as an incoherent assemblage of disparate elements. There were the Proudhonian mutualists, the Utopians of the old school like Benoit Malon, anarchists, narrow-minded syndicalists patronised by the Radical Party, some Blanquists, Collectivists and finally old Communards still addicted to the verbiage of insurrection. In these circumstances, the unification of the workers’ movement took different forms in comparison to other countries. Before regrouping, it was necessary first of all to take the first step through a process of differentiation and progressive elimination of heterogeneous elements. In 1879 the first strictly marxist party was set up, the French Workers’ Party of Jules Guesde, and two years later, the Blanquists regrouped behind Edouard Vaillant in the Central Revolutionary Committee. A real clarification was appearing on the basis of the present tasks of the socialists which underlined the importance of political action and workers’ parliamentarianism. Despite a rapprochement, those that were called the “Parties of the old school” regarded each other with distrust and were incapable, from the fact of their history and the fact of their accumulated political errors, of fighting for the unification of the movement. Only new and independent forces could fulfil this role.

This offered a whole field of action to such personalities as Jean Jaurès. The crisis in the Radical Party brought new blood and new militants. But they were marked by their petty bourgeois origins and presented themselves as independent socialists who were above parties. There was thus a risk of the movement losing its class character and only the old socialist parties could avoid this trap. Rosa Luxemburg described the situation in this way: “While the old parties have shown themselves incapable of translating the final socialist objective into practical slogans applicable to the politics of the moment, the ‘independents’ could not, in the present political circumstances, preserve the stamp of the final socialist goal. The failings of the independents make it obvious that the mass movement of the proletariat needs a force that is organised and educated on solid principles to lead it; on the other hand, the attitude of the old organisations show that none amongst them is capable of undertaking this task alone27.

The evolution of the situation with the growth of militarism, imperialist tensions and with the crisis of successive radical governments, gave a final impulse. After the setback of 1899, arising from disagreements over ministerialism, the unification of the socialists was realised at the Congress held in the Salle du Globe in Paris, 1905. The Socialist Party was formed as “French Section of the Workers’ International”28 on the basis of the Resolutions of the Amsterdam Congress. It presented itself as “a class party, which aims at socialising the means of production and exchange, that is to say transforming capitalist society into a collective and communist society”. It “is not a party of reform but a party of class struggle and revolution”. The Party’s parliamentary deputies were to form “a single group against bourgeois political factions” and “refuse the government all the means which assure the domination of the bourgeoisie” in other words refusing appropriations for the military, for colonial conquest, for secret funds and indeed the budget as a whole29. With all his intellectual power Jaurès dominated the new party. April 18th 1904, saw the publication of the first issue of L’Humanité, the great socialist daily founded by Jean Jaurès. It would soon replace the official organ of the finally united party, Le Socialiste.

The revolution in 1905 in Russia and Poland overturned the situation. The glimmers of light from the east carried not only precious weapons for the revolutionary struggle, the mass strike and workers’ councils, they also revealed that bourgeois society was about to pass to the other side of its historic evolution, the downward trend of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production. The entire epoch marked by the creation of the Second International in 1889, where: “the centre of gravity of the workers’ movement was placed entirely on the national terrain in the framework of national states, on the basis of national industry, in the domain of national parliamentarism30, was entering its death throes.

The deadly shock of war

Jaurès’ profound ambiguity was once again revealed in his work L’Armée nouvelle (The new army). Published as a book in 1911, this text first saw the light as an introduction to a proposed law turned down by the Chamber of Deputies. Far from trying to understand and analyse the growth of militarism and imperialism which concerned and mobilised the clearest socialists, Jaurès proposed a “really popular organisation for national defence” based on the “nation in arms”. His idea was some distance away from the demand for an “army of militias” defended in the previous period by the French and German socialists. It was based on the idea of a “defensive war”, an idea that had really lost its meaning with the evolution of events. It was enough that through a series of provocations an imperialist power pushed an enemy to react, for it to appear immediately as the aggressor nation.

The two Moroccan crises, in 1905 and 1911, the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the constitution of two imperialist blocs, the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy and the Triple Entente of Britain, France, Russia, all this meant that the era of national wars was finished and war of a new type was appearing on the horizon: an imperialist war for the carving up of the world market. Totally in the grip of his Republican positions, Jaurès did not see the centrality of the internationalist positions of the proletariat and the danger of the least concession to the national interest, trying again to reconcile the two: “It is in the International that the independence of nations has its highest guarantee; it is in the independent nations that the International has its most powerful and noble organs. One could say; a little internationalism distances us from the fatherland; a lot of internationalism brings us back to it.”31

Whereas he was perfectly conscious of the mortal danger that lay in wait for the world proletariat, Jaurès strode the corridors of the Chamber of Deputies calling on this or that minister under the illusion that he could block the fatal gearing up to war and demanding the government to condemn the imperialist appetites of Russia. He multiplied his appeals for international arbitration between nations and supported the International Court of the Hague created by Russian Tsarism and subject to the mockery of the entire world. Basically, in the end he shared the position of Kautsky according to whom the trusts and the cartels would be interested in making peace. This so-called “super-imperialism” obscured the danger of world war, totally disarming the proletariat and rallied centrism to opportunism. The old friends, Kautsky and Bernstein were finally reconciled.

But once again it is very difficult to force Jaurès into a box. Like Engels some years earlier, he understood that a world war would mean a profound defeat for the proletariat which would call the future into question. He recalled his formula condemning capitalism: “Your violent and chaotic society always (...) bears within it war as a sleeping cloud bears the storm32. In 1913, at the Chamber of Deputies, one could hear him thunder against the return of three-year military service and he employed all his strength to have demonstrations organised in common between the revolutionary syndicalists of the CGT and the Socialist Party. Demonstrations were organised in many towns. In Paris enormous crowds flocked to the Butte-Rouge, at Pré-Saint-Gervais. His condemnation of war was not simply on moral grounds and that is why it carried all the hopes of the world and the international proletariat. He again used all his oratory power in a speech at Lyon-Vaise, July 25 1914: “In this moment when we are threatened with murder and savagery the only chance for the maintenance of peace and the salvation of civilisation is for the working class gather all the strength of its numerous brothers and that all the proletarians, French, English, German, Italian, Russian and we ourselves ask of these thousands of men to unite so that the unanimous beat of their hearts should thrust back this horrible nightmare33.

This is what made Jaurès the target for the hatred of the whole bourgeoisie. A veritable campaign of slanders and death threats was launched against him. Some demanded he be executed by a firing squad. The most excited voices came from the most reactionary political tendencies and the ultra-nationalists, the petty bourgeois milieu and the lumpenproletariat which played such a big role in the irrational mobs. They were sustained and encouraged by the democratic government. It was like a pogrom against the Jews. They had to find a scapegoat who could play the guilty role, someone to be designated the cause of all the problems, all the anguish for the future. Jaurès was that sort of symbol, a banner that had to be gotten rid off at all costs. Rosa Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s deaths were demanded in November 1918 and obtained in January 1919. In the same way the bourgeois called for the death of Jaurès and got it on 31st July, 1914. Raoul Villain, the assassin of Jaurès, was recognised as a “patriot” and was acquitted on March 29 1919.

Jaurès went to the last pre-war meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels on 29th July 1914. After the meeting a public meeting was held with the leading speakers of the Socialist International. Jaurès took the floor and again talked of peace and arbitration between nations. He fulminated against a French government incapable of reasoning with Russia. He pointed his finger at the German, French, Russian and Italian leaders who would be swept away by the revolution that the war would provoke, as in 1871 and 1905. He addressed Rosa Luxemburg sitting alongside him on the tribune: “Allow me to salute the intrepid woman whose thought enflames the heart of the German proletariat34. Everyone in the room was overwhelmed by Jaurès’ speech and gave him a long standing ovation. But the talk about peace revealed the impotence of the International. What was lacking was the call to break with the bourgeoisie and with the opportunists who supported it. This was the meaning of Karl Liebknecht’s slogan: “The main enemy is in our country, it is our own bourgeoisie”. That was also the meaning of the calls to break with opportunism launched by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. War should be opposed not by peace but by revolution. Luxemburg, Lenin and Martov stipulated thus in their celebrated amendment at the International’s Stuttgart Congress of 1907: “In case war breaks out anyway, it is the duty [of the working class and its representatives in parliament] to intervene for its speedy termination and to strive with all their power to utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule35.

It is not for us to speculate on what Jaurès would have done faced with the test of war had he survived. But it seems very likely that the French bourgeoisie or its secret services did not want to take the risk; they knew his weaknesses, but they also knew his strength, his moral uprightness, his hatred of war and his great reputation among the workers. Rosmer recalls that Jaurès began to distrust the pacifist and lying declarations of Poincaré36 and that some hours before his death, a rumour had it that Jaurès was ready to draft an editorial in L’Humanité which would be a new J’accuse!,37 denouncing the government and its warmongering, and calling on the workers to resist it. Before he could write the feared article, Jaurès was killed by Raoul Villain in circumstances which have nver really been clarified. The assassin, after passing the war in prison, was acquitted in proceedings for which the widow of Jaurès even had to pay the costs38.

With Jaurès dead, those who resisted the chauvinist turn of 1914 were at first a tiny minority. Most of the French leaders from the revolutionary syndicalists to the socialists took the bitter pill of betrayal. All proclaimed that the international working class should hold back the bloody arm of imperialism but added craftily: “On condition that the socialists of Germany do the same. In fact if we renounce the advance of the defence of the country it means that we will be encouraging the chauvinists of the enemy country”. With such reasoning, the workers’ International made no sense, nor did its resolutions against the war at the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, of Copenhagen, 1910 and Basel, 1912. It is true that the International was undermined from within and that it was to collapse like a house of cards when the order for mobilisation was pronounced. The Third International was soon raised on the ruins of the Second.

Jean Jaurès does not belong to our tradition, that of Marx and Engels, that of the Left in the Second and then the Third Internationals, the tradition of Left Communism. But with all his being Jaurès belonged to the workers’ movement, that is to say the only social force which still carries with it to this day the perspective of human emancipation. That is why we pay him homage and we can conclude with Trotsky: “Great men know how to disappear with time. Feeling his death approach, Tolstoy fled from the society that he renounced and went to die in a pilgrimage to an obscure village. Lafargue, epicurean and stoic, lived in an atmosphere of peace and meditation up to sixty-eight years of age, then decided that he had had enough and took poison. Jaurès, an athlete of ideas, fell in the arena while fighting against war, that most terrible scourge of humanity and of the human species. And he remains in the memory of posterity as the precursor, the prototype of superior man who must be born from sufferings, failures, hopes and struggle39.

Avrom E, August 18 2014


1 Leon Trotsky, My Life, Penguin Books, 1979, pp251-2.

2 Rosa Luxemburg, J’etais, je suis, je serai, Correspondence, 1914-19, Paris ed. Maspero, 1977, Letter to Sonia Liebknecht, 14.1.1918, p 325.

3 Cf. Rosa Luxemburg, Le Socialisme en France ,Marseilles/Toulouse, ed. Agone/Smolny, 2013, p. 163

4Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

5Considérants du Parti ouvrier français (1880) in Oeuvres I, Paris, ed. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1963, p. 1538.

6Leon Trotsky, “Jean Jaurès” in Le Mouvement communiste en France, Paris, ed. de Minuet, 1967, p. 25.

7My Life, op.cit. P251.

8 Ibid., p252

9Jean Jaurès, “La socialisme de la Révolution française” (1890), in Jean Jaurès, Karl Kautsky, Socialism et Révolution française, Paris, ed. Demopolis, 2010, p.189.

10Karl Kautsky, “Jaurès et la politique francaise vis-a-vis de l’Eglise” (1903), idem, p.228.

11See the prefaces to the Communist Manifesto and the preface to Marx’s work, The class struggles in France, 1848-1850, where Engels explained why “history has shown us, and all those who thought in a similar way, to be wrong”. The clearest explanation that the historic tasks of one class cannot be assumed by another is given by Marx in The Cologne Communist Trial (Basel, 1853).

12For example in his book News From Nowhere, 1890.

13Woman in the past, present and future, 1891. See our series “Communism is not a good idea but a material necessity”, parts XII to XV in International Review nos. 84, 85, 86 and 88.

14The Radical Party or the Republican Party or Radical Socialist Party, was born in 1901 and held a central role in government in the 3rd Republic in particular in preparing for an alliance with the socialists (Emile Combes). It was also able to manage a provocation and hard repression against the working class under the auspices of Georges Clemenceau. The quote from Luxemburg comes from “Die sozialistische Krise in Frankreich”, published in Die Neue Zeit 1900/1901: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1901/socialist-crisis-france/....

15Luxemburg, op.cit.

16“Eine taktische Frage”, Leipziger Volkszeitung, Nr.153, 6th July 1899

17On this issue see in particular our pamphlet Nation or Class.

18Georges Boulanger was a right-wing general and War Minister who gave his name to the “boulangiste” movement from 1889-91. Although the movement regrouped many from the proletarian left, these only served as a façade to Boulanger’s avowed anti-democratic intentions, which led the monarchists to give him their support. This finished by alarming the republican parties in power to the point where the movement was banned in 1889. Boulanger himself committed suicide in 1891.

19A colossal financial scandal around the collapse of the first attempt to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama by a French company, led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who had been responsible for the construction of the Suez Canal. The company was shown to have paid substantial bribes to members of the government to win their support, while 85,000 small investors were ruined.

20 Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Chapter 4: Position of the communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties. Marx, Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1968.

21The two quotes are from Jean Jaurès, an article of 1915 in Leon Trotsky, Le Mouvement communiste en France (1919-1939). Op.it. p. 32.

22Quoted in the review L’Histoire no. 397, March 2014, p.48.

23The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable (...)”: “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

24 Quoted in the review L’Histoire no. 397, March 2014, p. 50.

25 This can be found in Paul Lafargue, Paresse et revolution, Ecrits, 1880-1911. Paris, ed. Tallandier. Coll. Texto, 2009, p. 212.

26 Alfred Rosmer, Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la premiere guerre mondiale, Paris, ed. d’Avron, 1993, tome I, p. 41.

27 L’unification Francaise, 1899 article in Rosa Luxemburg’s, Le Socialisme en France (1898-1912), Op. Cit., p. 81.

28It was generally known thereafter as the SFIO (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière)

29 All the quotes from the unification congress come from Pierre Bezbakh, Histoire du socialisme francaise. Paris, ed. Larousse, 2005, p. 138.

30 Manifesto of the first Congress of the Communist International. Manifestes, theses et resolutions des quatre premiers congres de l’Internationale communiste, 1919-1923, Paris, ed. La Breche-Selio, 1984, p. 33.

31 Jean Jaurès, L’Armee nouvelle, quoted in Jean Jaurès, un prophete socialiste, Le Monde, hors-serie, March-April 2014, p. 51.

32 Speech of 1898 to the Chamber quoted in the review L’Hisotire, no 397, March 2014, p. 57.

33 Quoted in Alfred Rosmer, “Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la premiere guerre mondial, Op. Cit. P. 487.

34Quoted by Paul Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg, Paris, ed. l’Hartmattan, 1991, p. 252.

35Quoted in Lenin’s struggle for a revolutionary International, Monad Press, p35.

36French President in 1914, leader of the French ruling class’ warmongering faction.

37From the title of Emile Zola’s devastating attack on the reactionary forces during the Dreyfus affair.

38Cf. our article 1914: how the bloodletting began. There is however another version of events given by Pierre Dupuy, Deputy and manager of the Petit Parisien founded by his father Jean Dupuy who sat in the government of Waldeck-Rousseau. According to Dupuy, Jaurès told him in confidence a few hours before his assassination: “He said that a little before he had learned from a reliable source that the German socialists of the workers’ international had unreservedly decided to obey the general mobilisation and that, in these conditions, it would be necessary that evening for him to redraft, for appearance the next day, an article in his paper, L’Humanité, titled “Forward!”. He considered in fact that in the face of this now definitive setback to all his efforts and those of his party to maintain peace it was now necessary to avoid giving the enemy of tomorrow the impression of a disunited and fearful France” (this witness is quoted in Le Monde, February 12 1958). But one can question what faith can be put in this witness who, as an ally of Poincaré, had every interest in making Jaurès out to be a posthumous patriot. For the details of the proceedings involving Raoul Villain see Domique Pagenelli, Il a tué Jaurès, La Table Ronde, 2014.

39 Leon Trotsky, Jean Jaurès in Le Mouvement communiste en France (1919-39), Op. Cit. P. 35.

 

Historic events: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

People: 

Rubric: 

World War I

Truth and memory, art and propaganda

A visit to the "Truth and Memory" exhibition of British war artists, currently showing at London’s Imperial War Museum, prompts some thought about the complex relationship between art, politics and propaganda.

For a start, there is a striking contrast between the paintings in "Truth and Memory" and the conventional World War I special exhibit on the ground floor.1 Where the art is raw, harrowing, the museum exhibit is bland and colourless. Juxtapositions of military uniforms, weapons, reproductions of propaganda posters – a film of muddy fields: nothing there to shock even the most sensitive spectator. There are tin hats and jackets for visitors to try on and take selfies, but heaven forbid that we should be reminded of what this war really was, of the horror and the stench of death in the trenches. World War I has been sanitised and packaged for tourist consumption and it seems unlikely that those who visit it will learn very much, or indeed anything at all.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the World War I exhibit, in your face on the ground floor, is packed with a queue of families waiting to get in, while the exhibition of war art, discreetly hidden away on the third floor behind frosted glass doors, is almost empty. This exhibition is organised in two parts, on opposite sides of the Museum: one part called "Truth" exhibits paintings produced during the conflict, mostly by artists employed by the British War Propaganda Bureau who in some cases were already serving soldiers; the part called "Memory" contains paintings produced after the war, both independent and official. It has to be said that this section is by far the least interesting, artistically and for what it has to say about the war itself. The pictures are for the most part still, almost peaceful, they seem distant from reality, lacking in immediacy, as if both the artist and the spectators – and certainly the state – wanted not to remember but to forget, or at least to gloss over memory with a patina that would relegate the war safely to the past. Only two pictures strike us with any force. One, "A battery shelled" by Percy Wyndham Lewis (who fought in the artillery) shows the soldiers working under fire reduced to machine-like stick figures, while those outside the danger zone are detached, indifferent.

The other, "Over the top" by John Nash (brother of the much better-known artist Paul Nash) evokes the futility of the endless assaults which ended with tens of thousands dead and a military result of zero; there is something dreadful about the soldiers’ hopeless advance towards certain death, all the more so when we know that Nash portrays here an attack by his own unit, the 1st Artists Rifles, which ended with barely a man left alive or uninjured.

One is inclined to think that after the war, for the most part, people wanted to forget or at least to return to life and leave war behind. And that the governments were only to happy to let them do so because World War I had – for many – discredited capitalist society and the governments that managed it.

Society, ideology, the search for truth

Bourgeois society has a more paradoxical relationship to truth than any previous class society. This is due to two factors: the conditions and demands of industrial production; and the specific characteristics of bourgeois class domination.

Capitalism is the first mode of production which cannot live without constantly revolutionising and overturning the productive process through the application of scientific and technical innovation. At the outset, as bourgeois society begins to emerge within its feudal shell, this is not immediately apparent: the woollen textile industry in 13th century England begins to break out of the constricting bonds of the feudal guild system, but the technology remains largely unchanged. The revolution is social, not yet technical, based on new ways of organising production and trade. By the 17th century, experimental science aims to contribute to the improvement of manufacture, and by the 18th century scientific investigation of nature is applied to industry and becomes a productive force in its own right. Today, quantum mechanics and relativity theory may seem abstruse and even weird – nonetheless, a multitude of products in everyday use are dependent on their effects.

Capitalism, then, depends on science. But science itself rests on two pillars: the assumption that a world exists independent of thought, be it human or divine; and the conviction that it is possible to understand this material world through free investigation and freedom of debate.2 A precondition for the development of capitalism and bourgeois society is therefore the victory of Copernicus and Galileo over the Catholic church and the Inquisition: the Catholic church cannot be allowed to maintain its monopoly over thought.

Class rule under capitalism is also unique. Indeed, the bourgeois class is the first in history to pretend that its class domination does not exist, the first to justify its own rule by basing it on "the will of the people". Bourgeois society is therefore the most hypocritical in history.

Yet, if this were all there were to it, such domination would not long survive. The bourgeoisie dominates, but it must not be seen to dominate; its hypocrisy must be sincere. Nor can the search for truth be limited to the domain of science, prevented from spilling out into the social and artistic sphere, for science and art are not two separate worlds, they do not at all rely on antithetical or even different qualities of the human mind. The bourgeoisie then, is forced to give free rein to the search for truth as much in the artistic as in the scientific domain, under pain of loosing out to its competitors. It was the United States, not Nazi Germany, that succeeded in producing the atomic bomb.

There is another new characteristic of capitalist society: for the first time, the revolutionary class is an exploited class. Even more important, this exploited class is a cultured class. For the first time, the exploited class must be educated in order to master the intricacies of capitalist production: workers must be able to read and write, to handle increasingly complex technical and social tasks. Capitalism itself educates and trains the masses of workers in the skills necessary not just to master social organisation but to lay claim to the heritage of all humanity’s artistic, scientific, and technical knowledge and achievements which it will use to satisfy human needs, including human cultural needs. More: at its best, the proletarian class has never been satisfied with the scraps from the table of bourgeois culture, it has set out to grasp this culture and make it its own. "Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture".3

The greater the presence within society of this cultured, revolutionary and exploited class, the less the bourgeoisie can rely solely on lies and repression. Only in regimes where the workers have been utterly crushed – regimes like Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR – is it possible for propaganda to rely solely on the ideological knout.

The British ruling class, perhaps more than any other, is aware of this strange, shifting, and contradictory situation, aware that it must play the propaganda game in two directions. We are almost tempted to answer Winston Churchill’s famous dictum that "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies" by turning it round: "Lies are so precious that they must be surrounded by a bodyguard of truth".

Art and propaganda

"There's an east wind coming, Watson."

"I think not, Holmes. It is very warm."

"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared".4

These words are spoken at the very end of Arthur Conan Doyle’s last "Sherlock Holmes" story, His Last Bow, in which Holmes foils a German master spy just before the outbreak of war. The fictitious Holmes only echoes here sentiments that were expressed by real characters at the outbreak of war: Collins-Baker, Keeper at the National Gallery, writing in August 1914, believed that art would benefit from a "cleansing war",5 and this was a not uncommon view in the British establishment who hoped the war would "regenerate" art and society and rid both of the disturbances of Cubism, Modernism, and everything offensive to so-called "good taste".

Previous wars had been celebrated "realistically" and patriotically as a series of heroic engagements – the kind of thing that could have been produced during the Crimean war for example:


 

Doubtless the reactionary wing of the British ruling class and its art establishment expected such painting to drown out foreign, decadent, and corrupting influences. But this turned out to be a dying genre. As we enter the exhibition we are presented, symbolically, with one example: William Barnes Wollen’s "2nd Ox & Bucks defeating the Prussian Guard at Nonne Bosschen".

Step into the next room, and we are in a different world altogether, and here we want to focus on the evolution of two artists who followed diametrically opposed directions from the artistic standpoint as a result of their war experience: CRW Nevinson and William Orpen.

Nevinson was 25 when war broke out, and joined the Friends Ambulance Unit set up by the Quakers; he was profoundly shocked by his experience and this clearly informed his art. He was already in 1914 an established landscape painter associated with the Italian Futurist movement and particularly the painter Marinetti who would later be one of Mussolini’s supporters. In 1914, Marinetti had declared that "We wish to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world" (a sentiment he shared with a Catholic reactionary such as the poet Hilaire Belloc for example, and others that we have cited above), yet there is no trace of any glorification of war in Nevinson’s work. On the contrary, Nevinson declared in 1915 that "Unlike my Italian Futurist friends, I do not glory in war for its own sake, nor can I accept the doctrine that war is the only healthgiver (…) In my pictures (…) I have tried to express the emotion produced by the apparent ugliness and dullness of modern warfare".6 In 1915, he told the Daily Express: "Our Futurist technique is the only possible medium to express the crudeness, violence, and brutality of the emotions seen and felt on the present battlefields of Europe". Nevinson uses these Futurist techniques of juxtaposed planes and sombre colouring to show man reified and dehumanised, transformed into an adjunct of the machine in a war which was mechanised more than ever before: his painting "La mitrailleuse" ("The machine gun", 1915) is emblematic of this attitude. In "Return to the trenches", the soldiers have almost been transformed themselves into machines.

Nevinson fully intended his art to be an indictment of war and its motivations. Of his painting "La Patrie" ("The fatherland", 1916) he wrote "I regard this picture, quite apart from how it is painted, as expressing an absolutely NEW outlook on the so-called ‘sacrifice’ of war. It is the last word on the ‘horror of war’ for the generations to come"7


 

Nevinson’s paintings were well received when he exhibited them in November 1916, despite the fact that his modern and "foreign" style typified everything that the more patriotic and reactionary side of British society abhorred. But after two years of war, war weariness and disenchantment were setting in, and Nevinson’s ferocious critique caught the mood better than official government propaganda. Leading critics accepted that "modern methods were needed to depict modern war" and even the Times saw in his work "a nightmare of insistent unreality, untrue but actual, something that certainly happens but to which our reason will not consent".8

Another painting which created a sensation when it was exhibited in 1916 was Eric Kennington’s "The Kensingtons at Laventie". This painting shows his own unit shortly before he himself was wounded (Kennington appears in the background on the left wearing a balaclava helmet).

The enthusiastic reception given to Kennington’s and Nevinson’s work was in large part due to the public’s perception of these paintings as more truthful, more credible, than the drawings produced on the basis of photographs or second hand accounts, in the illustrated magazines: first, because they portrayed a reality that people knew to be far closer to the truth, both visually and emotionally, and second because the artists were, or had been, serving soldiers with real experience of the front line.

These paintings were all produced before either Nevinson or Kennington had been employed as a war artist by the British Department of Information. The latter was the successor to the Bureau of War Propaganda, which had been set up in secret in August 1914 and at first concentrated on the written word, organising the output in favour of Britain’s war effort of well-known writers like John Buchan and HG Wells. One of the Bureau’s first efforts was the "Report on alleged German outrages" (also known as the Bryce Report), which accused the German army of war crimes against civilians following the invasion of Belgium. By May 1916, the Bureau’s chairman, the Liberal MP Charles Masterman, an ally of the Prime Minister Lloyd George, decided to respond to the demand for illustrations from the picture press by recruiting the well-known artist Muirhead Bone (who had lobbied hard for the establishment of an Official War Artists scheme), who was sent to tour the front with an honorary commission. The sketches he brought back, despite their graphic excellence, are bland and lifeless compared with the raw emotion evident in Nevinson’s art.

Even his "Soldiers’ cemetery" is scarcely more stirring than an image of a country churchyard:

This was doubtless what prompted the Ministry of Information to open up to younger artists, especially those serving on the front whose work the public would accept as more authentic. At the same time, bringing artists under the aegis of the Ministry meant that their exhibitions were subject to military censorship. By the time that his second, hugely successful exhibition opened in 1918 Nevinson seems to have come to the conclusion that only a return to realism was adequate to express his horror at the war, as we can see in the picture ironically entitled "Paths of Glory" – a title later used by Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 anti-war film starring Kirk Douglas. The irony of the title is only too evident when we see the corpses face down in the mud, already bloated by decomposition.

If Nevinson’s earlier work showed man dehumanised, reduced to the status of a machine, incorporated into the machine one might almost say, we can wonder whether he felt the need to escape from the aesthetic, even an aesthetic of the machine, to show the true horror of what war was doing not to machines but to real human beings of flesh and blood with whom we can identify and sympathise – something we cannot do with a machine.

The painting was banned by the authorities. Nevinson hung it in the exhibition anyway, obscured by a large ribbon inscribed with the word "Censored".

Paul Nash, another war artist who was to become one of Britain’s best known landscape artists of the 20th Century, commented bitterly on his employment as a war artist: "I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls". And the public could surely not escape the implications of this painting entitled "We are building a new world".

Truth will out

While Nevinson moved from the modernist to the traditional, another very different artist moved almost in the opposite direction. William Orpen was nearly 40 when war broke out, and a popular well-established, and even wealthy high society portrait painter. Sent to France as a war artist with the rank of Major, he was derided by some for his privileged and safe situation well away from any combat experience, and indeed the earliest portraits he produced could readily serve as propaganda images of British troops, especially the pilots treated by the press and the propaganda machines as the new "knights in shining armour" of modern warfare.


His portrait of the young pilot Lieutenant Rhys Davids, killed shortly afterwards in a dogfight, was much reproduced.

Orpen’s portraits of Generals Haig and Trenchard were also widely praised and he could have stuck to merely doing more of the same, but he did not.9 On the contrary, he was increasingly disturbed by the effects of war on those involved in it, both soldiers and civilians, and as time went on he turned more and more to an imagery that sometimes approaches a Dali-esque surrealism.

We know that he had been shocked to see young French prostitutes plying for trade at a burial ceremony. Maybe it was this that prompted his "Adam and Eve at Péronne":

There is something almost pornographic about this picture. Here there is no loss of innocence – it is already long gone, lost in the wreckage of war that we see in the background. Eve’s modest headscarf contrasts oddly with her plunging neckline and the somehow cynical expression on her face, while the bored indifference of the young soldier suggests someone who has seen so much death that he has become indifferent to life.

The same soldier turns up in "The mad woman of Douai", depicting a scene Orpen had witnessed of a woman raped shortly beforehand by retreating German troops . Here he appears equally indifferent to the rape, to the tragedy of the victim, and to the hastily buried corpse whose foot we see sticking out of its grave in the foreground.

Tucked away in a room at the back of the exhibition is a series of seven etchings by Percy Delf Smith, who was a gunner in the Royal Marines on the front.

Where some of Orpen’s pictures reprise themes from Goya (for example, "Bombing, Night"), Smith returns to the imagery of decadent medieval society with its omnipresent portrayals of death. These are some of the most shocking pictures in the exhibition.

In "Death awed", even Death shies away from the slaughter, epitomised by the two boots still filled with the stumps of legs, while "Death intoxicated" makes a mockery of dance as Death cavorts deliriously behind a soldier about to spit an enemy on his bayonet.


 

It seems natural enough to want, almost to expect, that artists who move us by their critical spirit should share our ideas. Natural, but profoundly mistaken. The artists who figure here – and to them we could add poets like Wifred Owen and Siegried Sassoon, and German Expressionists like Otto Dix or Käthe Kollwitz – were profoundly revolted by the war, indeed several of them suffered nervous breakdowns of varying degrees of severity by the end of the war. But none of them were in the least moved by a proletarian political viewpoint; in some cases they were not even particularly attractive as people.

We sometimes forget that the great masters who we admire today were not alone, on the contrary (with very rare exceptions) they were the greatest exponents of an effort in which many were engaged. And when artists rise above the common run that surrounds them, when their art reaches heights that continue to touch us today when so many lesser contemporaries have been forgotten, then it somehow communicates to us something that goes beyond the artist himself. At such moments, the artist is attuned to something in the social atmosphere, something which is very often not explicit. Is it really an accident, that some of these most stinging indictments of the War should have been produced in the same year – and could almost have served as illustrations for – Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet. In Junius, Luxemburg declared: "Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form". Is it not precisely this that we see reaching out to grip us from the picture frames of the Imperial War Museum? And is it not precisely because there existed, somewhere, a mind capable of Junius, and a workers’ movement bloodied and betrayed but still alive and capable of taking up and transforming into social action the ideas of Junius, that there could also exist a critical artistic spirit capable of speaking not to the consciousness, as Luxemburg did, but directly to the emotions. In doing so, they speak to something constant in human nature, something truly human (as Marx might have said) which can only react with revulsion to the monstrous machine of death that capitalism had become.

Where is the art of World War II?

It is striking, at all events, that while World War I produced some of Britain’s greatest 20th century painting, not to mention some of Germany’s most outstanding artistic expression, nothing of the kind can be said of World War II which produced absolutely nothing comparable.

In part, this was the result of technical evolution. When illustrated magazines like the famous Picture Post looked to show the war in images, they turned less to artists than to photographers, and in particular to the new breed of war photographers such as the great Robert Capa. Much more importantly, the ruling class on both sides of the conflict had a much firmer grasp on the importance of propaganda. The Nazi regime exerted a state control over artistic production, denouncing the Expressionists as "degenerate art": Otto Dix, though he remained in Germany, retreated into a self-imposed exile both personal and artistic, and the great enemy of capitalist war and social corruption spent his last years painting innocuous, though technically irreproachable, portraits such as "Nelly as Flora" from 1940.

Hitler was a great admirer of British war propaganda, and the British themselves lost no time, when war began, in setting up a "War Artists Advisory Committee" subordinated to the Ministry of Information. We need only compare Paul Nash’s almost lyrical "Battle of Britain" with his "We are making a new world" to see that the critical spirit of the latter has completely disappeared.


Or again, compare Alfred Thomson’s 1943 painting of an injured airman receiving treatment, with Nevinson’s World War I depiction of a hospital scene in "La Patrie". Here we have an image of calm peacefulness, far removed from the agony and the anguish of the field hospital.

The critical spirit had not entirely disappeared. Some of the American combat artists featured on the PBS site "They drew fire" – and doubtless it is significant that these men were themselves faced with the terror of war – produced art which echoes the horror experienced by the combatants of World War I.

 

Of one sketch, the artist Howard Brodie wrote: "My most searing memory of any war was during the Battle of the Bulge, when Germans posing as GI's infiltrated our lines. I heard we were going to execute three of them… A defenceless human is entirely different than a man in action. To see these three young men calculatingly reduced to quivering corpses before my eyes really burned into my being. That's the only drawing I've ever had that's been censored. All coverage of the execution was censored".

And there is certainly nothing glorious about Kerr Eby’s "Helping wounded man" (Eby had served on an ambulance crew during World War I).


 

The United States’ involvement in World War I had been relatively minor, certainly the involvement of the population as a whole in the fighting was incomparably less than was the case in the European countries, and far less than it was to be in World War II. Perhaps we can explain the powerful effect of the images above by the naïvety of the American working class which – although it had to confront one of the most brutal fractions of the capitalist class in its struggles, had yet to experience the insane barbarism of full-scale modern warfare.

These forthright portrayals of war’s brutality – and the insanity it inflicts on human beings that we see staring out of the eyes of Eby’s "wounded man" – reveal an honest search for artistic truth, which shows that integrity and humanity continued to survive even in the heart of barbarism. But there is one aspect missing when we compare these to the World War I works: a sense of a broader social criticism that goes beyond the individual reaction to individually experienced events. Marx was wrong to say that only bad artists put titles on their paintings (Britain’s greatest landscape artist, William Turner, not only gave his works long titles, he sometimes accompanied them with lines from his own poetry), and titles such as "Paths of Glory" or "We are making a new world" underscore for us the broader protest of the artist against the war, its causes and its consequences.

Thanks to "socialist realism", Russian painting of World War II was anything but realistic, and during the Korean War the principles of socialist realism seem to have been applied with equal enthusiasm by both the Americans and the Chinese.

Vietnam: art against war

It is only with the Vietnam War that art truly returns to a critical onslaught against war, and here it is art of a new kind that comes front-stage: photography.

Photography and painting are very different technical skills: where the painter sketches to prepare a final work, the photographer will take hundreds, sometimes even thousands of shots. Where the painter adds to his work, little by little, teasing out the truth by adding paint, the photographer rejects, pares down to a single shot which best embodies the event, the scene, or the face that he is trying to represent. And of course, black and white photography in particular involves a subtle work with chemicals in the darkroom to deepen shadow, highlight, and bring the focus onto the essentials.

At their highest expression, painting and photography can, like all art, both express a search for truth. And hence we have one of the most emblematic pictures from the Vietnam war. Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut's photo of Trang Bang after Napalm Attack (8th June, 1972). No painting from World War I portrayed the sheer horror, barbarity, and above all senselessness of this war better than does this photo.

Nick Ut was a photographer with Associated Press, a non-profit news cooperative founded during the Mexican War of 1846, which produced much of the best – most emotionally true – photography to come out of the Vietnam War.10 The war itself came at a very specific moment, and was in some ways unique in the annals of war photography. For one thing it was “the first war in which reporters were routinely accredited to accompany military forces, yet not subject to censorship.”11 This was a lesson that the United States, in particular, was to learn for future wars. The Gulf Wars, for example, were rigorously censored with television reporting being systematically verified before going on air. All those "live" reports were live only in the sense that they came with a few minutes delay while the military censor checked their content as it streamed: under such conditions, many reporters learned to censor themselves.

Pictures like Ut’s, or like Art Greenspon’s photo of American soldiers awaiting a helicopter coming to evacuate the wounded, are more than just war photography telling a striking story, they are also a form of social criticism. Although there are relatively few pictures of Vietcong troops other than prisoners, we are left in no doubt who are the principal sufferers in the war: the civilians first and foremost, of course, but also the "grunts" as the American GI conscripts were called to distinguish them from the "lifers", or professional military (and of course the South Vietnamese army and the Vietcong had their equivalents): overwhelmingly, it was the conscripts, workers in uniform, who were sent into the most dangerous situations on the front lines.

If this form of social criticism were possible, this is not just because the American army had not yet learnt about censorship. A picture, whether it be painting or photography, is always communication. The artist communicates his truth, but he can only do so if the truth is also heard, if within society there are those able to hear and understand this truth. Those who regard art are also part of its meaning. So it is no accident that these photographs come from 1968 and 1972, from the Vietnam war and not the Korean (just as it is no accident that M.A.S.H., a satirical film about the Korean war, was only made in 1970), for this is the period when the post-war reconstruction is coming to an end and the class struggle is once again on the rise, finding its most momentous expression in May ‘68 in France.

The "spirit of the age", the Zeitgeist, can seem an ungraspable, nebulous notion. Yet when we consider this artistic production that grew out of wars brought to an end either because the working class revolted directly against the war itself (World War I), or because the workers revolted against the effects of the crisis of which the war was a part, and increasingly refused to fight (the Vietnam War), it seems to us clear that such art was only possible because within society there existed a working class with "radical chains", a class which is historically opposed to the present state of society, even if the workers themselves are not aware of it, much less the artists. Balzac, as Engels said, went beyond his own class prejudices in portraying truthfully what he saw: so the artists of the First World War bring to us something that goes beyond what they themselves were because they have teased out the truth that underlies the surface. The relationship between artistic expression within capitalism and the revolt against it, is by no means a mechanical one. Art is not great because it is socialist. Like science, art has its own dynamic and the artist’s first responsibility is to be true to himself. One is tempted to paraphrase what Engels’ said of science: ".... the more ruthlessly and disinterestedly [art] proceeds, the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests of the workers."

Jens


1The topography of the Museum has its own significance. The World War I exhibit is to be found immediately, on the ground floor, in a dramatic gallery housing aircraft and originals of the German V1 and V2 missiles from World War II. The war artists of the "Truth and Memory" exhibition are housed far more discreetly, in two galleries on opposite sides of the third floor.

2The fate of the Stalinist USSR’s agricultural production as a result of the ideological imposition of Lysenko’s theories of evolution is a counter-example. And of course, the fact that the scientific world often fails to live up to this necessity does not in any way invalidate it.

3Lenin, "On proletarian culture", 1920

4Read the whole book on Project Gutenberg

5See Paul Gough, A terrible beauty, Sansom & Co., 2010, p17

6Quote drawn from the generally thoughtful labels that accompany the exhibits.

7Quoted in this useful and intelligent review of Paul Gough’s book about Britain’s war artists, A terrible beauty.

8From one of the exhibition labels.

9It is significant also that he donated his entire collection of war paintings to the Imperial War Museum, feeling that it was morally wrong to profit from painting a war where so many suffered.

11See the article just cited.

 

Historic events: 

General and theoretical questions: 

People: 

Rubric: 

World War I

2015 - International Review

International Review - Winter 2015

The articles published in this issue of the International Review first appeared on the web site in 2014 and can be found under that year.

The article on the 2nd International can be found in the World War I special issue

100 years after World War I, the struggle for proletarian principles is as relevant as ever

One hundred years ago, the war enters a new year of slaughter. It was supposed to have been "over by Christmas", but Christmas has been and gone and the war continues.

On Christmas Eve, fraternisations along the front line give rise to the "Christmas Truce". On their own initiative, and to the consternation of their officers, the soldiers – workers and peasants in uniform – spontaneously leave their trenches to exchange beer, cigarettes, and food. The General Staffs on both sides, taken by surprise, do not know how to react.

These fraternisations pose the question: what would have happened if there had been a workers’ Party, and International, capable of giving them a broader vision, allowing them to bear fruit and become a conscious opposition not only to the war but to its causes? But the workers have been abandoned by their parties: worse still, these parties have become the recruiting officers of the riling class. Behind the firing squads that await deserters and mutineers, stand the "socialist" ministers. The betrayal of the socialist parties in most of the belligerent nations has meant that the International has collapsed, incapable of applying the resolutions adopted by the Congresses of Stuttgart in 1907 and Basel in 1912: this collapse is the theme of one of the articles in this issue.

The New Year begins, but there will be no "Christmas Truce" in 1915: uneasy, the General Staffs will tighten discipline and shell the front lines next Christmas, to nip in the bud any attempt by soldiers and workers to bring the war to an end.

And yet, painfully and without any overall plan, the workers’ resistance re-emerges. In 1915 there will be more fraternisations on the fronts, major strikes in Scotland’s Clyde Valley, demonstrations of German working women against rationing. Little groups, like Die Internationale (of which Rosa Luxemburg is a member) or the Lichtstrahlen group in Germany, survivors of the wreckage of the International, begin to organise despite censorship and repression. In September, some of them will take part in the first international conference of socialists against the war, in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald. This conference, and the two that follow it, will confront the same problems as the 2nd International: is it possible to pursue a policy of "peace" without a policy of revolution? Is it possible to imagine rebuilding the International on the basis of the pre-1914 unity which has been revealed as an illusion?

This time, the left will win the battle, and the 3rd International which will come out of Zimmerwald will be explicitly communist, revolutionary, and centralised: it will be the answer to the failure of the International, just as the Soviets in 1917 will be the answer to the bankruptcy of unionism.

Almost 30 years ago (in 1986), we commemorated the 70th anniversary of Zimmerwald in an article published in this Review. Six years after the failure of the International Conferences of the Communist Left1, we wrote: "Like at Zimmerwald, the regroupment of revolutionary minorities is posed acutely today (…) Faced with the present stakes, the historic responsibility of revolutionary groups is posed. Their responsibility is to engage in the formation of the world party of tomorrow, whose absence can be cruelly felt today (…) The failure of the first attempt at conferences (1977-80) does not invalidate the necessity of such places of confrontation. This failure is a relative one: it is the product of political immaturity, of sectarianism and of the irresponsibility of a part of the revolutionary milieu which is still suffering the weight of the long period of counter-revolution (…) Tomorrow, new conferences of groups descending from the Left will be held".2

We cannot but accept that our hopes, our confidence of those years have been bitterly disappointed. Of the groups that took part in the Conferences, only the ICC and the ICT (ex-IBRP, created by Battaglia Comunista of Italy and the CWO of Britain shortly after the Conferences) remain.3 While the working class has not let itself be enrolled under the colours of generalised imperialist war, neither has it been able to impose its own perspective on bourgeois society. As a result, the class struggle has proven unable to impose on the revolutionaries of the Communist Left even a minimal sense of responsibility: there have been no more Conferences, and our repeated calls for a minimum of common action by internationalists (in particular at the time of the Gulf Wars during the 1990s) have fallen on deaf ears. The spectacle presented by anarchism is, if possible, even more deplorable. Few have emerged with honour (the KRAS in Russia is an admirable exception) from the lapse into nationalism and anti-fascism as a result of the wars in Ukraine and Syria.

Nor has the ICC been spared, in this situation characteristic of the general atmosphere of social decomposition. Our organisation is shaken by a profound crisis, which demands of us an equally profound calling into question and theoretical reflection if we are to face up to it. This is the theme of the article on our Extraordinary Conference, also published in this issue.

Crises are never comfortable, but without crises there is no life and they can be both healthy and necessary. As our article emphasises, if there is one lesson to be learned from the betrayal of the Socialist parties and the collapse of the International, it is that the unruffled path of opportunism leads to death and betrayal, and that the political struggle of the revolutionary left has never avoided confrontation and crisis.

ICC, December 2014


1 We refer our readers to the article ‘Sectarianism, an inheritance from the counter-revolution that must be transcended’ https://en.internationalism.org/ir/22/sectarianism

2International Review n°44, 1st quarter 1986

3The GCI having gone over to the enemy camp when it gave its support to the Peruvian Shining Path movement.

 

Rubric: 

Editorial

International Review - Summer 2015

In this summer of 2015, the centenary of the Great War – as it is still called – is behind us. The wreaths on the monuments to the fallen faded long ago, the town halls’ temporary exhibitions have been folded and put away, the politicians have given their fine hypocritical speeches, and life can return to whatever passes for “normal”.

In 1915, the war is anything but finished. Nobody any longer has the slightest illusion that the troops will be “home by Christmas”. Ever since the German army’s advance was halted on the river Marne in September 1914, the conflict has been bogged down in trench warfare. During the second battle of Ypres, in April 1915, the Germans used poison gas for the first time, and this will soon be put to use by the armies on both sides of the front. Already, the dead are numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

The war will be long, the suffering terrible, and the cost ruinous. How can the populations be made to accept the horror to which they are subjected? This is to be the cynical task of the warring states’ propaganda bureaux, and it is the subject of our first article. Here, as in so many other domains, 1914 marks the opening of a watershed period which will see the step-by-step installation of an omnipresent state capitalism, the only response possible to capitalism’s decadence as a social form.

In 1915, we also begin to see the first signs of working class resistance, especially in Germany where the Socialist Party’s parliamentary fraction no longer votes unanimously for war credits as it had done the previous August. The revolutionaries Otto RŸhle and Karl Liebknecht, who were the first to break ranks and oppose the war, have been joined by others. The movement of opposition to the war, bringing together a handful of militants from the various belligerent nations, will give rise in September 1915 to the first Zimmerwald Conference.

The groups who came together in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald were far from presenting a united front. Alongside Lenin’s revolutionary Bolsheviks, for whom the only answer to imperialist war was the civil war for the overthrow of capitalism, there was a – much more numerous – current which still hoped to reach an accommodation with the Socialist Parties that had gone over to the enemy. This was known as the “centrist” current, and it was to play an important part in the difficulties and ultimate defeat of the German revolution in 1919. This is the theme of an internal text written by Marc Chirik in December 1984, substantial extracts of which we are publishing here. The centrist USPD is no more, but it would be a mistake to think that centrism as a form of political behaviour has disappeared as a result; on the contrary, as this text shows, centrism is especially characteristic of decadent capitalism.

To conclude, we also publish in this issue a new article in our series on the class struggle in Africa, notably in this case, in South Africa. We deal here with the dark period between World War II and the world wide renewal of class struggle at the end of the 1960s; despite the divisions imposed by the sinister apartheid regime, we show that the class struggle did indeed survive and that it is far from being a mere accessory to the nationalist movement led by Nelson Mandela’s ANC.

ICC, July 2015

 

The birth of totalitarian democracy

Propaganda during World War I

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country" (Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928).

Propaganda was not invented in World War I. When we admire the lines of tributaries carved on the monumental staircase of Persepolis, laying the produce of the empire before the great King Darius, or the deeds of the Pharaohs immortalised in the stone of Luxor, or the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, we are looking at works of propaganda, designed to communicate a monarch’s power and legitimacy to his subjects. The imperial theatre of troops on parade in Persepolis would have been perfectly recognisable to the British Empire of the 19th century, which itself staged immense and colourful displays of military power at the “Durbars” held in Delhi on great royal occasions.

But while propaganda was not new in 1914, the war profoundly altered its form and its significance. In the years after the war, “propaganda” became a dirty word synonymous with the dishonest manipulation, or fabrication, of information by the state.1 By the end of World War II, following the experience of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, it took on still more sinister overtones: omnipresent, excluding all other sources of information, invading every corner of private life, propaganda came to be presented as an equivalent to brainwashing. But in reality, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were merely crude caricatures of the ubiquitous propaganda machine set up in the Western democracies post-1918, building with ever-growing sophistication on the techniques first developed on a large scale during the war. When Edward Bernays,2 whose seminal work on propaganda we have quoted at the beginning of this article, left the US Committee on Public Information (in reality, the government office of war propaganda) at the end of the war, he established himself as a consultant to private industry not in propaganda but in “public relations” - a term which he himself coined. This was a deliberate and conscious decision: even at such an early date, Bernays knew that the word “propaganda” had become indelibly stained in the public mind with the taint of “untruth”.

World War I marked the moment that the capitalist state first undertook the massive and totalitarian control of information, through propaganda and censorship, directed towards a single over-riding aim: victory in all-out war. As in all other aspects of social life – the organisation of production and finance, the social control of the population and especially of the working class, the transformation of a parliamentary democracy of opposing bourgeois interests into an empty shell – World War I marked the beginning of the state’s absorption and control of social thought and action: state capitalism. After 1918 the men who, like Bernays, had worked for government propaganda departments during the war, fanned out into private industry to become PR men, advertising consultants, experts in “communication” as it is called today. This did not mean an end to state involvement; quite the contrary, it continued a process begun during the war of constant osmosis between the state and private industry. Propaganda did not go away, but it did disappear: it became such a ubiquitous and normal part of everyday life that it became invisible, one of the most insidious and powerful elements of today’s “totalitarian democracy”. When George Orwell wrote his great and chilling novel 1984 (in 1948, hence the title), he imagined a future where every citizen would be obliged to have a screen installed in his home through which he could be subjected to state propaganda: sixty years on, people buy their own TV sets, and willingly sit down to be entertained by products whose sophistication leaves Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth in the shade.3

The approach of war confronted Europe’s ruling classes with a historically unprecedented problem, though the full implications only emerged as war progressed. First, this was a total war involving vast masses of troops: never before in the modern world had such a proportion of the male population been under arms. Second – and in part as a result – the war involved the entire civilian population in the manufacture of military supplies both directly offensive (canon, rifles, ammunition...) and equipment (uniforms, food, transport). Men were conscripted en masse to the front; women were drawn en masse into the factories and hospitals. The war also had to be financed; it was impossible to take on such enormous costs through taxation, and a major preoccupation of state propaganda was to call on the nation’s savings through the sale of war bonds. Because the whole population was directly involved in the war, the whole population had to be convinced that the war was right and necessary, and this was not something that could simply be assumed in advance:

So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations that every war must appear to be a war of defence against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about whom the public is to hate. The war must not be due to a world system of conducting inter national affairs, nor to the stupidity or malevolence of all governing classes, but to the rapacity of the enemy. Guilt and guilelessness must be assessed geographically, and all the guilt must be on the other side of the frontier. If the propagandist is to mobilize the hate of the people, he must see to it that everything is circulated which establishes the sole responsibility of the enemy. Variations from this theme may be permitted under certain contingencies which we shall undertake to specify, but it must continue to be the leading motif.

The governments of Western Europe can never be perfectly certain that a class-conscious proletariat within the borders of their authority will rally to the clarion of war”.4

Propaganda, communist and capitalist

Etymologically the word propaganda means that which is to be propagated, distributed, from the Latin propagare: to distribute. It was used notably in the name of an organism of the Catholic Church created in 1622: the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Ministry for Propagating the Faith). By the end of the 18th century, with the bourgeois revolutions the term also began to be used for propaganda in secular activities, especially for the spreading of political ideas. In What is to be done?, Lenin followed Plekhanov, saying that: “A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but he presents them to a mass of people.

In his 1897 text on “The tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats”, Lenin insisted on the importance of “spreading by propaganda the teachings of scientific socialism (…) spreading among the workers a proper understanding of the present social and economic system, its basis and its development, an understanding of the various classes in (…) society, of their interrelations, of the struggle between these classes (…) an understanding of the historical task of international Social-Democracy...”. Over and over again, Lenin insists on the need to educate conscious workers (“Letter to the Northern Union of the RSDLP, 1902), that to do this the propagandists must first educate themselves, must read, study and gain experience (“Letter to a comrade on our organisational tasks”, September 1902), that the socialists consider themselves heirs to the best of previous culture (“What heritage do we reject?”, 1897). Propaganda then, for communists, is education, the development of consciousness and a critical spirit, inseparable from a determined and conscious effort by the workers themselves to acquire this consciousness.

Compare this to Bernays: “The steam engine, the multiple press, and the public school, that trio of the industrial revolution, have taken the power away from kings and given it to the people. The people actually gained power which the king lost. For economic power tends to draw after it political power; and the history of the industrial revolution shows how that power passed from the king and the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage reinforced this tendency, and at last even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.

Today, however, a reaction has set in. the minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities. It has been found possible so to mould the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction (…) Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all received identical imprints (…)

As a matter of fact, the practice of propaganda since the war has assumed very different forms from those prevalent twenty years ago. This new technique may fairly be called the new propaganda.

It takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. It sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organism but as a cell organized into the social unit. Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism.5

Bernays had been deeply impressed by the theories of Freud, in particular his work Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (“Group psychology and the analysis of the Ego”); far from seeking to educate and develop the conscious mind, he considered that the work of the propagandist was to manipulate the unconscious. “Trotter and Le Bon”, he wrote, “concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits, and emotions” (op.cit. p73). Consequently, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing about it?” (p71). In whose name is this manipulation to be undertaken? Bernays uses the expression “invisible government”, and it is clear that he is referring here to the big bourgeoisie or even to its upper reaches: “The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public’s thoughts and actions is likewise expensive” (op.cit. p63).

Organising for war

Bernays’ book was written in 1928, and drew in large part on his work as a propagandist during the war. But in August 1914 this was still in the future. European governments had long been accustomed to manipulating the press by “planting” stories and even complete articles, but now this had to be organised – like the war itself – on an industrial scale: the aim, as the German General Ludendorff wrote, was “to mould public opinion without appearing to do so”.6

There is a striking difference in the approach adopted by the continental powers, and that taken by Britain and later America. On the continent, propaganda was first and foremost a military affair. The Austrians, surprisingly, were quickest off the mark: on 28th July 1914, while the war was still a localised conflict between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the KuK KriegsPressequartier (Imperial and Royal war press bureau) was established as a division of the Army High Command. In Germany, control of propaganda was at first divided between the Army General Staff’s War Press Office and the Nachrichtenabteilung (News Department) of the Foreign Ministry, which was limited to organising propaganda in neutral countries; in 1917, the military created the Deutsche Kriegsnachrichtendienst (German War News Service), which kept control of propaganda to the end.7 In France, a Section d’Information publishing military bulletins and later whole articles, was set up in October 1914 as a division of Military Intelligence. Under General Nivelle, this became a “Service d’Information pour les Armées”, and it was this organism that accredited journalists to the front. The Foreign Ministry had its own “Bureau de la Presse et de l’Information”, and it was only in 1916 that the two were brought together in a single “Maison de la Presse”.

Britain, with its 150 years experience of running a vast empire on the basis of a small island population, was both more informal and more secretive. The War Propaganda Bureau set up in 1914 was run not by the military, but by the Liberal politician Charles Masterman. It was never known by this name, but simply as “Wellington House”, a building housing the National Insurance Commission which the Propaganda Bureau used as a front. At least at the outset, Masterman concentrated on coordinating the work of well-known authors like John Buchan and HG Wells,8 and the Bureau’s output was impressive: by 1915 it had published 2.5 million books, as well as circulating a newsletter to 360 American newspapers.9 By the end of the war, Britain's propaganda effort was in the hands of two newspaper magnates: Lord Northcliffe (owner of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror) was in charge of British propaganda first in the USA then in enemy countries, while Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, took responsibility for a full-blown Ministry of Information that was to replace the Propaganda Bureau. Lloyd George, Britain’s Prime Minister during the war, responded to protests at the undue influence thus handed to the press barons, that “he had found that only newspapermen could do the job”. This is according to Lasswell who goes on to remark that “Newspapermen win their daily bread by telling their tales in terse, vivid style. They know how to get over to the average man in the street, and to exploit his vocabulary, prejudices, and enthusiasms (…) they are not hampered by what Dr Johnson has termed ‘needless scrupulosity’. They have a feeling for words and moods, and they know that the public is not convinced by logic but seduced by stories”.10

When the United States entered the war in 1917, its propaganda was immediately put on an industrial footing, with all the country’s genius for logistics. According to George Creel, who ran the “Committee on Public Information”, “Thirty odd booklets were printed in several languages, 75 million copies were circulated in America, and many millions of copies were circulated abroad () The Four-Minute Men11 commanded the volunteer services of 75,000 speakers, operating in 5,200 communities, and making a total of 775,190 speeches12 () it used 1,438 drawings prepared by volunteers for the production of posters, window cards and similar material () Moving pictures were commercially successful in America and effective abroad, such as Pershings Crusaders, Americas answer, and Under 4 Flags, etc”.13

The mention of volunteers is significant of the developing symbiosis between the overt state apparatus and civil society that is characteristic of democratic state capitalism: thus Germany had its Pan-German League and its Fatherland Party, Britain its Council of Loyal British Subjects and British Empire Union, and America its American Patriotic League and Patriotic Order of Sons of America (which were essentially vigilante groups).

On a grander scale, the film industry14 acted both independently and under government auspices, and in a less formal mixture of the two. In Britain, the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee – not strictly a government agency but rather an informal grouping of MPs – commissioned the recruiting film You! In 1915. On the other hand, the first major feature-length movie of the war – The Battle of the Somme, 1916 – was produced by an industry cartel, the British Topical Committee for War Films, which paid for permits to film at the front and then sold the resulting film to the government. In Germany, the film producer Oskar Messner established a virtual monopoly over war reporting thanks to his control of government permits to film at the front. Towards the end of the war, in 1917, Ludendorff established the Universum-Film-AG (known as Ufa) for the purpose of “patriotic instruction”; it was financed jointly by state and private industry, and after the war was to become Europe’s biggest private film company.15

To conclude on a technical note. Perhaps the greatest single prize in the propaganda war was the support of the United States. The British here had an immense advantage: right at the outset of the war, the Royal Navy cut Germany’s undersea transatlantic cable, and from then on all communication between Europe and the Americas could only pass through London. Germany attempted to respond using the world’s first radio transmitter at Nauen, but this was before radio had become a means of mass communication and its impact was marginal at most.

The purpose of propaganda

What was propaganda for? At the most general level, propaganda aimed at something that had never been done before: to bind together all the material, physical, and psychological energies of the nation and to direct them towards a single aim – the crushing defeat of the enemy.

Relatively little propaganda was aimed directly at the troops in combat. This may seem paradoxical, but it reveals a certain reality at the foundation of all propaganda: although its underlying theme is a lie – the idea that the nation is united, above social classes, and that all have an equal interest in its defence – it loses its effectiveness when it is too much at odds with the lived reality of those it aims to influence.16

Troops at the front in World War I generally derided the grossest propaganda directed at them, and succeeded in producing their own “press” which caricatured the yellow press delivered to them in the trenches: the British had the Wipers Times,17 the French had La Rire aux Éclats, Le Poilu, and Le Crapouillot. German troops did not believe their propaganda either: in July 1915, a Saxon regiment at Ypres sent a message to the British line, asking them to “Send us an English newspaper so that we may hear the verity”.

Propaganda was also aimed at enemy troops, the French and British in particular taking advantage of the prevailing westerly winds to send balloons to drop leaflets over Germany. There is little evidence that this had very much effect.

The main emphasis, then, was on the home front, rather than the fighting troops, and here we can distinguish several main aims whose relative importance varied according to the specific circumstances of each country. Three stand out especially:

  1. Financing the war. Even at the outset, it was obvious that normal income would not meet the cost of the conflict, which rose dramatically as the war dragged on. The solution was to call on the nation’s accumulated savings through war loans, which remained voluntary even in the autocratic regimes.18

  2. Recruitment for the armed forces. For the powers of the European continent, where compulsory military service was a long-standing fact,19 the issue of recruitment did not really arise. In the British Empire and the United States it was another matter: Britain only introduced conscription in 1916, Canada did so in 1917, while in Australia two referendums on conscription were defeated and the country relied entirely on volunteers; in the USA, a Draft Bill was ready as soon as the country entered the war, but the lack of enthusiasm for the war among the working population was such that the government in effect had to “recruit” Americans to support the Draft.

  3. Support for industry and agriculture. The nation’s entire productive apparatus must be constantly keyed to the highest pitch and directed wholly to military purposes. Inevitably this means austerity for the population in general, but it also means a vast upheaval in the organisation of industry and agriculture: the men at war must be replaced by women in the fields and factories.

So much for the Home Front, but what of abroad? The 1914-18 war was, for the first time in history, a truly world war and as such the attitudes adopted by neutrals and allies could be of critical importance. The question was posed immediately by Britain's economic blockade of the German coast, imposed on all shipping including that of neutrals: what attitude to this clear violation of international agreements on the freedom of the seas would neutral governments adopt? But by far the most important effort towards neutral states was aimed by both sides at bringing the USA – the only great industrial power not involved in war from the beginning – into the conflict. America’s intervention on behalf of the Entente was by no means a foregone conclusion: it might remain neutral, picking up the pieces once the Europeans had fought themselves to exhaustion; should it enter the war, it might even do so on the German side: Britain was its main commercial and imperial rival, and there was an old historical antipathy to Britain going back to the American revolution and the 1812 war between the two countries.

How propaganda worked

The propaganda objectives that we have just outlined are, in themselves, rational, or at the least accessible to rational analysis. But this begs the question that the vast mass of the population might well have asked: why should we fight? what is this war for? Why, in short, is propaganda necessary? How can millions of men be persuaded to hurl themselves into the maelstrom of murder that was the Western Front, year after year? How can millions of civilians be made to accept the slaughter of sons, brothers, husbands, the physical exhaustion of factory labour and the privations of rationing?

The reasoning of pre-capitalist societies no longer held true. As Lasswell points out: “The bonds of personal loyalty and affection which bound a man to his chief have long since dissolved. Monarchy and class privilege have gone the way of all flesh and the idolatry of the individual passes for the official religion of democracy. It is an atomised world...”.20 But capitalism is not only the atomisation of the individual, it has also called into being a social class inherently opposed to war and capable of overthrowing the existing order, a revolutionary class unlike any other because its political power is founded on consciousness and understanding. It is a class which capitalism itself has been forced to educate so that it can fulfil its role in the productive process. How then to appeal to a literate working class schooled in political debate?

In these conditions, propaganda “is a concession to the rationality of the modern world. A literate world, a schooled world, prefers to thrive on argument and news () All the apparatus of diffused erudition popularizes the symbols and forms of pseudo-rational appeal: the wolf of propaganda does not hesitate to masquerade in the sheepskin. All the voluble men of the day writers, reporters, editors, preachers, lecturers, teachers, politicians are drawn into the service of propaganda to amplify a master voice. All is conducted with the decorum and trappery of intelligence, for this is a rational epoch, and demands its raw meat cooked and garnished by adroit and skilful chefs”. These “new chefs” must serve up the “raw meat” of unavowable emotion: “A new flame must burn out the canker of dissent and temper the steel of bellicose enthusiasm”.21

In a sense we can say that the problem facing the ruling class in 1914 is one of different perspectives for the future: up until 1914, the Second International had repeatedly declared, in the most solemn terms, that the war which it rightly saw as imminent would be fought for the interests of the capitalist class, and had called on the international working class to oppose it with the perspective of revolution, or at the very least mass international class struggle;22 for the ruling class, the real perspective of war, of appalling bloodshed in defence of the interests of a small class of exploiters, must therefore at all costs be concealed. The bourgeois state must assure itself of the monopoly of propaganda by smashing or seducing the organisations which give expression to the working-class perspective, and at the same time hide its own perspective under the illusion that the conquest of the enemy will open up a new period of peace and prosperity – a “new world order”, as George Bush once put it.

This introduces two fundamentals of war propaganda: “war aims”, and the hatred of the enemy. The two are closely connected. “To mobilize the hatred of the people against the enemy, represent the opposing nation as a menacing, murderous aggressor () It is through the elaboration of war aims that the obstructive role of the enemy becomes particularly evident. Represent the opposing nation as satanic; it violates all the moral standards (mores) of the group and insults its self-esteem. The maintenance of hatred depends upon supplementing the direct representations of the menacing, obstructive, satanic enemy, by assurances of ultimate victory”.23

Already prior to the war, a good deal of work had been done by psychologists on the existence and nature of what Gustave Le Bon24 called the “group mind”, a form of collective unconscious formed by “the crowd” in the sense of the anonymous mass of atomised individuals, cut off from social ties and obligations, which is characteristic of capitalist society and especially of the petty bourgeoisie. Lasswell comments that “Every school of psychological thought seems to agree () that war is a type of influence, which has vast capacities for releasing repressed impulses and for allowing their external manifestations in direct form. There is thus a general consensus that the propagandist is able to count upon very primitive and powerful allies in mobilising his subjects for war-time hatred of the enemy”. He also quotes from John A Hobson’s The psychology of jingoism (1900),25 which speaks of “a coarse patriotism, fed by the wildest rumours and the most violent appeals to hate and the animal lust for blood, [that] passes by quick contagion through the crowded life of the cities, and recommends itself everywhere by the satisfaction it affords to the sensational cravings. It is less the savage feeling for personal participation in the fray than the feeling of a neurotic imagination that marks Jingoism”.26

There is a certain contradiction here nonetheless. Capitalism, as Rosa Luxemburg said, likes to present, and indeed has, a cultured self-image;27 yet beneath the surface lies a seething volcano of hatred and violence which occasionally breaks through into the open – or is put to use by the ruling class. The question remains: is this violence a return to primal aggressive instincts or is it caused by the neurotic, anti-human nature of capitalist society? It is certainly true that human beings have asocial, aggressive instincts as well as social ones. Yet there is a fundamental difference between the social life of archaic societies and capitalism. In the former, aggression is held in check and regulated by a whole web of social interactions and obligations outside of which life is not merely impossible but unimaginable. In capitalism, the tendency is towards the individual’s detachment from all social ties and responsibilities,28 whence an immense emotional impoverishment and a lack of resistance to the anti-social instincts.

An important element of the culture of hatred within capitalist society, is the guilty conscience. This did not appear with capitalism: on the contrary, if we follow Freud it is an ancient attainment of human culture. Human beings’ ability to think and so to choose between two different courses of action places them before the choice between good and evil, and hence before moral conflict. The sense of guilt is a consequence of this very freedom, which is both a product of culture springing from the ability to think, yet at the same time largely unconscious and so open to manipulation. One mechanism that the unconscious uses to deal with guilt is through projection: guilt is projected onto "the other". The guilty conscience’s self-hatred is relieved by being projected towards the outside, onto those who have suffered injustice and who are thus the cause of guilty feelings.

Some might object that capitalism is hardly the first society in which murder, exploitation, and oppression have existed – and this of course is true. The difference with all previous societies is that capitalism claims to be based on the “rights of man”: when Genghis Khan massacred the population of Khorasan, he did not claim to be doing it for their own good. The oppressed, enslaved, and exploited populations of imperialistic capitalism weigh on the conscience of bourgeois society, whatever the self-serving justifications (usually backed up by the church) it may have invented for itself. Prior to World War I, the hatred of bourgeois society had been directed logically against the most downtrodden sections of society: the precursors to the hate-mongering images of Germans are thus to be found in the caricatures of the Irish in Britain, and the negroes in the United States in particular.

Hatred of the enemy is far more effective if it can be combined with a conviction in one’s own righteousness. Hatred and humanitarianism are thus close companions in war-time.

It is striking that the politically more backward, autocratic regimes of Germany and Austria-Hungary were unable to wield these weapons with the success and sophistication of the British and French, and later the Americans. Most caricatural in this respect was Austria-Hungary, a sprawling multi-ethnic empire made up in large part of minorities infected by a fractious nationalism. Its semi-feudal, aristocratic ruling caste, cut off from the aspirations of its population, had none of the versatile unscrupulousness of a Poincaré, a Clemenceau, or a Lloyd George. Its social vision was limited to the Vienna Ring, a multi-cultural city of which Stefan Zweig could write that “Life was pleasant in this atmosphere of spiritual conciliation and, all unbeknown to himself, each bourgeois of this city was raised by his education to that cosmopolitanism which repudiates all narrow nationalism, to the dignity, in short, of a citizen of the world”. Small wonder then, that Austro-Hungarian propaganda combined medieval imagery with art nouveau style: St George overcoming an enemy reduced to the mythical anonymity of a dragon; of the handsome prince in shining armour escorting his lady to the sunlit kingdom of peace (both these posters are for war loans).

For all its brutal Prussian heavy-handedness, the German aristocratic caste still preserved a certain sense of noblesse oblige, at least in its own vision of itself that it sought to portray to the outside world. According to Lasswell, German ineffectiveness could be blamed on the lack of imagination of the Germany military, who kept control of the propaganda throughout, but there was more to it than that: in early 1915 the Leitsätze der Oberzensurstelle (the censorship bureau) laid down the following guidelines for journalists: “The language towards the enemy states can be hard () The pureness and the greatness of the movement that seized our people demand a dignified language () Calls for barbaric warfare, extermination of foreign people are disgusting; the army knows where severity and clemency should reign. Our shield must remain pure. Similar callings by the enemy yellow press are no excuse for such behaviour on our part”.

The British and French had no such qualms, any more than did the Americans.29

The contrast between the British and German handling of the Edith Cavell affair is striking in this respect. Edith Cavell was a British nurse who worked for the Red Cross in Belgium, continuing to do so under the German occupation. At the same time, she was helping British, French and Belgian troops escape to Britain via Holland (there have also been unconfirmed suggestions that she was working for British intelligence). Cavell was arrested by the Germans, tried and found guilty of treason under German military law, and shot by firing squad in 1915. This was a gift from heaven for the British, who raised an enormous scandal aimed both at recruitment in Britain and at discrediting the German cause in the USA. A torrent of posters, postcards, pamphlets and even postage stamps kept the tragic fate of nurse Cavell constantly before the public mind (in this poster she appears a good deal younger than she was in reality).

Not only were the Germans hopelessly inept at responding, they proved equally incapable of using their own opportunities. “Shortly after the Allies had created the most tremendous uproar about the execution of Nurse Cavell, the French executed two German nurses under substantially the same circumstances”, Lasswell tells us.30 An American newspaperman asked the officer in charge of German propaganda why they did not “raise the devil about those nurses the French shot the other day”, to which the German replied: “What? Protest? The French had a perfect right to shoot them!”.

The British made enormous use of Germany’s occupation of Belgium, not without a good dose of cynicism since the German invasion merely forestalled Britain’s own war plans. Much was made of the most lurid atrocity stories: German troops were bayoneting babies, making soap out of corpses, tying priests upside-down on the clappers of their own church bells, etc., etc. To give such fanciful tales more weight, the British commissioned a report on “Alleged German atrocities”, chaired by Viscount James Bryce, who had been a respected ambassador to the USA (1907-13) and was known as a scholar imbued with, and sympathetic to, German culture (he had studied at Heidelberg) – so many guarantees of impartiality. Since atrocities are inevitable when a raw conscript army officered by political incompetents is engaged among a rebellious civilian population,31 some of those condemned by the “Bryce Report” as it became known, were undoubtedly true. However, there is no doubt either that the Committee was unable to interview any witnesses of the supposed atrocities, and that the majority were pure fabrications especially the most revolting tales of rape and mutilation. Nor were the Allies above using a touch of pornographic sensationalism, with posters portraying women in suggestive states of undress, a simultaneous appeal to prudery and salaciousness.

The appeals for help to Belgian widows and orphans issued by organisations like the “Committee for Belgian Relief”, with the aid of an illustrious galaxy of literary stars, including (in Britain) Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and George Bernard Shaw amongst the best known,32 or for funds to support the Belgian Red Cross, were the precursors of today’s “humanitarian” military interventions supported by intellectuals like Bernard Henri-Lévy (though one would hesitate to compare, in terms of talent, an Henri-Lévy with a Thomas Hardy). The plight of Belgium, indeed, was used over and over again in a multitude of contexts: in recruitment, to denounce German barbarism or perfidious disregard for diplomatic treaties (much was made of Germany’s reneging on its commitment to honour and defend Belgian neutrality), and, importantly, to win American sympathy for the Franco-British cause.

German attempts to respond to the barrage of Allied hate campaigns, based on atrocity stories and cultural animosity, remained legalistic, literal-minded, and unimaginative. In effect, the Germans remained on the back foot, constantly forced to react to Allied attacks and incapable making effective use of the Allies’ own contraventions of international law – as we can see in the Cavell case.

In writing of hate campaigns and atrocities, Lasswell makes the point that “It is always difficult for many simple minds inside a nation to attach personal traits to so dispersed an enemy as a whole nation. They need to have some individual on whom to pin their hate. It is therefore important to single out a handful of enemy leaders and load them down with the whole decalogue of sins”. And he continues, “No personality drew more abuse of this sort in the last war than the Kaiser”.33 The Kaiser was made to epitomise everything barbaric, militaristic, brutal, autocratic – “The Mad Dog of Europe”, as he was christened by the British Daily Express, or even the Beast of the Apocalypse according to the Parisian Liberté. The parallels with the propaganda use of Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are obvious.

Hatred of what is different, of whatever is outside the group, is a powerful unifying psychological force. Warfare – and above all the total war of national masses – demands that the nation’s psychological energies be welded into a single effort. The entire nation must be aware of itself as a unity, which means eradicating from conscious awareness the indubitable fact that this unity is unreal, a myth, since in reality the nation is made up of opposing classes with antagonistic interests. One way of achieving this is to emphasise a figurehead of national unity, which may be real, symbolic, or both. The autocratic regimes had the ruler: the Tsar in Russia, the Kaiser in Germany, the Emperor in Austria-Hungary. Britain had the King and the symbolic figure of Britannia, France and the United States had the Republic, personified respectively as Marianne and Liberty. The drawback of such positive symbolism is that it can also fall victim to criticism especially should the war go badly. The Kaiser, after all, was also a figure of Prussian militarism and junkerdom which was far from arousing universal enthusiasm in Germany; the King in Britain could also be associated with an arrogant and privileged aristocratic ruling caste. Hatred directed outside the nation, at the enemy, has no such disadvantages. The hated figure’s defeats may make him contemptible but never less hateful, while his successes only make him more so. “The leader or leading idea might also, so to speak, be negative; hatred against a particular person or institution might operate in just the same unifying way, and might call up the same kind of emotional ties as positive attachment”.34 We are tempted, indeed, to say that the more society is fractured and atomised, the sharper the real class contradictions within it, the greater the emotional and spiritual emptiness of its mental life, the greater are its reserves of frustration and hatred and the more effectively can these be redirected into hatred of an external enemy. Or to put it another way, the further a society has moved towards advanced capitalist totalitarianism, be it Stalinist, fascist or democratic, the more will the ruling class use hatred of the outside as a means to unite an atomised and disunited social bodyody.

It was only in 1918 that posters appeared in Germany, that could be said to prefigure the Nazis anti-Jewish propaganda. It was directed, not against Germany’s military enemies, but against the internal threat from the working class, and especially from its most combative, class-conscious and dangerous element: Spartacus.

These posters were both produced by a right-wing “Union for struggle against Bolshevism”, allied to the same Freikorps units of disbanded soldiers and lumpen elements that were to assassinate Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, at the behest of the Social-Democratic government. One wonders what workers thought of the idea that it was Bolshevism that was responsible for “War, unemployment, and hunger” as the poster on the right pretends.

Just as the SPD used the Freikorps while disowning it, the poster above – presumably by the SPD since the baby is clutching a red flag – avoids referring to Bolshevism or Spartakus directly, but still puts out the same message: “Dont strangle baby Freedom with disorder and crime! Otherwise, our children will die of hunger!”.

The psychology of propaganda

For Bernays, as we have seen above, propaganda was directed at the “impulses, habits, and emotions” of the masses. It seems to us undeniable that the theories of Le Bon, Trotter, and Freud on the over-riding importance of the unconscious mind, and above all what Bernays terms the “group mind”, strongly influenced the production of propaganda, at least in the Allied countries. It is therefore worth considering its themes in this light. Rather than concerning ourselves with the fairly straightforward message - “support the war” - let us look at its vehicle: the emotional wellsprings that propaganda sought to press into service.

We are struck first by the fact that this overwhelmingly patriarchal society, engaged in warfare whose combatants are all men and where war is still seen as a strictly male preserve, choose women as a national symbol: Britannia, Marianne, Liberty, Eternal Rome. These female figures can be extremely ambiguous. Britannia – a mixture of Athena and the indigenous Boadicea – tends to be statuesque and regal, but she can also be motherly, sometimes explicitly so; Marianne, bare-breasted, is generally heroic but she can be downright alluring on occasion, as can Roma; Liberty manages to play in every key – majestic, maternal, and enticing all at once.

Britain and America also have their father symbols: John Bull and Uncle Sam, both of whom are shown pointing sternly out of their posters “wanting YOU! For the armed forces”. One British poster rather optimistically features a marriage of Britannia with Uncle Sam.

The real art of propaganda lies in suggestion rather than clarity, and this ambiguous combination, or rather confusion of imagery, loads the message with all the powerful emotions of childhood and family. Guilt fuelled by sexual desire and sexual shame is a powerful driver, especially for the young men at whom the recruiting campaigns were directed. These were critical in the “Anglo-Saxon” countries where conscription was introduced late (Britain, Canada), with much controversy (USA) or not at all (Australia). In Britain, indeed, the use of sexual shame was made absolutely explicit, in the “White Feather campaign” organised by Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, with the enthusiastic support of the suffragette leaders Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst: this involved recruiting young women to hand a white feather – a traditional symbol of cowardice – to men not in uniform.35

The “King Kong” coiffed with a German helmet (in the poster above), and carrying a semi-naked female, is a typically American effort to manipulate feelings of sexual insecurity. The black ape ravishing the white innocent is a classic theme of the anti-negro propaganda prevalent in the United States well into the 1950s and 60s, which played on the supposed “animality” and sexual prowess of black men portrayed as a threat to “civilised” white womanhood, and of course by implication to her male “protector”.36 This made it possible, in the American south, for the white planter aristocracy to tie the “poor white trash” to support for the existing order of segregation and class rule, whereas their real material interests should have made them natural allies of the black worker.37 The myth of “white superiority”, with all its accompanying emotions of sexual shame, fear, domination and violence, infested American society including the working class – prior to World War I, the only union to form chapters where blacks and whites were on an equal footing, was the revolutionary syndicalist IWW.38

The other side of the coin to sexual shame and fear is the image of “man as protector”. The modern soldier, a worker in uniform whose life in the trenches will be one of mud, lice, and imminent death from shells and bullets fired by an enemy he cannot even see, is portrayed over and over again as the gallant defender of hearth and home against a bestial (if often unseen) foe.

Propaganda thereby carried out a veritable hijack on one of the proletariat’s prime principles: solidarity. From its beginnings, the working class had had to fight for the protection of women and children, especially to shield them from the unhealthiest or most dangerous employment, to limit their working hours, or to outlaw their subjection to night work. By protecting the reproduction that only women can assume, the workers’ movement took on the solidarity both between the sexes and towards future generations, just as the creation of the first retirement pension funds outside state control expressed its solidarity towards the older generations no longer apt for work.

At the same time, from the outset marxism has both defended the equal status of the sexes as a condition sine qua non of communist society, and shown that women’s emancipation through wage labour is a precondition for this objective.

Nonetheless, it is undeniable that patriarchal attitudes remained deeply anchored in society as a whole, including in the working class: we will not be rid of millennia of patriarchy in a few decades. To assert their independence, women still had to organise separately in special sections within the unions and the socialist parties. Rosa Luxemburg’s example is striking in this respect: the SPD leadership thought they could reduce her influence by encouraging her to limit herself to the organisation of "women’s business" – something she refused outright. Propaganda sought to subvert solidarity with women by transforming it into the "chivalrous" protection of women, which of course is nothing but the counterpart to the reality of women’s inferior status within class society.

This idea of manly duty – more especially the duty of the knight – to protect “widows and orphans” and the poor and oppressed, strikes deep roots in European civilisation, going back to the medieval church’s efforts to establish its moral authority over the warrior aristocracy. It might seem far-fetched to connect the propaganda of 1914 with an ideology promoted for very different reasons a thousand years previously. But ideologies remain like a sediment in society’s mental structures, even when their material underpinning has long disappeared. Moreover, what one might call "medievalism" was used by both the big and small bourgeoisie in Germany and Britain – and so, by extension, in the United States – during the 19th century’s massive surge industrialisation in order to give a solid foundation to the national principle. In Germany, where national unity still remained to be built, there was an entirely conscious effort to create the vision of a "volk" united by a common culture; it is to be found, for example, in the Grimm brothers great project to resuscitate the popular culture of myths and legends. In Britain, the notion of "the liberties of free-born Englishmen" could be traced back to the Magna Carta signed by King John in 1206. The medieval idiom exerted a strong influence not only in church-building – no Victorian suburb would be complete without its mock-medieval church – but also on scientific institutions like the magnificent Natural History Museum, or on railway stations like St Pancras (both in London). Not only did workers live in a physical space marked by medieval imagery, the same idiom entered the workers’ movement, for example in William Morris’ utopian novel News from Nowhere. Even in the United States, the first real trade union called itself “The Knights of Labor”. The aristocratic ideals of “chivalry” and “gallantry” were thus very present – and very real – in a society which, on the level of day-to-day economic life, was given over to greed, the ruthless exploitation of labour, and a bitter conflict between the capitalist and proletarian classes.

If war propaganda diverted the solidarity between the sexes into a reactionary chivalric ideology, it also subverted the masculine solidarity between factory workers. In 1914, any worker knew the importance of solidarity in the workplace. But despite the International, the workers’ movement remained a collection of national organisations: day-to-day solidarity was towards familiar faces. It was above all the recruitment propaganda that made use of this themes, and nowhere more so than in Australia where there was no conscription. To show solidarity is no longer to struggle with your comrades against war, but to take your place alongside comrades in uniform, at the Front. Since this is necessarily a male solidarity, there are – as in the “defence of the family” - strong overtones of “manliness” in many of these posters.

Inevitably, pride and shame go together so that the proud assertion of masculinity that comes (or is supposed to come) with being part of a fighting corps, has its counterpoint in guilt at “not doing one’s bit”, at not sharing the manly suffering of one’s comrades. It was perhaps some such mix of emotions that drove the war poet Wilfred Owen to return to the front after recovering from a nervous breakdown, despite his horror at the war and his deep loathing for the ruling classes – and the yellow press – that he held responsible for this.39

Freud believed not only that the “group mind” was ruled by the emotional unconscious, but that it represented an atavistic return to a more primitive mental state characteristic of archaic societies and of childhood. The ego, with its usual self-conscious calculation of personal advantage, could be submerged in the “group mind” and in this condition would be capable of actions that the individual would not contemplate, both for better or for worse, becoming capable of great savagery or great heroism. Bernays and his propagandists undoubtedly agreed with this view, at least up to a point – but they were more interested in the mechanics of manipulation than with theory and they certainly did not share Freud’s deep pessimism about human civilisation and its prospects, above all after the experience of World War I. Where Freud was a scientist whose aim was to further humanity’s understanding of itself by bringing the unconscious to consciousness, Bernays – and of course his employers – were interested in the unconscious only insofar as it allowed them to manipulate a mass that must remain unconscious. Lasswell considers that one can participate in the “group mind” even when one is alone; he makes the point that propaganda seeks to be omni-present in the individual’s life, to take every opportunity (street hoardings, advertising in public transport, the press, etc.) to affect his thinking as a member of a group. We touch here on a whole range of questions far too complex to be treated in this article: the relationship between the individual’s psychology profoundly influenced by his personal history, and the prevalent “psychological energies” (for want of a better term) in society as a whole. But there can be no doubt, in our view, that these “psychological energies” exist, and that the ruling class studies them and seeks to use them in order to manipulate the mass for its own ends. Revolutionaries ignore them at their peril – not least because we do not exist outside bourgeois society and are also subjected to its influence.

Today, the war propaganda of 1914 can seem naïve, absurd, even grotesque. The 19th century’s naivety has been cauterised from society by two world wars and one hundred years of capitalist decadence and barbaric warfare. The development of cinema, television, radio, the omnipresence of the visual media, and the universal education demanded by the production process, have made society more sophisticated; it is also, perhaps, more cynical. But this does not make it immune from propaganda. On the contrary, not only have propaganda techniques been constantly refined, what was once merely commercial advertising has become one of propaganda’s principal forms. Advertising – as Bernays said it should – has long since ceased merely plugging products: it promotes a world-view within which the product becomes desirable, and this world-view is deeply, viscerally bourgeois (and petty-bourgeois) and reactionary (and never more so than when it pretends to be “rebellious”).

But the purposes of bourgeois propaganda is not only to inculcate, to propagate; it is also, perhaps even above all, to hide, to conceal. Let us remember Lasswell’s words quoted at the beginning of this article: “The war must not be due to a world system of conducting inter national affairs, nor to the stupidity or malevolence of all governing classes...”. The difference with communist propaganda is stark for the communists (as Rosa Luxemburg did in the Junius pamphlet) aim to reveal, to strip bare, to make comprehensible and therefore open to revolutionary change, the social order that confronts the working class. The ruling class seeks to submerge rational thought and conscious knowledge of social existence. The more "democratic" the society, the truer this is, for the greater the appearance of choice and "freedom", the more care must be taken to ensure that the population makes the "right choice" in complete freedom. Communist propaganda seeks on the contrary to help the revolutionary class to free itself from class society’s ideology, including when this is deeply rooted in the unconscious. It aims to ally rational consciousness with the development of the social emotions, and to make each individual aware of himself not as a helpless atom, but as one link in a great association extended not only geographically – because the working class is inherently internationalist – but also historically, into both the past and the future which we have yet to build.

Jens / Gianni, 7th June, 2015


1A book by the British pacifist Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in wartime, published in 1928, caused an enormous uproar by detailing the mendacious nature of the most widespread anti-German atrocity stories: it went through 11 print editions between 1928 and 1942.

2Edward Bernays (1891-1995) was born in Vienna, the nephew both of Sigmund Freud and of his wife Anna Bernays. His family moved to New York in the year after his birth, but as an adult he kept in close contact with his uncle and was deeply influenced by his ideas, as well as by the studies on crowd psychology published by Gustave Le Bon and William Trotter. By all accounts, he was deeply impressed by the impact that US President Woodrow Wilson made on European crowds when he toured the continent at the end of the war; he attributed this to the success of US propaganda for Wilson’s “14 Points” peace programme. In 1919 he opened an office as “Public Relations Counsellor” and became a well-known and highly influential manager of advertising campaigns for major US corporations, notably American Tobacco (Lucky Strike cigarettes) and United Fruit. His book on Propaganda can be seen as an advertising prospectus to potential clients.

3One classic early example of the symbiotic relationship between state propaganda and private PR is the 1954 publicity campaign, masterminded by Edward Bernays’ company on behalf of the United Fruit Corporation, to justify the CIA-sponsored overthrow of the newly elected Guatemalan government (which intended to nationalise uncultivated land owned by United Fruit), and its replacement by a military regime of fascist death squads, all in the name of “defending democracy”. The techniques used against Guatemala in 1954 were first sketched out by state propaganda departments during World War I.

4Harold Lasswell, Propaganda technique in the World War, 1927 (available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/). Harold Dwight Lasswell (1902-1978) was one of the foremost American political scientists of his day, introducing for the first time into the discipline, new methods based on statistical measurement, content analysis, etc. He was especially interested in the psychological aspect of politics and the workings of the “group mind”. During World War II, he worked for the American army’s political warfare unit. Although raised in small-town Illinois he had a broad education, being introduced by one of his uncles to the work of Freud, and to the works of Marx and Havelock Ellis by one of his teachers. His 1927 doctoral thesis, from which we quote extensively in this article, was probably the first in-depth study of the subject.

5Edward Bernays, Propaganda, Ig Publishing, 2005, pp47, 48, 55.

6Lasswell, op.cit., p28)

7See Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, Penguin Books, 1999, pp224-5).

8See also our article "Truth and memory, art and propaganda": https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201502/12275/truth-a...

9Ferguson, op.cit., p223

10Op.cit., p32.

11The “Four-Minute Men” were a remarkable and uniquely American invention. Volunteers would deliver a four-minute speech (on themes provided by the Creel Committee) at all kinds of places where an audience would be guaranteed: street corners during market days, in cinemas while reels were changed, and so on.

12Since the USA only entered the war in April 1917, they were delivering more than 1000 speeches every day. It is estimated that they were heard by 11 million people.

13Quoted in Lasswell, op.cit., pp211-212. We have limited ourselves to the most significant elements in Creel’s list.

14Cinema, despite being silent, was already a major medium of public entertainment. In Britain alone in 1917, there were already more than 4000 cinemas playing to audiences of 20 million every week (cf. John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, Manchester University Press, 1984, p69).

15Cf. Ferguson, op.cit., pp226-225

16We can take two admittedly extreme examples to illustrate this point: it was notorious, by the 1980s, that nobody in the Eastern Bloc countries believed any official propaganda; by the end of World War II, the German population no longer believed anything they read in print – with the exception, for some, of the horoscope, which was duly prepared every day by the Propaganda Ministry (cf. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, MacMillan 1970, pp410-411.

17“Wipers” being the English distortion of Ypres, the section of the front where a large part of the British army was concentrated and which saw one of the war’s most murderous engagements.

18The war was also financed through loans abroad, most importantly by France and Britain borrowing in the United States. “As [President] Woodrow Wilson put it, the beauty of having financial leverage over Britain and France was that when the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking” (Ferguson, op.cit., p329).

19Indeed, shortly before the outbreak of war the French had raised the duration of military service to three years.

20Lasswell, op.cit., p222

21Lasswell, op.cit., p221

22This was the public, official agitation of the International. Events were tragically to show that the International’s apparent strength hid a profound weakness which in 1914 led its constituent parties to betray the workers’ cause and lend their support to their respective ruling classes. See our article 1914: How the 2nd International failed.

23Lasswell, op.cit., p195

24Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) was a French anthropologist and psychologist, whose major work La psychologie des foules was published in 1895.

25John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940) was a British economist who opposed the development of imperialism, believing it contained the seeds of international conflict. Lenin drew extensively on (and polemicised with) Hobson’s major work Imperialism (1902), in his own Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.

26“Jingoism” is an English term for aggressive patriotism, derived from a popular British song at the time of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877:

We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do

We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too

We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true

The Russians shall not have Constantinople”.

27The “cultured surface” is not only a mask. Capitalist society also contains within itself a dynamic towards the development of culture, science, and art. To deal with this here however, would take too long and distract from our main argument.

28Or as Margaret Thatcher once said, there is no society, only individuals and their families.

29The postcard contains a “poem” supposedly written by a French infantryman to his daughter on the theme “What is a Boche (perjorative French term for a German)?

“Do you want to know, child, what is this monster, a Boche?

A Boche, dear, is a being without honour,

A cunning heavy-handed bandit, full of hatred and ugly with it,

A Bogeyman, a poisoning Ogre!

He’s the Devil disguised as a soldier who burns down villages,

Shoots the old men and women, without remorse,

Finishes off the wounded and robs the dead!

He’s a cowardly cut-throat of children and little girls,

Spitting babies with his bayonet,

Killing for pleasure, for no reason, without pity!

This is the man, my child, who wants to kill your father,

Destroy the Fatherland and torture your mother!

This is the Teuton damned by the whole Universe!”

30Op. cit., p32

31We need only remember the example of the Vietnam war, where atrocities such as the My Lai massacre were frequent and attested.

32Cf. Lasswell, op.cit., p138

33Lasswell, op.cit., p88. Though one wonders whether one should consider it a “quality” of less “simple” minds that they should be capable of hating an entire nation without a hate figure to focus on...

34Freud, Group psychology..., quoted in Adorno, Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda.

35As can be imagined, this was deeply resented by men on leave from the front, when they found themselves being given a white feather, but it could also be devastating: the present author’s grandfather was a 17-year old apprentice in a Newcastle steel works when he was given a white feather by his own sister – driving him to enlist in the Navy by lying about his age.

36Given that – in a white-dominated patriarchal society – sexual predation was above all the fact of white males on black women, this would almost be funny were it not so vile.

37As was indeed the case, embryonically, in the 18th century: cf Howard Zinn’s Peoples history of the United States.

38International Workers of the World.

39Owen’s motivations were certainly much more complicated, as they must be for an individual. He was also an officer, and felt a responsibility towards “his” men.

 

Historic events: 

General and theoretical questions: 

People: 

Rubric: 

World War I

Zimmerwald and the centrist currents in the political organisations of the proletariat

The article we publish here is a contribution by comrade MC to the internal debate of the 1980s, with the aim of fighting against centrist positions towards councilism within the ICC. MC was the signature of Marc Chirik (1907-1990), a former militant of the communist left and the main founding member of the ICC (see International Reviews nºs 61 and 62).

It may seem surprising that a text whose title refers to the Zimmerwald Conference held in September 1915 against the imperialist war was written in the context of an internal debate in the ICC around the question of councilism. In fact, as the reader will see, this debate was obliged to widen out to more general questions which had already been posed for a century and which are just as relevant today.

We have given an account of this debate on centrism towards councilism in issues nº40 to 44 of the International Review (1985-6). We refer the reader in particular to the article in issue nº 42 of the Review, “Centrist slidings towards councilism”. This article presents the origins of the debate which we will summarise here in order to make certain aspects of MC’s polemic more understandable.

At the 5th congress of the ICC, and especially afterwards, a series of confusions emerged within the organisation with regard to the analysis of the international situation; in particular, a position on the development of consciousness within the proletariat which was influenced by a councilist vision. This position was mainly put forward by comrades of the section in Spain (referred to as “AP” in MC’s text, the name of the section’s publication, Acción Proletaria).

The comrades who identified with this analysis thought that they were in agreement with the classic theses of marxism (and of the ICC) on the problem of class consciousness. In particular, they never explicitly rejected the necessity for an organisation of revolutionaries in the development of consciousness. But in fact, they had ended up with a councilist vision:

  • by presenting consciousness as a determined and never a determining factor in the class struggle;

  • by considering that the ‘one and only crucible of class consciousness is the massive, open struggle’, which leaves no place for revolutionary organisations;

  • by denying any possibility of the latter carrying out the work of developing and deepening class consciousness in phases of reflux in the struggle.

The only major difference between this vision and councilism is that the latter takes the approach to its logical conclusion by explicitly rejecting the necessity for communist organisation whereas our comrades did not go as far as this.” 1

One of the major themes of this approach was the rejection of the notion of the “subterranean maturation of consciousness”, which actually meant excluding the possibility of revolutionary organisations developing and deepening communist consciousness outside the open struggles of the working class.

As soon as he became aware of the documents that expressed this point of view, our comrade MC wrote a contribution aimed at combating it. In January 1984, the plenary meeting of the central organ of the ICC adopted a resolution that took position on the erroneous analyses which had been expressed, in particular on the councilist conceptions involved:

When this resolution was adopted, the ICC comrades who had previously developed the thesis of ‘no subterranean maturation', with all its councilist implications, acknowledged the error they had made. Thus they pronounced themselves firmly in favour of this resolution and notably of point 7 whose specific function was to reject the analyses which they had previously elaborated. But at the same time, other comrades raised disagreements with point 7 which led them either to reject it en bloc or to vote for it ‘with reservations', rejecting some of its formulations. We thus saw the appearance within the organisation of an approach which, without openly supporting the councilist theses, served as a shield or umbrella for these theses by rejecting the organisation's clear condemnation of them or attenuating their significance. Against this approach, the ICC's central organ was led in March ‘84 to adopt a resolution recalling the characteristics of:

  • ‘opportunism as a manifestation of the penetration of bourgeois ideology into proletarian organizations, and which is mainly expressed by:

  • a rejection or covering up of revolutionary principles and of the general framework of marxist analyses;

  • a lack of firmness in the defence of these principles;

  • centrism as a particular form of opportunism characterised by:

  • a phobia about intransigent, frank and decisive positions, positions that take their implications to their conclusions;

  • the systematic adoption of medium positions between antagonistic ones;

  • a taste for conciliation between these positions;

  • the search for a role of arbiter between these positions;

  • the search for the unity of the organisation at any price, including that of confusion, concession on matters of principle, and a lack of rigour, coherence and cohesion in analyses.’

And the resolution concludes that ‘within the ICC at the moment there is a tendency towards centrism - ie towards conciliation and lack of firmness - with regard to councilism.’”2

In response to this analysis, a certain number of “reservists”, rather than taking the analyses of the organisation into consideration in a serious and rigorous way, adopted a classically centrist approach, evading the real questions and engaging in a whole series of contortions that were as spectacular as they were lamentable. The text by McIntosh3 to which MC was replying was a flagrant illustration of this kind of evasion, defending a thesis that was very simple (and unprecedented): there can’t be any centrism towards councilism in the ICC because centrism cannot exist in the period of capitalist decadence.

Thus, as we saw earlier, although at the beginning the debate of 1985 was around the question of councilism as a political current and outlook, it was led to broaden out onto the more general question of centrism as an expression of the way that the organisations of the working class are subjected to the influence of the dominant ideology of bourgeois society. As MC underlines in the article below, centrism as such cannot disappear as long as class society exists.

The interest in publishing his article externally today consists above all in the fact that it relates to the history of the First World War (a question which we have been looking at from various angles in the International Review since 2014) and in particular on the role of revolutionaries and the development of consciousness about this event in the working class and its vanguard. The Zimmerwald Conference, which was held 100 years ago this September, is part of our history, but it is also a very significant illustration of the difficulties and hesitations of its participants in breaking not only with the traitor parties of the Second International but also with the whole conciliationist and pacifist ideology which hoped to put an end to the war without launching an explicitly revolutionary struggle against the capitalist society which had engendered it. This is how Lenin presented the question in 1917:

"During the two odd years of the war the internationalist and working class movement in every country has evolved three trends...The three trends are:

  1. The social-chauvinists, ie, socialists in word and chauvinists in deed... These people are our class enemies. They have gone over to the bourgeoisie...

  2. The second trend, known as the ‘Centre’, consists of people who vacillate between the social-chauvinists and the true internationalists... The ‘Centre’ is the realm of honeyed petty bourgeois phrases, of internationalism in word and cowardly opportunism and fawning on the social-chauvinists in deed.

The crux of the matter is that the ‘Centre’ is not convinced of the necessity for a revolution against one's own government; it does not preach revolution; it does not carry on a wholehearted revolutionary struggle; and in order to evade such a struggle it resorts to the tritest ultra-‘Marxist’-sounding excuses...

The chief leader and spokesman of the "Centre" is Karl Kautsky, the most outstanding authority in the Second International (1889-1914), since August 1914 a model of utter bankruptcy as a marxist, the embodiment of unheard-of spinelessness and the most wretched vacillations and betrayals...

  1. The third trend, that of the true internationalists, is best represented by the ‘Zimmerwald Left'."4

It would however be more correct to say, in the context of Zimmerwald, that the right was represented not by the “social chauvinists”, to use Lenin’s term, but by Kautsky and his consorts – all those who later formed the right wing of the USPD5 - whereas the left was made up of the Bolsheviks and the centre by Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacus group. The process which led towards the revolution in Russia and Germany was marked precisely by the fact that a large part of the “centre” was won over to the positions of the Bolsheviks.

Later on, the term centrism was not used in the same way by all political currents. For the Bordigists, for example, Stalin and the Stalinists in the 1930s are still named as the “centre” between the left of the International (those who we now call the communist left around Bordiga and Pannekoek in particular), and the right around Bukharin. Bilan maintained this terminology up until the Second World War. For the ICC, which follows on from Lenin’s approach, the term centrist means the tendency that lies between the revolutionary left and the right (which is opportunist, but still in the proletarian camp). Thus Stalinism with its programme of “socialism in one country” was neither centrist nor opportunist, but part of the enemy camp – of capitalism. As the article below makes clear, ‘centrism’ doesn’t represent a political current with specific positions, but rather a permanent tendency within the political organisations of the working class, looking for a “happy medium” between intransigent revolutionary positions and those which represent a form of conciliation with the ruling class.

ICC, August 2015


Centrism according to Mish-Mash Intosh

In my article Centrism and our informal tendency, which appeared in the previous issue of the IIB (International Internal Bulletin), I have attempted to demonstrate the inconsistency of the affirmations of McIntosh concerning the definition of centrism in the 2nd International. We have seen the confusion established by McIntosh:

  • in identifying centrism with reformism;

  • in reducing centrism to a “social basis”, that of the “functionaries and officials of the social democratic apparatus and the unions” (the bureaucracy);

  • stressing that “its political basis” is furnished by the existence of a fixed “precise programme”;

  • in proclaiming that the existence of centrism is exclusively tied to one determined period of capitalism, the ascendant period;

  • in completely ignoring the persistence within the proletariat of the mentality and ideas of the bourgeoisie and the petit-bourgeoisie (immaturity of consciousness), which it has great difficulty in disengaging itself from;

  • in neglecting the fact of the constant penetration of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ideology within the working class;

  • in totally eluding the problem of a possible process of degeneration of a proletarian organisation.

We recall these points, not simply to summarise the preceding article, but also because many of these points are necessary in order to demolish the new theory of McIntosh on the existence of centrism in the workers’ movement in the period of the decadence of capitalism…

Centrism in the period of decadence

McIntosh bases his accusation that we cannot have a centrist current in the decadence of capitalism on the fact that with the change of period the room previously occupied (in the ascendant period) by centrism is now occupied by capitalism, and notably by state capitalism. This is only partly true. It is true for certain political positions formerly defended by centrism, but it is wrong with respect to the room, the “space” separating the communist programme of the proletariat from bourgeois ideology. This space (which supplies centrism with a terrain) is determined by the immaturity (or the maturity) of class consciousness and by the force of the penetration of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ideology within its ranks, which tends to be reduced, but does not disappear except along with the existence of classes, all the more so as long as the bourgeoisie remains the dominant class in society. This remains equally true even after the victory of the revolution, since, when we speak of the proletariat as a class, this implies that also other classes exist in society and thus exercise an influence on the working class and penetrate it with their ideology. The entire marxist theory of the period of transition is based on the fact that, contrary to other revolutions in history, the proletarian revolution does not close the period of transition but only opens it. Only the anarchists (and in part the councilists) think that with the revolution it’s possible to jump straight from capitalism to communism. For marxists, the revolution is but the precondition opening the possibility of the realisation of the communist programme of the social transformation and a society without classes. This communist programme is defended by a revolutionary minority organised as a political party against the positions of the other currents and political organisations acting within the class and on its class terrain, and this both before, during and after the revolution. To put it mildly, to consider that the class already has a communist consciousness or can develop one without further ado is to render any political organisation of the class superfluous if not damaging (unless it be an organisation with a purely pedagogic function as in the councilism of Pannekoek) or else to decree that the class can have just a single party (as the rabid Bordigists see it) whereas we recognise the inevitable existence within the proletariat, alongside the organisation of the communist party, of confused political organisations, more or less coherently carrying the ideas of the petit-bourgeoisie and making political concessions towards ideologies alien to the class.

To say this is to recognise the existence within the class, in all periods, of centrist tendencies, since centrism is none other than the persistence within the class of political currents with confused, inconsequent, incoherent programmes, penetrated by and acting as a vehicle for petit-bourgeois ideology, making concessions to it, vacillating between this ideology and the historical consciousness of the proletariat, and trying unceasingly to conciliate them.

It is precisely because centrism cannot be defined in terms of a “precise programme”, which it hasn’t got, that we can understand its persistance, how it adapts itself to every particular situation, changing the position according to the balance of forces existing between the classes.

It is nonsensical to talk of centrism in general, in the abstract, in terms of a “social base” of its own or a “specific precise programme”. It has to be located in relation to other, more stable political current, as it happens in the present debate in relation to councilism. One can, on the other hand speak of a consistence in its political behaviour: oscillation, avoiding taking a clear and consequent position...

Let us take another concrete example, equally edifying, of centrist behaviour: in his text McIntosh refers several times to the Kautsky-Rosa polemic of 1910. How did this polemic begin? It was begun by an article which Rosa wrote against the opportunist politics and practice of the leadership of the social democracy, opposing it to the revolutionary politics of the mass strike. Kautsky in his position as editor of Neue Zeit (the theoretical organ of social democracy) refused to publish this article under the pretext that, while being perfectly in agreement with the general idea of the mass strike, he considered this policy to be inadequate at the given moment, so that he would be compelled to reply, implying a discussion between two members of the radical marxist tendency in face of the right wing of the party, something he considered would be most regrettable. In face of this refusal, Rosa published her article in the Dortmunder Arbeiter Zeitung, thereby forcing Kautsky to reply and to engage in the polemic known to us.

When I announced in September in the IS6 my intention of writing an article throwing light on the councilist approach of the texts of AP, comrade JA7 began by demanding an explanation of the content and argumentation of this article. This explanation having been given, comrade JA considered this article to be inopportune and suggested waiting until the IS gave its preliminary agreement, that is to say to “correct” it in advance in such a way that the IS as a whole could sign it. In face of this kind of correction consisting of rounding off the angles and obscuring the real issues, I preferred to go ahead with publication under my own name. Once it had been published JA considered this article to be absolutely deplorable since it could only stir up trouble in the organisation. Fortunately, JA was not the editor (of the IIB) as Kautsky had been and didn’t have his power, since otherwise the article would never have seen the light of day. In the 75 intervening years with the change of period (ascendance and decadence) centrism has certainly changed its face and its positions but has retained the same spirit and the same approach: avoiding raising debates in order not to “trouble” the organisation.

In one of my first polemical articles against the reservists I said that the period of decadence is the period par excellence of manifestations of centrism. A simple glance over the history of these last 70 years will immediately allow us to establish the fact that in no other period of the history of the workers’ movement has centrism manifested itself with such force, in such a variety and has caused so many ravages as in this period of the decadence of capitalism. One cannot but agree with the very correct definition given by Bilan: that an International never betrays as such but dies, disappears, ceases to exist so that its different “national” parties one by one go over to their national bourgeoisie. Thus, in the aftermath of 4th August 1914 when the socialist parties of the belligerent countries sealed their treason in voting for the war credits, there began to develop, in each country, alongside the small minorities remaining loyal to internationalism, a more and more numerous opposition, within the socialist parties and the unions, against the war and the politics of national defence. This was the case in Russia with the Menshevik Internationalists of Martov, with the intermediary group of Trotsky. This was the case in Germany with the development of the opposition to the war which was to be excluded from the SPD in order to give birth to the USPD. This was the case in France with the revolutionary syndicalist group of Vie Ouvrière of Monatte and Rosmer, with the majority of the socialist party of Italy, that of Switzerland etc etc. All of this constituted a varied, inconsistent, pacifist-centrist current opposed to war in the name of peace and not in the name of revolutionary defeatism and of the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. It was this centrist current which organised the socialist conferences against the war, at Zimmerwald in 1915 (where the consistent and intransigent revolutionary left represented a small minority, restricted to the Russian Bolsheviks, the Dutch Tribunists and the Bremen Radicals in Germany) and at Kienthal in 1916, which was still largely dominated by the centrist current (when the Spartakists of Rosa and Liebknecht finally joined the revolutionary left). This centrist current posed in no manner or means the question of the immediate rupture with the socialist parties which had become social-chauvinists and “bitter-enders”. Instead they raised the question of their regeneration in an organisational unity.8 The revolution in February 1917 in Russia found almost the whole of the Bolshevik party and many workers’ and soldiers’ councils adhering to the position of conditional support for the bourgeois government of Kerensky.

The general enthusiasm sparked off in the working class of the whole world following the victory of the October revolution could not go much further than develop an immense fundamentally centrist current. The parties and groups which were to constitute and adhere to the Communist International were for the most part profoundly marked by centrism. With 1920 one saw the first signs of the revolutionary wave running out of steam, and it was to shrivel up rapidly. This was expressed at the political level by a centrist sliding already visible at the Second Congress of the CI (Communist International), through the taking up of ambiguous and erroneous positions on questions as important as the trade unions, parliamentarism, the independence and self-determination of nations. From one year to the next, the CI and the Communist Parties which constituted it followed an accelerating rhythm of retreat towards centrist positions and degeneration. The revolutionary intransigent tendencies rapidly became a minority in the Communist Parties, and were one by one excluded from these parties and themselves suffered the impact of the centrist gangrene as was to be the case for the different oppositions coming out of the CI and in particular for the left opposition of Trotsky which finally crossed the class line with the war in Spain and the Second World War in the name of anti-fascism and of the defence of the degenerated workers’ state in Russia. The tiny minority which remained firmly on the terrain of the class and communism, such as the International Communist Left and the Dutch Left, suffered the blows of the black period which followed the aftermath of the war with, on the one hand, the Bordigists becoming sclerotic and seriously regressing politically, and on the other hand the Dutch Left decomposing in a completely degenerated councilism. One had to wait until the end of the sixties with the announcing of the open crisis and the revival of the class struggle before it was possible to renew, at considerable effort, the historic line of revolutionary marxism…

You really have to be struck by a kind of academic blindness not to see this reality. You have to completely ignore the last 70 years of the history of the workers' movement since 1914 in order to peremptorily affirm, as McIntosh does, that centrism doesn’t and cannot exist in the period of decadence. Grandiloquent radical phraseology, fake indignation, don’t make up for a lack of serious argumentation.

It is certainly more comfortable to pursue the politics of the ostrich, closing one’s eyes in order not to see reality and its dangers, all the better to deny them. This is a cheap way of reassuring oneself and of sparing oneself from the headaches of thinking. This is not the method of Marx who wrote: “The communists are not there to console the class, they are there to make it even more miserable and to make it conscious of its misery”. McIntosh follows the first path in denying the existence of centrism in the period of decadence, purely and simply for his own tranquillity and against all the evidence. For the marxists which we have to be it is necessary to follow another path: to open our eyes wide to reality, to recognise reality and to understand it in its movement and is complexity. It is therefore up to us to set about explaining the why and wherefore of the undeniable fact that the period of decadence is also a period of the gestating of centrist tendencies

The proletariat and the period of capitalist decadence

…The period of decadence means entering a permanent, objective historic crisis of the capitalist system, thus posing the historical dilemma: its self destruction, bringing with it the destruction of the whole of society, or the destruction of this system in order to make way for a new society without classes – communist society. The only class capable of realising this grandiose project of saving humanity is the proletariat, since its interest in liberating itself from exploitation pushes it into a life and death struggle against the system of capitalist wage slavery, and since the proletariat cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the whole of humanity.

Against the theory according to which the workers' struggles determine the crisis of the capitalist economic system (GLAT – Groupe de Liaison et d’Action des Travailleurs); against the theory which ignores the permanent historic crisis, recognising only conjunctural and cyclical crises offering the possibility of revolution and, in the absence of its victory, permitting a new cycle of accumulation going on until infinity (A. Bordiga); against the pedagogic theory for which the revolution is not linked to a question of the crisis of capitalism but depends on the intelligence of the workers acquired in the course of their struggle (A. Pannekoek); we affirm with Marx that a society does not disappear until it has exhausted all the possibilities for development which it contains within itself. We affirm with Rosa that it is the maturation of the internal contradictions of capital which determines its historic crisis, the objective condition of the necessity of revolution. We affirm with Lenin that it is not enough that the proletariat no longer tolerates being exploited, but that it is necessary that capitalism cannot continue to live as before.

Decadence is the break-down of the capitalist system under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The comprehension of this theory is indispensable in order to understand the conditions in which the proletarian revolution unfolds and will unfold.

With this entrance into the decadence of its economic system, which bourgeois academic science could neither foresee nor understand, capitalism – without being able to master this objective situation – replies with the extreme concentration of all its political, economic and military forces which is state capitalism, both in order to face up to the extreme exacerbation of inter-imperialist tensions and above all in the face of the menace of the explosion of the proletarian revolution which it became aware of with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

If the entry into decadence signifies the objective historical necessity for the disappearance of capitalism, the same is not true for the maturation of the subjective conditions – the coming to consciousness of the proletariat – in order to be able to accomplish this. This condition is indispensable since, as Marx and Engels said, history does nothing by itself; men (classes) make history.

We know that as opposed to all the past revolutions in history, in which the coming to consciousness on the part of the classes which carried them out played a secondary role, since they involved replacing one system of exploitation by another system of exploitation, the socialist revolution signals the end of every exploitation of man by man and of the entire history of class societies, necessitating and posing as its fundamental condition the conscious action of the revolutionary class. The proletariat is not only the class upon which history imposes the greatest task which it has ever thrust upon any class in humanity, a task which goes beyond all the tasks which humanity has ever faced up to, the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom; but also the proletariat is confronted with the greatest difficulties. The last exploited class, it represents all the exploited classes of history against all the exploiting classes represented by capitalism.

It is the first time in history that an exploited class is led to assume the social transformation, and what’s more, a transformation which carries with it the destiny and future of the whole of humanity. In this titanic struggle the proletariat presents itself at the beginning in a state of weakness, a state inherent to every exploited class, aggravated by the weight of the weaknesses of all the dead generations of exploited classes which weigh on it: lack of consciousness, lack of conviction, lack of confidence, afraid of what it is led to think and to undertake, habituated to thousands of years of submission to the force and ideology of dominant classes. This is why, contrary to the line of march of other classes from victory to victory, the struggle of the proletariat proceeds through advances and retreats and cannot achieve its final goal except in the wake of a long series of defeats…

This movement of advances and retreats of the struggle of the proletariat which Marx already spoke of in the aftermath of the revolutionary events of 1848 cannot but accelerate and does accelerate in the period of decadence since it is the very barbarism of this period which poses to the proletariat the question of the revolution in more concrete, more practical, more dramatic terms. This in turn is translated, at the level of the coming to consciousness, by an accelerated and turbulent movement like the sweep of waves on an agitated ocean.

These conditions – a reality which consists of the maturity of the objective conditions and the immaturity of the subjective conditions – determine the tortuous process within the class which gives rise to a multitude of diverse and contradictory, convergent and divergent political currents, evolving and regressing, and notably the different varieties of centrism.

The struggle against capitalism is at the same time a struggle and a political decantation within the proletariat in its striving towards coming to consciousness, and this process is all the more violent and tortuous in that it takes place under the fire of the class enemy.

The only weapons the class possesses in its death struggle against capitalism and which can assure its victory are: consciousness and organisation. It is in this sense and in this sense only that one can understand the phrase used by Marx:  “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do” (The Holy Family)

The councilists interpret this phrase of Marx in the sense that each workers’ struggle automatically produces the coming to consciousness of the class, denying the necessity of conducting a theoretical-political struggle within the class (the necessary existence of the political-revolutionary organisation). Our reservists have slid in the same direction with the debates of the IB Plenum of January ’84 and the voting of point 7 of the resolution. Today (in order to cover up the first sliding), in latching on to the aberrant theory of McIntosh of the impossibility of the existence of centrist currents in the class in the period of decadence, they really pursue the same sliding, contenting themselves simply with placing the same coin on its other side.

To say that in this period (of the decadence of capitalism) there cannot be any kind of centrism within the class, neither before, during or after the revolution, amounts to idealistically considering the class to have a uniform consciousness, absolutely homogenous and totally communist (eliminating the need for the very existence of a communist party, as council communists do), or else deducing that just a single party can exist in the class, beyond which every other current is by definition counter-revolutionary and bourgeois, falling by a curious detour into the worst manifestations of Bordigist megalomania.

The two principal tendencies of the centrist current

As we have already seen, the centrist current does not present itself as a homogenous current with a “specific, precise, programme”. It is the least stable, least coherent political current, torn within itself by the attraction exercised on it on the one hand, by the influence of the communist programme and on the other by petit-bourgeois ideology. This comes from two sources (existing and growing at the same time) which give rise to and nourishes this:

  1. The immaturity of the class in the process of coming to consciousness.

  2. The constant penetration of petit-bourgeois ideology within the class.

These sources push the centrist current in two diametrically opposed directions.

As a general rule, it is the balance of forces between the classes in precise periods of upsurge and reflux of the class struggle which decide the direction of the evolution or the regression of centrist organisations… McIntosh sees in his congenital myopia only the second source and imperiously ignores the first, just as he ignores the contradictory pressures which are exerted on centrism. He only knows centrism as an “abstraction” and not in the reality of its movement. McIntosh recognises centrism when it is definitively integrated into the bourgeoisie, that is when centrism ceases to be centrism and our comrade is all the more furious and lets his indignation fly against what he hadn’t known and recognised previously.

It corresponds perfectly to the nature of our minority to fiercely attack the corpse of a wild animal which it didn’t combat when it was alive and which it takes care not to recognise and combat today.

Let us then examine the centrism nourished by the first source, in others words coming from the immaturity in understanding class positions. Let us take the example of the USPD, the bogeyman discovered today by our minority and made into the main bone of contention by them.

Persian mythology relates that the devil, fed up with his defeats in combating God through the use of evil decided, one fine day, on a change of tactics and proceeded by another means, pitting good against good. Thus when God gave man the blessing of love and the desires of the flesh, the devil, by increasing and exacerbating the desire, caused man to sink into luxury and rape. The same thing when God bestowed the blessing of wine, the devil increased the pleasure of wine in order to create alcoholism. We know the slogan “one glass is good, three glasses makes for a hangover.”

Our minority do exactly the same thing today. In their incapacity to defend their centrist sliding towards councilism they change their tactics. “You talk of centrism, but centrism is the bourgeoisie! In pretending to combat centrism you only succeed in rehabilitating it, in placing it and giving it a class label. Thus in situating it in the class, you make yourselves its defenders and its apologists.”

The old trick of the reversal of roles. Perfectly successful in the hands of the devil. Unfortunately for them, our minoritarians are not devils, so that in their hands this astute tactic doesn’t get them very far. Who, which comrade, could seriously believe this absurdity that the majority of the IB Plenum of January ’84, which pointed out the existence of a centrist sliding towards councilism and for a year now has done nothing but combat it, would become in reality the defender and apologist for the Kautsky of 70 years ago? Our minoritarians themselves don’t believe this. They are trying rather to blur the debate on the present by raving on about the past.

To return to the history of the USPD we will begin by recalling the development of the opposition to the war in the social democracy

In Germany, the Union Sacrée was sealed by the unanimous vote – minus the vote of Rühle – of the parliamentary fraction in favour of war credits, stupefying many members of this party to the point of paralysis. The left which was to give birth to Spartacus is at this moment so reduced that the small apartment of Rosa was big enough to allow it to meet in the aftermath of 4th August 1914.

The left was not only reduced but was divided into several groups:

  • the “Radical Left” of Bremen which, influenced by the Bolsheviks, called for an immediate break with social democracy;

  • groups around small bulletins and reviews, such as that of Borchardt (close to the “Radical Left”);

  • the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (the most important of the groups) regrouping the union representatives of the metal factories of Berlin and which were situated politically between the centre and Spartakus;

  • the Spartakus group;

  • and finally the centre which would give birth to the USPD.

Moreover, none of the groups represented a homogenous entity but were subdivided into multiple tendencies, expanding and contracting, approaching each other and distancing themselves again incessantly. In any case, the principle axis of their divisions always remained the regression towards the right and the evolution towards the left.

This already gives us an idea of the ferment in the working class in Germany from the beginning of the war (the critical point of the period of decadence) and which accelerated as the war went on. It is impossible within the limits of this article to give details concerning the numerous strikes and demonstrations against the war in Germany. No other belligerent country witnessed such a development, not even Russia. We will content ourselves here with giving some points of reference: amongst others, the political repercussions of these shudderings in the most right-wing fraction of the SPD, the parliamentary fraction:

  • On August 4th 1914, 94 out of 95 deputies voted the war credits. Only one vote was cast against, that of Rühle. Karl Liebnecht, submitting to discipline, also voted in favour.

  • In December 1914, on the occasion of a new vote on credits, Liebnecht broke discipline and voted against.

  • In March 1915, a new budgetary vote including new war credits. “Only Liebnecht and Rühle voted against, after which thirty deputies, with Haase and Ledebour (two future USPD leaders) at their head, left the hall.” (Fleichmann, Le Parti communiste allemand dans la république de Weimar, Ed Maspéro, p.38).

  • 21 December 1915, a new vote of credits in the Reichstag. F. Geyer declared in the name of 20 deputies of the SPD “We refuse the credits”. “With this vote twenty deputies refused the war credits and twenty more left the room” (ibid).

  • January 6 1916, the social-chauvinist majority of the parliamentary group excluded Liebknecht from its ranks. Rühle solidarised with him and was also excluded. Haase rejected, in the name of the minority of the SPD group in the Reichstag, the emergency budget of the state. After the meeting, the minority published the following statement: “The social-democratic parliamentary group has with 58 votes against 33 and 4 abstentions taken away our rights pertaining to the group… We see ourselves compelled to group ourselves in a social democratic working collective.” Among the signatories of this declaration we find the names of the most of the future leaders of the USPD, and notably Bernstein.

The split and from then on the existence of two SD groups in the Reichstag, one social-chauvinist and the other against the war, corresponded, to some extent to what happened in the SD as a whole, with its divisions and fierce struggles of tendencies, as within the working class as a whole.

In June 1915 a common action of the entire opposition was organised against the central committee of the party. A text in the form of a leaflet was distributed, carrying the signatures of hundreds of full-timers. It ended as follows: “we demand that the parliamentary group and the leadership of the party finally denounce the Union Sacrée and engage in the class struggle on the basis of the programme and decisions of the party, the socialist struggle for peace” (op.cit). Soon afterwards a manifesto appeared, signed by Bernstein, Haase and Kautsky entitled “The needs of the hour” “in which they called for an end of the politics of voting for the credits” (ibid).

At the level of the class struggle we can recall:

  • 1915 several demonstrations against the war in Berlin involving at the most one thousand people.

  • On the occasion of May Day 1916 the Spartakus group held a demonstration of 10,000 workers from the factories.

  • August 1916, following the arrest and condemnation of Liebknecht for his action against the war, 55,000 metal workers went on strike in Berlin.

There were also strikes in several provincial cities.

This movement against the war and against the social chauvinist positions grew continuously throughout the war, winning over more and more workers, within them a small revolutionary minority (itself groping in the dark) and a strong majority made up of a centrist current becoming more radical. Thus at the national conference of the SPD in September 1916, in which the centrist minority and the Spartakus group participated, 4 speakers declared “What is important is not the unity of the party but the unity of principles. We must call on the masses to engage in struggle against imperialism and the war and impose peace by employing every means at the disposal of the proletariat” (ibid).

On January 7th 1917 a national conference grouping all the currents opposed to the war was held. Of 187 delegates, 35 represented the Spartakus group. A conference which unanimously adopted a manifesto…written by Kautsky, and a resolution by Kurt Eisner. The two texts said: “What the opposition demands is a peace without victors or vanquished, a peace of reconciliation without violence.

How is it to be explained that Spartakus voted for such a perfectly opportunist, pacifist resolution, which according to its representative Ernst Meyer “poses the question of stopping the payment of dues to the instances of the party”?

For McIntosh, in his simplism, such a question has no sense; the majority of social democracy had become bourgeois, centrism is thus also bourgeois and the same goes for Spartakus…

But in that case it must be explained what this makes the Bolsheviks and the Dutch Tribunists at the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, where, while proposing their own resolution for the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war, they finally voted for the manifesto and resolution in favour of peace without annexations and retributions. In the logic of McIntosh everything is black and white for all eternity. He doesn’t see the movement, any more than he sees the direction of the movement. Luckily, McIntosh is not a doctor since he would be a bad doctor, who in the face of an advanced disease would already see the patient as a corpse.

We have to insist that what is not true for the life of men is a total absurdity at the level of an historic movement such as that of the proletariat. Here the passage from life to death is not measured in seconds or even minutes but in years. The moment when a workers’ party signs its own death certificate and its actual, definitive death, are not the same thing. This is perhaps difficult to understand for a radical phraseologist, but it is quite understandable for a marxist who doesn’t have the habit of deserting a ship like a rat when it begins to take in water. Revolutionaries know the historical meaning of an organisation which the class has given birth to, and as long as it still contains a breath of life they fight in order to save it, to hold onto it for the class. Such a position didn’t exist a few years ago for the CWO, it doesn’t exist for Guy Sabatier and other phraseologists for whom the Communist International and the Bolshevik party were bourgeois the whole time. Nor does it exist for McIntosh. Revolutionaries can be mistaken at a given moment, but for them this question is of the greatest importance. And why? Because revolutionaries do not constitute a sect of researchers but are a living part of the living body which is the workers’ movement, with its moments of ups and downs.

The social chauvinist majority of the SPD understood better than McIntosh the danger posed by this current of opposition to the Union Sacrée and the war, and urgently went over to the policy of massive expulsions. It was in the wake of these expulsions that the USPD was founded on 8 April 1917. It was only with the greatest reservations and many hesitations that Spartakus agreed to join this new party, posing as a precondition “complete freedom of critique and independent action”. Later Liebknecht was to characterise the relationship between the Spartakus group and the USPD as follows: “We joined the USPD in order to drive it forward, to have a platform for our position, to be able to reach thousands of elements.” It is more than doubtful if this strategy was valid at this moment, but one thing is clear: if such a question was posed for Luxemburg and Liebknecht, then it was because they rightly considered the USPD to be a centrist movement and not a party of the bourgeoisie.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that of the 38 delegates who participated at Zimmerwald, the German delegation with ten members under the leadership of Ledebour comprised seven members of the centrist opposition, 2 of Spartakus and one from the Bremen Left. And at Kienthal, of the 43 participants, 7 delegates came from Germany of whom four were centrists, 2 from Spartakus and one from the Bremen Left. Spartakus, though inside the USPD, preserved its independence and conduced itself in a similar manner to the Bolsheviks at the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal.

One cannot understand what was the centrist USPD without situating it in the context of a formidable movement of mass struggles. In April 1917 a mass strike broke out involving no less than 300,000 workers. Elsewhere, the first mutinies in the navy took place. In January 1918 on the occasion of the peace negotiations of Brest-Litovsk a strike wave involved an estimated one million workers. The organisation of the strike lay in the hands of the revolutionary shop stewards who were very close to the USPD (something no less astonishing is to see Ebert and Scheidemann becoming part of the strike committee). According to some estimates, at the moment of the split 248,000 adhered to the SPD and 100,000 to the USPD. In 1919 the USPD had almost one million members, and these in the main industrial cities.

It is impossible here to go over all the twists and turns of the revolutionary events in Germany in 1918. We will recall simply that on October 7 the fusion between Spartakus and the Bremen Left was decided on. On being freed, Liebknecht joined the organisation of the revolutionary shop stewards involved in preparing an armed insurrection for November 9.. But in the meantime the rising of the sailors at Kiel broke out in October 1919. In many respects the beginning of the revolution in Germany resembled that of February 1917. Particularly concerning the immaturity of the subjective factor, the immaturity of the consciousness in the class. Just like in Russia, the congress of the councils placed themselves in the hands of the worst hard-liners throughout the war; Ebert, Scheidemann, Lansburg, to which were added three members of the USPD: Haase, Ditmann and Barthe. These latter were part of the centrist right, with all this implies by way of spinelessness, cowardice, hesitation, and they served as a “revolutionary” cover for Ebert-Scheidemann, for a very short time (from 20/12 to 29/12 1919), but long enough to allow the latter to organise the counter revolutionary massacre, with the aid of the Prussian junkers and the Freikorps.

The policy of semi-confidence, semi-trust in this government, which was the policy of the direction of the USPD leadership, strangely resembled that of conditional support for the provisional government of Kerensky adopted by the leadership of the Bolshevik party up until May 1917 with the triumph of the April Theses of Lenin. The great difference, however, did not reside so much in the firmness of the Bolshevik party under the direction of Lenin and Trotsky as in the strength, the intelligence of an experienced class, able to bring together all its forces against the proletariat as did the German bourgeoisie. As for the USPD, it was torn, like every centrist current, between a right wing tendency seeking to reintegrate itself into the old party that had gone over to the bourgeoisie, and a stronger and stronger tendency seeking the camp of the revolution. Thus one finds the USPD by the side of Spartakus during the bloody days of the counter revolution in Berlin in January 1919, just as we find them in the different confrontations in the other cities, as was the case in Bavaria, in Munich. The USPD, like every centrist current, cannot maintain itself in the face of decisive revolutionary tests. It is condemned to blow apart; it was blown apart.

At its second congress (March 6 1919) the two tendencies confronted each other on several questions (unionism, parliamentarism) but above all on the question of joining the Communist International. The majority rejected joining. The minority however was growing stronger but at the national conference which was held in September it still did not succeed in gaining a majority. At the Leipzig Conference of November 3 of the same year, the minority won on the question of a programme of action, adopted unanimously, on the principle of the dictatorship of the soviets, and it was decided to engage in negotiations with the CI. In June 1920, a delegation was sent to Moscow to broach the question of negotiations and in order to participate at the second congress of the CI.

The EC of the CI had prepared on this subject a text containing, originally, 18 conditions which were to be reinforced with the addition of 3 more conditions. These were the 21 points of adhesion to the Communist International. After violent internal discussions, by a majority of 237 votes against 156, the extraordinary conference of October 1920 finally spoke out in favour of accepting the 21 conditions and of joining the CI.

McIntosh, and behind him JA, discovered in August 1984 the critique always made by the left of the CI that too many loopholes were left open regarding adhesion to the International. But as always, the extremely late discovery of our minority is but a caricature verging on absurdity. There is no doubt but that the 21 conditions contained positions which were erroneous in themselves, not only from the point of view of 1984, but already for the time, and were criticised by the left. What does this prove? That the CI was bourgeois? Or doesn’t it mean that the CI was penetrated by centrist positions on a deal of questions, and that from the onset?

The sudden indignation of our minority doesn’t hide very well either their ignorance of the history which they seem to have discovered today or the absurdity of their conclusion that centrism cannot exist in the present period of the decadence of capitalism.

So we have the spectacle of our minoritarians, who make concessions to councilism, posing as purists. Decidedly, they are not afraid of making themselves ridiculous in demanding a pure and virgin communist party, a party falling from the sky or emerging fully armed as God’s gift to mankind. Still, myopic as they are, incapable of going back very far in time, they should at least be able to see and understand the short history of the ICC. Where did the groups come from which finished up regrouping in the ICC? Our minoritarians only have to begin by looking at themselves and their political trajectory. From where did RI come, or WR, or the section in Belgium, the USA, Spain, Italy and Sweden? Didn’t they come out of the confusionist, anarchist and contestationist swamp?

We can never have stitches tight enough to give us an absolute guarantee against the penetration of centrist elements or their arising from within. The history of the ICC – without even speaking of the history of the workers’ movement – is there to show that the revolutionary movement is a process of incessant decantation. It suffices to look at our minoritarians to get an idea of the amount of confusions which they are capable of giving rise to in one year.

And so we have McIntosh discovering that the flood of the first revolutionary wave also threw up a Smeral, a Cachin, a Frossard and a Serrati. Has McIntosh ever seen, from the window of his university, what a revolutionary flood looks like?

As far as the PCF is concerned, McIntosh writes history in his own manner in saying for example that the party joined the CI grouped around Cachin-Frossard. Does he know nothing of the existence of the Committee for the Third International grouped around Longuet? Frossard and Cachin zig-zagged between these two committees, before finally rallying to the resolution of the Committee for the Third International in favour of joining the CI.

At the Strasbourg Conference of February 1920, the majority was still opposed to joining. At the congress of Tours in December 1920, the motion for joining the CI obtained 3,208 mandates, the motion of Longuet for joining with reserves got 1,022 and the group in favour of abstention (the Blum-Renaudel group) got 397 mandates.

The stitches were not yet sufficiently tight? Certainly. But this does not prevent us from understanding what it means to be in the rising flood of a revolution.

We are discussing whether the Bolsheviks, the Spartakists, the socialist parties which constituted or joined the CI were workers’ parties or parties of the bourgeoisie. We are not discussing their errors but their class nature, and Mish-Mash Intosh does not help us along in the slightest in this matter.

Just as McIntosh does not see what is a current of maturation, moving from bourgeois ideology towards class consciousness, he is no more able to distinguish this from a current which degenerates, that is to say goes from class positions towards bourgeois ideology.

In his fixed, frozen vision of the world, the direction of the movement has no sense or meaning. That’s why he cannot understand what it means to help the tendency which is approaching us by criticising it, and to pitilessly combat the other tendency which is distancing itself from us. But above all, he cannot recognise when the process of decantation of a proletarian party has been definitively completed. Without going over the entire history of the workers’ movement, we can give him one point of reference: a party is definitively lost for the working class when no tendency, no living (proletarian) body can emerge from it any more. This was the case from 1921 on for the Socialist Parties; this was the case at the beginning of the 30s for the Communist Parties. It is correct to talk of these organisations in terms of centrism until those dates.

And to finish off, it should be recalled that the new theory of McIntosh, which ignores the existence of centrism in the period of decadence, strongly resembles those people who instead of treating a “shameful disease” prefer to ignore it. One cannot combat centrism in the void, in ignorance. Centrism like every other plague which affects the workers’ movement cannot be dealt with by being hidden, but by being exposed, by being brought into the open as Rosa Luxemburg said.

The new theory of McIntosh rests on the superstitious belief in the evil power of words: the less one speaks of centrism the better. For us, on the contrary it is necessary to be able to recognise centrism, to know in which period of upsurge or reflux it situates itself, and to understand in what direction it is evolving. Understanding and combating centrism is in the final analysis the problem of the maturation of the subjective factor, of the coming to consciousness of the class.

MC (December 1984)


2. Ibid.

3. This text was published as a contribution to debate in the ICC’s internal bulletin but it was afterwards published, with a few minor differences, in International Review nº43 under the title “The concept of ‘centrism’, the road to the abandoning of class positions” as a position of the “Tendency” which was constituted in January 1985. In the same number of the International Review there was also a response to this text under the title “The rejection of the notion of ‘centrism’: an open door to the abandonment of class positions”.

4. “The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution”, quoted in the article “The rejection of the notion of ‘centrism’: an open door to the abandonment of class positions”.

5. ‘Unabhängige Sozialdemokratishe Partei Deutschlands’, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was founded in 1917 by the minority of those excluded from the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, for their opposition to the war.

6. The International Secretariat, the permanent commission of the International Bureau, the central organ of the ICC.

7. JA (Judith Allen) was part of those comrades who expressed “reserves” with regard to the resolution adopted in January 1984 by the central organ of the ICC and who, later on, rejected the notion of centrism towards councilism. In fact, they themselves fell into councilist conceptions and the majority of them left the ICC before the debate was finished, forming the “External fraction of the ICC” (EFICC) which published Internationalist Perspective. At the beginning this group presented itself as the real defender of the ICC’s platform, but it has little by little abandoned all reference to our platform.

8. Note in MC’s original text: “We will return later to the analysis of the nature of this centrism which spanned the period from the war to the constitution of the Communist International.

 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

People: 

Rubric: 

Zimmerwald 1915

South Africa from World War II to the mid-1970s

In the previous article on the workers’ movement in South Africa1, we addressed the history of South Africa by successively evoking the birth of capitalism, of the working class, the apartheid system and the first movements of workers’ struggle. And we ended the article by showing that, following the crushing of the workers’ struggles of the 1920s, the bourgeoisie (then represented by the Labour Party and the Afrikaner National Party) managed to stifle all expressions of proletarian class struggle, so that it was not until the eve of the Second World War that we see the working class awake from its deep sleep. Clearly, after the crushing of the insurrectionary strike of 1922 in a terrible bloodbath and up until the late 1930s, the South African proletariat was paralysed and essentially left the terrain of struggle to the white and black nationalist groups and parties.

This article highlights the formidable effect of the apartheid system on the class struggle, combined with the action of the trade unions and parties of the bourgeoisie, up until the end of the 1960s when, faced with the unprecedented development of the class struggle, the bourgeoisie had to “modernise” its political apparatus and revamp its system. In other words, it had to face up to the South African proletariat, which had finally resumed its massive struggles by enrolling in the global waves of struggle that marked the end of the 1960s and early 1970s.

To evoke this period of the working class struggle, we rely heavily on the work of Brigitte Lachartre,2 member of the Centre for Research, Information and Action in Africa – CRIAA – the only body (to our knowledge) that is dedicated to the history of social struggles in South Africa.

Ephemeral revival of the class struggle during the second butchery of 39-45

War preparations in Europe meant for South Africa an unexpected acceleration of industrialization, the major industrial countries constituting the principal sources of support for the South African economy: “(...) The period 1937-1945 was marked by a brutal acceleration of the industrial process. South Africa, at this time, was forced to develop its own processing industries given the economic paralysis of Europe at war and of its exports across the world.3

This resulted in the massive recruitment of workers and increasing rates of production. Against these rates and the degradation of its living conditions, the working class had to suddenly wake up and launch itself into struggle:

For the African masses, this phase of industrial intensification was reflected in accelerated proletarianisation, further increased by the fact that a quarter of the white labour force was then enrolled in voluntary military service with the Allies. During this period, workers’ struggles and strikes led to significant wage increases (13% per year between 1941 and 1944) and a resurgence of the African trade union movement. (...) Between 1934 and 1945 there were a record 304 strikes in which 58,000 Africans, coloureds and Indians and 6,000 whites took part. In 1946, the African miners’ union, an organisation not legally recognised, triggered a very important wave of strikes across the country that was repressed in blood. It nevertheless managed to mobilize some 74,000 black workers.”4

So the South African regime was forced to develop its own processing industries, given that it also had to replace a large part of the workforce mobilised in the imperialist slaughter. This meant that South Africa achieved at that time a certain level of technological development that allowed it to free itself (momentarily) from its European suppliers; a unique case on the African continent.

For its part, unexpectedly, the working class was able to quite massively resume its struggle in reaction to the super-exploitation caused by the speed up of work rates. Through a heroic movement (in the context of war with martial law applying) it was able to wrest wage increases without being massacred in a bloodbath. This defensive struggle, however, was largely insufficient to positively affect the dynamics of the class struggle, which was still largely contained by the bourgeois state. Indeed, the state was not slow to take advantage of the wartime context to reinforce its repressive apparatus and finally managed to inflict a heavy defeat on the entire South African proletariat. This defeat (like those experienced previously) traumatised the working class for a long time and plunged it into inertia, allowing the South African bourgeoisie to consolidate its victory at the political level, in particular through the formalisation of the apartheid system. The South African state, which was directed by the Afrikaners after their victory in parliamentary elections in 1948, decided to reinforce all the old repressive laws and measures5 against the proletarian masses in general. Thus, apartheid officially became a system of governance, justifying the most barbaric acts against the working class in its various ethnic groups and especially against Africans. These went from “small” vexations to the most abject practices:: separate toilets, separate kitchens, separate living areas, separate public benches, separate bus/taxis, separate schools, separate hospitals, etc. And they were all accompanied by an article of law punishing by imprisonment anyone who ventured to violate these monstrous laws. And indeed each year more than 300,000 people were arrested for breaches of these despicable laws. Thus, a worker of European origin was likely to go to jail if he was caught drinking with someone who was black or of mixed race. In this context where everyone risked prison, it was impossible to envisage a political discussion between proletarians of different ethnic groups.6

This situation weighed terribly on the ability of the working class as a whole to struggle, to the point of plunging it back into a period of “sleep” (like the one after the 1920s), which lasted from the 1950s until the early 1970s. During this period, the class struggle was diverted mainly by supporters of the struggle for “national liberation”, namely the partisans of the ANC/CP, behind whose cause they led black South African workers up until the end of apartheid.

Parties and unions divert the struggles onto a nationalist terrain

Parties and unions played a leading role in systematically diverting workers’ struggles onto the terrain of white and black nationalism. It is not necessary to describe at length the role played by the Labour Party against the working class, this being evident from the fact that, the day after its active participation in the global butchery of 1914-1918, it used its power to openly carry out violent attacks against the South African proletariat. Moreover, from that moment, it ceased to officially claim membership of “the workers’ movement”, which did not prevent it from preserving its links with the unions it was close to like TUCSA (Trade Union Confederation of South Africa). In addition, between 1914 and the end of apartheid, before breaking up, it passed from government to opposition, and vice versa, like any “classical” bourgeois party

For more details on the ANC, readers are referred to the previous article in this series. If we mention it here it is mainly because it is its alliance with the CP and trade unions that allowed it to play a double role as the controller and oppressor of the working class.

As for the Communist Party, we will return to the way it dealt with a certain proletarian opposition at the beginning of its black nationalist orientation, applying the instructions of Stalin and the degenerating Third International. Certainly the information we have does not indicate the numerical or political importance of this proletarian opposition to the South African Communist Party, but it was strong enough to attract the attention of Leon Trotsky who attempted to support it.

The counter-revolutionary role of the South African Communist Party under Stalin’s leadership

The South African Communist Party, as a “Stalinised party,” played a harmful counter-revolutionary role against the workers’ struggles in the early 1930s, when this former internationalist party was already in the grip of a profound process of degeneration. Having participated in the struggle for proletarian revolution at the beginning of its formation in the 1920s, the South African CP was very quickly manipulated by the Stalinist regime and from 1928 it obediently executed its counter-revolutionary orders, including the making of alliances with the black bourgeoisie. The Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country” was accompanied by the idea that underdeveloped countries must necessarily pass through a “bourgeois revolution” and that, in this vision, the proletariat could still fight against colonial oppression but on no account struggle for the overthrow of capitalism in order to establish proletarian power in the colonies. This policy was translated concretely, at the end of the 1920s, into a “class collaboration” where the South African CP was first the “proletarian guarantor” of the ANC’s nationalist policies before definitively becoming its active accomplice up until today. This can be illustrated by these dire words from a secretary general of the CP, addressing Mandela: “Nelson (...) we are fighting the same enemy (...) we are working in the context of African nationalism.7

An internationalist minority opposed to the nationalist orientation of the South African CP

This policy of the South African CP was contested by a minority whose efforts Trotsky himself attempted to support, unfortunately in the wrong way. Instead of resolutely fighting against the nationalist and counter-revolutionary orientation advocated by Stalin in South Africa, in 1935 Leon Trotsky summed up the attitude that the revolutionary militants should have towards the ANC:

1. The Bolshevik-Leninists put themselves in defence of the Congress in all cases when it is being attacked by the white oppressors and their chauvinistic agents in the ranks of the workers’ organisations.

2. The Bolshevik-Leninists place the progressive over against the reactionary tendencies in the program of the Congress.

3. The Bolshevik-Leninists unmask before the native masses the inability of the Congress to achieve the realisation of even its own demands, because of its superficial, conciliatory policy, and develop in contradistinction to the Congress a program of revolutionary class struggle.

4. Separate, episodic agreements with the Congress, if they are forced by circumstances, are permissible only within the framework of strictly defined practical tasks, with the retention of full and complete independence of our own organization and freedom of political criticism.”8

It is disconcerting to learn that, despite the evidence of the counter-revolutionary character of the Stalinist orientation applied by the South African CP towards the ANC, Trotsky still sought to accommodate himself with its diversionary tactics. On the one hand he asserted: “The Bolshevik-Leninists put themselves in defence of the Congress”, and on the other: “The Bolshevik-Leninists unmask before the native masses the inability of the Congress to achieve the realisation of even its own demands...

This was nothing but an expression of a policy of accommodation and conciliation with a fraction of the bourgeoisie because, at that time, there were no grounds to foresee any possible evolution of the ANC towards a proletarian class position. But above all, Trotsky was unable to see the reversal of the course of the class struggle, the domination of the counter-revolution, which was expressed by the victory of Stalinism.

It is no longer surprising to hear the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière (80 years later), having noted the erroneous character of Trotsky’s orientation, attempt to justify this orientation with typical Trotskyist contortions by saying, on the one hand: “Trotsky’s policy did not have a decisive influence but we must bear it in mind....” On the other hand, Lutte Ouvrière says the South African CP: “began fully in the service of the ANC and has continually sought to hide its bourgeois character”.

Instead of just saying that Trotsky’s policy on the matter was wrong and that the CP had become a bourgeois party just like the ANC, LO engages in hypocritical acrobatics aimed at masking the nature of the South African Stalinist party. In doing so LO tries to hide its own bourgeois character and emotional ties with Stalinism.

The unions’ role as saboteurs of struggles and the efforts of “revolutionary syndicalism”

It should first be said that, by their natural role as “professional negotiators” and “peacemakers” of the conflicts between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the unions cannot truly constitute organs of the struggle for proletarian revolution, especially in the period of capitalist decadence, as illustrated by the history of class struggle since 1914.

However, we should underline the fact that, with the butchery of 1914-1918, workers defending proletarian internationalism tried to create revolutionary unions such as the IWA (Industrial Workers of Africa), on the model of the American IWW, and the ICU (the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union)9:

“(...) In 1917, a poster appeared on the walls of Johannesburg, convening a meeting for July 19: ‘Come and discuss issues of common interest between white and indigenous workers’. This text was published by the International Socialist League (ISL), a revolutionary syndicalist organization influenced by the American IWW (...) and formed in 1915 in opposition to the First World War and the racist and conservative policies of the South African Labour Party and craft unions. Comprising at the beginning mostly white activists, the ISL moved very quickly towards black workers, calling in its weekly newspaper International, to build ‘a new union that overcomes the limitations of trade, skin colour, race and sex to destroy capitalism by a blockade of the capitalist class’”10

As shown in this quotation, truly revolutionary minorities did try to create “revolutionary” unions in order to destroy capitalism and its ruling class. We should note that the ICU was born in 1919 following a merger with the IWA and grew rapidly. But unfortunately this union soon abandoned the field of proletarian internationalism:

This union grew tremendously from 1924 and reached a peak of 100,000 members in 1927, making it the largest organisation of Africans after the ANC in the 1950s. In the 1930s, the ICU even established sections in Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe before declining gradually. The ICU was not officially a revolutionary syndicalist organization. It was more influenced by nationalist and traditionalist ideologies than anti-capitalism, and developed a certain form of bureaucracy.”11

As can be seen, “revolutionary” unionism did not thrive for as long in South Africa as its partisans claimed. The ICU was certainly a “radical” and combative union, which initially advocated the unity of the working class. But even before the end of the 1920s it oriented itself towards the exclusive defence of the “black cause” under the pretext that the official (white) unions did not defend the indigenous workers. Moreover, Clements Kadalie12 one of the ICU’s most influential leaders, categorically rejected the notion of “class struggle” and ceased to integrate white workers (including members of the South African CP) into his union. Finally, the ICU died in the early 1930s under the blows of the ruling power and from its own contradictions. However, later on a number of its leaders pursued their union activities in other groups known for their African trade union nationalism, while other elements opting for internationalism were marginalised or dispersed.

Unions designed according to the laws of the apartheid regime

Like all states, faced with the working class, the apartheid regime felt the need for trade unions, but in this case they were to be designed according to the principles of the segregationist system:

“(…) The unionised South African population was organised in unions partitioned according to the race of their members A first distinction was officially imposed between recognised unions, that is to say, those registered with the Ministry of Labour and workers’ organisations not recognised by the government, that is to say, which did not enjoy the official status of a workers’ union. This primary cleavage was the result, firstly, of the law on the settlement of Bantu work disputes (...), which maintained that Africans without the status of “employee” did not have the right to form fully recognised unions; and secondly, of the law on reconciliation in the industry (...) that allowed whites, coloureds and Indians to join unions but prohibited the creation of new mixed unions.13

At first glance, one can see in the South African state’s conception of trade unionism a certain cynicism and a very elementary racism. But really, the hidden purpose was to avoid at all costs a consciousness among the workers (of all backgrounds) that the resistance struggles of the working class were fundamentally confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the two real antagonistic classes in society. What is the best instrument for this bourgeois policy on the ground? It is obviously unionism. Hence all the laws and regulations on trade unions decided by the government at the time in order to improve the effectiveness of its anti-proletarian defences. The fact remains that the African section of the proletariat was the main target of the oppressor regime because it was larger and more combative, hence the fury which the bourgeois power showed towards it:

Since 1950, the African trade unions have lived under the threat of the law on the suppression of communism, which gives the government the power to declare any organisation, including an African union (but not the other unions), ‘illegal’ if it engages in activities to promote the objectives of communism. (…) The definition of communism includes, among others, activities aimed at provoking ‘industrial, social or economic change’. Thus, a strike, or any action organised by a trade union to end the system of reserved jobs or obtain wage increases and better working conditions, could well be declared favourable to ‘communism’ and serve as an excuse to outlaw the union.14

For the South African government, behind the workers’ struggles there was the spectre of the questioning of its system, which it identified with the struggle for communism. Such a perspective was, we know, far from corresponding to the possibilities of this period of counter-revolution, which was unfavourable to the struggles of the working class on its own class terrain and where the struggle for communism was identified with the establishing of Stalinist-type regimes. But this does not preclude the fact that, even in these conditions, regimes of whatever kind are faced with the need to block the spontaneous tendency of workers to struggle to defend their conditions of life and work. The apartheid system understood that the unions constituted the best means of doing this, any union not pliant with its rules running the risk of being outlawed.

The main existing unions until the 1970s

These were the following:

  • The unions of European origin: these had always followed the orientations of the colonial power, and in particular supported the war efforts in 1914-1918 and in 1939-1945. Similarly they assumed until the end of the apartheid system and beyond their role as “defenders” of the exclusive interests of white workers, even when they included workers of colour in their ranks. On the one hand there was the South African Confederation of Labour, considered as the most racist and conservative workers’ grouping in the country (close to the apartheid regime) and, on the other, the Trade Union Confederation of South Africa, whose complicit ties to the Labour Party were very old. Most workers of colour (Indian and ‘coloured’ as defined by the regime but neither blacks nor whites) were for their part sometimes in mixed unions (some coloured but mainly white) and sometimes in unions of “colour”.

  • African trade unions: these were more or less strongly tied to the CP and the ANC, proclaiming themselves as defenders of the African workers and for national liberation. These were the Congress of South African Trade Unions (SACTU), the Free Trade Union Federation of South Africa and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).

In 1974, there were 1,673,000 union members organised on the one hand in 85 exclusively white unions and on the other in 41 mixed and coloured unions regrouping a total of 45,188 white members and 130,350 of colour. But although outnumbered by members of colour, the white union members were of course more advantaged and considered they were better than the latter:

“(...) White workers’ unions were concentrated in economic sectors long protected by the government and reserved as a priority for the Afrikaner workforce, the electoral base of the ruling party. The six most numerically important white unions (...) were implanted in public and municipal services, the iron and steel industry, the automobile industry and mechanical engineering, railways and port services.”15

With this kind of union apparatus, we can better understand the difficulties of the white working class in identifying with its sister fractions (black, coloured and Indian), since the steel barriers set up by the segregationist system made it almost impossible to envisage any common action between proletarians faced with the same exploiter.

There were (in 1974) 1,015,000 union members organised, firstly, in trade unions exclusively of colour and, secondly, in mixed unions (i.e. all those in unions excluding black Africans). “The white unions were racially homogeneous, while the coloured or Asian unions had to submit to the coercion of the nationalist government.16

In the same year (1974), black Africans represented 70% of the working population and some 6,300,000 were affiliated to unions that were not officially recognised, given that workers didn’t have the right to organise themselves. Here again is an aberration of the apartheid system with its bureaucracy of another age in which the state and employers were allowed to employ people while denying them the status of employees, but allowing them nevertheless to create their own unions. What could therefore be the purpose of the regime’s manoeuvres in this situation?

It is clear that the tolerance of the African trade union organisations by the regime in no way contradicted its objective of controlling and dividing the working class along ethnic or nationalist lines. Indeed it is easier to control a strike controlled by “responsible” union organisations (even if unrecognised) than having to deal with a “wildcat” movement without leaders identified in advance. Besides, in this regard, the South African regime was following a “recipe” that was applied by all states faced with a combative proletariat.

The national liberation struggle against the class struggle

In reaction to the formal establishment of apartheid (1948), which resulted in the legal prohibition of African organisations, the CP and the ANC mobilised their militants, including the unions, and embarked on an armed struggle. With terror being employed on both sides, the working class suffered the consequences and could not avoid being enlisted by one or the other. Clearly, the working class as a whole was firmly taken hostage by the nationalists of all stripes.

Between 1956 and 1964, the main leaders of the ANC, the PAC,17 and the South African Communist Party were arrested. The interminable trials to which they were subjected eventually ended in life imprisonment or renewed banishment for the principal historic leaders (N. Mandela, W. Sisulu, R. Fischer...), while very heavy prison sentences hit all the militants. Those who could escape repression took refuge in Lesotho, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Botswana. (…) In addition, military camps in countries neighbouring South Africa regrouped refugees or ‘freedom fighters’ who underwent military training and stood ready to intervene. Inside the country, the decade 1960-1970 was one of silence: repression silenced the opposition and only the protests of some religious and student organisations were heard. Strikes could be counted on the fingers of one hand while black workers bowed their heads, and black puppet leaders appointed by the Nationalist government, collaborated in the policy of dividing the country.18

From all this it is clear that the South African proletariat was chained, trapped between the repression of the ruling power and the impasse of armed struggle launched by the African nationalists. This amply explains the passivity of the working class during this long period ranging from the 1940s up until the 1970s (except for the ephemeral episode of struggles during the second world butchery). But above all, this situation was an opportunity for the parties and trade unions to fully occupy the ideological terrain, poisoning class consciousness by striving to systematically transform every struggle of the working class into a struggle for “national liberation” for one section and one to defend the interests of “white workers” for the other. Obviously all this could only satisfy the objectives of the enemy of the working class, namely South African national capital.

The recovery of the class struggle: the strike waves between 1972 and 1975

After a long period of apathy, when it was subdued and held in check by the apartheid government and supporters of the liberation struggle, the working class successfully renewed its struggles in Namibia (a colony of South Africa at that time), thus enrolling itself in the worldwide waves of struggle that marked the end of the 1960s and the 1970s. 19

The example of Namibia

As in South Africa, the working class in Namibia was, on the one side, caught in the bloody clutches of the South African police regime, and, on the other, dominated by the supporters of the national liberation struggle (SWAPO20). But, unlike the working class in South Africa which benefited from a long experience of struggle, it was the working class in Namibia, one with no real experience (to our knowledge), that would start the ball rolling in the struggles of the 1970s:

Eleven years had passed since the last African mass movements. The white regime took advantage of this respite to consolidate its plans for separate development. On the social front, peace and stability could be loudly proclaimed across the world. But, two series of events emerged to disturb the ‘white peace’ in South Africa and create a sense of disquiet: the first occurred at the end of 1971 in Namibia, a territory illegally occupied by South Africa, and which, since 1965, had been agitated by the resistance of the South-West Africa People’ Organisation (SWAPO) to the central government of Pretoria. The second took place in the course of 1972 in South Africa itself, in the form of spectacular strikes launched by the bus conductors of Johannesburg. These two waves of unrest are generally attributed with the role of detonator for the events which were unleashed in the first days of January 1973.”21

The first strike started in Namibia in Windhoek (the capital) and its suburbs, in Katutura, where 6,000 workers decided to enter into struggle against the political and economic oppression of the South African regime. And 12,000 other workers spread over a dozen industrial centres would soon follow the same strike agenda as their Katutura comrades. Thus 18,000 strikers downed tools several days after the beginning of the movement – one third of the estimated workforce of 50,000. And, despite threats of state repression and the violent blackmail of the employers, the workers’ fighting spirit remained intact:

Two weeks after the start of the strike almost all the strikers were sent back to the townships. The employers announced that they would re-hire the Ovambo (the ethnic name of the strikers) who had been disciplined, but would seek their workforce from elsewhere if they did not accept the conditions on offer. With the workers standing firm, the employers launched a wide recruitment campaign in other parts of the country, as well as in Lesotho and South Africa: they failed to recruit more than 1,000 new workers and were forced to go back and talk to the Ovambo workers.”22

Clearly, faced with the fighting spirit of the workers, the employers began to manoeuvre to divide the strikers, but were forced to give way: “The employment contracts against which the strike was organised were subject to some changes; the recruitment agency (the SWANLA) was dismantled and its functions devolved to the Bantu authorities with the obligation to create recruitment offices in each Bantustan; the terms ‘masters’ and ‘servants’ were replaced in the contracts with ‘employers’ and ‘employees’.”23

Obviously, given everything that remained in the arsenal of apartheid in the world of work, we can say that the victory of the strikers was not decisive. However this was a highly symbolic and promising victory in the context in which the strike movement unfolded: “The scale of the strikes was such that it made it impossible for the government to adopt any traditional style of punitive action.24

This showed that the balance of forces began to change in favour of the working class, which was able to show its militancy and its courage against the repressive regime. Besides, the exemplary experience of the struggle of the Namibian workers did not fail to spread to South Africa, unfolding there on an even more massive scale.

Strikes and riots in South Africa between 1972 and 1975

After Namibia, the working class continued its struggle within South Africa in 1972 where 300 Johannesburg bus drivers went on strike, 350 in Pretoria; 2,000 dockers came out in Durban and 2,000 in Cape Town. All these strikes made demands for wage rises or better working conditions. And their importance could be measured by the anxiety of the bourgeoisie, which was soon employing huge resources to defeat the movements:

The reaction of the government and the employers was brutal and swift. The 300 strikers in Johannesburg were arrested. In Durban, 15 of them were sacked. In other sectors, at the Ferro Plastic Rubber Industries, they were penalised 100 rand or given 50 days in jail for stopping work illegally. At Colgate-Palmolive (Boksburg) all African staff were dismissed. In one diamond mine, the striking miners were sentenced to 80 days in prison, their contracts were cancelled and they were sent back to their townships.25

This brutal reaction expresses very clearly the palpable concern of the ruling class. However, the savagery which the South African bourgeoisie showed was accompanied by a dose of realism, because wage increases were granted to certain striking sectors with a view to encouraging a return to work. And as Brigitte Lachartre says:

Half-victory, half defeat, the 1972 strikes mainly had the effect of taking the authorities by surprise, and they swiftly took stock of the situation, refusing to negotiate with the black workers, deployed the police and dismissed the strikers. Some statistical measures help us to see the scale of the events that shook the country in the following years: coming from various sources, they do not match exactly and are inclined to under-estimate. According to the Ministry of Labour, there were 246 strikes in 1973, which involved 75,843 black workers. For its part, the Police Department declared that its forces were involved in dealing with 261 strikes in the same year. Meanwhile, union activists in Durban estimated at 100,000 the number of black workers who went on strike in Natal during the first three months of 1973. For 1974, the figure of 374 strikes was given for the industrial sector alone and there were considered to be 57,656 strikers. For the province of Natal alone from June 1972 to June 1974, there were officially 222 work stoppages involving 78,216 workers. In mid-June 1974, 39 strikes in metallurgy had been registered, 30 in textiles, 22 in the garment sector, 18 in construction, 15 in commerce and distribution. (...) Wildcat strikes were increasing. Durban had 30,000 strikers in mid-February ‘73, and the movement spread throughout the country.”26

As we can see, South Africa was fully drawn into the successive waves of struggle that unfolded from the late 1960s and which signalled the opening of a course towards the development of class confrontations globally. Many of these strikes had to face the harsh repression of the government and employers’ militias and ended in hundreds of deaths and injuries in the workers’ ranks. The aggression and fury of the forces of capitalist order were directed at strikers who were only demanding dignified living conditions. Therefore, we must underline the courage and the fighting spirit of the South African working class (black, in particular) that generally went into struggle in solidarity and relying on its own consciousness, as is illustrated by the following example:

The first expression of anger took place in a construction equipment plant (bricks and tiles): Coronation Brick and Tile Co, located in the industrial suburb of Durban. 2000 workers, the entire African workforce of the company, went on strike on 9 January 1973 in the morning. They demanded the doubling of their wages (which then amounted to 9 rand per week) and then demanded that they be tripled. An increase had been promised the previous year but had still not yet been given.

The workers of the first factory told how the strike began: they were awakened by a group of comrades at about three in the morning, who told them to meet on the football field instead of going to clock in for work. A delegation of sorts then left in the direction of the warehouses in the Avoca area to ask other workers to join them at the stadium. This first phase of the strike unfolded in good spirits and the slogans were warmly welcomed. Nobody was opposed. The Avoca workforce went to the stadium across town in two columns and without worrying about the heavy traffic on the streets of the city at that time or the prohibitions they were breaking. Passing through the gates of the stadium, they all sang: ‘Filumuntu ufesadikiza’, meaning ‘the man is dead, but his spirit still lives on.’”27

Here we see the working class engaging in a very different form of struggle, taking things into its own hands without consulting anyone; that is to say, neither the unions nor any other “social mediators”, a development which could only disorient the employers. Indeed, as expected, the company’s CEO said he did not want to discuss with the strikers inside a football stadium but would only be ready to negotiate with a “delegation”. But since an enterprise committee already existed, the workers flatly refused to form a delegation, chanting “our demands are clear, we do not want a committee, we want 30 rand a week”. So the South African government began to manoeuvre by sending the Zulu authorities (their puppets) to “discuss” with the strikers, while the police stood by with loaded guns. In the end, the strikers had to go back to work under the combined pressure of all the various forces of the regime and accept an increase of 2.077 rand after refusing 1.50 previously. The workers returned to work deeply dissatisfied because of the low salary increase obtained. However, with the press having broadcast the news of the movement, other sectors immediately gave it a fresh impetus by launching into struggle.

Two days later, 150 workers of a small tea packing company (TW Beckett) stopped work, demanding a wage increase of 3 rand a week. The reaction of management was to call the police and fire all those who refused to return to work. There were no negotiations. One of the employees said: ‘We were given 10 minutes to make our minds up’. A hundred workers refused to return to work. A few days later the management let it be known that it would re-hire the sacked workers but at the previous wage. Almost no one went back to his post. After only three weeks of the strike, the company agreed an increase of 3 rand for everyone. Almost all the workers were re-hired. (…). At the same time as the strike at Beckett’s, African workers from several service companies and boat repairers (JH Skitt and Co. and James Brown and Hamer) also stopped work. (...) The strike lasted several days and an increase of 2 to 3 rand a week was finally agreed.”28

A new phenomenon had occurred: a series of strikes which had ended in real victories because, faced with the balance of force imposed by the strikers, the bosses (in a state company) were forced to give in to the workers’ wage demands. In this sense, the most illustrative case is that of Beckett’s, which had agreed an increase of 3 rand a week; that is, the amount demanded by its employees. At the same time they were forced to take back almost all workers they had wanted to sack. Another very remarkable fact in the struggle was the conscious solidarity between workers from different ethnic groups, in this case, Africans and Indians. This wonderful gesture illustrates the ability of the working class to unite in struggle despite the multiple divisions institutionalised by the South African bourgeoisie and knowingly condoned and enforced by the trade unions and the nationalist parties. Therefore, ultimately, we can speak of a glorious workers’ victory over the forces of capital. Indeed, it was a success appreciated as such by the workers themselves, and which encouraged other sectors to launch strike action, for example in the public service sector:

On 5th February, the most spectacular actions, but also the most tension-filled, were carried out: 3,000 employees of the Durban municipality went on strike from the roads, sewers, electricity and slaughterhouse sectors. The weekly salary of the staff at the time amounted to 13 rand; the demands were for this to be doubled. The protests had such an affect that soon there were 16,000 workers refusing the increase of 2 rand made by the municipal council. It’s noteworthy that the Africans and Indians acted more often than not in close solidarity, even though the municipality had sent a large number of Indian employees home, so, it was said, they would not be molested and forced to strike by the Africans! If it was true that the Africans and Indians had different pay scales, the gaps in pay between them were not very important and usually varied between very low and low. On the other hand, if the Indians had the right to strike – which the Africans did not – this right was only applicable to certain sectors and in certain circumstances. However, in the public services, considered ‘essential services’, strikes were prohibited to everyone in the same way”.29

This strike, where we see the struggles in the private and public sectors coinciding, is also a major element expressing very clearly the high level of militancy and class consciousness reached by the South African proletariat in the early 1970s, especially as these movements took place, as always, in the same context of bloody repression - the automatic response of the apartheid regime, particularly against strikes considered “illegal”. And yet, despite all this, the militancy remained intact and even grew:

The situation remained explosive: the municipal workers had refused a wage increase of 15%; the number of factories affected by the strike had further increased and the majority of the textile workers had not returned to work. Addressing the striking workers of the municipality, one of the officials threatened them with the physical force he had the right to use, since their strike was illegal. (...) The crowd then began to jeer at him and ordered him off the stage. Trying to explain that the municipal council had already granted an increase of 15%, he was again interrupted by the workers who shouted to him that they wanted a further 10 rand. (...) The atmosphere of these meetings seems to have been mostly euphoric and the comments from the crowd of strikers more jocular than furious. The workers gave the impression of throwing off a weight that had long oppressed them. (...) As for the demands they made at these demonstrations, these also revealed the euphoric excitement since they were calling for wage increases much higher than could actually be achieved, sometimes in the order of 50-100%.”

Here we can speak in terms of a working class that had greatly recovered its class consciousness and was no longer content with wage increases but was more concerned with its self-respect and its dignity. More importantly, it demonstrated self-confidence, as shown above for example in the verbal exchange with the spokesman for the forces of law and order who the workers openly mocked. In short, in the words of the author of this quotation, the workers were euphoric and far from shocked by the police repression imposed by the state. On the contrary, in this situation where the South African proletariat had demonstrated its self-confidence, its class consciousness sowed confusion and panic inside the ruling class.

The bourgeois reaction to the workers’ strikes shows its disorientation

Clearly, faced with a wave of struggles of such strength, the ruling class could not stand idly by. But the leaders of the country were visibly surprised by the scale of combativity and the determination of the strikers, hence the dispersion and incoherence of the reactions of the bourgeoisie’s representatives.

This is demonstrated by these statements:

  • The President of the republic: “The subversive organisations persist in their efforts to incite sectors of the population to agitate. Their effects are resolutely opposed by the constant vigilance of the South African police. Sporadic strikes and protest campaigns, according to certain publications – organs of the Communist Party – are organised or given moral support by them, but have not produced significant results”.

  • The Minister of Labour: “The strikes in Natal show, by their conduct, that this is not a wage problem. (...) Everything indicates that an action was organised and that the strikers are out to get something more than a simple wage increase. The action of the workers and their unwillingness to negotiate clearly shows that agitation for union rights is not the solution and that it is only a smokescreen that hides something else ...”

  • A representative of the employers: “I don’t know who first had the idea to replace the strikers by prisoners, but this solution merits study. The alternative would be to employ Whites, but they use paint guns, which is hardly practicable in the windy conditions. As for the prisoners, we could certainly use them to clean the port and its surroundings …

  • An observer reflecting on the attitude of the unions to the strikes: “Another important aspect of the social situation in the country was specifically highlighted during these strikes: namely the loss of significant influence of the official unions. Although some members of these unions were themselves involved in some of these strikes, the majority of the union organisations were aware that the initiative was coming entirely from the non-unionised African workers and that there was no point in their intervening.”

This series of reactions clearly demonstrates a sense of panic at all levels of the South African state, and a particularly worrying phenomenon for the bourgeoisie was that these strikes were triggered and often controlled by the workers themselves, that is to say, with no union involvement. This attempt of the workers to control their struggles largely explains the divisions that were openly expressed by those in power over the means to be used to counteract the dynamic of the working class, as illustrated by the following quote:

The Anglophone and international sectors of capital did not have the same attachment to the racist and conservative doctrines as the state administrators. For them, productivity and profitability took precedence – at least at the level of discourse – over the official ideology and the legislative encumbrances of the colour barrier. (...). The most advanced spokesmen of the employers, for whom Harry Oppenheimer – President of the Anglo-American Corporation – was the leading voice, were for the gradual integration of the African labour force into the higher-paying skilled jobs, for improving the living and working conditions of the black workers and miners, and for its introduction to be controlled, at each stage, by the African trade unions.30

And, learning from the workers’ struggles, the big boss (Oppenheimer) of one of the largest diamond companies was instrumental (with others) in calling for the legalisation of the African unions to give them the means to better control the working class. Similarly, here is the case made by a spokesman of the “Progressive Party”, a close ally of the big boss quoted above: “The unions play an important role in that they prevent political disorder, (...) which, as history amply demonstrates, often follows from economic demands. If we can prevent these disorders through trade unionism and with negotiations on wages and working conditions, we can also reduce other risks. And it is not unionism which risks aggravating the situation”. Unlike the proponents of the apartheid “hard line”, this spokesman of the bourgeoisie (who we can describe as “enlightened”) saw very well the importance of the role played by the trade unions for the ruling class as forces for controlling the working class and preventing “risks” and “political disorder”.

The workers’ militancy forces the bourgeoisie to change its legislative system

Predictably, in drawing the lessons from the waves of struggle that shook the country in the early 1970s, the (“enlightened”) South African bourgeoisie was forced to react by adopting a series of measures to deal with the rising combativity of a working class that was becoming more and more aware of its strength and confidence. “The 1973 strikes broke out when its deputies were opening the parliamentary session in Cape Town. As was reported by the trade unionists in Durban, the representatives of the employers’ organisations and chambers of commerce went as a delegation to meet with the Minister of Labour to set up the first firewall against workers’ unrest. On this occasion, state-employer consultations were numerous and acted upon; past mistakes were not repeated.31

Indeed, after a series of consultations between the government, parliamentarians and employers, it was decided to “relax” a number of repressive measures to prevent “wildcat strikes” by giving more space to the African trade unions so that they could assume control over the workers. In doing so, the South African bourgeoisie became more “reasonable”, taking into account the changing balance of forces imposed by the working class through its massive struggles.

For a provisional conclusion on these great strike waves, we present the views of Brigitte Lachartre on these movements and those of a group of researchers from Durban, since both seem relevant in the light of the qualitative overall assessment: “The development of solidarity among the black workers in struggle and the increased awareness of their class unity were highlighted by many observers. This unquantifiable acquisition of the struggles is understood by them as the most positive for the continuation of the organisation of the movement of the black workers.32

And according to the analysis of the group of researchers33 cited by Brigitte Lachartre:

We note, moreover, that the spontaneity of the strikes was a major reason for their success, especially when compared with the relative failure of the mass actions of the Africans in the 50’s, in a period of more intense political activity. It was enough that the strikes were clearly organised (...) for the police to quickly seize those responsible. At the time, organised as they were, the strikes were a much greater threat to the White power; their demands were not negligible and, from the point of view of the Whites, the use of violence seemed the only possible outcome.

But the spontaneity of strikes does not mean that their demands were confined to the purely economic framework. These strikes were also political: the fact that the workers demanded the doubling of their wages is not a sign of the naiveté or stupidity of the Africans. It indicates more the expression of the rejection of their situation and their desire for a totally different society. The workers did return to work with some modest gains, but they were not more contented than they were before the strikes...”

We concur especially with the last paragraph of this quote, which gives a coherent conclusion to the overall analysis of the conduct of the struggles. As shown by its various experiences, the working class can easily switch from the economic struggle to the political struggle and vice versa. But we should above all retain the idea that the strikes were also very political. Indeed, behind the economic demands, the political consciousness of the South African working class was developing and this was a source of concern for the South African bourgeoisie. In other words, the political character of the strike waves in the years 1972-1975 eventually caused serious cracks in the apartheid system by forcing the political and industrial apparatus of capital to review its machinery for supervising the working class. This gave rise to a broad debate at the summit of the South African state on the question of the relaxation of repressive measures and more generally on the democratisation of social life, particularly regarding the legalisation of black trade unions. And indeed, after 1973 (the year of powerful strike movements), 17 new black trade unions were created or legalised in addition to the 13 previously existing. In other words, this debate was triggered by the workers’ struggles which led to the gradual process of dismantling the apartheid system but always under the pressure of workers’ struggles. Clearly by creating or strengthening the union forces, the bourgeoisie wanted to provide “social firemen” capable of extinguishing the flames of the workers’ struggles. For example, while maintaining the traditional means of deflecting social movements (nationalism, racism and corporatism), the bourgeoisie added a new “democratic” component by granting or extending “political rights” (supervised rights of association) to the black populations. It was this same process that allowed the ANC to come to power. However, as will be seen later on, the South African government would never abandon its other more traditional repressive measures against the working class, namely its police and military forces. This will be illustrated in the next article, particularly by looking at the large scale struggles of Soweto in 1976.

Lassou, June 2015


1. Published in International Review nº 154.

2. Luttes ouvrières et libération en Afrique du Sud, Editions Syros, 1977. We draw the reader’s attention to the fact that a simple reading of the book does not allow us to really know its author, her profile in terms of precise political influences. Nevertheless this seems close (at the time of the release of her book)to the intellectual milieu of the French left (or extreme left), as indicated from the following passage in her introduction: “(...) What to say to the individual concerned and aware of the game being played in southern Africa, to the political activist, trade unionist, student? Tell them about the struggles that led to it; that is, no doubt, what he expects. It is also a way of getting his attention by showing him how these struggles are close to him and how the society to which he belongs depends on their outcome. This is the choice that has been made here: to talk of the struggles of the black proletariat in recent years. Not that others have not done such work at different levels, and it would be a pity to pass over these in silence (those of intellectuals of all races, progressive Christians ...).

It turns out that among the authors (and other researchers) that we encountered in our research on the history of the workers’ movement in South Africa, Brigitte Lachartre is the only one who proposes to focus on the issue of workers’ struggles in this region, describing their progress with conviction and detailed analyses. Ultimately, that’s why we rely on it as a primary source document. Of course, where necessary, we reserve the right to express our disagreement with this or that element of her viewpoint.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. 1924 law passed by the Labourites and Afrikaners when in power.

6. On the “specific” difficulties of the white working class see International Review nº 154, the sections on “Apartheid against the class struggle”, and “National liberation struggle against the class struggle”.

7. See International Review nº 154.

9. Lucien van der Walt. www.zabalaza.net.

10. See the first article in this series in International Review nº 154.

11 .Lucien van der Walt, ibid.

13. Lachartre, ibid.

14. A. Hepple, Les travailleurs livrés à l’apartheid, cited by Lachartre, ibid.

15. Lachartre, ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Pan-Africanist Congress, a split from the ANC.

18. Lachartre, ibid.

19. See ibid.

20. South-West Africa People’s Organisation. Namibia was called “South-West Africa” at that time. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAPO.

21. Lachartre, ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. The Durban Strikes - 1973, quoted by Brigitte Lachartre, ibid.

28. Ibid.

29. Lachartre, ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Authors of The Durban Strikes - 1973.

 

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2016 - International Review

International Review 156 - Winter 2016

This issue of the International Review is devoted to texts from the ICC's Congress.

40 years after the foundation of the ICC


What balance sheet and perspectives for our activity?

Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history.” (Rosa Luxemburg, An Anti-Critique)

Last spring the ICC held its 21st Congress. Since this event coincided with 40 years of existence of our organisation, we took the decision to give this Congress an exceptional character with the central objective of making a critical balance sheet of our analyses and activities over these four decades. The work of the Congress was therefore committed to making as lucid an examination as possible of our strengths and weaknesses; of what was valid in our analyses and what errors we have made in order to arm ourselves to overcome them.

This critical balance sheet was fully in continuity with the approach that has always been adopted by marxism throughout the history of the workers’ movement. Thus Marx and Engels, loyal to a method that is both historical and self-critical, were able to recognise that certain parts of the Communist Manifesto had been proved wrong or overtaken by historical experience. It is this ability to criticise their mistakes that has enabled marxists to make theoretical advances and continue to make their contribution to the revolutionary perspective of the proletariat. In the same way that Marx was able to learn from the experience of the defeat of the Paris Commune, the Italian Left was able to recognise the profound defeat of the world proletariat in the late 1920s, to make a balance sheet or “bilan”1 of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and of the programmatic positions of the Third International. It is this critical balance-sheet that allowed them, despite their errors, to make invaluable theoretical advances, both in terms of the analysis of the period of counter-revolution and on the organisational level by understanding the role and tasks of a fraction within a degenerating proletarian party and as a bridge to a future party when the previous one had been won by the bourgeoisie..

This exceptional Congress of the ICC was held in the context of our recent internal crisis that led to the holding of an extraordinary international conference a year ago.2 It was with the utmost seriousness that all delegations prepared for the Congress and participated in the discussions with a clear understanding of the issues and of the necessity, for all the generations of militants, to make this critical evaluation of 40 years of the existence of the ICC. For the militants (especially the younger ones) who were not members of the ICC at its founding, this Congress and its preparatory texts allowed them to learn from the experience of the ICC while actively participating in the Congress’s work and taking a stand in the debates.

The critical balance-sheet of our analysis of the international situation

The foundation of the ICC was a sign of the end of the counter-revolution and the historic resurgence of the class struggle, which was shown particularly by the May ‘68 movement in France. The ICC was the only organisation of the Communist Left to analyse this event in the framework of the re-emergence of the open crisis of capitalism in 1967. With the end of the “30 Glorious Years”, and with the continuation of the Cold War arms race, the alternative was again posed of “global war or the development of proletarian struggles”. May ‘68 and the wave of workers’ struggles that developed at the international level marked the opening of a new historic course: after 40 years of counter-revolution, the proletariat had raised its head again and was not prepared to be mobilised for a third world war behind the defence of national flags.

The Congress underlined that the emergence and development of a new international and internationalist organisation confirmed the validity of our analytical framework on this new historic course. Armed with this concept (as well as the analysis that capitalism had entered its historic period of decadence with the outbreak of the first world war), the ICC has continued throughout its existence to analyse the three components of the international situation – the evolution of the economic crisis, the class struggle and imperialist conflicts – in order not to fall into empiricism and to establish the orientations for its activity. Nevertheless, the Congress applied itself to making the most lucid examination possible of the mistakes we have made in some of our analyses in order to allow us to identify the source of these errors and thus improve our analytical framework.

On the basis of the report submitted on the evolution of the class struggle since 1968, the Congress underlined that the main weakness of the ICC, since its origins, has been what we have called immediatism; that is to say a political approach marked by impatience and which is focused on immediate events to the detriment of a broad historical view of the perspective from which to understand these events. While we rightly identified that the return of the class struggle in the late 1960s marked the opening of a new historic course, the characterisation of this as a “course towards revolution” was wrong and we corrected it by using the term “course towards class confrontations.” This more appropriate wording however, due to a certain imprecision, did not close the door to a linear, schematic vision of the class struggle, with a certain hesitation among us to recognise difficulties, defeats and periods of retreat for the proletariat.

The inability of the bourgeoisie to mobilise the working class of the central countries for a third world war did not mean that the international waves of struggles that followed up until 1989 would continue in a mechanical and inevitable way towards the opening of a revolutionary period. The Congress confirmed that the ICC has underestimated the seriousness of the rupture in the historic continuity with the workers’ movement of the past and the ideological impact, within the working class, of 50 years of counter-revolution; the impact of which showed itself particularly in a suspicion, and even a rejection, of communist organisations.

The Congress also underlined another weakness of the ICC in its analyses of the balance of forces between the classes: the tendency to see the proletariat constantly “on the offensive” in each movement of struggle, even when the latter had only gone as far as defensive struggles for its immediate economic interests (important and meaningful as they are) and had failed to take on a political dimension.

The work of the Congress allowed us to note that these difficulties in analysing the evolution of the class struggle were based on an erroneous vision of the functioning of the capitalist mode of production, with a tendency to lose sight of the fact that capital is first of all a social relationship, which means that the bourgeoisie is obliged to take account of the class struggle in the implementation of its economic policies and its attacks against the proletariat. The Congress also highlighted a certain lack of mastery by the ICC of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory as an explanation of the decadence of capitalism. Following Rosa Luxemburg, to be able to continue its accumulation capitalism needs to find outlets in extra-capitalist sectors. The gradual disappearance of these sectors condemns capitalism to increasing convulsions.This analysis was adopted in our platform (even though a minority of our comrades based themselves on another analysis to explain decadence: that of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). This lack of mastery by the ICC of Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis (developed in her book The Accumulation of Capital) was reflected in a “catastrophist” vision, an apocalyptic view of the breakdown of the world economy. The Congress recognised that throughout its existence, the ICC has consistently overestimated the pace of the development of the economic crisis. But in recent years, particularly with the sovereign debt crisis, our analyses had in the background the underlying idea that capitalism could collapse by itself since the bourgeoisie was “at an impasse” and had exhausted all the palliatives that had allowed it to artificially prolong the survival of its system.

This “catastrophist” vision is due, in large part, to a lack of deepening our analysis of state capitalism, an underestimation of the capacity of the bourgeoisie, that we identified a long time ago, to draw the lessons of the crisis in the 1930s and to support its bankrupt system by all sorts of manipulations and trickeries with the law of value, through permanent state intervention in the economy. It is also due to a reductionist and schematic understanding of the economic theory of Rosa Luxemburg, with the mistaken idea that capitalism had already exhausted all its capacities for expansion in 1914 or in the 1960s. In reality, as Rosa Luxemburg stressed, the real catastrophe of capitalism lies in the fact that it subjects humanity to a decline, a long agony, by plunging society into a growing barbarism.

It is this error of denying any possibility of capitalism’s expansion in its decadent period which explains the difficulties the ICC has had in understanding the dizzying growth and industrial development in China (and other peripheral countries) after the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Although this industrial take-off in no way calls into question the analysis of the decadence of capitalism3, the ensuing vision that there was no possibility of development for the ‘Third World’ countries in the period of decadence does not hold. This error, highlighted by the Congress, led us to not consider the fact that the bankruptcy of the old autarchic model of the Stalinist countries could open up new opportunities, previously frozen, for capitalist investments4 (including the integration into wage labour of an enormous mass of workers who previously lived outside of directly capitalist social relations and who were subjected to a ferocious exploitation).

On the question of imperialist tensions, the Congress confirmed that the ICC had in general developed a very solid framework of analysis, whether during the epoch of the Cold War between the two rival blocs or after the collapse of the USSR and the Stalinist regimes. Our analysis of militarism, the decomposition of capitalism and the crisis in the Eastern countries allowed us to see the weaknesses that would lead to the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The ICC was the first organisation to have predicted the disappearance of the two blocs led by the USSR and United States, as well as the decline of US hegemony and the development of the tendency for “every man for himself” on the imperialist scene with the end of the discipline of military blocs.5

If the ICC was able to correctly understand the dynamics of imperialist tensions, this is because it was able to analyse the dramatic collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes as a major manifestation of capitalism’s entry into the final phase of its decadence: that of decomposition. This framework was the last contribution that our comrade MC6 bequeathed to the ICC to enable it to face an unprecedented and particularly difficult historical situation. For over 20 years, the rise of fanaticism and religious fundamentalism, the development of terrorism and nihilism, the unleashing of barbarism in armed conflict, the resurgence of pogroms (and, more generally, of a mentality of looking for scapegoats), only confirms the validity of this analytical framework.

Although the ICC understood how the ruling class was able to exploit the collapse of the Eastern bloc and of Stalinism to turn this manifestation of the decomposition of its system against the working class by unleashing its campaigns on the “bankruptcy of communism”, we greatly underestimated the depth of their impact on the consciousness of the proletariat and the development of its struggles.

We underestimated the fact that the deleterious atmosphere of social decomposition (as well as deindustrialisation and the relocation policies of some central countries) contributed to undermining the confidence and solidarity of the proletariat and reinforcing the loss of its class identity. Because of this underestimation of the difficulties of the new period opened up with the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the ICC has had a tendency to retain the illusion that the deepening economic crisis and attacks against the working class would necessarily, and in a mechanical way, provoke “waves of struggle” that would develop with the same characteristics and on the same model as those of 1970-80. In particular, despite rightly saluting the movement against the CPE in France and the Indignados in Spain, we have underestimated the enormous difficulties that confront today’s young generation of the working class to develop a perspective for its struggles (including the weight of democratic illusions, fear and rejection of the word “communism” and the fact that this generation has not benefited from the transfer of the living experience of the generation of workers, retirees today, who participated in the class struggles of the 1970s and 1980s). These difficulties affect not only the working class as a whole but also the searching young elements who want to engage in political activity.

The isolation and negligible influence of the ICC (like all the groups historically issuing from the communist left) in the working class for four decades, and particularly since 1989, indicates that the perspective of the world proletarian revolution is still far away. At its foundation, the ICC did not imagine that, 40 years later, the working class would still not have overthrown capitalism. This does not mean that marxism was mistaken and that the system is eternal. The principal error we made was that of underestimating the slow pace of the economic crisis which had resurfaced at the end of the reconstruction period after the Second World War, as well as the capacity of the ruling class to brake and prevent the historic collapse of the capitalist mode of production.

Moreover, the Congress highlighted that our latest internal crisis (and the lessons we have learned from it), has enabled the ICC to begin to clearly re-appropriate a fundamental acquisition of the workers’ movement highlighted by Engels: that the proletarian struggle has three dimensions – economic, political and theoretical. It is the theoretical dimension that the proletariat must develop in its future struggles in order to rediscover its identity as a revolutionary class, to resist the weight of social decomposition and put forward its own perspective of the transformation of society. As Rosa Luxemburg affirmed, the proletarian revolution is essentially a vast “cultural movement”, because communist society will not only have as its objective the satisfaction of the basic material needs of humanity but also the satisfaction of social, intellectual and moral needs. From the awareness of this gap in our understanding of the struggle of the proletariat (revealing an “economistic” and vulgar materialist tendency), we are able not only to identify the nature of our recent crisis but also understand that this “intellectual and moral” crisis, that we had already discussed at our extraordinary conference in 20147, has existed in reality for more than 30 years, and that the ICC has suffered from a lack of reflection and in-depth discussions on the roots of all the organisational challenges it has faced since its origins, and particularly since the late 1980s.

The ICC’s role as a “fraction of a certain type”

To begin a critical assessment of 40 years of the ICC, the Congress put at the centre of its work the discussion not only of a general report on activity but also on the role of the ICC as a “fraction”.

Our organisation has never had the pretension of being a party (let alone THE world party of the proletariat).

As underlined in our founding texts,The effort of our current to constitute itself as a pole of regroupment around class positions is part of that process towards the formation of the party at a time of intense and generalised struggles. We do not claim to be a ‘party’” (‘Report from the International Conference’, International Review no.1). The ICC must still undertake work that has a number of similarities with a fraction, even if it is not a fraction.

The ICC arose after an organic break with previous communist organisations and did not issue from a pre-existing organisation. There was therefore no organisational continuity with a particular group or party. The only comrade (MC) who had come from a fraction of the workers’ movement issuing from the Third International, could not represent the continuity of a group, but was the only “living link” with the past of the workers’ movement. Because the ICC was not rooted in or a split from a party that had degenerated, betrayed proletarian principles and passed into the camp of capital, it was not founded in the context of a struggle against its degeneration. The first task of the ICC, because of the break in organic continuity and the depth of the 50 years of counter-revolution, was first to re-appropriate the positions of the groups of the communist left who had preceded us.

The ICC had therefore to build and develop itself at the international level somehow from “zero.” This new international organisation had to learn “on the job” in new historical conditions and with a first generation of young inexperienced militants, coming from the student movement of May ‘68 and very strongly influenced by the weight of the petty bourgeoisie, of immediatism, the atmosphere of the “generation war” and the fear of Stalinism, which was particularly manifested from the start by a mistrust of centralisation.

From its foundation, the ICC re-appropriated the experience of the organisations of the past workers’ movement (notably the Communist League, the IWA, Bilan and the GCF8) by adopting Statutes, principles of functioning that are an integral part of its platform. But unlike past organisations the ICC was not conceived as a federalist organisation composed of a sum of national sections, each with its own local specificities. By constituting itself from the start as an international and centralised organisation, the ICC was conceived as an internationally unified body. Its principles of centralisation were the guarantor of the unity of the organisation.

While for Bilan and the GCF - given the conditions of the counter-revolution - it was impossible to grow and to build an organisation in several countries, the ICC has undertaken the task of constructing an international organisation based on solid positions (...) As an expression of the newly opened historic course towards class confrontations (...), the ICC has been international and centralised from the beginning, while other organisations of the Communist Left of the past were all confined to one or two countries.” (‘Report on the role of the ICC as a “fraction”’, presented to the Congress).

Despite these differences with Bilan and the GCF, the Congress emphasised that the role of the ICC was similar to that of a fraction: to constitute a bridge between the past (after a period of rupture) and the future. “The ICC defines itself not as a party, nor as a ‘miniature party’, but as a ‘fraction of a certain kind’” (‘Report on the role of the ICC as a “fraction”’). The ICC must be a pole of reference, of international regroupment and transmission of the lessons of the experience from the past workers’ movement. It must also guard against any dogmatic approach, knowing how to criticise, when necessary, erroneous or obsolete positions, to go beyond them and continue to keep marxism alive.

The ICC’s re-acquisition of the positions of the communist left was undertaken relatively quickly, although their assimilation was marked from the beginning by great heterogeneity. “Re-appropriation was not to say that we had arrived at clarity and truth once and for all, that our platform had become ‘invariant’ (...) The ICC modified its platform in early 1980 after intense debate” (Ibid). It was on the basis of this re-appropriation that the ICC could make theoretical elaborations of its analysis of the international situation (eg. the critique of Lenin’s theory of “weak links” after the defeat of the mass strike in Poland in 19809, and the analysis of decomposition as the final phase of the decadence of capitalism announced by the collapse of the USSR).10

From the outset, the ICC has adopted the approach of Bilan and the GCF who insisted throughout their existence on the need for an international debate (even under conditions of repression, fascism and war) to clarify the respective positions of the different groups by engaging in polemics on issues of principle. Right from the foundation of the ICC in January 1975, we took up this approach by engaging in numerous public debates and polemics, not with a view to a hasty regroupment but to promote clarification.

Since the beginning of its existence, the ICC has always defended the idea that there is a “proletarian political milieu” defined by principles and has endeavoured to play a dynamic role in the process of clarification within this milieu.

The trajectory of the Italian Left was marked, from beginning to end, by a permanent struggle for the defence of the principles of the workers’ movement and of marxism. This has equally been a permanent preoccupation of the ICC throughout its existence, either in external polemical debates or in the political struggles we have had to wage within the organisation, particularly in situations of crisis.

Bilan and the GCF were convinced that their role as fractions was equally the “formation of cadres”. Although this concept of “cadres” is very questionable and can lead to confusion, their main concern was perfectly valid: it was to train the next generation of militants by transmitting the lessons of historical experience so that it could pick up the torch and continue the work of the previous generation.

The fractions of the past did not disappear just because of the weight of the counter-revolution. Their erroneous analyses of the historic situation equally contributed to their demise. The GCF was dissolved following the analysis, which was not confirmed, of the imminent and inevitable break out of a third world war. The ICC is the international organisation that has had the longest life in the history of the workers’ movement. It still exists, 40 years after its founding. We have not been swept away by our various crises. Despite the loss of many militants, the ICC has managed to keep most of its founding sections and to constitute new sections allowing the distribution of our press in different languages, countries and continents.

However, the Congress emphasised, in a lucid way, that the ICC still carries the burden of the historical conditions of its origins. Because of these unfavourable historical conditions, there has been in our midst a generation “lost” after 1968 and a generation “missing” (because of the prolonged impact of the anti-communist campaigns after the collapse of the Eastern bloc). This situation has been a handicap to consolidating the organisation in its activity over the long term. Our difficulties have been further aggravated since the late 1980s by the weight of decomposition which affects the whole of society, including the working class and its revolutionary organisations.

In the same way that Bilan and the GCF had the capacity to carry on the fight “against the current”, the ICC, in order to assume its role as a bridge between past and future, must today develop that same fighting spirit knowing that we are also “against the current”, isolated and cut off from the whole of the working class (like the other organisations of the communist left). Although we are no longer in a period of counter-revolution, the historic situation opened up since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the very great difficulties of the proletariat to regain its revolutionary class identity and perspective (as well as all the bourgeois campaigns to discredit the communist left) have reinforced this isolation. “The bridge to which we must contribute will be one that goes from the ‘lost’ generation’ from 1968 and from the desert of decomposition towards the future generations” (Ibid).

The Congress debates emphasised that the ICC, over time (and especially since the death of our comrade MC which came shortly after the collapse of Stalinism), has greatly lost sight of the fact that it must continue the work of the fractions of the communist left. This was shown in an underestimation of the fact that our principal task is that of theoretical deepening11 (which must not be left to a few “experts”) and the construction of the organisation through the formation of new militants by transmitting the culture of theory. The Congress noted that the ICC has failed, over the last 25 years, to pass on to new comrades the method of the Fraction. Instead of transmitting the method of the long term construction of a centralised organisation, we have tended to transmit the vision of the ICC as a “mini party”12 whose main task will be intervention in the immediate struggles of the working class.

At the time of the ICC’s foundation, a great responsibility rested on the shoulders of MC, who was the sole comrade who could pass on to a new generation the marxist method, of the construction of the organisation and the uncompromising defence of its principles. There are today in the organisation many more experienced militants (who were present at the foundation of the ICC), but there is always a danger of “organic rupture” given our difficulties in carrying out this work of transmission.

In fact, the conditions that led to the foundation of the ICC were a huge handicap to the construction of the organisation over the long term. The Stalinist counter-revolution was the longest and deepest in the history of the workers’ movement. Never before, since the Communist League, had there been a discontinuity, an organic rupture between generations of militants. There had always been a living link of one organisation to the other, and the work of transmitting experience had never rested on the shoulders of a single individual. The ICC is the only organisation that has experienced this unprecedented situation. This organic break which lasted nearly half a century was a very difficult challenge to overcome and it was compounded by the reluctance of the young generation after May ‘68 to “learn” from the experience of the previous generation. The weight of the ideologies of the petty bourgeoisie in revolt, of the student milieu, contestating everything for its own sake and strongly marked by the “battle of generations ” (due to the fact that the preceding generation was precisely the one that had lived in the depths of the counter-revolution) further reinforced the weight of the organic break with the living experience of the past workers’ movement.

Obviously, the death of MC, at the very beginning of the period of capitalism’s decomposition, could only make the ICC’s efforts to overcome its congenital weaknesses more difficult.

The loss of the ICC section in Turkey was the most obvious manifestation of these difficulties in transmitting to young militants the method of the Fraction. The Congress made a very severe criticism of our error in having prematurely and precipitously integrated these ex-comrades when they had not really understood the Statutes and the organisational principles of the ICC (and tended to exhibit a strong localist, federalist tendency, conceiving the organisation as a sum of “national” sections and not as a unified and centralised body at the international level).

The Congress also noted that the weight of the circle spirit (and the dynamics of clans)13,which is part of the congenital weaknesses of the ICC, has been a permanent obstacle to its work of assimilation and transmission of the lessons of past experience to new militants.

The historic conditions in which the ICC lives have changed since its foundation. During the first years of our existence, we could intervene in a working class that was waging significant struggles. Today, after 25 years of stagnation in the class struggle at the international level, the ICC must now focus on a task similar to that of Bilan in its time: to understand the reasons for the failure of the working class to regain a revolutionary perspective almost half a century after the historic resurgence of the class struggle in the late 1960s.

The fact that we are almost alone today to examine the colossal problems can prejudge the results, but not the need for a solution” (Bilan n° 22, September 1935,” Draft resolution on the problems of international links”).

This work must bear not only on the issues we need to resolve today to establish our tactics but also on the problems that will arise tomorrow in the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Internationalise No. 1, January 1945 “Resolution on political tasks “).

The need for a moral and cultural “revival”

The debates on the critical evaluation of forty years of the ICC forced us to take the measure of the danger of sclerosis and degeneration that has always threatened revolutionary organisations. No revolutionary organisation has ever been immunised against this danger. The SPD (Socialist Party of Germany) was plagued by opportunism, to the point of a total questioning of the foundations of marxism; essentially because it had abandoned any theoretical work in favour of immediate tasks aimed at gaining influence among the working masses through its electoral successes. But the process of degeneration in the SPD began long before this abandonment of theoretical tasks. It began with the progressive destruction of solidarity between militants. Due to the abolition of anti-socialist laws (1878-1890) and the legalisation of the SPD, the solidarity between the militants, which had been a necessity in the preceding period, was no longer evident since they were no longer likely to be subjected to repression and the need for clandestinity. This destruction of solidarity (permitted by the “comfortable” conditions of the democratic bourgeoisie) opened the way to a growing moral depravity with the emergence of a pogrom mentality within the SPD, the leading party of the international workers’ movement, and which was manifested, for example, by the peddling of the most nauseating gossip about the most uncompromising representative of the left wing, Rosa Luxemburg.14 It is this combination of factors (not just opportunism and reformism), which opened the floodgates to a long process of internal degeneration leading to the collapse of the SPD in 1914.15 For a long time, the ICC had only addressed the issue of moral principles from an empirical, practical point of view (especially during the 1981 crisis when we were faced, for the first time, with thuggish behaviour with the theft of our equipment by the Chénier tendency). If the ICC had not been able to address this issue from a theoretical point of view, it is essentially because from the foundation of the ICC there was a rejection and a certain “phobia” of the term “morality”. Contrary to MC, the younger generation after the May ‘68 movement did not want the word “morality” to be included in the Statutes of the ICC (even though the idea of a proletarian morality was present in the statutes of the GCF). This aversion to “morality” was another manifestation of the ideology and the approach of the student petty bourgeoisie of the time.

It was only with the repetition, during the 2001 crisis, of thuggish behaviour (and after identifying the existence of a pogromist mentality among the ex-militants who were to form the “Internal Fraction of the ICC”) that the ICC understood the need for a theoretical re-appropriation of the achievements of Marxism on the question of morality. It took four decades for us to begin to realise the need to close this loophole. And it is since our last crisis that the ICC has begun a reflection aimed at a better understanding ofwhat Rosa Luxemburg meant when she said that “the proletarian party is the moral conscience of the revolution”.

The workers’ movement as a whole has neglected this issue. The debate at the time of the Second International was never sufficiently developed (apart from Kautsky’s book Ethics and the materialist conception of history) and the loss of morality was a decisive element in its degeneration. Although groups of the communist left have had the courage to practically defend proletarian moral principles, neither Bilan nor the GCF sufficiently addressed them theoretically. The difficulties of the ICC in this area must be seen in the light of the shortcomings of the revolutionary movement during the 20th century.

Today, the risk of the moral degeneration of revolutionary organisations is aggravated by the miasma of putrefaction and the barbarism of capitalist society. This question concerns not only the ICC but also the other groups of the Communist Left.

After our last Extraordinary Conference which was devoted to identifying the moral dimension of the crisis of the ICC, the Congress gave itself the objective of discussing its intellectual dimension. Throughout its existence the ICC has not ceased to point out its difficulties in deepening theoretical issues: the loss of the vision that the ICC plays the role similar to that of a fraction (and is not a “mini party”); immediatism in our analyses; activist and workerist trendencies in our intervention; contempt for theoretical work and the search for truth, have all been the breeding ground for the development of this crisis.

Our recurring underestimation of theoretical work (especially on organisational issues) finds its roots in the origins of the ICC: the impact of the student revolt with its academicist component (of a petty bourgeois nature), which has as its opposite an activist, “workerist” tendency (of a leftist nature), which confuses anti-academicism with a contempt for theory. And this in an atmosphere of infantile protest against “authority” (represented by the “old” MC). From the late 1980s, this underestimation of theoretical work in the organisation has been fuelled by the pernicious atmosphere of social decomposition which tends to destroy rational thought in favour of obscurantist beliefs and prejudices, which substitutes “gossip culture” for the culture of theory.16 The loss of our acquisitions (and the danger of sclerosis that this carries) is a direct consequence of this lack of a culture of theory. Faced with the pressure of bourgeois ideology, the gains of the ICC (whether programmatic, analytical or organisational) can only be maintained if they are constantly enriched by reflection and theoretical debate.

The Congress emphasised that the ICC is still affected by its “youthful indiscretion”, immediatism, which has repeatedly made us lose sight of the historic and long term framework for the functio of the organisation. The ICC was established by the regroupment of young elements who were politicised at a moment of spectacular revival of the class struggle (May ‘68). Many of them had the illusion that the revolution was already underway. The more impatient and immediatist were demoralised and abandoned their militant commitment. But this weakness was also maintained among those who stayed in the ICC. Immediatism continued to permeate us and was manifested on many occasions. The Congress realised that this weakness can be fatal for us because, linked to our loss of acquisitions, to the disdain for theory, it inevitably leads to opportunism; a drift that will always undermine the foundations of the organisation.

The Congress recalled that opportunism (and its variant, centrism) results from the permanent infiltration of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology into revolutionary organisations, demanding vigilance and a permanent struggle against the weight of these ideologies. Although the organisation of revolutionaries is a “foreign body”, antagonistic to capitalism, it arises and lives within class society and is therefore constantly threatened, either by the infiltration of ideologies and practices foreign to the proletariat, or a drift towards putting into question the gains of marxism and the workers’ movement. During these 40 years of existence, the ICC has constantly had to defend its principles and fight, in the course of difficult debates, all these ideologies that have shown themselves in its midst as, among others, leftist, modernist, anarcho-libertarian and councilist deviations.

The Congress also discussed the difficulties of the ICC in overcoming another major weakness of its origins: the circle spirit and its most destructive form, the clan spirit.17 This circle spirit is, as revealed in the history of the ICC, one of the most dangerous poisons for the organisation. And this for various reasons. It carries within itself the transformation of the revolutionary organisation into a simple grouping of friends, distorting its political nature as a product and instrument of the struggle of the working class. Through personalisation of political questions, it undermines the culture of debate and the clarification of disagreements through the confrontation of coherent and rational arguments. The constitution of clans or circles of friends clashing with the organisation or certain parts of it destroys collective work, solidarity and the unity of the organisation. Because it is powered by emotional, irrational approaches, by power relationships and personal animosities, the circle spirit is opposed to the work of thinking, of the culture of theory, in favour of a craze for idle gossip “between friends” and, in the end, for slander, undermining the moral health of the organisation.

The ICC has not succeeded in ridding itself of the circle spirit despite all the battles it has fought during these forty years of existence. The persistence of this poison is explained by the origins of the ICC, which was constituted from circles and in a “family” atmosphere where emotions (personal sympathies or antipathies) took precedence over the need for solidarity among militants fighting for the same cause and regrouped around the same programme. The weight of social decomposition and the tendency towards “every man for himself”, towards irrational actions, has compounded this original weakness. And above all, the lack of in-depth theoretical discussions on organisational issues has not allowed the organisation as a whole to overcome this “infantile disorder” of the ICC and the workers’ movement. The Congress underlined (in recalling the observation already made by Lenin in 1904 in his book One step forward, two steps back) that the circle spirit is conveyed essentially by the pressure of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie.

To face all these difficulties, and given the seriousness of the challenges of the present historical period, the Congress underlined that the organisation must develop a spirit of struggle against the influence of the dominant ideology, against the weight of social decomposition. This means that the revolutionary organisation must fight permanently against routinism, superficiality, intellectual laziness, schematism, to develop a critical spirit in lucidly identifying its mistakes and theoretical shortcomings.

To the extent that “socialist consciousness precedes and conditions the revolutionary action of the working class” (Internationalisme, “Nature and function of the political party of the proletariat”), the development of marxism is the central task of all revolutionary organisations. The Congress identified as a priority orientation for the ICC the collective strengthening of its work of deepening, of reflection, in re-acquiring the marxist culture of theory in all our internal debates.

In 1903, Rosa Luxemburg deplored the abandonment of the deepening of marxist theory thus:

“…it is only where economic matters are concerned that we are entitled to speak of a more or less completely elaborated body of doctrines bequeathed us by Marx. The most valuable of all his teachings, the materialist-dialectical conception of history, presents itself to us as nothing more than a method of investigation, as a few inspired leading thoughts, which offer us glimpses into the entirely new world (…) It is pure illusion to suppose that the working class, in its upward striving, can of its own accord become immeasurably creative in the theoretical domain.” (Stagnation and progress of marxism).

The ICC is today in a period of transition. Thanks to this critical balance-sheet, its capacity to examine its weaknesses and to admit mistakes, it is making a radical critique of the vision of militant activity that we have had until now, of relations between militants and between militants and the organisation, with as a guiding principle the question of the intellectual and moral dimension of the proletariat’s struggle. It is a real “cultural revolution” we must engage in, to continue to learn to assume our responsibilities. It is a long and difficult process, but vital for the future.

The defence of the organisation against attacks on the ICC

Throughout its existence, the ICC has waged a permanent struggle for the defence of its principles, against the ideological pressure of bourgeois society, against anti-proletarian behaviours or the manoeuvres of lawless adventurers. The defence of the organisation is a political responsibility and also a moral duty. The revolutionary organisation is not for the militants, but for the whole of the working class. It is a product of the latter’s historical struggle, an instrument of its fight for the development of its consciousness with the aim of the revolutionary transformation of society.

The Congress insisted on the fact that the ICC is a “foreign body” in society, antagonistic to and an enemy of capitalism. This is precisely why the ruling class has been very interested in our activities since the beginning of our existence. And this reality has nothing to do with paranoia or “conspiracy theories”. Revolutionaries must not be naive or ignorant of the history of the workers’ movement and even less yield to the siren song of bourgeois democracy (and its “freedom of expression”). If today, the ICC is not subject to the direct repression of the capitalist state, it is because our ideas are in a very small minority and do not represent any immediate danger to the ruling class. Like Bilan and the GCF, we swim “against the current”. However, even if the ICC today has no direct and immediate influence in the working class, in disseminating its ideas it sows seeds for the future. This is why the bourgeoisie is interested in the disappearance of the ICC which is the only centralised international organisation of the communist left having sections in different countries and continents.

This is also what fuels the hatred of declassed elements18 who are always on the lookout for “warning signs” of our disappearance. The ruling class cannot but rejoice to see a constellation of individuals claiming to be part of the communist left agitating around the ICC (through blogs, websites, internet forums, Facebook and other social networks) to peddle gossip, slanders against the ICC, pogromist attacks and police methods, targeting repeatedly and ad nauseam certain of our militants.

The Congress emphasised that the increase in attacks against the ICC by this parasitic milieu19, which seeks to recuperate and distort the militant work of the groups of the communist left, is a manifestation of the putrefaction of bourgeois society.

The Congress took full measure of the new dimension taken on by parasitism since the beginning of the period of decomposition. Its objective, avowed or not, is today not only to cause trouble and confusion, but above all to sterilise the potential forces that could become politicised around the historic organisations of the communist left. It aims to form a “cordon sanitaire” (notably by raising the spectre of Stalinism that is still allegedly rampant inside the ICC!) to prevent young searching elements from moving closer to our organisation. This work of undermining today complements the anti-communist campaigns unleashed by the bourgeoisie during the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. Parasitism is the best ally of the decadent bourgeoisie against the revolutionary perspective of the proletariat.

While the proletariat has enormous difficulties in regaining its identity as a revolutionary class and reconnecting with its own past, the slanders, attacks and the sickening mentality of the individuals claiming to be part of the communist left and who denigrate the ICC can only defend the interests of the ruling class. In assuming the defence of the organisation, we will not only defend our own “chapel”. It is for the ICC to defend the principles of marxism, of the revolutionary class and of the communist left which risk being swallowed up by the ideology of “no future” that parasitism carries within it.

The strengthening of the public and intransigent defence of the organisation is an orientation given by this Congress. The ICC is well aware that this orientation may temporarily lead to being misunderstood, to being criticised for our lack of “fair play”, and so to an even greater isolation. But the worst thing would be to let parasitism do its destructive work without reacting. The Congress emphasised that in this regard too, the ICC must have the courage to “swim against the current,” just as it has had the courage to make a relentless critique of its own errors and difficulties during this Congress, and to publicly report them.

Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life’s breath and light of the proletarian movement. (…) But we are not lost, and we will be victorious if we have not unlearned how to learn. And if the present leaders of the proletariat, the Social Democrats, do not understand how to learn, then they will go under “to make room for people capable of dealing with a new world.”” (Rosa Luxemburg, The crisis of social democracy)

ICC (December 2015)


1 Bilan was from 1933 to 1938 the name of the French language publication of the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy, which in 1935 became the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left.

4 This analysis is currently the subject of a deeper discussion in our organisation.

5 See in particular our article “After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, destabilization and chaos” in International Review n° 61.

6 MC (Marc Chirik) was a militant of the Communist Left: he was born in Chișinău (Kishinev, then in Bessarabia and now the capital of Moldavia) in 1907, and died in Paris in 1990. His father was a rabbi, and his elder brother the Bolshevik Party secretary in the city. Marc took part in the revolutions of February and October 1917 at his brother’s side. In 1919 the whole family emigrated to Palestine to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms of the Romanian White armies; Marc, barely 13 years old, became a member of the Palestine Communist Party founded by his elder brother and sisters. He soon found himself in opposition to the Communist International’s support for national liberation movements, which led to a first exclusion from the International in 1923. In 1924 some of his siblings returned to Russia, but Marc and one of his brothers moved to France. Marc joined the French Communist Party (PCF) and quickly joined the fight against its degeneration, leading to his exclusion in 1928. For a while he was a member of Trotsky’s International Left Opposition, where he fought against the latter’s opportunist turn and in 1933 he joined Gaston Davoust (Chazé) in founding the “Union Communiste” group publishing L’Internationale. Marc opposed UC’s ambiguous attitude towards anti-fascism at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and in early 1938 he left to join the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left with whom he was already in contact. Here he found himself once again in opposition, this time to the analyses of the organisation’s leading member Vercesi, who thought that the various military conflicts of the day were not preparations for a new world war, but intended to crush the proletariat to prevent it from launching a revolution. The outbreak of war in September 1938 threw the Italian Left into disarray. Vercesi justified theoretically a complete withdrawal from politics for the duration, while Marc regrouped those members of the Fraction who refused to follow Vercesi, in the non-occupied south of France. In the most difficult conditions imaginable, Marc and this tiny handful of militants continued the work undertaken by the Italian Left since 1928. But in 1945, the Fraction learnt of the formation in Italy of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, which considered itself in continuity with the Italian Communist Left, and dissolved itself so that its members could join the new Party on an individual basis. Marc disagreed with this decision, which ran counter to everything that had characterised the Italian Left up to then, and instead joined the French Fraction of the Communist Left (whose positions he had largely inspired), which was shortly afterwards to become the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF).

This group was to publish 46 issues of its review Internationalisme, continuing the Fraction’s previous theoretical efforts and drawing inspiration particularly from the contributions of the Dutch-German Communist Left. In 1952, fearing that the world was heading for a new war whose main battleground would be Europe and which therefore threatened to eradicate the last surviving handful of revolutionaries, the GCF decided to disperse some of its militants to other continents – Marc leaving for Venezuela. This was one of MC’s and the GCF’s major mistakes, and it led to the GCF’s formal disappearance. But in 1964, Marc gathered a number of very young elements around him to form the group Internacionalismo. In May 1968, as soon as news reached him of the general strike in France, Marc returned to France to renew the contact with his old comrades and, together with another militant who had been a member of Internacionalismo in Venezuela, played a decisive role in the formation of the Révolution Internationale group, which was to push for the international regroupment which, in 1975, gave birth to the International Communist Current. To his dying day, in December 1990, Marc Chirik was to play a vital part in the ICC’s life, especially in passing on the organisational heritage of the workers’ movement, and in its theoretical progress. For more details on MC’s biography, see the articles in International Review n°s 65 and 66.

7 See the afore-mentioned article on this extraordinary conference in International Review no. 153.

8 GCF: Gauche Communiste de France, a small group formed on the positions of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left following the dissolution of this group in May 1945. It published 46 issues of its review Internationalisme until 1952.

10 See International Review n° 62, “Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism”, point 13.

11 This does not mean that this deepening is not valid during a revolutionary period or significant movement of the working class where the organisation can exert a decisive influence on the course of the struggles. For example, Lenin wrote his most important theoretical work, The State and Revolution, in the midst of the revolutionary events of 1917. Similarly, Marx published Capital in 1867, when since September 1864 he had been fully engaged in the activities of the IWA.

12 This notion of a “mini party” or “miniature party” contains the idea that even in periods when the working class is not waging large scale struggles a small revolutionary organisation can have the same kind of impact (albeit on a reduced scale) as a party in the full sense of the word. Such an idea is in total contradiction with the analysis developed by Bilan, which emphasised the fundamental qualitative difference between the role of a party and that of a fraction. It should be noted that the Internationalist Communist Tendency, despite reclaiming the Italian Communist Left, is not clear on this issue since its section in Italy continues today to be called the “Partito Comunista Internazionalista”.

13 On this question see our text “The question of organisational functioning in the ICC” published in International Review n° 109, and particularly point e), on relations between militants.

14 These despicable campaigns against Rosa Luxemburg were, in a way, preparations for her assassination by order of the SPD-led government during “Bloody Week” in Berlin in January 1919 and more generally the calls for a pogrom against the Spartacists launched by the same government.

15 See our article “1914: how German socialism came to betray the workers” in the special issue of the International Review devoted to World War 1.

16The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

  • solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomization of “look out for number one”;
  • the need for organization confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;
  • the proletariat's confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;
  • consciousness, lucidity, coherent and uni­fied thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch.” (International Review n° 62, “Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism”, point 13.

17 See note 12.

18 See our text “Theses on parasitism” in International Review n° 94.

19 Ibid.

 

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21st ICC Congress

Report on the role of the ICC as a “fraction”

As we have said in the article “40 years after the formation of the ICC – what is our balance-sheet and what are the perspectives for our activity?”, the ICC’s 21st Congress adopted a report on the ICC’s role as a “Fraction”. This report was in two parts, the first giving the historical context and a reminder of the Fraction as a concept, the second being a concrete analysis of how our organisation has discharged its responsibility in this respect. We publish below the first part of the report, which is of a general interest over and above the specific questions confronting the ICC.

The notion of the fraction in the history of the workers’ movement

The 21st International Congress will put at the centre of its concerns a critical assessment of 40 years existence of the ICC. This critical balance sheet is related to :

  • the general analyses worked out by the ICC,
  • the way the ICC assumed its role in the preparation of the future party.

The answer to this second question obviously supposes that the role which falls to the ICC in the current historical period is well defined. That’s to say: in a period in which the conditions do not yet exist for the appearance of a revolutionary party, i.e. of an organisation having a direct influence on the course of class confrontations:

One cannot study or understand the history of this organism, the party, unless you situate it in the general context of the different stages the movement of the class has gone through, of the problems posed to the class, of its efforts at any given moment to become aware of these problems, to respond to them adequately, to draw the lessons from experience and use these lessons as a springboard towards future struggles. While political parties are a major factor in the development of the class, they are thus, at the same time, an expression of the real state of the class at a given moment in its history.

Throughout its history, the working class has been subjected to the weight of bourgeois ideology which tends to deform and corrupt proletarian parties, to distort their real function. In response to this tendency, revolutionary fractions have arisen with the aim of elaborating and clarifying communist positions, of making them more precise. This was notably the case with the communist left which came out of the Third International: any understanding of the question of the party necessarily involves assimilating the experience and the acquisitions of the whole international communist left.

It was the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, however, which had the specific merit of pointing out the qualitative differences in the organisation of revolutionaries according to whether the period was one of developing class struggle or one of defeat or retreat. The Italian Fraction showed what form the revolutionary organisation took in each of these two periods: in the first case, the form of the party, an organisation which could have a direct and immediate influence on the class struggle; in the second case, a numerically restricted organisation with a much weaker influence in the immediate life of the class. To this second type of organisation it gave the distinctive name of the ‘fraction' which, between two periods in the development of the class struggle, i.e. two moments in the existence of the party, constitutes a link, an organic bridge between the past and future party.” (International Review n°35, ‘On the party and its relation to the class’, point 9)

In this respect we are obliged to pose a certain number of questions:

  • what is meant by this concept of the fraction at the different moments in the history of the workers’ movement?

  • up to what point the ICC can be regarded as a “fraction”?

  • what are the tasks of a fraction that are valid for the ICC, and what tasks are not?

  • which particular tasks fall to the ICC and which tasks were not those of the fractions?

In the first part of this Report, we will primarily address the first of these four points in order to establish a historic framework for our reflection and to allow us to better approach the second part of the Report, which proposes to answer the key question mentioned above: which balance-sheet can one draw about the way the ICC has played its part in the preparation of the future party?

In order to examine this concept of the fraction at the different moments in the history of the workers’ movement, we will distinguish three periods:

  • the early period of the workers’ movement: the Communist League and the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), known also as the First International;

  • the age of its maturity: the Second International;

  • the “period of wars and revolutions” (to use the Communist International’s expression);

But, to start, it may be useful to include a very short reminder on the history of the parties of the proletariat since the question of the fraction always compels us to pose the question of the party, which constitutes both the point of departure and the point of arrival of the fraction.

The party in the history of the workers’ movement

The notion of the party was gradually elaborated, theoretically and practically, through the experience of the workers’ movement (Communist League, IWA, parties of the Second International, Communist parties).

The League, which was an illegal organisation, still belonging to the period of the sects: “At the dawn of modern capitalism, in the first half of the 19th century, a working class still in its phase of constitution undertook local and sporadic struggles and could only give birth to doctrinal schools, sects and leagues. The Communist League was the most advanced expression of this period, while at the same time its Manifesto with its call ‘proletarians of all countries – unite’ heralded the period to come.” (‘Nature and function of the political party of the proletariat’, Internationalisme n°38, October 1948)

It was precisely the task of the IWA to go beyond the sects, allowing for a broader gathering of European workers and a decantation with respect to many confusions that weighed on their consciousness. At the same time, with its heterogeneous composition (trade unions, co-operatives, propaganda groups, etc.) it was not yet a party in the modern sense that the word acquired later on, within and thanks to the Second International. “The First International corresponded to the proletariat’s effective entry onto the stage of social and political struggle in the principal countries of Europe. It thus grouped together all the organised forces of the working class, its diverse ideological tendencies. The First International brought together both all the currents and all the contingent aspects of the workers' struggles: economic, educational, political and theoretical.

It was the highest point of the working class’ unitary organisation in all its diversity. The Second International marked a stage of differentiation between the economic struggle of wage labour and the social, political struggle. In this period of the full flourishing of capitalist society, the Second International was the organisation of the struggle for reforms and of political conquests, for the political affirmation of the proletariat, and at the same time it marked a higher stage in the ideological demarcation of the proletariat by clarifying and elaborating the theoretical foundations of its historic revolutionary mission”. (ibid)

It was within the Second International that the distinction was clearly made between the general organisation of the class (trade unions) and its specific organization, charged with the defence of its historical programme, the party. A distinction which was quite clear when the Third International (ie the Communist International, the CI) was founded, at the moment when the proletarian revolution was, for the first time, on the agenda of the history. For the new International, the general organisation of the class no longer consisted of the trade unions (which, in any case did not regroup the whole proletariat) but the workers’ councils (even if much remained unclear in the CI on the question of the trades unions and on the role of the party).

Despite all the differences between these various organisations, there is a common point between them: they have an impact on the course of the class struggle and it is in this sense that one can attribute them the name “party”. This impact was still weak for the Communist League at the time of the revolutions of 1848-1849 when it acted mainly as a left wing of the democratic movement. Thus, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Marx, and which had a certain influence in the Rhineland and even in the rest of Germany, was not directly the organ of the League but was presented as an “Organ of the Democracy”. As Engels pointed out: “(…) the League proved to be much too weak a lever as against the popular mass movement that had now broken out.” (‘On the history of the Communist League’, November 1885).

One of the most important causes of this weakness layin the proletariat’s weakness in Germany itself, where industrial development had not yet taken off. However, Engels also makes the point that “The League was incontestably the only revolutionary organisation that was of importance in Germany”. The impact of the IWA was much more important since it was to become a “power” in Europe. But it was above all the Second International (in fact through the different parties that composed it) which could, for the first time in history, claim to have a determining influence on the working masses.

The idea of the fraction at the dawn of the workers’ movement

The question was already posed at the time of Marx, but was of a much greater importance later on: what becomes of the party when the vanguard, which defends the historical programme of the working class, the communist revolution, has no immediate impact on the struggles of the proletariat?

To this question history gave different answers. The first answer is that of the dissolution of the party when the conditions of its existence are no longer present. This was the case with the League and with the IWA. In both cases, Marx and Engels played a decisive role in this dissolution.

It was thus in November 1852, after the Cologne communist trial which sealed the victory of the counter-revolution in Germany, that Marx and Engels called on the Central Council of the League to pronounce its dissolution. It is worth pointing out that the question of the activity of the revolutionary minority in a period of reaction had already been raised in the autumn of 1850 within the League. In the middle of that year, Marx and Engels had come to the conclusion that the revolutionary wave was ebbing as a result of the economic recovery: “Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois society are developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a revolution is possible only in periods when both of these factors – the modern forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production — come into opposition with each other.” (Marx, The class struggles in France, Part IV)

Marx and Engels were thus led to fight the immediatist minority of Willich-Schapper that, despite the ebbing tide, wanted to continue calling the workers to insurrection: “During our last debate in particular, on the question of ‘The position of the German proletariat in the next revolution’, views were expressed by members of the minority of the Central Committee which directly contradict our second-to-last circular and even the Manifesto. A national German approach has replaced the universal conception of the Manifesto, flattering the national sentiments of German artisans. The will, rather than the actual conditions, was stressed as the chief factor in the revolution. We tell the workers: If you want to change conditions and make yourselves capable of government, you will have to undergo fifteen, twenty, or fifty years of civil war. Now they are told: We must come to power immediately or we might as well go to sleep. The word ‘proletariat’ has been reduced to a mere phrase, like the word ‘people’ was by the democrats. To make this phrase a reality one would have to declare the entire petty bourgeoisie to be proletarians, ie de facto represent the petty bourgeoisie and not the proletariat. In place of actual revolutionary development one would have to adopt the revolutionary phrase” (Marx, speaking to the meeting of the Central Council of the League of September 15th, 1850, cited in the “Preliminaries” of the Cologne Communist Trial1).

Similarly, at the Congress of the Hague of 1872, Marx and Engels supported the decision to transfer the General Council to New York in order to isolate it from the influence of the Bakuninist and Lassallean tendencies, which waxed just as the European proletariat had suffered a major defeat with the crushing of the Paris Commune. Moving the General Council out of Europe was intended to let the IWA lie dormant as a prelude to its dissolution, which took effect at the Philadelphia Conference in July 1876.

In a sense, the dissolution of the party, when the conditions no longer allow its existence, was much easier in the case of the League and of the IWA than later on. The League was a small clandestine organisation (except during the revolutions of 1848-1849), which had not occupied an “official” place in society.

As for the IWA, its formal disappearance did not mean that all its components disappeared. The English trade unions or the German Workers’ Party (SAP) survived the IWA. What disappeared was the formal ties between its various components.

Things changed after that. The workers’ parties no longer disappeared – they passed over to the enemy. They became institutions of the capitalist system and this conferred a new responsibility on the remaining revolutionaries.

When the League was dissolved, no formal organisation remained, charged with building a bridge towards the new party, which would emerge at some time in the future. During this period, Marx and Engels considered the work of theoretical elaboration to be the first priority. At this juncture, they were practically the only ones to master the theory they had developed, and they did not need a formal organisation to carry on this work. However, they remained in contact with a number of former members of the League, in particular those in exile in England.

There was even a reconciliation, in 1856, between Marx and Schapper. In September 1864, it was Eccarius, former member of the League’s Central Council, and who had close ties with the English labour movement, who asked Marx to join the platform of the famous meeting of 28th September at Saint Martin' s Hall, where the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was decided.2

The IWA’s General Council also contained a significant number of former members of the League: Eccarius, Lessner, Lochner, Pfaender, Schapper and, of course, Marx and Engels.

When the IWA disappeared, there remained, as we have seen, organisations that would be at the origin of the foundation of the Second International, in particular the German party, brought about by the unification of 1875 (SAP), and whose marxist component (Bebel, Liebknecht), known as the Eisenachers, had been affiliated to the IWA.

Here we should make a point with regard to the role these first two organisations were intended to fulfil at the moment of their formation. It is clear from the Communist Manifesto that the League expected to see the proletarian revolution in the near future. Following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions Marx and Engels understood that historical conditions were not yet ripe. In the same way, at the moment of the foundation of the IWA, there existed (according to its statutes) the idea of an “emancipation of the workers” in the short or medium term, (despite the diversity of the visions contained in this formula, and which corresponded to the different components of the IWA: mutualists, collectivists, etc).

The defeat of the Paris Commune highlighted once again the immaturity of the conditions for the overthrow of capitalism: the period that followed was one of massive capitalist expansion, expressed in particular by the emergence Germany as an industrial power that, by the beginning of the 20th century, had overtaken Britain.

The fractions in the Second International

During this period,3 while the revolutionary perspective remained distant, the Socialist parties acquired a major importance within the working class (particularly in Germany). This growing impact, at a time when the spirit of the majority of the workers was not revolutionary, is linked to the fact that the Socialist parties not only included in their programme the prospect of socialism, but also defended, in their daily newspapers, the “minimum programme” of reforms within capitalist society.

It was also this situation that led to the opposition between those for whom “the final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything” (Bernstein) and those who say that “the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social-Democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order – the question: ‘Reform or Revolution?’ as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the Social-Democracy the question: ‘To be or not to be?’ In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the Party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but of the very existence of the Social-Democratic movement.” (Rosa Luxemburg Social Reform or Revolution, Preface;)

Despite the official rejection Bernstein’s theses by the SPD and the Socialist International, this vision actually gained the majority within the SPD (especially in the Party apparatus) and within the International. “The experience of the Second International confirms the impossibility of maintaining the party of the proletariat during a prolonged period marked by a non-revolutionary situation. The participation of the parties of the Second International in the imperialist war of 1914 only revealed the long corruption of the organisation. The permeability and penetrability of the political organisation of the proletariat to the ideology of the reigning capitalist class, which is always possible, can in long periods of stagnation and reflux of the class struggle assume such an extent that the ideology of the bourgeoisie ends up substituting itself for that of the proletariat, so that inevitably the party is emptied of all its original class content and becomes instead an instrument of the enemy class” (“Nature and function of the political party of the proletariat”, Internationalisme n°38, October 19484).

In this context, for the first time, real fractions emerged.

The first fraction was that of the Bolsheviks who, after the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Congress of 1903, assumed the fight against opportunism, initially on the question of the organisation and thereafter on the questions of tactics with respect to the tasks of the proletariat in a semi-feudal country like Russia. It should be noted that, until 1917, although the Bolshevik and the Menshevik fractions carried on their policy independently from each other, they formally belonged to the same party, the RSDLP.

From 1907, the marxist current which developed in Holland around the weekly magazine De Tribune (led by Wijnkoop, Van Ravesteyn and Ceton, but in which Gorter and Pannekoek also participated) engaged in a similar work in the Dutch SDAP (Social Democratic Workers’ Party). This current fought against the opportunist drift within the party (mainly represented by Troelstra and the parliamentary fraction) which proposed, at the 1908 congress to shut down De Tribune. Troelstra finally won the case at the Extraordinary Congress of Deventer (February 1909), which decided on the closure of De Tribune and the exclusion of its three editors from the party. This policy, which aimed to separate the Tribunist “leaders” from the sympathisers of this current, actually provoked a strong reaction by the latter.

In the final analysis, Troelstra’s policy of exclusion, backed up by the reformist-dominated International Bureau of the Socialist International, which had been called in to arbitrate coincided with the three editors’ desire to break from the SDAP (a wish that Gorter did not share 5) led the “Tribunists”, in March 1909, to found a new party, the SDP (Social Democratic Party). This party would, until World War I, remain a very small minority, with an insignificant electoral influence, but it benefitted from the support of the Left within the International, and in particular of the Bolsheviks, which allowed it, in the final analysis to be reintegrated into the International in 1910 (after a first refusal by the Bureau of the SI in November 1909) and to send delegates (one mandate against 7 for the SDAP) to the International Congresses of 1910 (Copenhagen) and 1912 (Basel). During the War, in which Holland remained neutral, but which nonetheless weighed heavily on the working class (unemployment, food shortages, etc) the SDP gained in electoral influence thanks to its internationalist policy and its support of workers’ struggles. Finally, in November 1918, and even before the foundation of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the SDP adopted the name of Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN).

The third current which played a decisive role as a fraction in a party of the Second International was to form the KPD. On the evening of 4th August 1914, after the unanimous vote for war credits by the Socialist deputies in the Reichstag, a handful of internationalist militants gathered in the Rosa Luxemburg’s apartment to work out the prospects for the struggle and the means to regroup all those who, in the party, wanted to fight the chauvinist policy of the leadership and the majority. These militants were unanimous in considering that it was necessary to carry out this combat within the party. In many cities, the party rank and file denounced the parliamentary fraction’s vote for war credits. Even Liebknecht was criticised for having given his support for this, out of party discipline, on 4th August.

At the second vote, on 2nd December, Liebknecht was the only one who voted against, but in the two votes that followed he was joined by Otto Rühle, then by a growing number of deputies. From the winter of 1914-1915, illegal leaflets were being distributed (in particular one entitled ‘The main enemy is at home’). In April 1915 the first and only issue of Die Internationale was published, selling up to to 5000 copies on the first evening, and giving its name to the Gruppe Internationale, around Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring, and Clara Zetkin. In conditions of illegality, subjected to repression6, this tiny group, which adopted the name of “Spartacus Group” and then “Spartacus League”, led the fight against the war and the government as well as against the right and the centre of Social Democracy.

Spartacus was not alone: other groups, in particular in Hamburg and Bremen (where Pannekoek, Radek and Fröhlich were active) defended an internationalist policy even more clearly than the Spartakists. At the beginning of 1917, when the leadership of the SPD excluded the oppositions in order to stop the progress of their positions within the Party, these groups continued their activity autonomously, whereas the Spartakists continued as a fraction within the centrist USPD. Finally, these different currents came together at the moment of the foundation of the KPD, on 31st December 1918, but it was clearly the Spartakists who were the backbone of the new party.

A left fraction was formed in Italy somewhat later than in Russia, Holland and Germany. This was the “Abstentionist Fraction” (so called because it advocated abstention from parliamentary elections) around the newspaper Il Soviet, published in Naples by Bordiga and his comrades from December 1918, and which was formally constituted as a fraction at the congress of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in October 1919. In fact, as early as 1912, in the Federation of the Young Socialists and in the Naples federation of the PSI, Bordiga had animated an intransigent revolutionary current. This delay by the Italian left is partly explained by the fact that Bordiga, who was mobilised into the army, could not intervene in political life before 1917, but above all by the fact that, during the war, the leadership of the party had been in the hands of the left. The Congress of 1912 had expelled the reformist right and that of 1914 expelled the freemasons.

The PSI’s paper Avanti was run by Mussolini (who had presented the motions for exclusion at these congresses). He took advantage of this position to publish, on 18th October 1914, a leading article entitled ‘From absolute neutrality to an acting and working neutrality’, which declared for Italian entry into the war on the side of the Entente. Of course, he was dismissed from his post, but barely one month later, he published Il Popolo d'Italia, thanks to the funds brought by the French Socialist deputy Marcel Cachin (a future leader of the French Communist Party) on behalf of the French government and the Entente. He was excluded from the PSI on 29th November. Thereafter, as a situation dominated by the World War pushed towards a decantation of a Left, a Right and a Centre, the direction of the party oscillated between the right and left, between a “maximalist” standpoint and a reformist position.

It is only in 1917, at the Rome Congress, that the opposition between the right and the left hardened. The former obtained 17,000 votes, the latter 14,000. The victory of Turati, Treves and Modigliani, at the time when the Russian revolution was already underway, precipitated the formation of an intransigent revolutionary fraction in Florence, Milan, Turin and Naples.” (The Italian Communist Left). It was only from 1920, under the impetus of the revolution in Russia, the formation of the CI (which gave its support) and also of the workers’ struggles in Italy, in particular in Turin, that the Abstentionist Fraction gained an influence in the party. It also came into contact with the current gathered around the newspaper Ordine Nuovo, animated by Gramsci, even if important disagreements existed between the two currents (Gramsci was in favour of participation in elections; he defended a kind of revolutionary trade unionism and hesitated to break with the right and the centre and to form an autonomous fraction).

In Milan in October the United Communist Fraction was formed. It put out a Manifesto calling for the formation of the communist party through the expulsion of Turati’s right wing; it gave up the electoral boycott, applying the decisions of the Second Congress of the Comintern.” (ibid.). At the Congress of Imola, in December 1920 the principle of a split was decided: “our work as a fraction is and must be terminated now (…) an immediate exit from the party and the congress (of the SPI) as soon as the vote puts us in a majority or a minority. From this follows (…) the split with the centre” (ibid.). At the Congress of Livorno, which started on 21 January 1921, “the Imola motion obtained a third of the votes: 58,783 against 172,487. The minority leaves the congress and decides to settle as the Communist Party of Italy, the section of the Communist International. Just before leaving the Congress Bordiga passionately declared: ‘we take with us the honour of your past.’” (ibid.).

This (very rapid) examination of the work of the main fractions which were constituted within the parties of the Second International makes it possible to define the primary role that falls to a fraction: the defence of revolutionary principles within a degenerating party:

  • initially to gain a maximum of militants for these principles and to exclude from the party the positions of the right and the centre;

  • then to transform itself into a new revolutionary party, when circumstances require it.

It should be noted that practically all the currents of the left tried to remain as long as possible within the party. The only exceptions are those of the Tribunists (though Gorter and Pannekoek did not share their haste) and of the “radical lefts” animated by Radek, Pannekoek and Fröhlich which (unlike the Spartakists) , refused to enter the USPD after the opposition was expelled in 1917. The separation of the left from the old party, which had betrayed, resulted either from its exclusion, or from the need to found a new party, able to become the vanguard of the revolutionary wave.

It should also be noted that the action of the left was not condemned to remain a minority within the degenerating party: at the Tours Congress of the French Socialist Party (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO), the left’s motion calling for adhesion to the CI was passed by a majority. The Communist Party founded at Tours thus kept the newspaper L’Humanité founded by Jaurès. Unfortunately, it also kept Frossard, the general secretary of the SFIO, who pfor a while was to be the leading figure of the Communist Party (PCF).

A last note: this capacity of the left fractions to constitute the new party right away was only possible because of the short period between the proven treason of the old party and the sudden appearance of the revolutionary wave. Thereafter, the situation would be quite different.

The fractions that emerged from the Communist International

The Communist International was founded in March 1919. At that moment, very few Communist Parties already existed (the Communist Party of Russia, of the Netherlands, of Germany, of Poland and some others of less importance). And yet, at that moment, a first “Left” fraction (and announced as such) was emerging within the principal party, the one in Russia (which only adopted the name Communist in March 1918, during the 7th Congress of the RSDLP): at the beginning of 1918 this current was grouped around the paper Kommunist and was animated by Ossinsky, Bukharin, Radek and Smirnov. This fraction’s principal disagreement with the orientation followed by the Party was over the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The “Left Communists” were opposed to these negotiations and recommended “revolutionary war”, ”exporting” the revolution to other countries at gunpoint. But, at the same time, this fraction undertook a criticism of the authoritarian methods of the new proletarian power and insisted on the broadest participation of the working masses in this power, a criticism that is rather close to those of Rosa Luxemburg (see her pamphlet ).

The signature of the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement announced the end of this fraction. Not long afterwards, Bukharin became a representative of the right wing of the Party, but certain elements of this fraction, such as Ossinsky, were to join the left fractions that arose later. Thus, whereas in Western Europe some of the fractions in the Socialist parties, which were to give birth to the Communist parties, had yet to be formed (the Abstentionist Fraction animated by Bordiga was only constituted in December 1918), the Russian revolutionaries had already begun the combat (obviously in a very confused way) against the deviations that affected the Communist Party in their country. It is worth remarking (even if it is not necessary to analyse this phenomenon here) that, on a whole series of questions, the Russian militants were in the van during the first years of the 20th century: the constitution of the Bolshevik fraction after the Second Congress of the RSDLP; a clear position against the imperialist war in 1914; leading the Left at Zimmerwald; the recognition of the need for the foundation of a new International, the foundation of the first Communist Party in March 1918, the stimulus to and political orientation of the 1st Congress of the Communist International.

And this “precocity” is also to be found in the formation of fractions within the Communist Party. In fact, from its particular role of first (and only) Communist Party to come to power, the Russian Party was also the first to suffer the pressure of the main element in its decay (besides, obviously, the defeat of the worldwide revolutionary wave): its integration into the State. So, faced with this process of degeneration of the proletarian party, forms of resistance, however confused they may have been, started much earlier than elsewhere.

From then on, the Russian Party saw the emergence of a significant number of other “left” currents:

  • in 1919 the “Democratic Centralism” group, formed around Ossinsky and Sapronov, fought against the principle of “individual authority” in industry and defended the collective or collegial principle as being the “most effective weapon against the departmentalisation and bureaucratic stifling of the state apparatus.” (Theses on the Collegial Principle and Individual Authority).

  • also in 1919, many members of “Democratic Centralism” were engaged in the “Military Opposition”, which had been formed for a short period in March 1919 to fight against the tendency to shape the Red Army according to the criteria of a traditional bourgeois army.

During the civil war, criticism of Party policy surfaced less often because of the threat of the White Armies to the new regime; but as soon as this ended with the victory of the Red Army over the Whites, they redoubled in force:

  • At the beginning of 1921, on the occasion of the 10th Party Congress and the debate on the trade union question, the “Workers’ Opposition” was formed, led by Shliapnikov, Medvedev (both metal-workers) and, especially, Alexandra Kollontai, author of its Platform. Like the revolutionary syndicalists, this Opposition wanted to entrust the management of the economy to the trade unions instead of the state bureaucracy.7 After the prohibition of fractions, a decision taken at this very Congress (which was held during the insurrection of Kronstadt), the Workers’ Opposition dissolved, Kollontai later becoming a faithful follower of Stalin.

  • In the autumn of 1921 the group “Workers’ Truth” was constituted, made up mainly of intellectuals and followers of the “Proletkult” like its principal organizer, Bogdanov. This group, together with the other currents of the opposition, denounced the bureaucratisation of the party and of the State but, at the same time, adopted a semi-Menshevik position, considering that the conditions of the proletarian revolution were not mature in Russia, that these conditions had to be created on the basis of modern capitalism (a position that, later, would become the position of the “councilist” current);

  • in 1922-23 the “Worker’s Group” was constituted, led by Gabriel Miasnikov, a worker from the Urals, who had distinguished himself in the Bolshevik Party in 1921 when, immediately after the 10th Congress, he had called for the “freedom of the press, from the monarchists to the anarchists”. Despite Lenin’s efforts to engage a debate on this question, Miasnikov refused to withdraw and was then expelled from the Party at the beginning of 1922. With other militants of working class origin, he constituted the “Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)” that distributed its Manifesto at the RCP’s 12th Congress. This group started illegal work among the workers of the Party and seems to have had a significant presence in the strike waves of summer 1923, where it called for mass demonstrations and tried to politicise a primarily defensive class movement. Its activity in these strikes convinced the GPU that the group constituted a threat and its leaders, including Miasnikov, were imprisoned. The activity of this group went on in an illegal way in Russia (as well in exile) until the end of the 1920s, when Miasnikov succeeded in leaving the country and, exiled in Paris, took part in the publication of L’Ouvrière Communiste that defended positions close to those of the KAPD.

Of all the currents that conducted a battle against the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, it is certainly the Workers’ Group which was the most politically clear. It was very close to the KAPD (the latter published its documents and remained in contact with it). In particular, its criticisms of the policy pursued by the Party were based on an international vision of the revolution, contrary to those of the other groups who tended to focus on questions of democracy (in the Party and the working class) and on the management of the economy. It rejected the United Front policies of the CI’s 3rd and 4th Congresses, unlike the Trotskyist current which continued to refer to the first four congresses. There were however discussions (in particular in exile) between the left wing of the Trotskyist current and elements of the Workers’ Group.

The Workers’ Group was probably the only current to emerge within the Bolshevik party to have consistently acted like a fraction.. But the terrible repression which Stalin unleashed against revolutionaries (and which put Tsarist repression into the shade) removed any possibility of developing along this path. After World War II, Miasnikov decided to return to Russia.. Predictably, he disappeared immediately, depriving the weak forces of the communist left of one of its bravest militants.

The combat of the left fractions in the other countries necessarily took other forms than in Russia; but to return to the three other Communist Parties mentioned above we can see that the left currents also started the struggle very early.

At the foundation of the German Communist Party, the positions of the left had a majority. On the trade union question, Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote the Program of the KPD and presented it to the Congress, was very clear and categorical: “[trade unions] are no longer workers’ organisations; they are the most solid defenders of the state and bourgeois society. Consequently it follows that the struggle for socialisation must entail the struggle to destroy the unions. We are all agreed on this point.” On the parliamentary question, the Congress rejected, against the position of Spartakists (Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches, etc), participation in the elections which were to be held shortly after. After these militants’ assassination, the new leadership (Levi, Brandler) initially seemed to make concessions to the left (which remained the majority) on the trade union question. But from August 1919 (Frankfurt Conference of the KPD), Levi, who wanted a rapprochement with the USPD, opted for work in parliament as well as in the trade unions; and, at the Heidelberg Congress in October, it succeeded thanks to a manoeuvre, in excluding the left-wing anti-trade union and anti-parliamentary majority.

The majority of excluded militants refused to give in. They were firmly supported by the militants of Dutch Left (in particular Gorter and Pannekoek) who had great authority within the CI at the time and who pushed for the formation of the Amsterdam Bureau, appointed by the International to coordinate work in Western Europe and America. Only six months later (April 1920), faced with the February KPD Congress’ refusal to reintegrate the expelled militants, and also faced with the Party’s conciliatory attitude towards the SPD during the Kapp Putsch (13-17th March), the excluded militants founded the KAPD (Communist Workers’ Party of Germany).

Their approach was reinforced by the support of the Amsterdam Bureau, which organized an International Conference in February where the Theses of the left triumphed (on the trade union and parliamentary questions and on the rejection of the opportunist turn of the CI, expressed in particular by the insistence that Communists in Britain should enter the Labour Party)8. The new Party was boosted by the support of the left minority (led by Gorter and Pannekoek) of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), which published in its newspaper the KAPD programme adopted by the latter’s founding congress. This did not prevent Pannekoek from criticising the KAPD (in his letter of 5th July, 1920), in particular with regard to its position towards the “Unionen” (warning against any concession to revolutionary syndicalism) and above all for the presence of the “National Bolshevik” current in its ranks, which he regarded as a “monstrous aberration”. At this moment, on all the crucial questions facing the world proletariat, (trade unions, parliament, the party9, the attitude towards the Socialist parties, the nature of the revolution in Russia, etc.) the Dutch left (and particularly Pannekoek), which inspired the majority of the KAPD, was situated at the vanguard of the workers’ movement.

The Congress of the KAPD, which took place between 1st and 4th August, pronounced itself in favour of these orientations: at that moment the “National-Bolsheviks” left the Party and, a few months later, it was the turn of the federalist elements who were hostile to membership of the CI. For their part, Pannekoek, Gorter and the KAPD were determined to remain within the CI, to fight against its increasingly opportunist drift. For this reason the KAPD sent two delegates to Russia, Jan Appel and Franz Jung, for the Second Congress of the CI, which was to take place from 17th July 1920 in Moscow10. But in the absence of any news from them, it sent two others delegates, one of them being Otto Rühle. But, faced with the catastrophic situation the working class in Russia was suffering, and with the process of bureaucratisation of the governmental apparatus, they decided not to take part in the Congress, even though they had been called upon to defend their positions and were entitled to vote there. To prepare this Congress, Lenin wrote Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder. It should be noted that in this pamphlet, Lenin wrote that: “the mistake of Left doctrinarism in communism is at present a thousand times less dangerous and less significant than that of Right doctrinarism”.

From the standpoint both of the CI and the Bolsheviks on the one hand, and of the KAPD on the other, there was a real will to integrate the KAPD into the International, and thus into the KPD; but the regrouping of the latter with the left of the USPD in December 1920 to form the VKPD, a regroupment which all the left currents of the CI opposed, blocked this possibility. The KAPD nevertheless acquired the statute of a “Party sympathizing with the CI”, got a permanent representative in its Executive Committee, and sent delegates to its Third Congress in June 1921. In the meantime however, this cooperation strongly deteriorated, in particular after the “March Action” (an adventurist “offensive” promoted by the VKPD) and with the repression of the Kronstadt revolt (a repression which the left initially supported, believing that this insurrection was indeed the work of the Whites, as the propaganda of the Soviet government claimed). At the same time, the right leadership of the CPN (Wijnkoop, who was called the “Dutch Levi”), with the support of Moscow, undertook a policy of anti-statutory exclusions of the left-wing militants. Finally, in September, these militants would found a new party, the KAPN, on the model of the KAPD.

TheUnified Front policy, adopted at the CI’s Third Congress, only worsened things, as did the ultimatum addressed to the KAPD to merge with the VKPD. In July 1921, the leadership of the KAPD, with Gorter’s support, adopted a resolution breaking all links with the CI and calling for the constitution of a “Communist Workers’ International” (KAI) – this call was issued two months before the congress of the KAPD planned for September. It was clearly an over-hasty decision. At this Congress the question of the foundation of a new International was discussed (militants of Berlin, and in particular Jan Appel, were opposed to it) and the Congress finally decided to create a Bureau of Information with this aim in mind. This Bureau acted as if the new International had been formed already, even though its founding conference only took place in April 1922. At the same time, the KAPD went through a split between, on the one hand, the majority of the “Berlin tendency”, which was hostile to the formation of a new International and, on the other hand, the “Essen tendency” (which rejected the struggle around wages).

Only the latter tendency took part in this Conference, along with Gorter, who was the author of the KAI programme. The participating groups were few in number and represented very limited forces: besides the Essen tendency, there was the KAPN, the Bulgarian Communist Left, the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) of Sylvia Pankhurst, the KAP of Austria, described as a “Potemkin village” (ie a sham) by the KAPD of Berlin. In the end, this rump “International” was to vanish with the disappearance or progressive withdrawal of its components. The Essen tendency went through multiple splits. The KAPN disintegrated, initially as a result of the appearance of a current attached to the Berlin tendency, hostile to the formation of the KAI, then by internal conflicts, based more on clan conflicts than political principles. In fact, the essential element making it possible to explain the pitiful and dramatic failure of the KAI is to be found in the ebb of the revolutionary wave that had served as a springboard for the foundation of the CI:

The mistake of Gorter and his supporters was to proclaim the KAI artificially, when there still remained within the Komintern left fractions which could have been regrouped into an international left communist current. This error weighed heavily on the German revolutionary movement. (…) The decline of the world revolution, which was evident in Europe by 1921, hardly allowed the formation of a new International. Thinking that the course was still towards revolution, with the theory of ‘capitalism’s mortal crisis’, there was certain logic in the Gorter and Essen current’s proclamation of the KAI. But their premises were wrong.” (from our book The German and Dutch Left, Chapter V.4.d)

The final failure of the KAPD and the KAPN illustrates in a striking manner the need for revolutionaries to have the clearest possible vision on the evolution of the balance of forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

If the German-Dutch Left became aware of the ebb of the revolutionary wave only after much delay11, this was not the case with the Bolsheviks, the leaders of the Communist International, or the Communist Left of Italy. But they responded in radically different ways:

  • for the Bolsheviks and the majority of the CI, it was necessary “to go to the masses” since the masses were no longer moving towards the revolution. This resulted in an increasingly opportunist policy, in particular towards the “centrist” Socialist parties and currents as well as towards the trade unions;

  • for the Italian left, on the contrary, it was necessary to continue to show the same intransigence that had characterised the Bolsheviks during the war and up until the foundation of the CI; for them it was out of the question to attempt to take short-cuts towards the revolution by negotiating on principles and by watering them down; such short cuts were the most certain way towards defeat.

In reality, the opportunist course that affected the CI, already at the Second Congress, but especially from the Third Congress on, and which called into question the clarity and the intransigence of the First Congress, not only expressed the difficulties encountered by the world proletariat to continue and reinforce its revolutionary combat, but also the insoluble contradiction in which Bolshevik Party found itself. On the one hand the Bolsheviks – in effect the CI’s leadership – had been in the vanguard of the world revolution, and had played the same role in the Russian revolution. They had always insisted that the latter was only one very small step towards the world revolution and were quite conscious of the fact that the defeat of the world proletariat would mean the death of the revolution in Russia.

On the other hand, as a Party holding power in an entire country, the Bolsheviks were subject to requirements that are suited to the function of a national state and, above all, to the need to ensure external and internal “security”. In other words: to follow a foreign policy in conformity with the interests of Russia and an internal policy guaranteeing the stability of state power. In this sense, the repression of the strikes in Petrograd and the bloody crushing of the Kronstadt revolt, in March 1921, were the other side of the coin of the policy of the “open hand”. Under the cover of the “United Front”, it conducted this policy towards the Socialist parties with the idea that the latter could exert pressure on their governments to orientate foreign policy in a direction favourable to Russia.

The intransigence of the Italian Communist Left, which was actually at the head of the Communist Party of Italy (the “Rome Theses ” adopted by its Second Congress in 1922 were written by Bordiga and Terracini) found exemplary expression towards the rise of fascism in Italy, following the defeat of the class struggles of 1920. On the practical level, this intransigence expressed itself in a total refusal to make alliances with parties of the bourgeoisie (liberal or “Socialist”) faced with the fascist threat: the proletariat could fight fascism only on its own terrain, the economic strike and the organisation of workers’ militia for its self-defence. On the theoretical level, we owe to Bordiga the first serious analysis (which remains valid to this day) of the fascist phenomenon, an analysis which he presented to the delegates of the CI’s Fourth Congress, rejecting the latter’s analysis:

  • Fascism was not the product of the middle classes and of the landed bourgeoisie. It was the product of the defeat which the proletariat had suffered and which had the indecisive petty-bourgeois strata behind the fascist reaction” (from our book The Italian Communist Left, Chapter I)

  • Fascism was not a ‘feudal’ reaction. It was born first of all in the big industrial towns, like Milan…” (ibid) and had the support of the industrial bourgeoisie.

  • Fascism was not opposed to democracy. It was its indispensable complement when ‘the State was no longer able to defend the power of the bourgeoisie’” (ibid.)

This intransigence was also expressed with regard to the policy of the United Front, of the “open hand” towards the Socialist parties and its corollary, the slogan of the “workers’ government which amounts to a denial in practice of the political programme of communism, i.e. the necessity to prepare the masses for the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat”. (Bordiga, quoted in The Italian Communist Left)

This same intransigence opposed the CI’s policy of merging the Communist Parties with the left currents of the Socialist parties or “centrists”, which led to the formation of the VKPD in Germany. In Italy it resulted in the entry, in August 1924, of 2000 “terzini” (partisans of the Third International) into a party that counted no more than 20,000 members, as a result of repression and demoralisation.

Finally it was expressed in its opposition to the policy of “bolshevisation” of the CP’s, put forward at the Fifth Congress of the CI in July 1924. This policy was also combated by Trotsky. In brief, it consisted in reinforcing the discipline in the Communist Parties, a bureaucratic discipline intended to silence resistance against its degeneration. Bolshevisation also consisted in promoting a mode of organisation of the CPs based on “factory cells”, something that focused the workers on the difficulties that arose in “their” enterprise to the detriment, evidently, of a general vision and perspective on the proletarian struggle.

Although the left was still the majority within the Party, the CI imposed a rightwing leadership (Gramsci, Togliatti) that supported its policy, a manoeuvre facilitated by the imprisonment of Bordiga between February and October 1923. However, with the clandestine Conference of the Italian Party in May 1924, the theses presented by Bordiga, Grieco, Fortichiari and Repossi, which were very critical of the policy of the CI, were approved by 35 out of 45 federation secretaries and by 4 out of 5 interregional secretaries. In 1925 the campaign against the oppositions broke out within the CI, starting with the “Left Opposition” led by Trotsky. “In March-April 1925, the Enlarged Executive of the CI put on the agenda the elimination of the ‘Bordigist’ tendency at the Third Congress of CPI. It forbade the publication of the article of Bordiga favourable to Trotsky.” (The Italian Communist Left, Chapter I).

The Bolshevisation of the Italian section began with the removal of Bruno Fortichiari from his post as the federal secretary of Milan. In April, the left, through Damen, Repossi and Fortichiari, founded an ‘Entente Committee’ (Comitato di intesa) in order to co-ordinate its activities. The Gramsci leadership violently attacked this Committee, denouncing it as an ‘organised fraction’. In fact, the left still did not want to constitute itself into a fraction; it did not want to provide any pretext for its expulsion from the Party while it was still a majority. At first, Bordiga refused to adhere to the Committee, as he did not want to go outside the framework of discipline that had been imposed. it was only in June that he rallied to the position of Damen, Fortichiari and Repossi. He was given the task of drawing up a ‘platform’ of the left, which was the first systematic attack on Bolshevisation.” (ibid.)

Under the threat of expulsion, the Entente Committee had to dissolve, respecting the principle of discipline. It was the beginning of the end for the Italian Left as a majority.” (ibid.)

At the January 1926 Congress, which was held abroad because of fascist repression, the left presented the “Lyon Theses” which only received 9.2% of the votes: the policy that had been followed, applying the instructions of the CI, of an intensive recruitment of young and barely politicised elements, now bore fruit. The Lyon Theses were to orientate the policy of the Italian left in emigration.

Bordiga was to carry out a last battle during the 6th Enlarged Executive of the CI, from February to March 1926. He denounced the CI’s opportunist drift and mentioned the question of the fractions, without considering it to be on the immediate agenda, affirming that “the history of the fractions is the history of Lenin”; they are not a disease, but the symptom of this disease. They are a reaction of “defence against opportunist influences”.

In a letter to Karl Korsch, in September 1926, Bordiga wrote: “We needn’t aspire to a splitting of the parties and the International. Before a split is possible, we need to allow the experience of an artificial and mechanical discipline, with the resulting absurd practices, to run their course, never renouncing however our political and ideological positions or expressing solidarity with the prevailing line. (….) In general I think that the priority today is not so much in the realm of organisation and manoeuvres, but in the elaboration of a political ideology; one which is left-wing and international and based on the revealing experiences undergone by the Comintern. Weakness in this respect will mean that any international initiative will be very difficult.” (Bordiga, quoted in The Italian Communist Left)

These were also the bases on which the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy would finally be constituted, after its first conference in April 1928 in the Paris suburb of Pantin. At that moment it counted four “federations”: Brussels, New York, Paris and Lyon, with militants in Luxemburg, Berlin and Moscow.

This Conference unanimously adopted a resolution defining its perspectives:

  1. To constitute a Left Fraction of the Communist International
  2. (...)
  3. To publish a bimonthly, to be called Prometeo.
  4. To constitute left groups whose task will be to wage a ruthless struggle against opportunism and the opportunists (…)
  5. To take up as an immediate goal:
    1. the reintegration of all those expelled from the International who adhere to the Communist Manifesto and accept the theses of the Third World Congress.

    2. to call the 6th World Congress under the presidency of Leon Trotsky.

    3. to put on the agenda of the 6th World Congress the expulsion of all those who declare themselves to be in solidarity with the resolutions of the 5th Russian Congress.

As can be seen:

  • the Fraction did not conceive itself as “Italian”, but as a fraction of the CI;

  • it considered that a proletarian life still existed in the CI and that it could still be saved;

  • it considered that the Russian Party must be submitted to the decisions of the Congress of the IC and “put its own house in order” by expelling all those who had openly betrayed (as had already been done earlier with respect to the other parties of International);

  • it did not give itself the task of a general intervention towards the workers, but primarily among the militants of the CI.

Thereafter the Fraction would undertake a remarkable work until 1945, a work continued and supplemented by the Gauche Communiste de France until 1952. We have already often referred to this work in our articles, internal texts and discussions and it is not necessary to return to it here.

One of the essential contributions of the Italian Fraction, and which is the heart of this Report, would be precisely the development of the conception of the Fraction on the basis of the whole experience of the workers’ movement. This conception is already summarily defined at the beginning of the Report. We will limit ourselves here to citing a passage from an article in our press where the conception of Fraction is defined (“The Italian Fraction and the French Communist Left”; International Review n°9012):

In our press, we have often dealt with the distinction worked out by the Italian Left between the Party and fraction forms (in particular, see our study on ‘The relation between Fraction and Party in the Marxist tradition’, in International Review nos. 59, 61, 64). For clarity's sake, we can just recall the main lines of the issue here. The communist minority exists permanently, as an expression of the proletariat's revolutionary destiny. However, its impact on the class' immediate struggles is closely conditioned by their level, and the extent of the consciousness of the working masses. Only in periods of open and increasingly conscious proletarian struggle can the minority hope to have an impact. Only in these conditions can the minority be described as a party. By contrast, in periods where the proletarian struggle is ebbing historically, and the counter-revolution triumphs, it is vain to hope that revolutionary positions can have a significant and determining impact on the class as a whole. In such periods, the only possible - but vital - work is that of the fraction: preparing the political conditions for the formation of the future Party when the balance of class forces once again makes it possible for communist positions to have an impact throughout the proletariat.

The Left Fraction is formed as the proletarian Party is degenerating under the influence of opportunism, in other words its penetration by bourgeois ideology. It is the responsibility of the minority which upholds the revolutionary programme, to conduct an organised struggle for its victory within the Party. Either the Fraction succeeds, its principles triumph, and the Party is saved, or the Party continues to degenerate and ends up passing arms and baggage into the bourgeois camp. The moment where the proletarian Party passes into the bourgeois camp is not easy to determine. However, one of the most important signs of this passage is the fact that no proletarian political life any longer appears within the Party. It is the responsibility of the Left Fraction to continue the fight within the Party as long as there remains any hope of redressing it: this is why, during the late 1920’s and early '30’s, the left currents did not leave the parties of the CI, but were excluded, often by means of sordid manoeuvres. That being said, once a proletarian Party has passed over to the bourgeois camp, no return is possible. The proletariat must then produce a new party, to return to the road towards revolution, and the role of the Fraction is to be a "bridge" between the old Party gone over to the enemy and the future Party, for which it must build a programmatic foundation, and whose skeleton it must become. The fact that once the Party has passed over into the bourgeois camp, there can no longer exist any proletarian life within it means that it is both useless and dangerous for revolutionaries to undertake "entryism", which has always been one of Trotskyism's ‘tactics’, and which the Fraction always rejected. Attempts to maintain a proletarian life within a bourgeois party, in other words one which is sterile as far as class positions are concerned, has never had any result other than to accelerate the opportunist degeneration of those organisations which have attempted it, without redressing the Party in the slightest. As for any ‘recruitment’ gained by such methods, it has always been particularly confused, and gangrened by opportunism, and has never been able to form a vanguard for the working class.”

In fact, one of the fundamental differences between the Italian Fraction and Trotskyism was that when it came to regrouping revolutionary forces, the Fraction always put forward the need for the greatest clarity and programmatic rigour, although being open to discussion with all the other currents that had committed themselves to struggle against the degeneration of the CI. The Trotskyist current, by contrast, tried to form organisations in haste, without any serious discussion or decantation of political positions beforehand, relying essentially on agreements between ‘personalities’ and the authority of Trotsky as one of the most important leaders of the 1917 revolution, and of the early Cl.

Another question that opposed Trotskyism to the Italian Fraction concerned the moment for the formation of a new party. For Trotsky and his comrades, the question of the foundation of the new party was immediately on the agenda from the moment the old parties had been lost for the proletariat. For the Fraction, the question was very clear: The transformation of the fraction into a party is conditioned by two closely dependant elements.

This paragraph evokes the methods of the Trotskyist current that, for lack of place, we have not mentioned above. But it is significant that two of the characteristics of this current, before it joined the bourgeois camp, were the following:

  • at no moment did it integrate the notion of Fraction into its conception; for Trotskyism you passed from one party to another, and so during the time of retreat of the class, when revolutionaries were a small minority, their organisation had to be seen as a “mini-party”, a concept which had appeared within the Italian Fraction itself, in the mid-1930s, and which is that of the ICT today, since its main component is called the Partito Comunista Internazionalista;

  • Trotsky (but he was not the only one) had absolutely not understood the extent of the counter-revolution. His incomprehension was such that he considered the strikes from May-June 1936 in France as the “beginning of the revolution”. In this sense, the concept of the historic course (also rejected by the ICT) is fundamental for the Fraction

The will to clarify, which has always animated the Italian left as a fundamental precondition for the fulfilment of its role, can evidently not be separated from the preoccupation for theory and the permanent need to call into question analyses and positions that once seemed to be definitive.

By way of a conclusion

To conclude this part of the report: we must very briefly come back to the later trajectory of the currents which left the CI The current emerging from the German-Dutch Left remained even after the disappearance of the KAPD and the KAPN. Its principal representative was the GIK (Group of Internationalist Communists) in Holland, a group which had an influence outside this country (for instance Living Marxism, animated by Paul Mattick in the United States). During one of the most tragic and critical moments of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, this group defended a basically internationalist position, without any concession towards antifascism. It stimulated the reflection within the Communist Left, including Bilan (which took up the position of Rosa Luxemburg and the German Left on the national question) as well as that of the Gauche Communiste de France, which rejected the Italian Left’s traditional position on the trade unions, adopting instead the position of the German-Dutch Left.

However, this current adopted two positions which proved to be fatal (and which would have been foreign to the KAPD):

  • analysis of the Revolution of 1917 as bourgeois;

  • the rejection of the need for the Party.

This led it to categorise as bourgeois a whole series of proletarian organisations of the past, to reject, in the final analysis, the history of the workers’ movement and the lessons which it could bring for the future.

This also led it to deny any role to the fraction since the task of the latter is to prepare an organisation the councilist current does not want, the Party.

As a consequence of these two weaknesses, it has prevented itself from playing a significant part in the process which will lead to the future Party, and thus to the communist revolution, even if councilist ideas continue to have an influence on the proletariat.

A last introductory point to the 2nd part of the Report: can the ICC be considered as a fraction? The answer leaps to the eyes: obviously not, since our organisation was, at no moment, constituted within a proletarian party. But this answer had already been given at the beginning of the fifties by comrade MC in a letter to the other members of the Internationalisme group:

The Fraction was in a direct organic continuity with the old organisation since its existence was relatively brief. Often it remained within the old organisation up to the moment of the split. The split was often identical with the Fraction’s transformation into the new Party (eg the Bolshevik fraction and the Spartakusbund, like almost all the left fractions of the old International). Today, this organic continuity is all but non-existent (…) Because the Fraction did not have to confront fundamentally new problems such as those posed by our period of permanent crisis and evolution towards state capitalism, and was not shattered into the dust of tiny tendencies, it was more firmly anchored in its acquired revolutionary principles than called upon to formulate new principles; it had more to maintain than to build. Thanks to this, and, and to its direct organic continuity over a relatively short space of time, it was the new Party in gestation.

[Our group], though it has in part the tasks of the Fraction – ie the re-examination of past experience and the formation of militants – must also undertake the analysis of the newly evolving situation and the new perspective, but does not have to rebuild the programme of the future Party. It is only an element in this reconstruction, just as it is only an element of the future Party. Because of its organisational nature, its function of programmatic contribution can only be partial”.

Today, at the moment of 40 years existence of the ICC, we must have the same approach as when it was 30 years old, by pointing out: “We thus owe the ICC's ability to live up to its responsibilities during its 30 years of existence largely to the contributions of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. The secret of the positive balance sheets that we can draw of activity during this period lies in our fidelity to the teachings of the Fraction and, more generally, to the method and the spirit of Marxism which it had learnt so well.” (“30 years of the ICC: Learning from the past to build the future”, International Review n°12313).


1 “Minutes of the Central Committee Meeting of 15th September 1850” in Marx: The Revolutions of 1848, Penguin, 1973, p341.

2 It should be noted that, according to a letter of Marx to Engels, sent shortly after this meeting (not found by the writer), Marx accepted Eccarius’ invitation because, contrary to the previous attempts to constitute organisations to which he had been invited and which he considered artificial, this time he judged the effort to be a serious one.

3 In this and the following sections, we focus on the fractions in four different parties, those of Russia, Holland, Germany and Italy without examining the parties of two major countries, Great Britain and France. In fact, in these last parties, there were no left fractions worthy of the name mainly because of the extreme weakness of marxist thought within them. Thus, in France for example, the initial organised reaction against World War I did not come from a minority in the Socialist party but from a minority within the CGT trade union, the nucleus around Rosmer and Monatte, which published La Vie Ouvrière.

5 "I have continually said against the editorial board of DeTribune: we must do everything we can to draw others towards us, but if this fails – after we've fought to the end and all our efforts have failed – then we'll have to yield [in other words: to accept the suppression of De Tribune).” (Letter to Kautsky, 16th February 1909) “Our strength in the party can increase; our strength outside the party can never grow. Intervention of Gorter at the Congress in Deventer. (See: ‘The Dutch Left (1900-1914), part 3: The “Tribunist” Movement’ International Review n°47)

6 Among the many militants hit by repression, we can cite the case of Luxemburg, who spent a good part of the war in prison, the case of Liebknecht who initially was mobilized and then taken into custody in a fortress after denouncing the war and the government in the demonstration of 1st May 1916; the case of Mehring who, at more than 70 years old, was also imprisoned.

7 The two other positions were that of Trotsky, who wanted to integrate the trade unions into the State in order to make them organs to control the workers (on the model of the Red Army) and thus for increasing labour discipline, and that of Lenin who, on the contrary, considered that the trade unions must play a part in the defence of the workers against the state, which contains “strong bureaucratic deformations”.

8 Because of the “danger” that the Amsterdam Bureau would constitute a pole of regroupment of the left within the CI, the Executive Committee announced its dissolution by radio, on 4th May 1920.

9 At that time, the Dutch Left and Pannekoek were particularly clear in combating the vision, developed by Otto Rühle, which rejected the need for the party. The same position that would later be that of the councilists… and of Pannekoek.

10 The delegates managed to get to Russia (when the civil war and the blockade made it almost impossible to access the country by land) by persuading the crew of a merchant ship to mutiny and divert the ship to Murmansk.

11 In his last writings, on the eve of his death, Gorter showed that he understood his own mistakes and encouraged his comrades to do the same: to learn the lessons out of these errors (See T he German and Dutch Left”, the end of the chapter V.4.d)

 

Life of the ICC: 

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21st ICC Congress

Report on the class struggle (2015)

From its inception, the ICC has always attempted to analyse the class struggle in its historical context. Our organisation recognised that it owed its very existence not only to the efforts of past revolutionaries, and those who had acted as a bridge from one generation of revolutionaries to another, but also to a change in the course of history inaugurated by the world wide resurgence of the proletariat after 1968, ending “forty years of counter-revolution” since the last ripples of the great revolutionary wave of 1917-27. But today, a further 40 years after its foundation, the ICC is confronted with the task of re-examining the whole corpus of the very considerable work it has carried out in relation to this historic re-appearance of the working class and the immense difficulties it has encountered on the road to its emancipation.

This report can only be the beginning of such a re-examination. It is not possible to go back in any detail to the struggles themselves and the various analyses that have been made of them, whether by mainstream historians or other elements in the proletarian movement. Instead we will have to restrict ourselves to what is already a rather daunting task: to look at the way the ICC itself has analysed the development of the class struggle through its own publications, principally its international theoretical organ, the International Review, which by and large contains the synthesis of all the discussions and debates which have animated our organisation throughout its life.

The historic resurgence of the proletariat

Before the ICC, before May 1968, the signs of a crisis in capitalist society were already growing: at the economic level, the problems of the US and British currencies; at the social-political level, protests in the USA against the Vietnam war and racial segregation; in the class struggle, Chinese workers rebelling against the so-called ‘cultural revolution’, wildcats by US car workers, etc (see for example the article from Accion Proletaria published in in World Revolution 15 and 16, which actually talks about a wave of struggles from 1965 onwards). This was the context in which Marc Chirik1 (MC) and his young comrades in Venezuela made their oft-quoted (by us at least) prognosis: We are not prophets, nor can we claim to predict when and how events will unfold in the future. But of one thing are conscious and certain: the process in which capitalism is plunged today cannot be stopped? and it leads directly to the crisis. And we are equally certain that the inverse process of developing class combativity which we are witnessing today will lead the working class to a bloody and direct struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state.

Here are all the strengths of the marxist method inherited from the communist left: a capacity to discern major shifts in the trajectory of capitalist society long before they become too obvious to deny. And so MC, most of whose militant life had been played out under the shadow of the counter-revolution, was able to announce a change in the historic course: the counter-revolution was at last over, the post-war boom was drawing to a close, and the perspective was a new crisis of the world capitalist system and a resurgence of the proletarian class struggle.

But there is a key weakness in the formulation, which could give the impression that we were already entering a revolutionary period – in other words, a period where the world revolution is on the short-term agenda, as it was in 1917. The article does not of course claim that revolution is just around the corner, and MC had learned the virtue of patience in the most trying of circumstances. Nor did he subsequently make the mistake of the Situationists who actually thought May 68 was the beginning of the revolution. But such an ambiguity was to have its consequences for the new generation of revolutionaries who were to make up the ICC. For much of its subsequent history, even after it recognised the inadequacy of the formulation ‘course towards revolution’ and replaced it with ‘course towards class confrontations’ at the 5th Congress,1a the ICC would be plagued by the tendency to underestimate both the capacity of capitalism to maintain itself despite its decadence and its open crisis, and the difficulty of the working class to overcome the weight of the dominant ideology, to forge itself into a social class with its own autonomous perspective.

The ICC was formed in 1975 on the basis of an understanding that a new era of workers’ struggles had opened up, engendering also a new generation of revolutionaries whose first task was to re-appropriate the political and organisational acquisitions of the communist left and work towards regroupment on a world scale. The ICC was convinced that it had a unique role to play in this process, defining itself as the “pivot” of the future world communist party (Report on the question of the organization of our International Communist Current, International Review n°1).

However, the wave of struggles inaugurated by the massive movement in France May-June 68 was more or less over before the ICC was formed, since it is generally seen as running between 1968 and 1974, although there were important struggles in Spain, Portugal, Holland etc in 1976-77. As there is no mechanical link between the immediate struggle and the development of the revolutionary organisation, the relatively rapid growth of the ICC in its early days continued despite the reflux. But this expansion was still profoundly influenced by the atmosphere of May 68, when the revolution had seemed to many to be almost within reach. Joining an organisation which was openly for world revolution did not seem such a big wager at that time.

This feeling that we were already in the last days of capitalism, that the working class was gaining strength in an almost exponential manner, was reinforced by a characteristic of the class movement at that time, where there were only short pauses between what we identified as “waves” of international class struggle.

The second wave, 1978-81

Among the factors that the ICC analysed in the retreat of the first wave was the counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie, which had been taken by surprise in 1968 but soon developed a political strategy aimed at derailing the class and providing it with a false perspective. This was summarised in the strategy of the ‘left in power’, promising a rapid end to the economic difficulties which were still comparatively mild at the time.

The end of the first wave in fact more or less coincided with the more open development of the economic crisis after 1973, but it was this development which created the conditions for fresh outbreaks of the class movement. The ICC saw the ‘second wave’ beginning in 1978 with the struggles of the lorry drivers, the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the steel workers’ strike in Britain, the oil workers’ in Iran which was organised through ‘shoras’, large-scale strike movements in Brazil, the Rotterdam dockers’ strike with its independent strike committee, the militant steelworkers’ movement in Longwy-Denain in France, and above all the huge strike movement in Poland 1980.

The movement that began in the Gdansk shipyards was a clear expression of the phenomenon of the mass strike, and enabled us to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon by returning to the original analysis of Rosa Luxemburg following the mass strikes in Russia that culminated in the 1905 revolution (see for example the article Notes on the Mass Strike in International Review n°27). We saw the reappearance of the mass strike as the highest point of struggle since 68, answering many of the questions posed in previous struggles, especially about self-organisation and extension. We thus argued - against the vision of a class movement that must always go round in circles until the ‘party’ is able to direct it towards a revolutionary overthrow - that the workers’ struggles had a trajectory, that there was a tendency to advance, to draw lessons, to answer questions posed in previous struggles. On the other hand, we were able to see that the political awareness of the Polish workers lagged behind the real level of struggle. They formulated some general demands that posed more than just economic issues, but the domination of trade unionism, democracy and religion were very strong and tended to deform any attempt to advance onto the explicitly political terrain. We also saw the capacity of the world bourgeoisie to unite against the mass strikes, especially through the creation of Solidarnosc.

But our efforts to analyse the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie against the working class also gave rise to a very strong empiricist, ‘common sense’ tendency, expressed most clearly by the ‘Chenier’ clan (see note 2). When we observed a new political strategy of the bourgeoisie at the end of the 70s – the line-up of right in power, left in opposition in the central capitalist countries– we found ourselves having to go deeper into the question of the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie. The article in International Review n°31 on Machiavellianism, and the consciousness and unity of the bourgeoisie examined how the evolution of state capitalism enabled this class to develop active strategies against the working class, and a further article in International Review n°39, a response to correspondence in International Review n°34 with an element from Hong Kong, LLM, sought to go further into the nature of the consciousness of the bourgeoisie in general and in its decadent epoch in particular (see appendix). To a large extent the majority of the revolutionary movement had forgotten that the marxist analysis of the class struggle is an analysis of both major classes in society, not only of the advances and retreats of the proletariat. The latter is not engaged in shadow boxing but is taking on the most sophisticated ruling class in history, which despite its false consciousness has shown a capacity to learn from historical events, above all when it comes to dealing with its mortal enemy, and is capable of no end of manipulations and deceptions. Examining the strategies of the enemy class was a given for Marx and Engels, but our attempts to continue this tradition have often been dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’ by many elements who are bewitched by the appearance of democratic freedoms.

Analysing the balance of forces between the classes also takes us to the question of the historic course. In the same International Review as the first major text on the left in opposition (International Review no 18 -3rd quarter 1979, which contains the texts from the third ICC congress), and in response to confusions in the international conferences and within our own ranks (for example the RC/GCI tendency2 which announced a course towards war), we published a crucial contribution on the question of the historic course, which was an expression of our ability to continue and to develop the heritage of the communist left. This text set about refuting some of the most common misconceptions in the revolutionary milieu, in particular the idea, rooted in empiricism, that it is not possible for revolutionaries to make general predictions about the course of the class struggle. Against this notion, the text reaffirms the fact that its capacity to define a perspective for the future - and not only the general alternative between socialism and barbarism – is one of marxism's defining characteristics and always has been. More specifically, the text insists that marxists have always based their work on their ability to grasp the particular balance of class forces within a given period, as we saw again in the first part of this report. By the same token, the text shows that an inability to grasp the nature of the course had led past revolutionaries into serious errors (for example, Trotsky’s disastrous adventures in the 1930s).

An extension of this agnostic view of the historic course was the concept, defended in particular by the IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, later to become the International Communist Tendency, to which we shall return below), of a "parallel" course towards war and revolution: "Other theories have also arisen more recently, according to which 'with the development of the crisis of capitalism, both terms of the contradiction are reinforced at the same time: war and revolution don't exclude each other mutually but advance in a simultaneous and parallel manner, without it being possible for us to know which one will reach its culminating point before the other'. The main error in this conception is that it totally neglects the factor of class struggle in the life of society, just as the conception developed by the Italian left [the theory of the war economy] was based on an overestimation of this factor. Beginning from the phrase in the Communist Manifesto which says that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle', the Italian Left applied this mechanically to the analysis of imperialist war and saw imperialist war as a response to the class struggle; it failed to see that, on the contrary, imperialist war could only take place thanks to the absence or weakness of the class struggle. Although it was wrong, this conception began from correct premises; the mistake lay in the way these premises were applied. In contrast, the theory of a 'parallelism and simultaneity of the course towards war and the course towards revolution' plainly casts aside this basic marxist premise, because it holds that the two principal antagonistic classes in society can go on preparing their respective responses to the crisis - imperialist war for the one, revolution for the other - completely independently of each other, of the balance of forces between each other, of confrontations and clashes between each other. If it can't be applied to something which is going to determine the whole historic alternative for the life of society, the schema of the Communist Manifesto has no reason for existing and we can consign marxism to a museum alongside other outmoded productions of human imagination".

Although it would be four years before we formally changed our formula ‘course towards revolution’, above all because it contained the implication of a kind of inevitable and even linear progress towards revolutionary confrontations, we already understood that the historic course was neither static nor predetermined but was subject to changes in the evolution of the balance of force between the classes. Hence our ‘slogan’ at the beginning of the 80s, and in response to the tangible acceleration of inter-imperialist tensions (especially the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the response it provoked in the west): the Years of Truth. Truth not only in the brutal language of the bourgeoisie with its new right wing teams, but truth also in terms of deciding the very future of humanity. There were certainly errors in this text: in particular the idea of the “total failure” of the economy and of an already-existing proletarian “offensive” when the workers’ struggles were still of necessity on a fundamentally defensive terrain. But the text also had a real predictive power: not only because the Polish workers rapidly offered us clear proof that the course towards war was not open and that the proletariat was capable of providing an alternative, but also because the events of the 80s did prove decisive, even though not in the way we had initially envisaged. The struggles in Poland were a key moment in a process leading to the collapse of the eastern bloc and the definitive opening of the phase of decomposition, the expression of a social stalemate in which neither class was able to put forward its historic alternative.

 

The ‘second wave’ was also the period in which Marc Chirik exhorted us to ‘come down from the balcony’ and develop the capacity to participate in the struggles, to put forward concrete proposals for self-organisation and extension as for example during the steel workers’ strikes in France. This gave rise to a number of incomprehensions: for example, the proposal to distribute a leaflet calling on workers in other sectors to join the steelworkers’ march in Paris was seen as a concession to trade unionism because this was a march organised by the unions. But the question posed was not one of abstract denunciation of the trade unions but of showing how in practice the unions oppose the extension of the struggle, and pushing forward tendencies to challenge the unions and take charge of the organisation of the struggle. That this was a real possibility was shown by the echo we received in certain interventions at formally union-called mass meetings, as in Dunkirk. The question of workers’ groups arising from the struggle was also posed (see the article in International Review n°21). But there was a ‘negative’ side to this effort to intervene actively in the movement: the appearance of activist and immediatist tendencies which reduced the role of the revolutionary organisation to that of giving practical assistance to the workers. In the Rotterdam dock strike, we began to take on the role of ‘water carriers’ for the strike committee, and this gave rise to an extremely important contribution by MC (The proletarian struggle under decadence  in International Review n°23) which systematically laid out how the move from ascendancy to decadence had brought profound changes in the dynamic of the proletarian class struggle, and thus to the primary functions of a revolutionary organisation, which could no longer see itself as the ‘organiser’ of the class but as a lucid minority providing political leadership. Despite this vital clarification, a minority of the organisation fell even further into workerism and activism, typified by the opportunism on the trade unionism question manifested by the Chenier clan, which saw trade union strike committees in the British steel strike as class organs, while at the same time refusing to recognise the historic significance of the movement in Poland. The Extraordinary Conference Report on the function of the revolutionary organisation identified many of these errors (International Review n°29).

We saw the second wave coming to an end with the repression in Poland and this also accelerated a crisis in the revolutionary milieu (the break-up of the international conferences, the split in the ICC3, the collapse of the PCI: see The present convulsions in the revolutionary milieu in International Review n°28 and The origins of the ICP(Communist Programme): what it claims to be, and what it really is in International Review n°32). But we continued to develop our theoretical understanding, in particular by raising the problem of international generalisation as the next step in the struggle, and through the debate on the critique of the theory of the weak link (see The proletariat of Western Europe at the centre of the generalization of the class struggle in International Review n°31, and Debate: On the critique of the theory of the "weakest link" in International Review n°37). These two interconnected issues were part of our effort to understand the significance of the defeat in Poland. Through these discussions we recognised that the key to the next major development of the world-wide class struggle – which we defined not only in terms of self-organisation and extension but of international generalisation and politicisation – remained in Western Europe. The texts on generalisation and other polemics also reaffirmed that the best conditions for the proletarian revolution were provided not by war, as most groups from the Italian left tradition continued to argue, but from an open economic crisis, and that this was precisely the perspective that had been opened up after 1968. Finally, in the wake of the defeat in Poland some very far-sighted analyses of the underlying rigidity of the Stalinist regimes were put forward in articles such as Eastern Europe: Economic crisis and the bourgeoisie's weapons against the proletariat in International Review n°34. These analyses were the basis for our understanding of the mechanisms of the collapse of the eastern bloc after 1989.

1983-88: the third wave

A new wave of struggles was announced by the public sector strikes in Belgium and this was confirmed over the next few years via the British miners’ strike, the struggles of the railway and health workers in France, rail and education sectors in Italy, massive struggles in Scandinavia, in Belgium again in 1986, etc. Nearly every issue of the International Review during this period had an editorial article about the class struggle and we published various congress resolutions on the question. There was certainly an attempt to situate these struggles in a more general historical context. In International Review n°39 and International Review n°41 we carried articles about the method needed to analyse the class struggle, responding to the dominant empiricism and lack of framework in the milieu, which could go from severe underestimation to sudden and absurd exaggerations. The text in International Review n°41 in particular reaffirmed some basic elements about the dynamic of the class struggle – its uneven, ‘wave like’ character, deriving from the underlying fact that the working class is the first revolutionary class to be an exploited class and cannot march from victory to victory like the bourgeoisie, but must go through a process of painful defeats which can be the springboard for future advances in consciousness. This jagged contour of the class struggle is even more pronounced in the decadent period, so that to understand the significance of a particular outbreak of the class struggle we cannot merely ‘photograph’ it in isolation: it must be located within a more general trajectory, which leads us back to the question of the rapport de forces between the classes, the question of the historic course.

 

This was again a period of heightened intervention, with a greater focus on intervention at the workplace, on a more active participation in struggle groups etc. Alongside this was the development of the debate on centrism towards councilism, which first manifested itself on the theoretical level - the relationship between consciousness and struggle and the question of subterranean maturation (see Reply to the CWO: On the subterranean maturation of consciousness in International Review n°43). These debates enabled the ICC to make an important critique of the councilist view that consciousness only develops through the open struggle, and to elaborate the distinction between the dimensions of extent and depth (“consciousness of the class and class consciousness”, a distinction instantly seen as ‘Leninist’ by the future EFICC tendency). The polemic with the CWO on the question of subterranean maturation noted the similarities between the councilist views of our ‘tendency’ and those of the CWO, which at that point was openly advocated the Kautskyist theory of class consciousness (understood as something brought to the proletariat from the outside, by bourgeois intellectuals). The article tried to go further into the marxist view of the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious while making a critique of the vulgar ‘common sense’ vision of the CWO.

There is another area in which the struggle against councilism has not been taken to its conclusion: while recognising in theory that class consciousness can indeed develop outside periods of open struggle, there is a long-standing tendency to hope that, nonetheless, given that we were no longer living in a period of counter-revolution, the economic crisis would bring about sudden leaps in the class struggle and class consciousness. This smuggled the councilist conception of an automatic link between crisis and class struggle back in through the window, and it has frequently returned to haunt us, not least in the period following the 2008 crash.

A proletariat on the offensive? The difficulties of politicisation

Applying the analysis we had developed through the debate on the weak link, our principal texts on the class struggle in the period recognised the importance of a new development of the class struggle in the central countries of Europe. The Theses on the present upsurge in class struggle (1984) published in International Review n°37, outlined the features of this wave:

The characteristics of the present wave, as have already been manifested and which will become more and more discernible are as follows:

  • a tendency towards very broad movements involving large numbers of workers, hitting entire sectors or several sectors simultaneously in one country, thus posing the basis for the geographical extension of the struggle;

  • a tendency towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, showing, especially at the beginning, a certain bypassing of the unions;

  • the growing simultaneity of struggles at an international level, laying the basis for the world generalization of struggles in the future;

  • a progressive development, within the whole proletariat, of its confidence in itself, of its awareness of its strength, its capacity to oppose itself as a class to the attacks of the capitalists;

  • the slow rhythm of the development of struggles in the central countries and notably of their capacity for self-organization, a phenomenon which results from the deployment by the bourgeoisie of these countries of a whole arsenal of traps and mystifications, and which has been shown again in the most recent confrontations.

Most important of these “traps and mystifications” was the deployment of rank and file unionism against the real tendencies towards workers’ self-organisation, a tactic which was sophisticated enough to produce allegedly anti-union co-ordinations which actually functioned as a last rampart of trade unionism. But while by no means blind to the dangers facing the class struggle, the Theses, like the text on the Years of Truth, still contained the notion of an offensive of the proletariat, and predicted that the third wave would reach a higher level than the previous two, which implied that it would reach the necessary stage of international generalisation.

The fact that the course is towards class confrontations doesn’t imply that the proletariat is already on the offensive: until the eve of revolution, its struggles will be essentially defensive faced with the relentless attacks of the ruling class. Such errors were the product of a long-standing tendency to overestimate the immediate level of the class struggle. This was often in reaction to the failure of the proletarian milieu to see beyond its noses, a theme often developed in our polemics, and also in the resolution on the international situation from the1985 6th ICC congress, published in International Review n°44, which contains a long section on the class struggle. This section is an excellent demonstration of the ICC’s historical method for analysing the class struggle, a further critique of the scepticism and empiricism which dominated the milieu, and it also identifies the loss of historical traditions and the rupture between the class and its political organisations as key weaknesses of the proletariat. But in retrospect it places too much emphasis on disillusionment with the left and especially the unions, and the growth of unemployment, as potential factors in the radicalisation of the class struggle. It does not ignore the negative sides of these phenomena, but could not yet see how, in the approaching phase of decomposition, both passive disillusionment with the old ‘workers’ organisations, and the generalisation of unemployment, especially among the young, could become powerful elements in the demoralisation of the proletariat and the undermining of its class identity. It’s also telling, for example, that as late as 1988 (Polemic: Confusion of communist groups over the present period in International Review n°54) we were still publishing a polemic on the underestimation of the class struggle in the proletarian camp. Its arguments were generally correct but it also showed a lack of awareness to what was just around the corner – the collapse of the blocs and the most drawn-out reflux we had ever experienced.

But towards the end of the 80s it became clear to a minority at least that the forward movement of the class struggle, which we had analysed in many of the articles and resolutions during this period, was getting bogged down. There was a debate about this at the 8th congress of the ICC (The 8th Congress of the ICC: the stakes of the Congress in International Review n°59), in particular in relation to the question of decomposition and its negative effects on the class struggle. A considerable part of the organisation saw the ‘third wave’ going from strength to strength, and the impact of certain defeats was underestimated. This had been especially true of the UK miners’ strike, whose defeat didn’t stop the wave but had a longer-term effect on working class self-confidence and not only in the UK, while reinforcing the bourgeoisie’s commitment to going ahead with the dismantling of ‘old’ industries. The 8th congress was also the one where the idea was mooted that bourgeois mystifications now ‘lasted no longer than three weeks’.

The discussion on centrism towards councilism had raised the problem of the proletariat’s flight from politics, but we weren’t able to apply this to the dynamic of the class movement – in particular its lack of politicisation, its difficulty in developing a perspective, even when struggles were self-organised and showed a tendency to extend. We can even say that the ICC has never made an adequate critique of the impact of economism and workerism in its own ranks, leading it to underestimate the importance of factors which take the proletariat beyond the limits of the workplace and of immediate economic demands

It wasn’t until the collapse of the eastern bloc that the full weight of decomposition could really be grasped, and we then correctly foresaw a period of new difficulties for the proletariat (see Collapse of Stalinism: New difficulties for the proletariat in International Review n°60). These difficulties derived precisely from the inability of the working class to develop its perspective, but were also to be actively reinforced by the vast ideological offensive of the ruling around the theme of the ‘death of communism’ and the end of the class struggle.

The period of decomposition

The subsequent reflux in the class struggle, faced with the weight of decomposition and the anti-communist campaigns of the ruling class, proved to be very deep, and although we saw some tentative expressions of militancy in the early 90s and again towards the end of the decade, it was to persist into the next century while decomposition advanced visibly (expressed most clearly in the attack on the Twin Towers and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq). In the face of this advancing decomposition we were obliged to re-examine the whole question of the historic course in a report to 14th Congress (The idea of the historic course in the revolutionary movement published in International Review n°107. Other texts of note on this theme included Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism, Part 1 and Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism, Part 2 in International Review n°s 103 and 104 and the ICC 15th Congress: Resolution on the International situation, International Review n°113).

The 2001 report on the historic course, after reaffirming the theoretical acquisitions of past revolutionaries and our own framework as developed in the document from the 3rd Congress, focused on the definite modifications brought about by the entry of capitalism into its phase of decomposition, where the tendency towards world war was obstructed not only by the inability of the bourgeoisie to mobilise the proletariat, but also by the centrifugal dynamic of ‘every man for himself’, which meant that the re-formation of imperialist blocs met with increasing difficulties. However, since decomposition contains the risk of a gradual descent into chaos and irrational destruction, it creates immense dangers for the working class, and the text reaffirms the view of the original theses that the class could be gradually ground down by the whole process to the point where it would no longer be able to stand against the advancing tide of barbarism. The text also tentatively distinguished between the material and ideological elements involved in the ‘grinding down’ process: the ideological elements emerging spontaneously from the soil of capitalist decay, and the conscious campaigns orchestrated by the ruling class, such as the endless propaganda about the death of communism; at the same time, the text identified more directly material elements like the dismantling of the old industrial centres which had often been the centres of militancy in the previous waves of class struggles (mines, steel, docks, car plants etc). But while the new report did not attempt to mask the difficulties facing the class, it examined signs of the class regaining its fighting spirit and the continuing difficulties of the ruling class in enlisting the working class for its war campaigns, and concluded that the potential for a revival of the class struggle was still largely intact, and this was to be confirmed two years later by the movements around ‘pension reform’ in Austria and France.

In the Report on the class struggle in International Review n°117 we identified a turning point, a revival of the struggle, manifested in these movements around pensions and other expressions. This was confirmed by further movements in 2006 and 2007, such as the movement against the CPE in France and massive struggles in the textile and other sectors in Egypt. The students’ movement in France was particularly eloquent testimony of a new generation of proletarians facing a very uncertain future (see Theses on the spring 2006 students' movement in France, International Review n°125, and also the editorial from the same issue). This tendency was further confirmed by the ‘youth’ struggles in Greece in 2008-9, the student revolt in the UK in 2010, and above all by the Arab Spring and movements of the Indignados and Occupy in 2011-2013, which gave rise to a number of articles in the International Review, in particular The Indignados in Spain, Greece and Israel in International Review n°147. There were definite gains in these movements – the affirmation of the assembly form, a more direct engagement with political and moral issues, a clear sense of internationalism, elements whose significance we will return to later. In our report to the October 13 plenary session of the International Bureau we criticised the workerist and economist dismissal of these movements and a temptation to shift the focus of the world class struggle to the new industrial concentrations in the Far East. But we did not hide the basic problem revealed in these revolts: the difficulty of their young protagonists in seeing themselves as part of the working class, the immense weight of the ideology of the citizen and thus of democratism. The fragility of these movements was indicated very clearly in the Middle East where we could see clear regressions in consciousness (eg in Egypt and Israel) and, in Libya and Syria, an almost immediate collapse into imperialist war. There had indeed been a genuine tendency towards politicisation in these movements since they posed deep questions about the very nature of the existing social system, and like previous upsurges in the 2000s, they gave rise to a tiny minority of searching elements, but within this minority there was a huge difficulty in advancing towards revolutionary militant commitment. Even when these minorities seemed to have escaped the more obvious chains of decomposing bourgeois ideology, they very often encountered them in the more subtle or radical forms that are crystallised in anarchism, ‘communisation’ theory, and similar tendencies, all of which furnish additional evidence that we had been very much on the right track when we saw ‘councilism as the main danger’ in the 80s, since all these currents founder precisely on the question of the political instruments of the class struggle, above all the revolutionary organisation.

A proper balance sheet of these movements (and of our discussions about them) has not been drawn and can’t be attempted here. But it seems that the cycle of 2003-2013 has come to an end and we are facing a new period of difficulties4. This is most obvious in the Middle East, where social protest has given way to ruthless state repression and imperialist barbarism; and this horrible involution can only have a depressive effect on workers all over the world. In any case, if we recall our analysis of the uneven development of the class struggle, the reflux from these upsurges is unavoidable and for some time this will tend to further expose the class to the noxious impact of decomposition.

Underestimating the enemy

 

"...According to the reports, you said that I had prophesied the collapse of bourgeois society in 1898. There is a slight error there somewhere. All I said was that we might possibly come to power by 1898. If this does not happen, the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed"  (Engels, letter to Bebel 24-26 October, 1891).

In this short passage the flaw is so obvious that it hardly needs commenting on: the notion of the working class coming to power by 1898 was in all probability an illusion generated by the rapid growth of the social democratic party in Germany. Here a drift towards reformism was melded with the old over-optimism and impatience which in the Communist Manifesto had given birth to the formulation that “the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (and maybe not so far off…). But alongside this is a very valuable idea: that a society which has been condemned by history can still maintain its “rotten casing” well after the need to replace it had emerged. In fact not decades but now a century after the First World War, we are witness to the grim determination of the bourgeoisie to keep its system alive at whatever cost to the future of the species.

Most of our errors over the past 40 years seem to be in the direction of underestimating the bourgeoisie, the capacity of this class to maintain its rotting system, and thus the enormity of the obstacles facing the working class in assuming its revolutionary tasks. In drawing up a balance sheet of the struggles between 2003 and 2013, this has to be a key element.

The report to the 2014 Congress of the section in France reasserts the analysis of the turning point: the 2003 struggles raised the key issue of solidarity and the anti-CPE 2006 in France was a profound movement which took the bourgeoisie by surprise and forced it to retreat as it posed the real danger of an extension to the employed workers. But following this there was a tendency to forget the capacity of the ruling class to recover from such shocks and to renew its ideological offensive and manoeuvres, particularly when it comes to restoring the influence of the unions. We had seen this in France in the 80s with the development of the co-ordinations and we again recognised it in 1995, but, as the report on the class struggle to the last Congress of Révolution Internationale points out, we forgot it in our analyses of the movements in Guadeloupe and the pensions struggle in 2010, which effectively exhausted the French proletariat and prevented any serious contagion from the movement in Spain a year later. And again, despite our past emphasis on the enormous impact of the anti-communist campaigns, the report to the French section’s congress also suggests that we have been too quick to forget that the campaigns against marxism and communism still have a considerable weight on the new generation that has appeared in the last decade.

Some of the other weaknesses in our analysis during this period are only beginning to be recognised.

In our criticisms of the ideology of the ‘anti-capitalists’ of the 1990s, with their emphasis on globalisation as a totally new phase on the life of capitalism – and of the concessions made within the proletarian movement to this ideology, especially in the case of the IBRP which seemed to be putting the decadence of capitalism into question – we didn’t recognise the truth at the heart of this mythology: that the new strategy of ‘globalisation’ and neo-liberalism enabled the ruling class to weather the recessions of the 80s and even opened up real possibilities for expansion in areas where the old bloc divisions and semi-autarkic economic models had erected considerable barriers to the movement of capital. The most obvious example of this development is of course China, whose rise to ‘super-power’ status we didn’t fully anticipate, although ever since the 1970s and the Sino-Russian split we had recognised that it was a kind of exception to the rule of the impossibility of ‘independence’ from the domination of the two blocs. We have thus been late in assessing the impact that the emergence of huge new industrial concentrations in some of these regions will have on the global development of the class struggle. The underlying theoretical reasons for our failure to predict the rise of the New China will have to be investigated in more depth in the discussions around our analysis of the economic crisis.

Perhaps most significantly, we have not adequately investigated the role played by the break-up of many of the old centres of class militancy in the heartlands in undermining class identity. We have rightly been sceptical of purely sociological analyses of class consciousness, but the changing composition of the working class in the heartlands, the loss of traditions of struggle, the development of much more atomised forms of labour, have certainly contributed to the appearance of generations of proletarians who no longer see themselves as part of the working class, even when they are engaged in struggle against the attacks of the state, as we saw during the Occupy and Indignados movements of 2011-13. Particularly important is the fact that the whole scale ‘relocations’ that have taken place in the western countries often resulted from major defeats - the UK miners and French steelworkers being cases in point. These issues, though posed in the 2001 report on the historic course, were not really taken up and had to be re-affirmed in the 2013 report on the class struggle. This is a very long delay, and we have still not really incorporated this phenomenon into our own framework, which would certainly require a response to the flawed efforts of currents like the autonomists and the ICT to theorise about the ‘recomposition’ of the working class.

At the same time, the prevalence of long term unemployment or precarious employment has exacerbated the tendency towards atomisation and loss of class identity. The autonomous struggles of the unemployed, able to link up with the struggles of the employed workers, were much less significant than we had foreseen in the 70s and 80s (cf the theses on unemployment, International Review n°14, or the resolution on the international situation from the 6th ICC Congress, referred to in the previous section) and large numbers of the unemployed or precariously employed have fallen into lumpenisation, gang culture, or reactionary political ideologies. The students’ movement in France in 2006, and the social revolts towards the end of the first decade of the new century, began to supply answers to these problems, offering the possibility of encompassing the unemployed in mass demonstrations and street assemblies, but this was still in a context where class identity was still very weak.

Our main emphasis on explaining the loss of class identity has been at the ideological level, whether we are talking about the immediate products of decomposition (every man for himself, gang culture, flight into irrationality, etc) or about the deliberate use of the effects of decomposition by the ruling class – most obviously the campaigns around the death of communism, but also the more day to day ideological onslaught of the media and of advertising packaging false revolt, obsession with consumerism and celebrity, etc. This is of course vital but we have in some ways only begun to investigate how these ideological mechanisms operate at the deepest level – a theoretical task clearly posed by the Theses on Morality5 and our efforts to develop and apply the marxist theory of alienation.

Class identity is not, as the ICT has sometimes argued, a kind of merely instinctive or semi-conscious feeling held by the workers, to be distinguished from the true class consciousness preserved by the party. It is itself an integral aspect of class consciousness, part of the process whereby the proletariat recognises itself as a distinct class with a unique role and potential in capitalist society. Furthermore, it is not limited to the purely economic domain but from the beginning had a powerfully cultural and moral element: as Rosa Luxemburg put it, the workers’ movement is not limited to “bread and butter issues” but is a “great cultural movement” The workers’ movement of the 19th century thus encompassed not only struggles for immediate economic or political demands, but the organisation of education, of debates about art and science, of sport and leisure activities and so on. The movement provided a whole milieu in which proletarians and their families could associate outside the workplace, strengthening the conviction that the working class was the true heir of all that was healthy in previous expressions of human culture. This kind of working class movement reached its peak in the period of social democracy but this was also the prelude to its demise. What was lost in the great betrayal of 1914 was not only the International and the old forms of political and economic organisation but also this wider cultural milieu, which only survived as a kind of caricature in the ‘fêtes’ of the Stalinist and leftist parties. 1914 was thus the first of a series of blows against class identity over the past century: the political dissolution of the class in democracy and anti-fascism in the 30s and 40s, the assimilation of communism with Stalinism, the break in organic continuity with the organisations and traditions of the past brought about by the counter-revolution: long before the unfolding of the phase of decomposition these traumas already laid heavily on the proletariat’s capacity to constitute itself into a class with a real sense of itself as the social force bearing within itself the “dissolution of all classes”. Thus any investigation into the problem of loss of class identity will have to go back over the whole history of the workers’ movement and not restrict itself to the last few decades. Even if it is in the last few decades that the problem has become so acute and so threatening to the future of the class struggle, it is only the concentrated expression of processes which have a much longer history.

To return to the problem of our underestimation of the ruling class: the culmination,, of our long-standing underestimation of the enemy – and which is also the greatest weakness in our analyses – was reached after the financial crash of 2007-8, when an old tendency to see that the ruling class in the centres of the system had more or less run out of options, that the economy had reached a total impasse, came to a head. This could only increase feelings of panic, the often unstated notion that the working class and the tiny revolutionary movement were either at the last chance saloon or had already ‘missed the boat’. Certain formulations about the dynamic of the mass strike fed into this immediatism. In fact, we were not wrong to see the ‘germs’ of the mass strike in the student movement in France in 2006 or struggles like those of the steel workers in Spain in the same year, in Egypt in 2007, in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Our mistake lay in seeing the seed as the flower, and in not understanding that the period of germination could be a very long one. Clearly these errors of analyses were closely linked to the activist and opportunist deformations of our intervention during this period, although these errors must also be understood in the broader discussion of our role as an organisation (see the text on the work of the fraction in this issue).

The moral dimension of class consciousness

If the owner of labour-power works to-day, to-morrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a labouring individual. His natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing, vary according to the climatic and other physical conditions of his country. On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed.  In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element (Marx, Capital vol 1 chapter 6).

To approach Capital without really grasping that Marx is seeking to understand the workings of a particular social relation which has been the product of thousands of years of history, and which like other social relations is doomed to disappear, is to end up being bewitched by the reified view of the world which Marx’s study aims to combat. This includes all the academic marxologists, whether they see themselves as comfortable professors or ultra-radical communists, who tend to analyse capitalism as a self-sufficient system of eternal laws which operate in precisely the same way in all historical conditions, in the decadence of the system as in its ascent. But Marx’s remarks about the value of labour power take us away from this purely economic view of capitalism towards an understanding that “historical and moral” factors play a crucial role in determining a central ‘economic’ foundation of this society: the value of labour power. In other words, contrary to the assertions of Paul Cardan (alias Castoriadis, the founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group) for whom Capital was a book without class struggle, Marx argues that the assertion of human dignity by the exploited class – the moral dimension par excellence – cannot by definition be removed from a scientific examination of the operations of the capitalist system. In the same sentence Marx also answers those who see him as a moral relativist, as a thinker who rejects all morality as being the hypocritical cant of one ruling class or another.

Today the ICC is being obliged to deepen its understanding of the “historical and moral element” in the situation of the working class – historical not only in the sense of the struggles of the last 40, or 80, or 100 years, or even since the first workers’ movements at the dawn of capitalism, but in the sense of the continuity and rupture between the struggles of the working class and those of previous exploited classes, and beyond that, its continuity and rupture with all previous attempts of the human species to overcome the barriers to the realisation of its true potentialities, to “unlock its slumbering powers” as Marx defined the central characteristic of human labour per se. This is where history and anthropology come together, and to talk of anthropology is to talk of the history of morality. Hence the importance of the Theses on Morality6 and our discussions around them…..

Extrapolating from the Theses, we can note certain key moments marking the tendency towards the unification of the human species: the passage from the horde to a wider primitive communism; the advent of the ‘axial age’, connected to an incipient generalisation of commodity relations, which saw the emergence of most of the world religions, expressions in ‘spirit’ of the unification of a humanity which could not yet be united in reality; the global expansion of ascendant capitalism which for the first time tended to unite humanity under the admittedly brutal reign of a single mode of production; the first world revolutionary wave which contained the promise of the material human community. This tendency was dealt a terrible blow by the triumph of the counter-revolution and it is no accident that, on the verge of the most barbaric war in history, Trotsky in 1938 could already talk of the “crisis of humanity”. No doubt he had in mind, as evidence of this crisis, World War One, Stalinist Russia, the world economic depression and the march towards a second world war, but it was perhaps above all the image of Nazi Germany (even though he did not live to witness the most horrific expressions of this barbaric regime), which confirmed this notion, this idea of humanity itself being put the test, because here was an unprecedented process of regression in one of the cradles of bourgeois civilisation: the national culture that had given birth to Hegel, Beethoven, Goethe was now succumbing to the rule of thugs, occultists and nihilists, driven by a programme which sought to drive a final nail in the possibility of a united humanity.

In decomposition, this tendency towards regression, these signs of the whole of human progress up till now collapsing in on itself, is becoming ‘normalised’ across the planet. This is expressed above all in the process of fragmentation and every man for himself: humanity, at a stage where production and communication is more unified than ever, is in danger of being divided and subdivided into nations, regions, religions, races, gangs, all of this accompanied by an equally destructive regression at the intellectual level with the rise of numerous forms of religious fundamentalism, nationalism and racism. The rise of Islamic State provides a summary of this process on a historic scale: where once Islam was the product of a moral and intellectual advance across and beyond the entire region, today Islamism, both in its Sunni and Shia forms, is a pure expression of the negation of humanity - of pogromism, misogyny and the worship of death.

Clearly this danger of regression infects the proletariat itself. Sections of the working class in Europe, for example, having seen the defeat of all the struggles of the 70s and 80s against the decimation of industry and jobs, are being targeted with some success by racist parties who have found new scapegoats to blame for their misery – the waves of immigrants into the central countries, fleeing economic, ecological or military disaster in their own regions. These immigrants are generally more ‘noticeable’ than were the Jews in 1930s Europe, and those of them who espouse the Muslim religion can be directly linked to forces engaged in imperialist conflicts against the ‘host’ countries. This capacity of the right rather than the left to penetrate parts of the working class (in France for example, previous ‘bastions’ of the CP have fallen to the Front National) is a significant expression of a loss of class identity: where once we could point to workers losing their illusions in the left because of their experience of its sabotaging role in the struggle, today the declining influence of the left is more of a reflection of the fact that the bourgeoisie has less need of forces of mystification which claim to act on behalf of the working class because the latter is less able to see itself as a class at all. It also reflects one of the most significant products of the global process of decomposition and the uneven development of the world economic crisis: the tendency for Europe and North America to become islands of relative ‘sanity’ in a world gone mad. Europe in particular looks increasingly like a well-stocked bunker holding out against the desperate masses looking for shelter from a global apocalypse. The ‘common sense’ response of all the besieged, no matter how ruthless the regime inside the bunker, would be to close ranks and make sure that the doors to the bunker remain tight shut. The instinct to survive then becomes totally divorced from any moral feelings and impulses.

The crises of the ‘vanguard’ must also be located in this overall process: the influence of anarchism on the politicised minorities that were generated by the struggles of 2003-13, with its fixation on the immediate, the particular workplace, the ‘community’; the growth of workerism à la Mouvement Communiste and its opposing pole, the ‘communisation’ tendency which rejects the working class a subject of the revolution; the slide towards moral bankruptcy within the communist left itself, which we will be analysing in other reports. In sum, the incapacity of the revolutionary vanguard both to grasp the reality of the moral and intellectual regression sweeping the world and to fight against it.

This report argues not only that the cycle of struggles which went from 1968-1989 came to a halt because the proletariat was unable to offer an alternative to capitalism, definitively opening the phase of decomposition, but also that the first important cycle of struggles in the phase of decomposition also seems to have drawn to an end, and largely for the same reasons.

The historic course

The situation looks very grave indeed. Does it still make sense to talk about a historic course towards class confrontations? The working class today is as distant from 1968 as 1968 was from the beginnings of the counter-revolution, and in addition its loss of class identity means that its capacity for re-appropriating the lessons of struggles that may have taken place decades ago has diminished. At the same time the dangers inherent in the process of decomposition – of a gradual exhaustion of the proletariat’s ability to resist capitalist barbarism – do not remain static but tend to amplify as the capitalist social system falls deeper into decay.

The historic course has never been fixed in perpetuity and the possibility of massive class confrontations in the key countries of capitalism is not a pre-arranged staging post in the journey into the future.

Nevertheless, we continue to think that the proletariat has not spoken the last word, even when those who have spoken have little awareness of speaking for the proletariat.

In our analysis of the class movements of 68-89, we noted the existence of certain high points which provided an inspiration for future struggles and a yardstick to measure their progress. Thus: the importance of 68 in France in raising the question of a new society; of the Polish struggles of 1980 for reaffirming the methods of the mass strike, of the extension and self-organisation of the struggle, and so on. To a large extent these were questions that remained unanswered. But we can also say that the struggles of the last decade or so have also had their high points, above all because they began to raise the key question of politicisation which we have identified as a central weakness of the struggles in the previous cycle. What’s more the most important of these movements – such as the student struggle in France in 2006 and the revolt of the Indignados in Spain - posed many questions which demonstrated that for the proletariat politics is not about whether to keep to dump the governing bourgeois team but about changing social relations, that proletarian politics is about creating a new morality opposed to the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism. In their ‘indignation’ against the waste of human potential and destructiveness of the current system, in their efforts to win over the most alienated sectors of the working class (the appeal of the French students to the ‘banlieu’ youth), in the leading role played by young women, in their approach to the question of violence and police provocation, in the desire for passionate debate in the assemblies, and in the incipient internationalism of so many of the movements’ slogans7, these movements shook a fist at the advancing tide of decomposition and affirmed that passively yielding to this tide is not at all the only possibility, that it is still possible to respond to the no-future of the bourgeoisie, with its incessant attacks on the perspective of the proletariat, with reflection and debate about the possibility of a different kind of social relationship. And in so far as these movements were forced to raise themselves to the general level, to pose questions about every aspect of capitalist society, from the economic and the political to the artistic, scientific and environmental, they provided us with a glimpse of how a new “great cultural movement” could reappear in the fires of revolt against the capitalist system.

There were certainly moments when we tended to get carried away with enthusiasm for these movements and to lose sight of their weaknesses, reinforcing our tendencies towards activism and forms of intervention that were not guided by a clear theoretical starting point. But we were not wrong in 2006, for example, to see elements of the mass strike in the movement against the CPE. No doubt we tended to see this in an immediatist rather than a long term perspective, but there is no question that these revolts did reaffirm the underlying nature of the class struggle in decadence: struggles that are not organised by permanent bodies in advance, that tend to spread rapidly throughout society, that pose the problem of new forms of self-organisation, that tend to integrate the political with the economic dimension.

Of course the great weakness of these struggles was that to a large extent they did not see themselves as proletarian, as expressions of the class war. And if this weakness is not overcome, the strong points of such movements will tend to become weak points: a focus on moral concerns will decline into a vague form of petty bourgeois humanism that falls easily into democratic and ‘citizen’ – i.e. openly bourgeois – politics; assemblies will become mere street parliaments where open debate around the most fundamental issues is replaced by the manipulations of political elites and by demands that fix the movement within the horizon of bourgeois politics. And this of course was essentially the fate of the social revolts of 2011-13.

The necessity to link the revolt in the street with the resistance of the employed workers, with all the various products of the working class movement, and to understand that this synthesis can only be based on a proletarian perspective for the future of society, which in turn implies that the unification of the proletariat must include the restoration of the connection between the working class and the organisations of revolutionaries. This is the unanswered question, the unfulfilled perspective posed by not only by the struggles of the last few years, but by all the expressions of the class struggle since 1968.

Against the common sense of empiricism, which can only see the proletariat when it comes to the surface, Marxists recognise that the proletariat is like Blake’s sleeping giant Albion whose wakening will turn the world upside down. On the basis of the theory of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, which the ICC is more or less alone in defending, we recognise that the vast potential of the working class remains for the most part hidden, and even the clearest revolutionaries can easily forget that this ‘slumbering power’ can have a huge impact on social reality even when it has apparently withdrawn from the scene. Marx was able to discern that the working class was the new revolutionary force in society on what seemed like scanty evidence, such as a few strikes by French weavers who had not yet completely gone past the artisan stage of development. And despite all the immense difficulties facing the proletariat, despite all our overestimations of the struggle and underestimations of the enemy, the ICC can still see enough in the class movements over the past 40 years to conclude that the working class has not lost this capacity to offer humanity a new society, a new culture, and a new communist morality…

 

Conclusion: posing the questions in depth

This report is already much longer than intended, and even then it has often been limited to posing questions rather than answering them. But we are not looking for immediate answers; rather we are aiming to develop a theoretical culture in which every question is approached in depth, linking them back to the intellectual treasure-troves of the ICC, to the history of the workers’ movement and to the classics of marxism as indispensible guides for exploring the new problems thrown up in the final phase of capitalist decline. A key question raised implicitly in this report – in its reflections on class identity, or on the course of history – is the very notion of social class and the concept of the proletariat as the revolutionary class of this epoch. The ICC has made some important contributions in this area – in particular Who can change the world? The proletariat is still the revolutionary class International Review n°73 and 74, and ‘Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism’ in International Review n°103 and 104, both of which sought to answer doubts within the proletarian political movement about the very possibility of the revolution. It is necessary to go back to these articles but also to the marxist texts and traditions on which they are based, while at the same time testing out our arguments in the light of the real evolution of capitalism and the class struggle in the past few decades. Clearly such a project can only be undertaken in the long term. The same goes for other aspects of the report which could only be touched on, such as the moral dimension of class consciousness and its essential role in the capacity of the working class to overcome the nihilism and lack of perspective inherent in capitalism in its phase of decomposition, or the need for a very thorough criticism of the various forms of opportunism which have distorted both the ICC’s analysis of the class struggle and its intervention within it, in particular our concessions to councilism, workerism and economism (see appendix).

Perhaps the one weakness that appears most clearly in the report is our tendency to underestimate the capacities of the ruling class to maintain its decaying system, both at the economic level (an element to be developed in the report on the economic crisis) and at the political level through its ability to anticipate and derail the development of consciousness in the class through a whole panoply of manoeuvres and stratagems. The corollary to this weakness on our part is that we have been too optimistic about the ability of the working class to counter the attacks of the bourgeoisie and to advance towards a clear understanding of its historical mission – a difficulty which is also reflected in the often agonisingly slow and tortuous development of the revolutionary vanguard. It is a characteristic of revolutionaries to be impatient for the revolution: Marx and Engels considered that the bourgeois revolutions of their day could very rapidly be ‘transformed’ into the proletarian revolution; the revolutionaries who formed the Communist International were confident that the days of capitalism were numbered; our own MC hoped that he would live to see the beginning of the revolution. For cynics and purveyors of good old common sense, this is because revolution and the classless society are at best illusions and utopias, so you might as well hope for them to begin tomorrow or in a hundred years from now. For revolutionaries, on the other hand, this impatience to see the dawn of the new society is a product of their passion for communism, a passion which is not “based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer », but merely express « actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes » (Communist Manifesto). Of course, passion must also be guided and sometimes tempered by the most rigorous analysis, the most severe capacity for testing, verification, and self-criticism; and this above all is what we are seeking to do in the reports for the 21st ICC Congress. But, citing Marx once more, such self-criticism is not a mere passion of the head, but the head of passion.


1 For a presentation on Marc Chirik, see the footnote in the article ‘What balance sheet and perspectives for our activity’ in this issue

1a “The existence of a course towards class confrontations means that the bourgeoisie does not have a free hand to unleash a new world butchery: first, it must confront and beat the working class. But this does not prejudge the outcome of this confrontation, in one way or the other. This is why it is preferable to talk about a 'course towards class confrontations' rather than a 'course towards revolution'"(Resolution on the international situation, published in International Review n°35).

2 For more on this tendency, see ‘The question of organisational functioning in the ICC’ in International Review n°109 (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/109_functioning)

3 For more on this split, see the article in International Review n°109, ‘The question of organisational functioning in the ICC’, which contains the following passage : “At the time of the crisis of 1981, a vision developed (with the contribution of the suspicious element Chenier, but not just him) which considered that each local section could have its own policy as far as intervention was concerned, which violently contested the IB and the IS (reproaching them with their position on the left in opposition and of provoking a Stalinist degeneration) and who, while defending the necessity of central organs, attributed to them the role of a mere post box.” (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/109_functioning)

4 This question is still under discussion in the ICC

5 An internal document currently under discussion in the organisation

6 An internal document still under discussion in the organisation

7 We can point to the open expression of solidarity between the struggles in the US and Europe and those in the Middle East, especially Egypt, or the slogans of the movement in Israel defining Netanyahu, Mubarak and Assad as the same enemy.

 

Life of the ICC: 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

Rubric: 

21st ICC Congress

Appendix 1: on Machiavellianism

This quote was originally included in the report, but omitted because of its length. However, it does raise a few questions which are relevant to some of our recent discussions, in particular, our attempt to grasp not only how the bourgeoisie is compelled to intervene in and manipulate the ‘machine’ of the capitalist economy, but also why, above all in the epoch of decadence, it is compelled to do so. There are numerous reasons for going back to the discussions about the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, not only in relation to the economic policies of the ruling class, but perhaps above all in order to help us to understand its attacks on the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities.

LLM also accuses us of making more and more use of our ‘machiavellian' analysis, of taking it as the starting-point for examining each and every action of the ruling class. Here we make no apology because we are merely recognizing a historic reality - that since we are moving towards the most momentous class confrontations in history, we are witnessing the bourgeoisie becoming more unified, more ‘intelligent', than at any time in the past.Certainly, this intelligence of the bourgeoisie is a total degeneration from the grand historical visions, the optimistic philosophies it elaborated in the heroic days of its youth. If, in the age of Goethe, Beethoven and Hegel, the bourgeoisie could be personified by Faust, high point in the restless upward strivings of humanity, in decadence the bourgeoisie's dark side has come into its own - and the dark side of Faust is Mephistopheles, whose vast intelligence and knowledge is a thin covering over a pit of despair, The Mephistophelean character of bourgeois consciousness in this epoch is determined by the underlying necessities of the age: this is the epoch in which the possibility and necessity for emancipating humanity from the historic division of society into antagonistic classes, from the exploitation of man by man, have at last come together; and yet all the bourgeoisie's science, all its technology, all the remnants of its own wisdom are directed towards the preservation of the same system of exploitation and oppression at the price of the most monstrous increase in human misery. Hence the fundamental cynicism and nihilism of the bourgeoisie in this epoch. But precisely because this is the period of history that demands "man's positive self-consciousness", the conscious mastery of productive activity and the productive forces, the bourgeoisie has only been able to survive within it by running its anarchic system as though it was under conscious human control. Thus capitalism in decadence, with its centralized planning, its international organization, and of course its ubiquitous ‘socialist' ideology, tends to present itself as a grotesque caricature of communism. No longer can the bourgeoisie allow the free play of ‘market forces' (ie the law of value), either within or between nation states: it has been forced to organize and centralize itself, first at the level of the nation state, then at the level of the imperialist blocs, merely to stave off capital's accelerating tendency towards economic collapse. But this national and international organization of the bourgeoisie reaches its highest point when the bourgeoisie is threatened with the proletarian menace - a fact that, as LLM himself notes, has been demonstrated in response to all the major proletarian upheavals in history (eg 1871, 1918)”.

Life of the ICC: 

General and theoretical questions: 

Appendix 2: on workerism and economism

The October 2013 report on the class struggle developed more on the question of economism and workerism, which have retained a heavy weight in the proletarian movement and the ICC itself, and require further in-depth analysis integrating in particular the analysis of Lenin in What Is To Be Done. We reprint here the section of the 2013 report dealing with this issue: as with the rest of the report, this was not widely discussed in the ICC at the time.

"Workerism and economism, which have been posed in a new light by the break-up of the old industrial sectors in the central economies. The combat against these ideologies has a long history. Workerism tends to separate the industrial workers from other components of the class, glorifying the former and arguing that theirs is the only true class struggle. Economism, which is usually closely linked to workerism, puts its emphasis on the day to day ‘economic’ struggle and underestimates the political dimension of the class movement. Both tend to be hostile to the revolutionary political organisation, and above all to the theoretical aspect of its activity, much preferring to focus on the ‘immediate’ and the ‘practical’ questions of the struggle than on its historical dimension and above all on its ultimate goals. Already in the times of the Communist League, the ‘intellectual’ Marx had to battle against the prejudices of those who saw themselves as ‘pure’ working men who favoured action over reflection.

These arguments would resurface in a more sinister way in the demagogy of the social democrats who used them to prevent revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg intervening in the workers’ councils during the German revolution. It was above all Lenin in What is to be Done who provides us with the most thorough critique of economism as a form of opportunism, and who insisted that the class struggle could only be grasped as both an economic and a political movement (to which Rosa Luxemburg added: and a great cultural movement as well). But these ideologies have proved remarkably persistent, and are a potent force for blocking and even destroying revolutionary energies. Two examples: workerist prejudices, the perceived divide between the ‘real workers’ of the Workers Voice group in Liverpool and the ‘petty bourgeois types’ who formed the ICC’s section in Britain were a factor in undermining the efforts at regroupment in Britain in the early 70s. More recently, the strength of these old mystifications can be seen in the revival of anarcho-syndicalist currents who argue that we should go beyond the divide between political and economic organisation and fuse the two elements in a ‘revolutionary union’ which can concentrate on ‘workplace organising’ around immediate economic demands. But we can also detect these influences in certain analyses of the ‘social revolts’ which have been put forward within the left communist milieu (ICT, Devrim, but also within the ICC). The underlying emphasis of these analyses is to see all the movements of the past two years as ‘cross class’ or ‘inter-classist ’movements, and to identify strikes as the only ‘real’ class struggle (cf. the recent headline over an ICT article about the miners’ strikes in South Africa: ‘This is class war’ – as though other expressions of struggle were not). From a more obviously bourgeois standpoint of course there is also the ideological mystification which holds that the revolts in Spain, Brazil, Turkey etc are movements of the ‘middle class’.

In the phase of decomposition the employed sector of the working class certainly remains a crucial element in the development of a radical class movement; resistance, strikes and self-organisation beginning at the workplace will make an indispensable contribution to the growing capacity of the working class to sense its own power in society. But given the enormous weight of precarious working and permanent unemployment, the ‘real movement’ of today’s proletariat has no choice but to draw in those vast masses who are more or less excluded from the workplace: this is already the key to understanding why the principal social revolts of the last two years belong to the proletariat. As we said some time ago in our theses on unemployment, the unemployed may have lost the workplace, but they have gained the street.

There is another aspect to this problem which eludes an analysis limited by workerist spectacles. To a far greater extent than in the period 1968-89, the proletarian character of a movement, and its prospects of evolution, will be shown less in its sociological or economic character and more in its political character, in the extent to which ‘theory has gripped the masses’, in its capacity to locate the immediate struggle in the perspective of the revolution and communism. We can see this reflected in the question of demands. The outbreak of the movement in Turkey, for example, began around the defence of a small area of green in Istanbul, threatened by the insensate urban development projects which characterise a large part of the ‘growth’ of capitalist economies today. This was not at all the only factor in the explosion of the movement – the repression the state doled out to the original protesters was probably a far more potent element. But behind the concern for a small plot of green is the growing awareness of the ecological question, the dawning realisation that capitalism is incompatible with a sustainable interchange between humanity and nature. This kind of reaction is very different from the struggles of the 68-89 period, where there was a much wider divorce between ‘class issues’ (mainly economic demands) and largely petty bourgeois campaigns about the environment. It is a step towards the proletariat becoming what Lenin referred to as a tribune for humanity. We can see a similar development around the problem of violence against women and other ‘social’ questions".

Life of the ICC: 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

Resolution on the international situation (2015)

Basing ourselves on the history of the workers’ movement

1. In making a balance sheet of the last 40 years of its analyses of the international situation, the ICC can take inspiration from the example of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, the first open declaration of the marxist current in the workers’ movement. The achievements of the Manifesto are well-known: the application of the materialist method to the historical process, showing the transient nature of all hitherto existing social formations; the recognition that while capitalism was still playing a revolutionary role in unifying the world market and developing the productive forces, its inherent contradictions, manifested in the repeated crises of overproduction, indicated that it too was only a passing stage in human history; the identification of the working class as the gravedigger of the bourgeois mode of production; the necessity for the working class to raise its struggle to the level of taking political power in order to lay the foundations of a communist society; the necessary role of the communist minority as a product and active factor in the class struggle of the proletariat.

2. These steps forward are still a fundamental part of the communist programme today. But Marx and Engels, faithful to a method which is both historical and self-critical, were later able to recognise that some parts of the Manifesto had been surpassed or proved erroneous by historical experience. Thus, following the events of the Paris Commune in 1871, they concluded that the seizure of power by the working class would entail the destruction and not the seizure of the existing bourgeois state. And long before this, in the debates in the Communist League that followed the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, they realised that the Manifesto had been mistaken in its view that capitalism had already reached a fundamental dead-end, and that there could be a rapid transition from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution. Against the hyper-activist tendency around Willich and Schapper, they insisted on the need for revolutionaries to undertake a far deeper reflection on the perspectives of a still ascendant capitalist society. However, in recognising these errors, they did not call into question their underlying method – rather they returned to it to give the movement’s programmatic gains a more solid foundation.

3. The passion for communism, the burning desire to see the end of capitalist exploitation, has frequently led communists to fall into similar errors as Marx and Engels in 1848. The outbreak of the First World War, and the immense revolutionary upsurge it provoked in the years 1917-20, was correctly seen by the communists as definitive proof that capitalism had now entered a new epoch, the epoch of its decline, and thus the epoch of the proletarian revolution. And indeed world revolution had been placed on the agenda by the seizure of power by the proletariat of Russia in October 1917. But the communist vanguard of the day also tended to underestimate the huge difficulties facing a proletariat whose self-confidence and moral compass had been dealt a severe blow by the betrayal of its old organisations; a proletariat which had been exhausted by years of imperialist slaughter, and which was still weighed down by the reformist and opportunist influences that had grown up in the workers’ movement during the previous three decades. The response to these difficulties by the leadership of the Communist International was to fall into new versions of opportunism aimed at gaining influence within the masses, such as the ‘tactic’ of the United Front with the proven agents of the bourgeoisie active in the working class. This opportunist turn gave rise to healthy reactions from the left currents within the International, notably the German and Italian Lefts, but they themselves still faced considerable obstacles to understanding the new historical conditions. In the German Left, those tendencies who adopted the theory of the ‘death crisis’ mistakenly saw the onset of capitalism’s decadence – which would reveal itself as a whole period of crises and wars – as indicating that the system had come up against a brick wall and would be totally unable to recover. One result of this was the launching of adventurist actions aimed at provoking the proletariat into giving capitalism its death blow; another was the launching of an ephemeral Communist Workers’ International followed by the ‘councilist’ phase, a growing abandonment of the very notion of the class party.

4. The inability of the majority of the German Left to respond to the reflux of the revolutionary wave was a crucial element in the disintegration of most of its organised expressions. By contrast, the Italian Left was able to recognise the profound defeat suffered by the world proletariat by the late 20s and to develop the theoretical and organisational responses demanded by the new phase in the class struggle, encapsulated in the concept of a change in the course of history; in the formation of the Fraction; and in the idea of drawing a ‘bilan1 (balance sheet) of the revolutionary wave and the programmatic positions of the Communist International. This clarity enabled the Italian Fraction to make priceless theoretical advances, at the same time defending internationalist positions when all around were succumbing to anti-fascism and the march towards war. And yet even the Fraction was not immune from crises and theoretical regressions; by 1938 the review Bilan had been renamed Octobre in anticipation of a new revolutionary wave resulting from the impending war and its ensuing ‘crisis of the war economy’. And in the post-war period, the Gauche Communiste de France - which was born in reaction to the crisis in the Fraction during the war and the immediatist rush to form the Internationalist Communist Party in 1943, and was able in a very fruitful period between 1946 and 1952 to synthesise the best contributions of the Italian and German lefts and to develop a deep understanding of capitalism’s adoption of totalitarian and statified forms - was itself undone by a faulty understanding of the post-war period, wrongly foreseeing the imminent outbreak of a third world war.

5. Despite these serious mistakes, the fundamental approach of Bilan and the GCF remained valid and was indispensible to the formation of the ICC in the early 1970s. The ICC was formed on the basis of a whole number of the key acquisitions of the communist left: not only fundamental class positions such as opposition to national liberation struggles and all capitalist wars, the critique of trade unions and of parliamentarism, the recognition of the capitalist nature of the ‘workers’ parties and the ‘socialist’ countries, but also:

  • The organisational heritage developed by Bilan and the GCF, in particular, their distinction between the fraction and the party, and the critique of both councilist and substitutionist conceptions of the role of the organisation; in addition, the recognition of the questions of functioning and of militant behaviour as political questions in their own right;
  • A number of indispensable elements for providing the new organisation with a clear perspective for the period opening up before it, in particular: the notion of the historic course and the analysis of the global balance of forces between the classes; the concept of capitalist decadence and the deepening economic contradictions of the system; the drive towards war and the constitution of imperialist blocs; the essential role of state capitalism in the system’s ability to maintain its existence despite its historical obsolescence.

Understanding the historic period

6. The focus of this resolution is the elements guiding our analysis of the international situation since our inception. And here it is clear that the ICC did not merely inherit the acquisitions of the past but was able to develop them in a number of ways:

  • Armed with the concept of the historic course, the ICC was able to recognise that the May-June events in France in 1968, and the subsequent international wave of struggles, announced the end of the period of counter-revolution and the opening up of a new course towards massive class confrontations; it was therefore able to continue analysing the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes, the real advances and retreats of the class movement, in this global and historical framework, thus avoiding a purely empirical response to each episode in the international class struggle.
  • On the foundations of its theory of capitalist decadence, the groups that came together to form the ICC had also understood that this wave of struggles was not, contrary the theory of the Situationists, provoked by boredom with the consumer society, but by the return of the open crisis of the capitalist system. Throughout its existence, the ICC therefore continued to follow the course of this economic crisis and point to its inexorable deepening.
  • Understanding that the resurfacing of the economic crisis would push the capitalist world powers towards new conflicts and preparations for a new world war, the ICC recognised the need to continue with its analysis of the balance of forces between the imperialist blocs, and between the bourgeoisie and the working class, whose resistance to the economic crisis erected a barrier to the system’s capacity to launch a generalised holocaust.
  • With its conception of state capitalism, the ICC was able to offer a coherent explanation of the long-drawn out nature of the crisis that emerged in the late 60s, which has seen the bourgeoisie use all kinds of mechanisms (nationalisations, privatisations, massive recourse to credit, etc) to distort the functioning of the law of value and thus to mitigate or postpone the most explosive effects of the economic crisis. By the same token, the ICC has been able to see how the bourgeoisie in its decadent phase has used its position in the state to carry out all kinds of manoeuvres (on the terrain of elections, trade union actions, ideological campaigns etc) to derail the class struggle and hinder the development of class consciousness. And it was this same theoretical framework which enabled the ICC to show the underlying reasons for the crisis in the so-called ‘socialist’ countries and the collapse of the Russian bloc after 1989.
  • Drawing together its concept of the historic course and its analysis of the evolution of imperialist conflicts and of the class struggle, the ICC has been the only proletarian organisation to understand that the collapse of the old bloc system was the product of a historic stalemate between the classes and that it marked capitalism’s entry into a new and final phase of its decadence – the phase of decomposition, which in turn has brought new difficulties for the proletariat and new dangers for humanity.

7. Alongside its ability to incorporate and take forward the gains of the past workers’ movement, the ICC, like all previous revolutionary organisations, is also subject to the multiple pressures emanating from the dominant social order, and therefore to the ideological forms these pressures generate - above all, opportunism, centrism, and vulgar materialism. In particular, in its analyses of the world situation, it has fallen prey to the impatience and immediatism which we identified in the organisations of the past (...). These weaknesses have been aggravated in the history of the ICC by the conditions in which it was born, since it suffered from an organic break with the organisations of the past, from the impact of the Stalinist counter-revolution which introduced a false vision of the struggle and of proletarian morality, and from the powerful influence of the petty bourgeois rebellion of the 1960s – the petty bourgeoisie, as a class with no historic future, being almost by definition the embodiment of immediatism. Furthermore, these tendencies have been exacerbated in the period of decomposition which is both the product of and an active factor in the loss of perspectives about the future.

The class struggle

8. From the beginning, the danger of immediatism expressed itself in the ICC’s evaluation of the balance of forces between the classes. While correctly identifying the period after 1968 as the end of the counter-revolution, its characterisation of the new historic course as a “course towards revolution” implied a linear and rapid ascent from the immediate struggles to the overthrow of capitalism; and even after this formulation was corrected, the ICC maintained the view that the ensuing waves of struggle between 1978 and 1989, despite temporary retreats, amounted to a semi-permanent proletarian offensive. The immense difficulties of the class in moving from defensive movements to the politicisation of its struggles and the development of a revolutionary perspective were not sufficiently emphasised and analysed. Even though the ICC was able to recognise that the onset of decomposition and the collapse of the blocs would involve a profound retreat in the class struggle, we were still strongly influenced by the hope that the continued deepening of the economic crisis would bring back the ‘waves’ of struggle of the 70s and 80s; and while we were right in seeing that there was a turning point in the reflux after 2003, we often underestimated the huge problems facing the new generation of the working class in developing a clear perspective for its struggles, a factor affecting both the class as a whole and its politicised minorities. These errors of analysis have also fed some false and even opportunist approaches to intervention in the struggle and the construction of the organisation.

9. Thus if the theory of decomposition (which in fact was the last legacy to the ICC from comrade MC) has been a unique and indispensable guide to understanding the present period, the ICC has not always taken on board all its implications. This is particularly true when it has come to recognising and explaining the difficulties of the working class since the 1990s. While we were able to see how the bourgeoisie had used the effects of decomposition to mount huge ideological campaigns against the working class – most notably the barrage of noise about the ‘death of communism’ after the collapse of the eastern bloc – we did not go deeply enough into examining how the very process of decomposition tended to undermine the proletariat’s self-confidence and solidarity. In addition, we struggled to understand the impact on class identity of the break-up of old proletarian concentrations in some of the old capitalist heartlands and their re-location to the formerly ‘underdeveloped’ nations. And while we have had at least a partial understanding of the necessity for the proletariat to politicise its struggles if it is to resist the weight of decomposition, it has only been late in the day that we have begun to grasp that for the proletariat the recovery of its class identity and its adoption of a political perspective has a vital cultural and moral dimension.

The economic crisis

10. It’s probably in the area of following the economic crisis that themost obvious difficulties of the ICC have been expressed. In particular:

  • At the more general level, a tendency to fall into a reified view of the capitalist economy as a machine governed solely by objective laws, obscuring the reality that capital is first and foremost a social relation and that the actions of human beings – in the form of social classes – can never be entirely abstracted from an analysis of the course of the economic crisis. This is particularly true in the epoch of state capitalism where the ruling class is permanently faced with the need to intervene in the economy and even to counter its ‘immanent’ laws, while at the same time being compelled to factor in the danger of the class struggle as an element in its economic policies.
  • A reductionist understanding the economic theory of Rosa Luxemburg, coming to the false extrapolation that capitalism had already exhausted all possibilities of expansion by 1914 (or even by the 1960s). In reality when she formulated her theory in 1913 she recognised that there were still major areas of non-capitalist economy remaining to be exploited, even if it was less and less possible for this to take place without direct conflict between the imperialist powers.
  • While recognising that with the reduction of these fields for its expansion, capitalism was more and more compelled to resort to the palliative of debt, this formula has sometimes become a catch-all explanation which did not go back to the underlying question of credit in the accumulation of capital; more seriously, the organisation has repeatedly predicted that the limits to debt had already been reached.
  • All these elements were part of a view of the automatic collapse of capitalism,which became particularly prevalent in the wake of the 2008 ‘credit crunch’. More than one internal report or article in our press proclaimed that capitalism had already run out of options and was heading towards a kind of economic paralysis, an overnight collapse. In reality, as Rosa herself insisted, the real catastrophe of capitalism is that it subjects humanity to a long drawn out agonising decline, plunging society into an increasing barbarism, so that the ‘end’ of capitalism will not be a purely economic seizure but will inevitably be played out on the terrain of militarism and war, unless it is consciously brought about by the proletarian revolution (and to Rosa’s prognosis we must also add the increasing threat of ecological devastation, which will certainly accelerate the drive towards war). This idea of a sudden and complete collapse also forgets our own analysis of the capacity of the ruling class, through state capitalism, to prolong its system through all kinds of political and financial manipulations.
  • The denial, in some of our key texts, of any possibilities of expansion for capitalism in its decadent phase also made it difficult for the organisation to explain the dizzying growth of China and other ‘new economies’ in the period since the downfall of the old blocs. While these developments do not, as many have argued, call into question the decadence of capitalism, and indeed are a clear expression of it, they have disproved the assertion that in the decadent period there is strictly no possibility of industrial take-off in any of the ‘peripheral’ regions. While we were able to refute some of the more facile myths about ‘globalisation’ in the phase following the collapse of the blocs (from the right seeing it as a new and glorious chapter in the ascent of capitalism, from the left as a basis for reviving old nationalist and state capitalist solutions), we were not able to discern the kernel of truth in the globalisation mythology: that the removal of the old autarkic model did open up new spheres for capital investment, including the exploitation of a huge new fund of labour power reared outside of directly capitalist social relations.
  • These errors of analysis are coupled to the fact that the organisation has found considerable difficulty in developing its understanding of the economic question in a genuinely associated manner. A tendency towards economic questions being the sphere of ‘experts’ became apparent in the debate about the ’30 glorious years’ in the first decade of the 21st century. Although the ICC certainly needed to understand and explain why it had rejected the idea that the reconstruction of war-shattered economies in itself explains the survival of the system in decadence, in practice this debate was a failed attempt to grapple with the problem. It was not well understood inside and outside the organisation and has left us theoretically rudderless. It needs to be re-framed in relation to the whole period of decadence, with the aim of clarifying the role of the war economy and the meaning of the irrationality of war in decadence.

Imperialist tensions

11. In the sphere of imperialist tensions, the ICC has in general had a very solid framework of analysis, showing the different phases of the confrontation between the blocs in the 70s and 80s; and, despite being somewhat ‘surprised’ by the sudden collapse of the Eastern bloc and the USSR after 1989, it had already developed the theoretical tools for analysing the inherent weaknesses of the Stalinist regimes; linking this to its understanding of the question of militarism and to the concept of decomposition that it had begun to elaborate in the latter half of the 80s, the ICC was the first in the proletarian milieu to predict the end of the bloc system, the decline of US hegemony, and the very rapid development of ‘each for themselves’ at the imperialist level. While remaining aware that the tendency towards the formation of imperialist blocs had not disappeared after 1989, we showed the difficulties facing even the most likely candidate for the role of bloc leader against the US, the newly reunified Germany, in ever being able to fulfill this imperialist ambition. However, we were less able to foresee the capacity of Russia to re-emerge as a force to be reckoned with on the world arena, and most importantly, we have been very late in seeing the rise of China as a new and significant player in the great power rivalries which have developed over the past two or three decades – a failure closely connected to our problems in recognising the reality of China’s economic advance.

A better understanding of still valid perspectives

12. Taken as a whole, the existence of all these weaknesses should not be a factor of discouragement, but a stimulus for undertaking a programme of theoretical development which will enable the ICC to deepen its grasp of all aspects of the world situation. The beginnings of a critical balance sheet of the last 40 years undertaken in the congress reports, the discussion on the Theses on morality2 the attempts to go to the root of our method for analysing the class struggle and the economic crisis, the redefinition of our role as an organisation in the period of capitalist decomposition – all these are signposts pointing towards a real cultural renaissance in the ICC. In the coming period, the ICC will also have to return to such fundamental theoretical questions as the nature of imperialism and decadence in order to provide the most solid framework for our analyses of the international situation.

13. The first step in the critical balance sheet of 40 years of analysis of the world situation is to recognise our errors and to begin digging down to their origins. It would therefore be premature to try to apply all their implications to the current world situation and to the perspectives for the future. Nevertheless, we can say that despite our weaknesses, the fundamentals of our perspectives remain valid:

  • At the level of the economy, there is every reason to expect that the economic crisis will continue to deepen and that, while there will be no final economic apocalypse, there will be phases marked by severe convulsions that shake the system to the core, as well as the continuation of the situation of precarity and endemic unemployment that already weigh heavily on the working class. Certainly we cannot underestimate the resilience of this system and the determination of the ruling class to keep it going despite its historical obsolescence, but as we have always said, the very remedies that capital applies to its mortal sickness, while bringing some short term relief, tend to make the patient even more sick in the long run.
  • At the level of imperialist tensions, we are currently seeing a real acceleration of military chaos, most notably in Ukraine, the Middle East,Africa and the China sea, bringing with them an increasing threat of ‘blow back’ to the central countries (as with the recent killings in Paris and Copenhagen). The stage of imperialist conflict is growing larger and so are the alliances being forged to wage them, as we can see in the case of the conflict between Russia and the ‘west’ over Ukraine, or in the growing cooperation between Russia and China over the conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. But these alliances remain very contingent and lack the conditions for evolving into stable blocs. The primary danger facing humanity is not from a classic world war but from a degeneration of regional conflicts into an uncontrollable spiral of destruction.
  • The premises of this spiral are already discernible and they have the most negative consequences for the proletariat, whose ‘peripheral’ fractions are being directly mobilised or massacred in the present conflicts, and whose central fractions find themselves incapable of reacting to the growing barbarism, reinforcing the tendency to fall into atomisation and despair. But despite all the very real dangers posed by the advancing tide of decomposition, the potential for the working class to respond to this unprecedented crisis of humanity have not been exhausted, as indicated by the best moments of the student movement in France in 2006 or the social revolts of 2011, where the proletariat, even without clearly recognising itself as a class, showed evidence of its capacity to unify across all its divisions, in the streets and in the general assemblies. Above all, the young proletarians engaged in these movements, insofar as they have begun to challenge the brutality of capitalist social relations and to pose the question of a new society, have taken the first timid steps towards reaffirming that the class struggle is not only an economic struggle, but a political struggle; and that its ultimate aim remains what was outlined so audaciously in the Manifesto of 1848: the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the inauguration of a new human culture and a new morality.

1 Bilan was the name of the journal published from 1926 by Italian Left in exile in France.

2 An internal text currently under discussion in the organisation

 

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21st ICC Congress

International Review 157 - Summer 2016

The summer of 2016 has been marked by signs of growing instability and unpredictability on a world scale, confirming that the capitalist class is finding it increasingly difficult to present itself as the guarantor of order and political control. The botched coup and subsequent wave of repression in Turkey, a strategically vital lynchpin of the global imperialist arena; the “blow back” of the chaos in the Middle East in the form of terrorist outrages in Germany and France; the intense political tremors provoked by the EU referendum result in the UK and the awful prospects taking shape with Trump’s presidential candidacy in the US: all these phenomena, so full of dangers for the ruling class, are no less threatening to the working class, and it is a major challenge to the revolutionary minorities within our class to develop a coherent analysis which cuts through the ideological fog obscuring these events.

It is not possible, in this International Review, to cover all these elements of the world situation. With regard to the coup in Turkey in particular, we want to take the time to discuss its implications and work on a clear analytical framework. For the moment we intend to focus on a series of questions which seem to us to be even more urgent to clarify: the implications of “Brexit” and the Trump candidacy; the national situation in Germany, in particular the problems created by the European refugee crisis; and the social phenomenon common to all these developments: the rise of populism.

We ourselves have been late to recognise the significance of the populist movements. Hence, the text on populism presented in this issue is an individual contribution, written to stimulate reflection and discussion in the ICC (and hopefully beyond). It argues that populism is the product of an impasse which lies at the heart of society; even if the bourgeois state is giving rise to factions and parties which are attempting to ride this tiger, the result of the EU referendum in the UK and Trump’s ascendancy in the Republican Party demonstrate that this is no easy ride and can even deepen the political difficulties of the ruling class.

The purpose of the article on Brexit and the US presidential elections is to apply the ideas of the text on populism to a concrete situation. It is also intended to correct an idea present in previous articles published on our site, that the Brexit referendum result is somehow a "success" for bourgeois democracy, or that the rise of populism today "strengthens democracy".

We also publish two historical articles on the national question, focusing on the case of Ireland. They are included not simply because we have reached the centenary of the 1916 Dublin rising, but because this event (and the subsequent history of the Irish Republican Army) was one of the first clear signs that the working class could no longer ally itself with nationalist movements or incorporate “national” demands in its programme; and because today, faced with a new surge of nationalism in the centres of the capitalist system, the necessity for revolutionaries to affirm that the working class has no country is more urgent than ever. As the Report on the German national situation puts it, overcoming the boundaries of the nation is the awesome challenge confronting the proletariat in the face of globalised capitalism and the false alternatives of populism:

Today, with contemporary globalisation, an objective historical tendency of decadent capitalism achieves its full development: each strike, each act of economic resistance by workers anywhere in the world, finds itself immediately confronted by the whole of world capital, ever ready to withdraw production and investment and produce somewhere else. For the moment, the international proletariat has been quite unable to find an adequate answer, or even to gain a glimpse of what such an answer might look like. We do not know if it will succeed in the end in doing so. But it seems clear that the development in this direction would take much longer than did the transition from trade unionism to mass strike. For one thing, the situation of the proletariat in the old, central countries of capitalism – those, like Germany, at the “top” of the economic hierarchy – would have to become much more dramatic than is today the case. For another, the step required by objective reality – conscious international class struggle, the “international mass strike” – is much more demanding than the one from trade union to mass strike in one country. For it obliges the working class to call into question not only corporatism and sectionalism, but the main, often centuries- or even millennia-old divisions of class society such as nationality, ethnic culture, race, religion, sex etc. This is a much more profound and more political step”.

ICC, August 2016

On the question of populism

The article that follows is a document under discussion in the ICC, written in June of this year, a few weeks before the “Brexit” referendum in the UK. The corresponding article in this issue of the Review is an attempt to apply the ideas put forward in this text to the concrete situations posed by the referendum result in Britain and by the candidature of Trump in the US.


We are presently witnessing a wave of political populism in the old central countries of capitalism. In states where this phenomenon is more long established, such as France or Switzerland, the right wing populists have become the biggest single political party at the electoral level. More striking however is the encroachment of populism in countries which until now were known for the political stability and efficiency of the ruling class: the USA, Britain, Germany. In these countries, it is only very recently that populism has succeeded in having a direct and serious impact.

The contemporary upsurge of right wing populism

In the United States the political establishment initially strongly underestimated the presidential candidature of Donald Trump in the Republican Party. His bid was at first opposed more or less openly both by the established party hierarchy and by the religious right. They were all taken aback by the popular support he found both in the Bible belt and in the old urban industrial centres, in particular among parts of the “white” working class. The ensuing media campaigns designed to cut him down to size, led among others by the Wall Street Journal and the East Coast media and financial oligarchies, only increased his popularity. The partial ruining of important layers of the middle, but also of the working classes, many of whom lost their savings and even their homes through the financial and property crashes of 2007/08, has provoked outrage against the old political establishment which rapidly intervened to save the banking sector, while leaving to their fate those small savers who had been trying to become owners of their own home.

The promises of Trump to support small savers, to maintain health services, to tax stock exchange and financial big business, and to keep out immigrants feared as potential competitors by parts of the poor, have found an echo both among Christian religious fundamentalists and more left, traditionally Democratic voters who, only a few years before, would not even have dreamt they could vote for such a politician.

Almost half a century of bourgeois political “reformism”, during which candidates of the left, whether at the national or municipal/local level, whether in parties or trade unions, having been elected to allegedly defend workers’ interests, consistently upheld those of capital instead, have prepared the ground for the proverbial “man on the street” in America to consider supporting a multi-millionaire like Trump, with the assumption that he at least cannot be “bought” by the ruling class.

In Britain the main expression of populism at the moment seems to be not a particular candidate or political party (although the UKIP1of Nigel Farage has become a major player on the political stage), but the popularity of the proposal to leave the European Union, and of deciding this by referendum. The fact that this option is opposed by most of the mainstream of the finance world (City of London) and of British Industry has, here also, tended to increase the appeal of “Brexit” among parts of the population. Apart from representing particular interests of parts of the ruling class much more closely tied to the former colonies (the Commonwealth) than to continental Europe, one of the motors of this opposition current seems to be to take the wind out of the sails of new right wing populist movements. Perhaps the likes of Boris Johnson and other Tory “Brexit” advocates would, in the event of an eventual exit, be the ones who would then have to salvage whatever can be saved by trying to negotiate some kind of a close associated status to the European Union, presumably along the lines of that of Switzerland (which usually adopts EU regulations, without however having any say in formulating them).

But it is also possible that politicians of the Conservative Party have themselves become infested by the populist mood, which, in Britain also, gained ground rapidly after the financial and housing crises which negatively affected significant parts of the population.

In Germany, where, after World War II, the bourgeoisie has always succeeded until now in preventing the establishment of parliamentary parties to the right of Christian Democracy, a new populist movement appeared on the scene, both on the streets (Pegida) and at the electoral level (Alternative für Deutschland) in response, not to the “financial” crisis of 2007/08 (which Germany weathered relatively unscathed) but to the ensuing “Euro-Crisis”, understood by part of the population as a direct threat to the stability of the joint European currency, and thus to the savings of millions of people.

But no sooner was this crisis defused, at least for the moment, than there began a massive influx of refugees, provoked in particular by the Syrian civil and imperialist war and by the conflict with ISIS in the north of Iraq. This re-energised a populist movement which was beginning to falter. Although a sizeable majority of the population still support the “welcoming culture” of chancellor Merkel and of many leaders of the German economy, attacks against refugee shelters have multiplied in many parts of the country, while in parts of the former GDR2 a veritable pogrom mood has developed.

The degree to which the rise of populism is linked to the discrediting of the party political establishment is illustrated by the recent presidential elections in Austria, the second round of which was fought between candidates of the Greens and the populist right, whereas the main parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, who together have run the country since the end of World War II, both suffered an all time electoral debacle.

In the wake of the Austrian Elections, political observers in Germany have concluded that a continuation of the present Christian and Social Democratic coalition in Berlin after the next general elections would be likely to further favour the rise of populism. In any case, whether through Grand Coalitions between left and right parties (or “cohabitations” like in France), or through the alternation between left and right governments, after almost half a century of chronic economic crisis and around thirty years of capitalist decomposition, large parts of the population no longer believe there is a significant difference between the established left and right parties. On the contrary, these parties are seen as constituting a kind of cartel defending their own interests, and those of the very rich, at the expense of those of the population as a whole, and of those of the state. Because the working class, after 1968, failed to politicise its struggles and to take further significant steps towards developing its own revolutionary perspective, this disillusionment presently above all fans the flames of populism.

In the Western industrial countries, in particular after 9/11 in the USA, Islamist terrorism has become another factor accelerating populism. At present this poses a problem for the bourgeoisie in particular in France, which has once again become a focus of such attacks. The need to counter the continuing rise of the Front National was one of the motives for the anti-terrorist state of emergency and for the war language of François Hollande after the recent attacks, posing as the leader of an alleged international coalition against ISIS. The loss of confidence of the population in the determination and the capacity of the ruling class to protect its citizens at the security (not only the economic) level is one of the causes of the present populist wave.

The roots of contemporary right wing populism are thus diverse and vary from country to country. In the former Stalinist countries of Eastern Europe they seem to be linked to the backwardness and parochialism of political and economic life under the previous regimes, as well as to the traumatising brutality of their transition to a more effective, Western style capitalism after 1989.

In as important a country as Poland the populist right already runs the government, while in Hungary (a centre of the first wave of the proletarian world revolution in 1917-23), the regime of Victor Orban more or less openly promotes and protects pogromist attacks.

More generally, reactions against “globalisation” have been a leading factor of the rise of populism. In Western Europe, the mood “against Brussels” and the EU have long belonged to the staple diet of such movements. But today, such an atmosphere has also appeared in the United States, where Trump is not the only politician threatening to ditch the TTIP3 free trade agreement being negotiated between Europe and North America.

This reaction against “globalisation” should not be confused with the kind of neo-Keynesian correction to the (real) excesses of neo-liberalism propounded by representatives of the left such as ATTAC. Whereas the latter put forward a responsible coherent alternative economic policy for the national capital, the populist critique represents more a kind of political and economic vandalism, such as already partly manifested itself as a moment of the rejection of the Maastricht Treaty in referendums in France, the Netherlands and Ireland.

The possibility of government participation by contemporary populism and the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The populist parties are bourgeois fractions, part of the totalitarian state capitalist apparatus. What they propagate is bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology and behaviour: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, cultural conservatism. As such, they represent a strengthening of the domination of the ruling class and its state over society. They widen the scope of the party apparatus of democracy and add fire-power to its ideological bombardment. They revitalise the electoral mystification and the attractiveness of voting, both through the voters they mobilise themselves and through those who mobilise to vote against them. Although they are partly the product of the growing disillusionment with the traditional parties, they can also help to reinforce the image of the latter, who in contrast to the populists can present themselves as being more humanitarian and democratic. To the extent that their discourse resembles that of the fascists in the 1930s, their upsurge tends to give new life to anti-fascism. This is particularly the case in Germany, where the coming to power of the “fascist” party led to the greatest catastrophe in its national history, with the loss of almost half of its territory and its status as a major military power, the destruction of its cities, and the virtually irreparable damage to its international prestige through the perpetration of crimes which have gone down as the worst in the history of humanity.

Nevertheless, and as we have seen until now, above all in the old heartlands of capitalism, the leading fractions of the bourgeoisie have been doing their best to limit the rise of populism and, in particular, to prevent if possible its participation in government. After years of mostly unsuccessful defensive struggles on their own class terrain, certain sectors of the working class today even seem to feel that you can pressurise and scare the ruling class more by voting for the populist right than by workers’ struggles. The basis for this impression is that the “establishment” really does react with alarm to the electoral success of the populists. Why this reticence of the bourgeoisie in face of “one of its own”?

Until now we have tended to assume that this is above all because of the historic course, (i.e. the still undefeated status of the present generation of the proletariat). Today it is necessary to re-examine this framework critically in face of the development of social reality.

It is true that the establishment of populist governments in Poland and Hungary is relatively insignificant compared to what happens in the old Western capitalist heartlands. More significant however is that this development has not for the moment led to a major conflict between Poland and Hungary and NATO or the EU. On the contrary, Austria, under a social democratic chancellor, after initially imitating the “welcoming culture” of Angela Merkel in summer 2015, soon followed the example of Hungary in erecting fences on its borders. And the Hungarian prime minister has become a favourite discussion partner of the Bavarian CSU who are part of Merkel’s government. We can speak of a process of mutual adaptation between populist governments and major state institutions. Despite their anti-European demagogy, there is no sign for the moment of these populist governments wanting to take Poland or Hungary out of the EU. On the contrary, what they now propagate is the spreading of populism within the European Union. What this means, in terms of concrete interests, is that “Brussels” should interfere less in national affairs, while continuing to transfer the same or even more subventions to Warsaw and Budapest. For its part, the EU is adapting itself to these populist governments, who sometimes are praised for their “constructive contributions” at complicated EU summits. And while insisting on the maintenance of a certain minimum of “democratic standards”, Brussels has refrained for the moment from imposing any of the threatened sanctions on these countries.

As for Western Europe, Austria, it should be recalled, was already a forerunner in once including the party of Jörg Haider as junior partner in a coalition government. Its aim in so doing – that of discrediting the populist party by making it assume responsibility for running the state – partly succeeded. Temporarily. Today however the FPÖ4, at the electoral level, is stronger than ever before, almost winning the recent presidential elections. Of course in Austria the president plays a mainly symbolic role. But this is not the case in France, the second economic power and the second concentration of the proletariat in continental Western Europe. The world bourgeoisie is looking anxiously towards the next presidential election in that country, where electorally the Front National is the leading party.

Many of the political experts of the bourgeoisie have already concluded from the apparent failure of the Republican Party in the USA to prevent the candidature of Trump, that sooner or later the participation of populists in western governments has become more or less inevitable, and that it would be better to start to prepare for such an eventuality. This debate is a first reaction to the recognition that the attempts, to date, to exclude or limit populism have not only reached their own limit but have even begun to have the opposite effect.

Democracy is the ideology best suited to developed capitalist societies and the single most important weapon against the class consciousness of the proletariat. But today the bourgeoisie is confronted with the paradox that, by continuing to keep at arms length parties which do not abide to its democratic rules of “political correctness”, it risks seriously damaging its own democratic image. How to justify the maintenance in opposition indefinitely of parties with a sizable, eventually even with a majority share of votes, without discrediting oneself and getting caught up in inextricable argumentative contradictions? Moreover, democracy is not only an ideology but a highly efficient means of class rule – not least because it is able to recognise and adjust to new political impulses coming from society as a whole.

It is in this framework that the ruling class today poses the perspective of possible populist involvement in government in relation to the contemporary balance of class forces with the proletariat. Present trends indicate that the big bourgeoisie itself does not think that a still undefeated working class necessarily excludes such an option.

To begin with, such an eventuality would not mean the abolition of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, such as was the case in Italy, Germany or Spain in the 1920/30s after the defeat of the proletariat. Even in Eastern Europe today the existing right wing populist governments have not tried to outlaw the other parties or establish a system of concentration camps. Such measures would indeed not be accepted by the present generation of workers, particularly in the western countries, and perhaps not even in Poland or Hungary.

In addition however, and on the other hand, the working class, although not definitively historically defeated, is presently weakened at the level of its class consciousness, its combativeness and its class identity. The underlying historical context here is above all the defeat of the first world revolutionary wave at the end of World War I and the depth and length of the counter-revolution which followed it.

In this context, the first cause of this weakening is the inability of the class, for the moment, to find an adequate answer, in its defensive struggles, to the present stage of state capitalist management, that of “globalisation”. In its defensive struggles, the workers rightly sense that they are immediately confronted with world capitalism as a whole. Because today not only trade and commerce but also, and for the first time, production is globalised, the bourgeoisie can rapidly reply to any local or national scale proletarian resistance by transferring production elsewhere. This apparently overwhelming instrument of the disciplining of labour can only effectively be counteracted by international class struggle, a level of combat which the class in the foreseeable future is still incapable of attaining.

The second cause of this weakening is the inability of the class to continue to politicise its struggles after the initial impetus of 1968/69. What resulted is the absence of the development of any perspective for a better life or a better society: the present phase of decomposition. In particular, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe appeared to confirm the impossibility of an alternative to capitalism.

During a brief period, maybe from 2003 to 2008, there were tender, relatively inconspicuous first signs of a beginning of the necessarily long and difficult process of proletarian recovery from these blows. In particular, the question of class solidarity, not least between the generations, began to be put forward. The anti-CPE5 movement of 2006 was the high point of this phase, because it succeeded in making the French bourgeoisie back down, and because the example of this movement and its success inspired sectors of youth in other European countries, including Germany and Britain.

However, these first fragile buds of a possible proletarian recovery were soon frozen to death by a third negative wave of events of historic importance in the post 1968 phase, constituting a third major setback for the proletariat: the economic calamity of 2007/08, followed by the present wave of war refugees and other migrants – the biggest since the end of World War II.

The specificity of the 07/08 crisis was that it began as a financial crisis of enormous proportions. As a result, for millions of workers, one of its worst effects, in some cases even the main one, was not direct wage cuts, tax hikes or mass lay-offs imposed by employers or the state, but loss of homes, savings, insurance policies, and so on. These losses, at the financial level, appear as those of citizens of bourgeois society, not specific to the working class. Their causes remain unclear, favouring personalisation and conspiracy theories.

The specificity of the refugee crisis is that it takes place in the context of “Fortress Europe” (and Fortress North America). As opposed to in the 1930s, since 1968 the world capitalist crisis has been accompanied by an international state capitalist management under the leadership of the bourgeoisie of the old capitalist countries. As a result, after almost half a century of chronic crisis, Western Europe and North America still appear as havens of peace, prosperity and stability, at least by comparison with the “world outside”. In such a context, it is not only the fear of the competition of the immigrants which alarms parts of the population, but also the fear that the chaos and lawlessness perceived as coming from the outside, will, along with refugees, gain access to the “civilised” world. At the present level of the extension of class consciousness it is too difficult for most workers to understand that both the chaotic barbarism on the capitalist periphery and its increasing encroachment on the central countries are the result of world capitalism and of the policies of the leading capitalist countries themselves.

This context of the finance, Euro and then the refugee crises have, for the moment, nipped in the bud the first embryonic strivings towards a renewal of class solidarity. This is perhaps at least partly why the Indignados struggle, although it lasted longer and in some ways appeared to develop more in depth than the anti-CPE, failed to stop the attacks in Spain, and could so easily be exploited by the bourgeoisie to create a new left political party: Podemos.

The main result, at the political level, of this new surge of decline in solidarity from 2008 to today has been the strengthening of populism. The latter is not only a symptom of the further weakening of proletarian class consciousness and combativeness, but itself constitutes a further active factor in this. Not only because populism makes inroads into the ranks of the proletariat. In fact, the central sectors of the class still strongly resist this influence, as the German example illustrates. But also because the bourgeoisie profits from this heterogeneity of the class to further divide and confuse the proletariat. Today we seem to be approaching a situation which, at a first glance, has certain similarities with the 1930s. Of course, the proletariat has not been defeated politically and physically in a central country, as took place in Germany at the time. As a result, anti-populism cannot play exactly the same role as that of antifascism in the 1930s. It also seems to be a characteristic of the phase of decomposition that such false alternatives themselves appear less sharply contoured than before. Nevertheless, in a country like Germany, where eight years ago the first steps in politicisation of a small minority of searching youth were being made under the influence of the slogan “down with capitalism, the nation and the state”, today they are being made in the light of the defence of the refugees and the “welcoming culture” in confrontation with the neo-Nazis and the populist right.

In the whole post 1968 period, the weight of anti-fascism was at least attenuated by the fact that the concretisation of the fascist danger lay either in the past, or was represented by more or less marginalised right wing extremists. Today the rise of right wing populism as a potentially mass phenomenon gives the ideology of the defence of democracy a new, much more tangible and important target against which it can mobilise.

We will conclude this part by arguing that the present growth of populism and of its influence on bourgeois politics as a whole is also made possible by the present weakness of the proletariat.

The present debate within the bourgeoisie about the rise of populism

Although the bourgeois debate about how to deal with a resurgent populism is only beginning, we can already mention some of the parameters being put forward. If we look at the debate in Germany – the country where the bourgeoisie is perhaps the most aware and vigilant about such questions – we can identify three aspects being put forward.

Firstly that it is a mistake for the “democrats” to try and fight populism by adopting its language and proposals. According to this argument, it was this copying of the populists which partly explains the fiasco of the governing parties at the recent elections in Austria, and which helps to explain the failure of the traditional parties in France to stop the advance of the FN. The populist voters, they argue, prefer the original to any copy. Instead of making concessions, they argue, it is necessary to emphasise the antagonisms between “constitutional patriotism” and “chauvinist nationalism”, between cosmopolitan openness and xenophobia, between tolerance and authoritarianism, between modernity and conservatism, between humanism and barbarism, According to this line of argumentation, Western democracies today are “mature” enough to cope with modern populism while maintaining a majority for “democracy” if they put their positions forward in an “offensive” manner. This is the position for instance of the present German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Secondly, it is insisted, the electorate should be able to recognise again the difference between right and left, correcting the present impression of a cartel of the established parties. This idea, we suspect, was already the motivation for the preparation, over the past two years, by the CDU-SPD6 coalition, of a possible future Christian Democratic coalition with the Greens after the next general elections. The exit from atomic power after the Fukushima catastrophe announced not in Japan but in Germany, and the recent euphoric support of the Greens for a “welcoming culture” towards refugees associated not with the SPD but with Angela Merkel, were the main steps to date of this strategy. However, the unexpectedly rapid electoral rise of the AfD today threatens the realisation of such a strategy (the present attempt to bring the liberal FDP7 back into parliament might be in response to this, since this party could eventually join a “Black-Green” coalition). In opposition the SPD, the party which in Germany led the “neo-liberal revolution” with its Agenda 2010 under Schröder, could then adopt a more “left” stance. As opposed to the Anglo-Saxon countries, where the conservative right under Thatcher and Reagan imposed the necessary “neo-liberal” measures, in many European continental countries the left (as the more political, responsible and disciplined parties) had to participate or even lead their implementation.

Today however it has become clear that the necessary stage of neo-liberal globalisation was accompanied by excesses which sooner or later will have to be corrected. This was particularly the case after 1989, when the collapse of the Stalinist regimes appeared overwhelmingly to confirm all the ordo-liberal8 theses about the unsuitability of a state capitalist bureaucracy to run the economy. Such excesses are now increasingly been pointed to by thoughtful bourgeois commentators. For instance, it is not absolutely indispensable for the survival of capitalism that a tiny fraction of society owns almost all the wealth. This can be damaging, not only socially and politically but even economically, since the very rich, instead of spending the lion’s share of their wealth, are above all concerned about preserving its value, thus augmenting speculation and withholding solvent purchasing power. Equally, it is not absolutely necessary for capitalism that the competition between nation states takes, to the present extent, the form of the cutting taxes and state budgets so that the state can no longer undertake necessary investments. In other words, the idea is that, through an eventual comeback of a kind of neo-Keynesian correction, the left, whether in its traditional form or through new parties like Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, might regain a certain material basis for posing as an alternative to the ordo-liberal conservative right.

It is important however to note that today’s reflections within the ruling class about a possible future role of the left are not in the first instance inspired by fear (in the immediate) of the working class. On the contrary, many elements of the present situation in the main capitalist centres indicate that the first aspect determining the policy of the ruling class is presently the problem of populism.

The third aspect is that, like the British Tories around Boris Johnson, the CSU9, the “sister” party of Merkel’s CDU, thinks that parts of the traditional party apparatus should themselves apply elements of populist policy. We should note that the CSU is no longer the expression of traditional Bavarian, petty bourgeois backwardness. On the contrary, alongside the adjacent southern province of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria is today economically the most modern part of Germany, the backbone of its high-tech and export industries, the production base of companies such as Siemens, BMW or Audi.

This third option propagated in Munich of course collides with the first one mentioned above propounded by Angela Merkel, and the present head-on confrontations between the two parties are not just electoral manoeuvres or (real) differences between particular economic interests, but also differences of approach. In view of the chancellor’s present determination not to change her mind, certain representatives of the CSU have even begun to “think aloud” about putting up their own candidates in other parts of Germany in opposition to the CDU at the next general elections.

The idea of the CSU, like that of parts of the British Conservatives, is that if it has become inevitable, to a certain extent, that populist measures are taken, it is better if they are applied by an experienced and responsible party. In this manner, such often irresponsible measures could at least be limited on the one hand, and compensated for by auxiliary measures on the other hand.

Despite the real friction between Merkel and Seehofer, as between Cameron and Johnson, we should not overlook the element of division of labor between them (one part “offensively” defending democratic values, the other recognising the validity of the “democratic expression of enraged citizens”).

At all events, what this discourse, taken as a whole, illustrates, is that the leading fractions of the bourgeoisie are beginning to reconcile themselves to the idea of populist governmental policies of some kind and to some degree, as is already partly being practised by the Brexit Tories or the CSU.

Populism and Decomposition

As we have seen, there has been, and there remains a massive reticence of the main fractions of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe and North America towards populism. What are its causes? After all, these movements in no way put capitalism in question. Nothing they propagate is foreign to the bourgeois world. Unlike Stalinism, populism does not even put in question the present forms of capitalist property. It is an “oppositional” movement of course. But so, in a certain sense, were Social Democracy and Stalinism, without this preventing them from being responsible members of governments of leading capitalist states.

To understand this reticence, it is necessary to recognise here the fundamental difference between present day populism and the left of capital. The left, even when they are not former organisations of the workers’ movement (the Greens for instance), although they can be the best representatives of nationalism and the best mobilisers of the proletariat for war, base their attractiveness on the propagation of former or distorted ideals of the workers’ movement, or at least of the bourgeois revolution. In other words, as chauvinist and even anti-Semitic as they can be, they do not deny in principle the “brotherhood of humanity” and the possibility of improving the state of the world as a whole. In fact, even the most openly reactionary neo-liberal radicals claim to pursue this goal. This is necessarily the case. From the onset, the claim of the bourgeoisie to be the worthy representative of society as a whole was always based on this perspective.

None of this means that the left of capital, as part of the rotten society, does not also put forward racist, anti-Semitic poison of a similar kind to the right wing populists!

As opposed to this, populism embodies the renunciation of such an “ideal”. What it propagates is the survival of some at the expense of others. All of its arrogance revolves around this “realism” it is so proud of. As such, it is the product of the bourgeois world and its world view – but above all of its decomposition.

Secondly, the left of capital proposes a more or less coherent and realistic economic, political and social programme for the national capital. As opposed to this, the problem with political populism is not that it makes no concrete proposals, but that it proposes one thing and its opposite, one policy today and another tomorrow. Instead of being a political alternative, it represents the decomposition of bourgeois politics.

This is why, at least in the sense the term is being used here, it makes little sense to speak of the existence of a left populism as a kind of pendant to that of the right.

Despite similarities and parallels, history never repeats itself. The populism of today is not the same thing as the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s. However, fascism then and populism now have, in some ways, similar causes. In particular, both are the expression of the decomposition of the bourgeois world. With the historic experience of fascism and above all of national socialism behind it, the bourgeoisie of the old central capitalist countries today is acutely aware both of these similarities, and of the potential danger they represent to the stability of capitalist order.

Parallels to the rise of national socialism in Germany

Fascism in Italy and in Germany had in common the triumph of the counter-revolution and the insane fantasy of the dissolution of the classes into a mystical community after the prior defeat (mainly through the weapons of democracy and the left of capital) of the revolutionary wave. In common also is their open contestation of the imperialist carve up and the irrationality of many of their war goals. But despite these similarities (on the basis of which Bilan was able to recognise the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the change in the historic course, opening the way for the bourgeoisie to mobilise the proletariat for world war), it is worthwhile – in order to better understand contemporary populism – to look more closely at some of the specificities of historic developments in Germany at the time, including where they differed from the much less irrational Italian fascism.

Firstly, the shaking of the established authority of the ruling classes, and the loss of confidence of the population in its traditional political, economic, military, ideological and moral leadership was much more profound than anywhere else (except Russia), since Germany was the main loser of the first world war, and emerged from it in a state of economic, financial and even physical exhaustion.

Secondly, in Germany much more than in Italy, a real revolutionary situation had arisen. The way the bourgeoisie was able to nip in the bud, at an early stage, this potential, should not lead us to underestimate the depth of this revolutionary process, and the intensity of the hopes and longings which it awakened and which accompanied it. It took almost six years, until 1923, for the German and the world bourgeoisie to liquidate all the traces of this effervescence. Today it is difficult for us to imagine the degree of disappointment caused by this defeat, and the bitterness it left in its wake. The loss of confidence of the population in its own ruling class was thus soon followed by the much more cruel disillusionment of the working class towards its own (former) organisations (social democracy and trade unions), and disappointment about the young KPD10 and the Communist International.

Thirdly, economic calamities played a much more central role in the rise of National Socialism than was the case with fascism in Italy. The hyper-inflation of 1923 in Germany (and elsewhere in Central Europe) undermined the confidence in the currency as the universal equivalent. The great depression which began in 1929 thus took place only six years after the trauma of hyper-inflation. Not only did the great depression hit a working class in Germany whose class consciousness and militancy were already smashed; the way the masses, intellectually and emotionally, experienced this new episode of the economic crisis was to an important extent modified, pre-formatted so to speak, by the events of 1923.

The crises in particular of decadent capitalism affect every aspect of economic (and social) life. They are crises of (over) production – of capital, commodities, of labour power – and of appropriation and “distribution”, financial and monetary speculation and crashes included. But unlike expressions of the crisis that appear more at the point of production, such as redundancies and wage cuts, the negative effects on the population at the financial and monetary levels are much more abstract and obscure. Yet their effects can be equally devastating for parts of the population, just as their repercussions can be even more world-wide, and spread even faster than ones taking place closer to the point of production. In other words, whereas the latter expressions of the crisis tend to favour the development of class consciousness, those coming more from the financial and monetary spheres tend to do the opposite. Without the aid of marxism it is not easy to grasp the real links between for instance a financial crash in Manhattan and the resulting default of an insurance company or even a state on another continent. Such dramatic systems of interdependence blindly created between countries, populations, social classes, which function behind the backs of the protagonists, easily lead to personalisation and social paranoia. That the recent sharpening of the crisis of capitalism was also a financial and banking crisis, linked to speculative bubbles and their bursting, is not just bourgeois propaganda. That a speculative false manoeuvre in Tokyo or New York can trigger off the collapse of a bank in Iceland, or rock the property market in Ireland, is not fiction but reality. Only capitalism creates such life or death inter-dependence between people who are completely indifferent to each other, between protagonists who are not even aware of each others’ existence. It is extremely difficult for human beings to cope with such levels of abstraction, whether intellectually or emotionally. One way to cope is personalisation, ignoring the real mechanisms of capitalism: it is all the fault of evil forces who deliberately set out to harm us. It is all the more important to understand this distinction between these different kinds of attacks today when, no longer mainly the petty bourgeoisie and the so-called middle classes lost their savings, as in 1923, but millions of workers who own or try to own their own homes, have savings, insurance policies etc.

In 1932 the German bourgeoisie, which already planned to go to war mainly against Russia, found itself confronted by a National Socialism which had become a real mass movement. To a certain extent the bourgeoisie was trapped, the prisoner of a situation it was largely responsible for having created. It could have opted for going to war under a Social-Democratic government, with the support of its trade unions, in a possible coalition with France and even Britain, initially even as a junior partner. But this would have entailed confronting or at least neutralising the Nazi movement, which had not only become too big to handle, but also mainly regrouped that part of the population which was longing for war. In this situation, the German bourgeoisie made the mistake of believing it could make use of the Nazi movement at will.

National Socialism was not simply a regime of mass terror exercised by a small minority against the rest of the population. It had a mass base of its own. It was not only an instrument of capital imposed on the population. It was also its opposite: a blind instrument of atomised, pulverised and paranoiac masses wanting to impose itself on capital.

National Socialism therefore was prepared, to an important extent, by the profound loss of confidence of large parts of the population in the authority of the ruling class and its capacity to run society effectively and afford a minimum of physical and economic security to its citizens. Bourgeois society was shaken to its foundations, first by World War I, then by economic catastrophe: the hyperinflation resulting from the World War (on the losers’ side) and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The epicentre of this crisis was the three empires – the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian – all of which collapsed under the blows of defeat in war and the revolutionary wave.

Whereas the revolution initially succeeded in Russia, it failed in Germany and in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. In the absence of a proletarian alternative to the crisis of bourgeois society, a deep void opened up, centred around Germany and, let us say, continental Europe north of the Mediterranean basin, but with world-wide ramifications, engendering a paroxysm of violence and pogroms centred around the themes of anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, culminating in the Holocaust and the mass liquidation of whole populations in particular on the territory of the USSR under German occupation.

The form taken by the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union played an important role in the development of this situation. Although there was no longer anything proletarian about Stalinist Russia, the violent expropriation of the peasantry (the collectivisation of agriculture and the liquidation of the “Kulaks”) terrified not only small property owners and savers in the rest of the world, but also many big ones. This was particularly the case in continental Europe, where these property owners (which could include the modest owners of their own dwellings) unprotected (unlike their British and American counterparts) from “Bolshevism” by seas or oceans, had little confidence in the existing unstable European democratic or authoritarian regimes at the beginning of the 1930s to protect them against expropriation by crisis or by “Jewish Bolshevism”.

We can conclude from this historical experience that, if the proletariat is unable to put forward its own revolutionary alternative to capitalism, the loss of confidence in the capacity of the ruling class to “do its job” eventually leads to a revolt, a protest, an explosion of a very different kind, one which is not conscious but blind, directed not towards the future but the past, based not on confidence but fear, not on creativity but on destructiveness and hate.

A second crisis of confidence in the ruling class today

This process we have just described was already the decomposition of capitalism. And it is more than understandable that many marxists and other astute observers of society in the 1930s expected this tendency soon to engulf the whole world. But as it turned out, this was only the first phase of this decomposition, not yet its terminal phase.

Above all, three factors of world historic importance pushed back this tendency to decomposition:

  • firstly the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II, which considerably raised the prestige of Western democracy, in particular of the American model, on the one hand, and “socialism in one country” and the Soviet model on the other;
  • and secondly the post World War II “economic miracle” above all in the Western bloc.

These two factors were the doing of the bourgeoisie. The third one was the doing of the working class: the end of the counter-revolution, the return of the class struggle to the centre stage of history, and with it the reappearance (however confused and ephemeral) of a revolutionary perspective. The bourgeoisie, for its part, responded to this changed situation not only with the ideology of reformism, but also with real material (of course temporary) concessions and improvements. All this enforced, among the workers, the illusion that life could improve.

As we know, what led to the present phase of decomposition was essentially the stalemate between the two principal classes, the one unable to unleash generalised war, the other unable to move towards a revolutionary solution. With the failure of the 1968 generation to further politicise its struggles, the events of 1989 thus inaugurated, on a world scale, the present phase of decomposition. But it is very important to understand this phase not as something stagnant, but as a process. 1989 marked above all the failure of the first attempt of the proletariat to re-develop its own revolutionary alternative. After 20 years of chronic crisis, and of worsening of the conditions of the working class and the world population as a whole, the prestige and authority of the ruling class was also eroded, but not to the same extent. At the turn of the millennium there were still important counter-tendencies enhancing the reputation of the leading bourgeois elites. We will mention three here.

Firstly, the collapse of Eastern bloc Stalinism did not at all damage the image of the bourgeoisie of the former Western bloc. On the contrary, what it appeared to disprove was the possibility of an alternative to Western democratic capitalism. Of course, part of the 1989 euphoria was quickly dispelled by reality, such as the illusion of a more peaceful world. But it remained true that 1989 had at least lifted the Damocles sword of the permanent threat of mutual annihilation in a nuclear World War III. Also, after 1989, both World War II and the ensuing Cold War between East and West could credibly be made to appear, in retrospect, as having been the product of “ideology” and “totalitarianism” (thus the fault of fascism and “communism”). At the ideological level it is extremely fortunate for the Western bourgeoisie that the new more or less open imperialist challenger to the USA today is no longer Germany (nowadays itself “democratic”) but “totalitarian China”, and that much of the contemporary regional wars and terrorist attacks can be attributed to “religious fundamentalism”.

Secondly the present “globalisation” stage of state capitalism, already introduced beforehand, made possible, in the post 1989 context, a real development of the productive forces in what until then had been peripheral countries of capitalism. Of course the BRICS11 states, for instance, constitute anything but a model of how workers in the old capitalist countries would want to live. But on the other hand they do create the impression of a dynamic world capitalism. It is worth noting, in view of the importance of the question of immigration for populism today, that these countries are seen at this level as making a contribution to stabilising the situation, since they themselves absorb millions of migrants who might otherwise move towards Europe and North America.

Thirdly, the really breathtaking developments at the technological level, which have revolutionised communication, education, medicine, daily life as a whole, once again create the impression of a vibrant society (vindicating, by the way, our own understanding that the decadence of capitalism does not mean the halt of the productive forces or technological stagnation).

These factors (and there are probably others), although unable to prevent the present phase of decomposition (and with it already a first development of populism), were still able to attenuate some of its effects. As opposed to this, the contemporary bolstering of this same populism today indicates that we may be approaching certain limits of these mitigating effects, perhaps even opening up what we might call a second stage in the phase of decomposition. This second stage, we would argue, is characterised by a growing loss, among increasing parts of the population, of confidence in the willingness or capacity of the ruling class to protect it. A process of disillusionment which, at least for the moment, is not proletarian, but profoundly anti-proletarian. Behind the finance, the Euro and the refugee crises, which are more triggering factors than root causes, this new stage is of course the result of the accumulated effects, over decades, of deeper lying factors. First and foremost the absence of a proletarian revolutionary perspective on the one side. On the other side (that of capital), there is its chronic economic crisis, but also the effects of the ever more abstract character of the mode of functioning of bourgeois society. This process, inherent to capitalism, witnessed a dramatic acceleration in the past three decades with the sharp reduction, in the old capitalist countries, of industrial and manual labour, and of bodily activity in general through mechanisation and the new media such as personal computing and the Internet. Parallel to this, the medium of universal exchange has been largely transformed from metal and paper to electronic cash, which is part of a wider process involving a radical separation from the body and its sensual reality.

Populism and violence

At the basis of the capitalist mode of production is a very specific combination of two factors: economic mechanisms or “laws” (the market) and violence. On the one hand: the precondition for equivalent exchange is the renunciation of violence: exchange instead of robbery. Moreover, wage labour is the first form of exploitation where the obligation to work, and the motivation in the labour process itself, is essentially an economic one rather than imposed by direct physical force. On the other hand, in capitalism the whole system of equivalent exchange is based on an original non-equivalent exchange – the violent separation of the producers from the means of production (“primitive accumulation”) which is the precondition for the wage system, and which is a permanent process in capitalism, since accumulation itself is a more or less violent process (see Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital). This permanent presence of both poles of this contradiction (violence and the renunciation of violence), and the ambivalence this creates, permeates the whole of life in bourgeois society. It accompanies every act of exchange, where the alternative option of robbery is ever present. Indeed, a society based at its roots on exchange, and therefore on the renunciation of violence, must enforce this renunciation with the threat of violence, and not only the threat – with the actual use of its laws, justice apparatus, police, prisons etc. This ambiguity is ever present particularly in the exchange between wage labour and capital, where economic coercion is supplemented by physical force. It is specifically present wherever the instrument of violence par excellence in bourgeois society is directly involved – the state. In its relation with its own citizens (coercion and extortion) and with other states (war), the instrument of the ruling class to suppress robbery and chaotic violence is itself, at the same time, the generalised, sanctified robber.

One of the focal points of this contradiction and ambiguity between violence and its renunciation in bourgeois society lies in each of its individual subjects. Living a normal, functional life in the present day world requires the renunciation of a plethora, of a whole world of bodily, emotional, intellectual, moral, artistic, creative needs. As soon as mature capitalism has passed from the stage of formal to that of real domination, this renunciation is no longer in the first instance enforced mainly through external violence. Indeed, each individual is more or less consciously confronted with the choice either of adapting to the abstract functioning of this society or of being a “loser”, possibly landing in the gutter. Discipline becomes self-discipline, but in such a way that each individual becomes the repressor of his own vital needs. Of course, this process of self-disciplining also contains a potential for emancipation, for the individual and above all for the proletariat as a whole (as the self disciplined class par excellence) to become master of its own destiny. But for the moment, in the “normal” functioning of bourgeois society, this self-discipline is essentially the internalisation of capitalist violence. Because this is the case, in addition to the proletarian option of the transformation of this self-discipline into a means of the realisation, the revitalisation of human needs and creativity, there also slumbers another option, that of the blind redirection of internalised violence towards the outside. Bourgeois society always needs and offers an “outsider” in order to maintain the (self) discipline of those who allegedly belong. This is why the blind re-externalisation of violence by the bourgeois subjects “spontaneously” directs itself (i.e. is predisposed or “formatted” to do so) against such outsiders (pogromisation).12

When the open crisis of capitalist society reaches a certain intensity, when the authority of the ruling class is damaged, when bourgeois subjects start to doubt the capacity and determination of the authorities to do their job, and in particular to protect them against a world of dangers, and when an alternative – which can only be that of the proletariat – is missing, parts of the population start to protest and even revolt against their ruling elite, not with the goal of challenging their rule, but in order to oblige them to protect their own “law-abiding” citizens against “outsiders”. These layers of society experience the crisis of capitalism as a conflict between its two underlying principles: between the market and violence. Populism is the option for violence to solve the problems the market cannot solve, and even to solve the problems of the market itself. For instance, if the world labour market threatens to flood the labour market of the old capitalist countries with a wave of have-nots, the solution is to put up fences and police at the frontier and shoot whoever tries to cross it without permission.

Behind populist politics today lurks the thirst for murder. The pogrom is the secret of its existence.

Steinklopfer, 8th June 2016.


1 United Kingdom Independence Party

2 The German Democratic Republic, the old East German Stalinist regime.

3 Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

4 Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Austrian Freedom Party)

5 Contrat Premier Emploi: see our Theses on the spring 2006 students' movement in France in International Review n°125

6 Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, currently the ruling party in Germany in a “grand coalition” with the “Socialist” Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

7 Freie Demokratische Partei, a “liberal-democratic” party which previously held the balance between SPD and CDU.

8 The German equivalent of neo-liberalism, emphasizing the free market but also the role of the state in protecting the free market

9 Christlich-soziale union

10 Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, the German section of the Third International.

11 Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa

12See the writings of the German researcher into anti-semitism Detlev Claussen.

 

General and theoretical questions: 

Rubric: 

Discussion text

Brexit, Trump: Setbacks for the ruling class, nothing good for the proletariat

The referendum that went out of control

More than thirty years ago in the “Theses on Decomposition”,1 we said that the bourgeoisie would find it more and more difficult to control the centrifugal tendencies of its own political apparatus. What this might mean concretely is demonstrated by the “Brexit” referendum in Britain, and Donald Trump’s candidature for the presidency in the United States. In both cases, unscrupulous political adventurers from the ruling class have exploited the populist revolt of those who have suffered most from the economic upheavals of the last thirty years, for their own self-aggrandisement.

The ICC has been late to recognise the rise of populism and to take account of its consequences. This is why we are publishing now a general text on populism, which is still under discussion in the organisation.2 The article that follows aims to apply the main ideas put forward in the discussion text to the specific situations of Britain and the USA. In a rapidly evolving world situation, it has no pretension to being complete, but we hope that it will give food for thought and further discussion.

The ruling class’ loss of control has never been more strikingly evident than in the spectacle of unprecedented shambolic disorder presented by the EU referendum in Britain and its aftermath. Never before has Britain’s capitalist class so far lost control of the democratic process, never before has it found its vital interests at the mercy of adventurers like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage.

The failure on all sides to prepare for the consequences of Brexit shows the extent of the disarray within the British ruling class. Within hours of the results being announced, the main Leave campaigners were explaining to their supporters that the £350 million per week extra for the NHS3 which they had promised a Brexit vote would bring – and a figure which had been plastered all over the sides of the Leave campaign buses – was in the nature of a “typing error”. Within days, Farage had resigned as UKIP4 leader, dumping the whole Brexit mess in the laps of his fellow Leavers; Boris Johnson’s former director of communications Guto Harri declared that Johnson’s “heart wasn’t in the Brexit campaign”, and there is more than a strong suspicion that Johnson’s espousal of the Brexit cause was a purely opportunistic, self-serving manoeuvre designed to boost his leadership challenge to David Cameron; Michael Gove, who had been Johnson’s campaign manager all through the referendum and was supposed to run Johnson’s campaign for PM (and who had repeatedly declared his own lack of interest in the job), stabbed Johnson in the back with only two hours to go before the candidature deadline, putting forward his own name for leader on the grounds that his longtime friend Johnson was not fitted to be PM; Andrea Leadsom entered the Tory leadership race as a firm Leave supporter – having declared only three years previously that leaving the EU would be a “disaster” for Britain. Lies, hypocrisy, double-dealing – none of this is new to ruling class politics of course. What is striking is the loss, within the world’s most experienced ruling class, of any sense of the state, of an overriding historic national interest which goes beyond personal ambition or the petty rivalries of cliques. To find a comparable episode in the life of the English ruling class, we would have to return to the Wars of the Roses (as dramatised in Shakespeare’s life of Henry VI), the last gasp of a decaying feudal order.

The unpreparedness of the financial and industrial bosses for a Leave victory is equally striking, especially given all the signs that the result was going to be “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life” (if one may be permitted to quote the Duke of Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo).5 Sterling’s immediate collapse by 20%, then 30%, against the dollar is an indication that Brexit was not an expected result – it had not been factored in to Sterling’s value before the referendum. We were treated to the unedifying spectacle of banks and businesses rushing for the exit as they looked to move offices, or even incorporation, to Dublin or Paris. George Osborne’s snap decision to reduce corporation tax to 15% was clearly an emergency move to keep companies in Britain, the British economy being one of the world’s most dependent on FDI (Foreign Direct Investment).

The Empire strikes back

All this being said, Britain's ruling class is not out for the count. Cameron’s immediate replacement as PM by Theresa May (not initially expected before September) – a solid and competent politician who had campaigned discreetly for Remain – and the demolition jobs done by the press and Tory MPs on her opponents Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove, demonstrate a real capacity for rapid, coherent reaction on the part of the ruling class’ dominant state factions.

Fundamentally, this situation is determined by the evolution of world capitalism and the balance of class forces. It is the product of a more general dynamic towards the destabilisation of coherent bourgeois policies in the present stage of decadent capitalism. The driving forces behind the tendency towards populism are not the subject of this article: they are analysed in the “Discussion contribution on the problem of populism” mentioned above. But these general international phenomena take concrete shape under the influence of specific national histories and characteristics. Hence the Tory party has always had its “Eurosceptic” wing which has never really accepted Britain’s membership of the EU and whose origins we can define as follows:

  1. Britain’s – and before it England’s – geographical position off the coast of Europe has meant that Britain has been able to remain detached from European rivalries in a way that continental states cannot; its relatively small size, and its non-existence as a land power, has meant that it could never hope to dominate Europe as France did until the 19th century or Germany since 1870, but could only defend its vital interests by playing the main powers against each other and avoiding commitment to any of them.

  2. Britain’s geographical position as an island, and its status as the world’s first industrial nation, have determined its rise as a maritime world imperialism. Since at least the 17th century, the British ruling classes have had a world outlook, which again let them maintain a certain aloofness from solely European politics.

This situation changed radically after World War II, first because Britain’s status as a dominant world power was no longer sustainable, second because modern military technology (airpower, long-range missiles, nuclear weapons) meant that isolation from European politics was no longer an option. One of the first to recognise this changed situation was Winston Churchill, who in 1946 called for the creation of a “United States of Europe”, but his position was never wholly accepted within the Conservative Party. Opposition to membership of the EU6 grew as Germany increased in strength, especially after the collapse of the USSR and Germany’s reunification in 1990 substantially increased the latter’s weight in Europe. During the referendum campaign, Boris Johnson famously caused a scandal by saying that the EU was an instrument of German domination “à la Hitler”, but he was hardly being original. The same sentiments, in much the same language, had already been expressed in 1990 by Nicholas Ridley, then a minister in Thatcher’s government. It is a sign of the loss of authority and discipline within the post-war political apparatus that whereas Ridley was immediately forced to resign from government, the repercussions for Johnson have been membership of the new cabinet.

  1. Britain’s one-time status, and loss of status, as the world’s greatest imperial power is a deeply-rooted psychological and cultural phenomenon within the British population (including the working class). The national obsession with World War II – the last time Britain could appear to act as an independent world power – illustrates this perfectly. A part of the British bourgeoisie, and still more the petty bourgeoisie, has still not got the message that Britain is today merely a second or third rate power. Many of the Leave campaigners appeared to believe that if only Britain were free of the “shackles” of the EU, the world would rush to buy British goods and services – a fantasy for which the British economy is likely to pay a heavy price.

This sensation of resentment and anger at the outside world for a loss of imperial power is comparable to that felt by a part of the American population as a result of the United States’ perceived loss of status (a constant theme of Trump’s calls to “Make America a great again”) and inability to impose its own rule as it could during the Cold War.

The referendum as a concession to populism

The populist antics of Boris Johnson are more spectacular, and got more media hype, than David Cameron’s old school upper-crust “responsible” persona. But in reality, Cameron is a better indication of how far the rot has gone in the ruling class. Johnson may have been the principal actor, but it was Cameron who set the stage by using the promise of a referendum for party political advantage to win the last general election. By its very nature, a referendum is more difficult to control than a parliamentary election and as such always represents a gamble.7 Like an addict in a casino, Cameron showed himself to be a repeat gambler, first with the referendum on Scottish independence which he won by the skin of his teeth, then with Brexit. His Conservative Party, which has always presented itself as the best defender of the economy, the Union,8 and national defence, has ended up putting all three at risk.

Given the difficulty of manipulating the results, plebiscites about important matters of national interest are for the most part an unwarranted risk for the ruling class. In the classical concept and ideology of parliamentary democracy, even in its decadent sham form, such decisions are supposed to be taken by “elected representatives” advised (and lobbied) by experts and interest groups – not by the population at large. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, it is a pure aberration to ask millions to decide on complex issues like the EU Constitutional Treaty of 2004, when the mass of voters were unwilling and even unable to read or understand the treaty text. No wonder the ruling class so often got the “wrong” result in the referenda held over this treaty (in France and the Netherlands in 2005, in Ireland in 2008 with the first referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon).9

There are those within the British bourgeoisie today who seem to hope that the May government will pull off the same trick as the French and Irish governments after their botched referenda over the Constitutional Treaty, and somehow just ignore or overturn the referendum. This seems to us unlikely, at least in the short term, not because the British bourgeoisie is more ardently democratic than its fellows but precisely because ignoring the “democratic” expression of the “popular will” merely gives credit to populist ideas and makes them more dangerous.

Theresa May's strategy so far has thus been to make the best of a bad job and to set out down the Brexit path with three of the best-known Leavers in ministerial posts, with responsibility for organising Britain's disentanglement from the EU. Even May’s appointment of the clown Johnson as Foreign Minister – greeted abroad with a mixture of horror, hilarity, and disbelief – is certainly part of this broader strategy. By putting Johnson in the hot seat of the negotiations to leave the EU, May has made sure that the Leavers’ main mouth will have to take much of the flak – and the discredit – for what will almost certainly be unfavourable terms, and is prevented from sniping from the sidelines.

The perception, especially by those who are voting for the populist movements in Europe or the USA, that the whole democratic process is a swindle because the elite simply ignores inconvenient results, is a real threat to the effectiveness of democracy itself as a system of class rule. In the populist conception of politics, “direct decision making by the people” is supposed to circumvent the corruption of elected representatives by the established political elites. This is why in Germany such referendums are excluded by the post-war constitution following the negative experience of the Weimar Republic and their use in Nazi Germany.10

The election that ran off the rails

If Brexit was a referendum that got out of control, Trump’s selection as Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2016 is an election that ran off the rails. When Trump’s candidacy was first declared it was barely taken seriously: the front runner was Jeb Bush, member of the Bush dynasty, preferred choice of the Republican grandees, and as such potentially a powerful fundraiser (always a crucial consideration in US elections). But against all expectations, Trump triumphed in the early primaries and went on to win state after state. Bush fizzled like a damp squib, other candidates were never much more than also-rans, and Republican Party bosses ended confronting the unpalatable prospect that the only candidate with any chance of defeating Trump was Ted Cruz, a man considered by his Senate colleagues as wholly untrustworthy, and only marginally less egotistical and self-serving than Trump himself.

The possibility that Trump might beat Clinton is in itself an indication of how insane the political situation has become. But already, Trump’s candidacy has sent shock waves through the whole system of imperialist alliances. For 70 years, the USA has been the guarantor of the NATO alliance whose effectiveness depends on the inviolability of reciprocal defence: an attack on one is an attack on all. When a potential US President calls into question the NATO alliance, and US readiness to honour its treaty obligations, as Trump has done by declaring that a US response to a Russian attack on the Baltic states would depend on whether in his judgment they had “paid their way”, it certainly sends shivers down the collective spines of the East European ruling classes that confront Putin’s Mafia state directly, not to mention of those Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Philippines) that are relying on America to protect them from the Chinese dragon. Almost equally alarming is the strong possibility that Trump simply does not know what is going on, as suggested by his recent statement that there are no Russian troops in the Ukraine (apparently unaware that Crimea is still considered part of the Ukraine by everybody except the Russians).

Not only that, Trump has gone on to welcome the Russian secret services hacking into the Democratic Party’s IT systems and more or less invited Putin to do his worst. How much, if at all, this will damage Trump is hard to tell, but it is worth recalling that ever since 1945 the Republican Party has been vigorously, if not rabidly anti-Russian, in favour of a powerful military establishment and a massive military presence world-wide no matter what the cost (it was Reagan’s colossal military build-up that really sent the budget deficit through the roof).

This is not the first time the Republican Party has fielded a candidate regarded as dangerously extreme by its leadership. In 1964 it was Barry Goldwater who won the primaries, thanks to support from the religious right and the “conservative coalition” – the forerunners of today’s Tea Party. His programme was at least coherent: drastic reduction of the Federal government especially social security, military strength and readiness to use nuclear weapons against the USSR. This was a classic far-right programme, but one that fitted not at all with the needs of US state capitalism and Goldwater went on to be heavily defeated in the election, partly as a result of the failure of the Republican hierarchy to back him.

Is Trump just a Goldwater 2.0? Not at all, and the differences are instructive. Goldwater’s candidacy represented a seizure of the Republican Party by the “Tea Party” of the time, which was sidelined for years following Goldwater’s crushing electoral defeat. It is no secret that the last couple of decades have seen a comeback for this tendency which has made a more or less successful takeover bid for the GOP.11 However, the Goldwater supporters were, in the truest sense, a “conservative coalition”: they represented a real conservative tendency within an America undergoing profound social changes (feminism, the Civil Rights movement, the beginning of opposition to the Vietnam War, and the breakdown of traditional values). Although many of the Tea Party’s “causes” may be the same as Goldwater’s, the context is not: the social changes he opposed have taken place, such that the Tea Party is not so much a coalition of conservatives as an alliance of hysterical reaction.

This has created increasing difficulties for the big bourgeoisie, which cares little or nothing about these social and “cultural” issues and is basically interested in US military strength and the free trade from which it profits. It has become a truism that anyone running in a Republican primary must prove himself “irreproachable” on a whole series of issues: abortion (you must be “pro-life”), gun control (against it), fiscal conservatism and lower taxation, “Obamacare” (socialism, it should be abolished: indeed Ted Cruz based a part of his credentials on a publicity-seeking filibuster against Obamacare in the Senate), marriage (sacred), Democratic Party (if Satan had a party this would be it). Now, in the space of a few short months, Trump has in effect eviscerated the Republican Party. Here we have a candidate who has shown himself “unreliable” on abortion, on gun control, on marriage (three times in his case), and who has in the past donated money to the Devil herself, Hillary Clinton. In addition, he proposes to raise the minimum wage, maintain Obamacare at least in part, return to an isolationist foreign policy, let the budget deficit go through the roof, and expel 11 million illegal immigrants whose cheap labour is vital to US business.

Like the Tories in Britain with Brexit, the Republican Party – and potentially the whole American ruling class – has found itself saddled with a programme which is completely irrational from the standpoint of its imperialist and economic class interests.

The implications

The only thing that we can say for certain, is that Brexit and the Trump candidacy will usher in a period of increased instability at every level: economic, political, and imperialist. At the economic level, the European countries – which, we should not forget, represent a major part of the world economy and its biggest single market – are already in a fragile condition: they have weathered the financial crisis of 2007/8 and the threat of a Greek exit from the Euro zone but they have not overcome them. Britain remains one of the major European economies and the long process of unravelling its connections with the EU will be fraught with unpredictability, not least on the financial level: nobody knows, for example, what effect Brexit will have on the City of London, Europe’s major centre for banking, insurance, and share trading. Politically, the success of Brexit can only encourage, and give greater credit to the populist parties on the European continent: next year sees a presidential election in France, where Marine Le Pen’s populist, anti-Europe, Front National is now the biggest single political party in terms of votes. The governments of Europe’s major powers are torn between the desire to make Britain’s separation from Europe as smooth and painless as possible, and a real fear that any concessions to Britain (such as, for example, access to the single market together with restrictions on movement of people) will give ideas to others, notably to countries like Poland and Hungary. The attempt to stabilise Europe’s south-eastern border by integrating the countries of ex-Yugoslavia will almost certainly come to a halt. The EU will find it more difficult to present a united response to Erdogan’s democratic coup d’Etat in Turkey and his use of Syrian refugees as pawns in a vile game of blackmail.

Although the EU itself has never been an imperialist alliance, most of its members are also members of NATO. Any weakening of European cohesion is therefore likely to have a knock-on effect on NATO’s ability to counter Russian pressure on its Eastern flank, destabilising further the Ukraine and the Baltic states. It is no secret that Russia has for some time been financing the French Front National and is at least using if not financing the German Pegida movement. The only outright winner from the Brexit referendum is in fact Vladimir Putin.

As we said above, the Trump candidacy has already dealt a blow to US credibility. The idea of a President Trump with his finger on the nuclear button is, it must be said, a frightening prospect.12 But as we have said many times, one of the major elements of instability and war today is the United States’ determination to maintain its dominant imperialist position against all comers and this situation will remain unchanged whoever becomes president.

Rage against the machine

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have more in common than a big mouth. Both are political adventurers, devoid of any principle or any sense of overriding national interest. Both are ready to twist and turn, to adjust their message to what their audience wants to hear. Their posturing antics are blown up by the media till they seem larger than life, but in reality they are complete non-entities, nothing but mouthpieces through which the losers from globalisation howl their rage, their despair, and their hatred for the wealthy elites and the immigrants they hold responsible for their misery. Hence Trump gets away with the most outrageous and contradictory statements: his supporters simply do not care, he is saying what they want to hear.

This is not to say that Johnson and Trump are identical, but their differences are less to do with personal character than they are with the differences between the ruling classes to which they belong: the British bourgeoisie has been playing a major role on the world stage for centuries, while the American’s brash, buccaneering, self-absorbed phase only really came to an end with Roosevelt’s defeat of the isolationists to enter World War II. Important fractions of the American ruling class remain deeply ignorant of the outside world, one is almost tempted to say that they are stuck in a state of retarded adolescence.

Electoral results will never be an expression of class consciousness; nonetheless they can tell us something about the condition of the working class. Whether it be in the Brexit referendum, in support for Trump in the USA, for Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, or for the German populists of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland, all the voting figures suggest that where these parties and movements gain workers’ support it is predominantly among those who have suffered most from the changes in the capitalist economy during the last forty years, and who have not unreasonably concluded, after years of defeat and endless attacks on their living conditions from governments of right and left, that the only way to frighten the ruling elite is by voting for demonstrably irresponsible parties whose policies are anathema to that same elite. The tragedy is that it is precisely these workers who were among the most massively involved in the struggles of the 1970s.

A common theme in both the Brexit and the Trump campaigns is the idea that “we” can “take back control”. No matter that “we” have never had any real control over our lives: as one resident of Boston UK put it “we just want things back the way they were”. Back to when there were jobs, and jobs with decent wages, when the social solidarity of working-class communities had not been broken down by unemployment and dereliction, when change seemed something positive and happened at a manageable speed.

It is undoubtedly true that the Brexit vote has created a new and ugly mood in Britain, one where the outright racists feel freer to crawl out from behind the woodwork. But many – probably the great majority – of those who voted Brexit or Trump to stop immigration are not racists as such, rather they are suffering from xenophobia: fear of the foreign, fear of the unknown. And this unknown is basically the capitalist economy itself, which is inherently mysterious and incomprehensible because it presents the real social relationships in the process of production as if they were natural forces, as elemental and uncontrollable as the weather, but whose effects on workers’ livelihoods can be even more devastating. It is a terrible irony, in this age of scientific discovery, that people no longer believe that bad weather is caused by witches, but are quite prepared to believe that their economic woes are caused by their immigrant fellows in misfortune.

The danger confronting us

We began this article by referring to the “Theses on decomposition”, written almost 30 years ago in 1990. We will conclude by citing them:

We must be especially clear on the danger of decomposition for the proletariat’s ability to raise itself to the level of its historic task (…) The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

  • solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;

  • the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;

  • the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;

  • consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch”.

That danger confronts us starkly today.

The rise of populism is dangerous for the ruling class because it threatens its ability to control its own political apparatus and at the same time maintain the democratic mystification which is one of the pillars of its social domination. But it offers nothing to the proletariat. On the contrary, it is precisely the proletariat’s own weakness, its inability to offer any alternative perspective for the chaos threatening capitalism, that has made the rise of populism possible. Only the proletariat can offer a way out of the dead-end that society finds itself in today, and it will never be able to do so if workers let themselves be taken in by the siren songs of populist demagogues promising an impossible return to a past which, in any case, never existed.

Jens, August, 2016


1 Published in 2001 in International Review n°107

2 See this issue of the Review.

3 National Health Service.

4 United Kingdom Independence Party: a populist party founded in 1991 which campaigns essentially for leaving the EU and against immigration. Paradoxically, it has 22 MEPs which makes it the largest single British party in the European Parliament.

5 It is true that the EU and the British Treasury made some effort to envisage contingency plans in the event of a victory for the Leave camp. Nonetheless, it seems clear that these preparations were inadequate and – perhaps more to the point – that nobody really expected Leave to actually win the referendum. This was even true of the Leavers themselves. Apparently, Farage conceded victory to Remain at one in the morning the night of the referendum, only to discover to his shock the morning after that Remain had lost.

6 Britain entered the European Economic Community (EEC) under a Conservative government in 1973. Its membership was confirmed by a referendum held by the Labour government in 1975.

7 It is worth remembering that Thatcher remained in power for more than ten years despite never winning more than 40% of the popular vote in parliamentary elections.

8 That is to say the Union of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

9 Following these inconvenient results, the European governments dropped the Constitutional Treaty, but rescued its most essential elements by simply modifying the existing arrangements with the Lisbon Treaty of 2009.

10 One should make a distinction here with referenda in places like Switzerland and California, where they are part of the historically established political process.

11 “Grand Old Party”, a colloquial name for the Republican Party, dating back to the 19th century.

12 One of the reasons for Goldwater’s defeat was his declared readiness to use tactical nuclear weapons. The Johnson campaign countered Goldwater’s slogan “In your heart, you know he’s right”, with the slogan “In your guts, you know he’s nuts”.

 

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Brexit, Trump

The national question 100 years after the Easter Rising

One hundred years ago, during the Easter of 1916, a handful of Irish nationalists seized strategic positions in the centre of Dublin and declared Ireland’s independence from the British empire, and the creation of an Irish Republic. They managed to hold out for a few days before being crushed by the British armed forces, which did not hesitate to shell the city using naval cannon. Among those summarily executed after the Easter Rising’s defeat was the great revolutionary James Connolly, one of the best known leaders of the working class in Ireland who brought his workers’ militia into the revolt alongside the nationalist Irish Volunteers.

Throughout the second half of the 19th century, support for the cause of Irish and Polish national independence had been a given of the European workers’ movement. Ireland’s tragedy and Marx’s belief in the necessity of Irish independence has been used over and over again to justify support for any number of “national liberation” movements against imperialist powers both old and new. But the outbreak of world war in 1914 set the seal on changed conditions which invalidated the old positions. As our predecessors of the French Communist Left put it: “Only an activity based on the most recent developments, on foundations that are constantly being enriched, is really revolutionary. In contrast, activity based on yesterday’s truths that have already lost their currency is sterile, harmful and reactionary”.1

Sean O’Casey reportedly said that when James Connolly was executed, the labour movement lost a leader and Irish nationalism gained a martyr.

How could this happen? How could a convinced and constant internationalist like Connolly throw in his lot with patriotism? We do not propose here to go over the evolution in his attitude in 1914: this is dealt with in an article first published in World Revolution in 1976, and which remains valid to this day2. Nor do we need to demonstrate his fundamental hostility to inter-classist nationalism: Connolly’s own words, in an article published on this site, are clear enough. Our purpose rather is to set Connolly’s thinking within the wider framework of the international socialism of his day, and to examine how the attitude of the workers’ movement to the “national question” evolved between the wave of popular uprisings against aristocratic and autocratic governments that swept Europe in 1848, and the outbreak of imperialist world war in 1914.

The events of 1848 were – as Marx was to show later – of a dual nature. On the one hand they were national democratic movements aimed at unifying a “nation” divided up among a multitude of petty semi-feudal fiefdoms: this was true above all in Germany and Italy. On the other, especially in Paris, they saw the nascent industrial proletariat appear for the first time3 on the historical stage as an independent political force. Not surprisingly, 1848 therefore also posed the question of the attitude that the working class should adopt to the national question.

The same year saw the publication of the Communist Manifesto, which laid out, clearly and unequivocally, the internationalist principle as the bedrock of the workers’ movement: “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got (…) The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!4

This then is the general principle: the workers are not divided by national interests, they must unite across national boundaries: “United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat” (Manifesto). But how is the principle to be worked out in practice? In mid-19th century Europe, it was clear to Marx and Engels that for the proletariat to seize power it had first to become a major social and political force, and that this in turn was dependent on the development of capitalist social relations. Such a development meant the overthrow of the feudal aristocracy, the demolition of feudal particularism, and the unification of the “great, historic nations” (the expression is Engels’) to create the large internal market that capitalism needed to develop and in doing so, develop the numbers, strength, and organisation of the working class.

For Marx and Engels, and for the workers’ movement in general at the time, national unity, the suppression of feudal privilege, and the development of industry, can only be accomplished by a democratic movement: a free press, access to education, the right of association – these are all democratic demands, within the framework of the nation state, and whose existence is impossible without the nation state. How far these were necessary conditions is debatable. After all, 19th century industrial development was not limited to democracies like Britain or the United States. Autocratic regimes like Tsarist Russia or Japan under the Meiji Restoration also witnessed startling industrial progress during the same epoch. That said, the development of Russia and Japan remained essentially dependent on that of the more advanced democratic countries, and it is significant that the reactionary autocratic Prussian Junker regime that dominated Germany was forced to respect a certain number of democratic freedoms.

These democratic demands were also in the interests of, and important to, the working class. As Engels put it, they give the workers’ movement “room to breathe” and to develop. Freedom of association made it easier to organise against capitalist exploitation. Freedom of the press made it easier for workers to educate themselves, to prepare themselves politically and culturally for the seizure of power. Because it was not yet ready to make its own revolution, the workers’ movement at this point shared its immediate goals with other classes, and there was a strong tendency to identify the causes of the proletariat, of progress and of national unity with the fight for democracy.. Here, for example, is Marx speaking in 1848 at a meeting in Brussels to celebrate the second anniversary of the rising in Krakow, Poland: “The Krakow revolution has set all of Europe a glorious example, because it identified the question of nationalism with democracy and with the liberation of the oppressed class (…) It finds its principles confirmed in Ireland, where O'Connell's party with its narrowly restricted nationalistic aims has sunk into the grave, and the new national party is pledged above all to reform and democracy”.

The struggle for national unity and independence was by no means a universal principle however. Hence Engels, writing in The Commonwealth in 1860: “This right of the great national subdivisions of Europe to political independence, acknowledged as it was by the European democracy, could not but find the same acknowledgement with the working classes especially. It was, in fact, nothing more than to recognize in other large national bodies of undoubted vitality the same right of individual national existence which the working men of each separate country claimed for themselves. But this recognition, and the sympathy with these national aspirations, were restricted to the large and well defined historical nations of Europe; there was Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary”. Engels goes on to say: “There is no country in Europe where there are not different nationalities under the same government. The Highland Gaels and the Welsh are undoubtedly of different nationalities to what the English are, although nobody will give to these remnants of peoples long gone by the title of nations, any more than to the Celtic inhabitants of Brittany in France”. Engels clearly distinguishes between the “right of national existence for the historic peoples of Europe” and that of “those numerous small relics of peoples which, after having figured for a longer or shorter period on the stage of history, were finally absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles”.

Was Ireland a special case?

This rejection of an all-embracing national principle naturally raises the question: what makes Ireland different? Why did Marx and Engels not advocate that Ireland should simply be absorbed into Britain, as a condition of its industrial development?

For there is no doubt that in their eyes, Ireland was a “special case” of particular significance. Marx at one point even went so far as to say that Ireland was the key to revolution in England, just as England was the key to revolution in Europe.

There were two reasons for this. Firstly, Marx was convinced that the brutal spoliation of the Irish peasantry by absentee English landlords was one of the main factors underpinning the reactionary aristocratic class that barred the way to democratic and economic progress.

Second, and perhaps more important, was the moral factor. England’s domination of an unwilling Ireland, and the treatment of the Irish, especially the Irish workers, as an enslaved underclass, was not only unjust and offensive, it was morally corrupting for the English workers. How, Marx reasoned, could the English working class rouse itself to the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order if it remained complicit with its own ruling class in the national oppression of the Irish? Moreover, as long as the Irish were deprived of their own national self-respect, there would never be a shortage of Irish proletarians ready to enlist in the service of the English army and help put down revolts by English workers – as Connolly was later to point out.

This insistence on Irish independence extended to the organisation of the First International, as Engels argued in 1872: “If members of a conquering nation called upon the nation they had conquered and continued to hold down to forget their specific nationality and position, to ‘sink national differences’ and so forth, that was not Internationalism, it was nothing else but preaching to them submission to the yoke, and attempting to justify and to perpetuate the dominion of the conqueror under the cloak of Internationalism. It was sanctioning the belief, only too common among the English working men, that they were superior beings compared to the Irish, and as much an aristocracy as the mean whites of the Slave States considered themselves to be with regard to the Negroes.

In a case like that of the Irish, true Internationalism must necessarily be based upon a distinctly national organisation; the Irish, as well as other oppressed nationalities, could enter the Association only as equals with the members of the conquering nation, and under protest against the conquest. The Irish sections, therefore, not only were justified, but even under the necessity to state in the preamble to their rules that their first and most pressing duty, as Irishmen, was to establish their own national independence”.

It was essentially the same logic that led Lenin to insist that the Bolshevik Party programme should include the right to national self-determination: this was the only way, in his view, to render explicit and unequivocal the Party’s rejection of “Great Russian chauvinism” – the equivalent among Russian workers, of the English workers’ feelings of superiority to the Irish.

National unity within defined national borders, democracy, progress, and the interests of the working class: all these, then, could be seen as moving in the same direction. Even Marx – who was hardly given to sentimental flights of fancy – could, in what was perhaps a moment of unguarded optimism, envisage the possibility of the workers taking power through the ballot-box in countries like Britain, Holland, or the United States. But at no point was national unity, or indeed democracy, the ultimate goal; they were merely contingent principles on the road to that goal: “The workers have no country. Workers of all countries, unite!

The problem with such contingent principles is that they can become frozen into abstract, fixed principles so that they no longer express the dynamic vanguard of real historical development, but on the contrary become a drag, or even worse an active obstacle. This, as we shall see, was what happened to the socialist movement’s perspective on the national question towards the end of the 19th century. But first, let us pause for a moment for a brief overview of how Connolly's own thought gives concrete form to the dominant ideas of the Second International.

Although he spent some years in the United States, where he joined the IWW,5 Connolly remained very much the Irish socialist. He espoused the methods of industrial unionism, in opposition to narrow craft unionism, joining with Jim Larkin to build up the Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union and playing a key role in the great Dublin strike and lockout of 1913. But even during his time in the USA Connolly was a member successively of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party, and of the Socialist Party of America, and it would be fair to say that his life was dedicated to building an Irish political socialist organisation. He would probably have thought of such an organisation as marxist, insofar as pinning theoretical labels on an organisation had any interest for him. Certainly, his Irish Socialist Republican Party6 was recognised as an Irish delegation in its own right at the 1900 Congress of the Second International. But there is little or no indication in Connolly’s writing that he knew of, or took part in, the debates within the International, on the national question in particular: this is all the more surprising in that he had taught himself to read German with some fluency.

Connolly believed that socialism could only grow in national soil. Indeed, his important study of “Labour in Irish history” is partly devoted to showing that socialism emerges naturally from Irish conditions; he highlights in particular the writings of William Thompson in the 1820s, who he considers not unjustly as one of Marx’s forerunners in identifying labour as the source of capital and profit.7

It is not surprising therefore, to see Connolly argue, in a 1909 article in The Irish Nation titled “Sinn Fein, socialism, and the nation” for a rapprochement between “Sinn Feiners who sympathise with Socialism” and “Socialists who realise that a Socialist movement must rest upon and draw its inspiration from the historical and actual conditions of the country in which it functions and not merely lose themselves in an abstract ‘internationalism’ (which has no relation to the real internationalism of the Socialist movement)”. In this same article, Connolly opposes those socialists who “observing that those who talk loudest about ‘Ireland a Nation’ are often the most merciless grinders of the faces of the poor, fly off to the extreme limit of hostility to Nationalism and, whilst opposed to oppression at all times, are also opposed to national revolt for national independence” and those “principally recruited amongst the workers in the towns of North-East Ulster [who] have been weaned by Socialist ideas and industrial disputes from the leadership of Tory and Orange landlords and capitalists, but as they are offered practical measures of relief from capitalist oppression by the English Independent Labour Party, and offered nothing but a green flag by Irish Nationalism... naturally go where they imagine relief will come from”.

This identification of the working class with the nation could plausibly claim to derive from Marx and Engels. After all, we can read in the Manifesto that “Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word”. And the same idea is found in Kautsky, writing in 1887:8Just as for bourgeois freedoms, the proletarians must come to the defence of their nation’s unity and independence, both against reactionary, particular interests, and against possible outside attack (…) In the decadent Roman Empire, social antagonisms had reached such a pitch, and the process of decomposition of the Roman nation – if we can call it such – had become so intolerable that for many, the national enemy, the German barbarian, appeared as a saviour. We have not yet reached this point, at least not in the national states. Nor do we think that the proletariat will ever reach it. Certainly, the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat is constantly increasing, but at the same time the proletariat is more and more the core of the nation in numbers and intelligence, and the interests of the proletariat and the nation are growing ever closer. A policy hostile to the nation would be pure suicide for the proletariat”.

With hindsight, it is easy to see the betrayal of 1914 – the defence of German “Kultur” against Tsarist barbarism – behind this identification of the nation and the proletariat. But hindsight is not much help in the present, and the fact is that the marxist movement at the end of the 19th century had largely failed to re-evaluate its view on the national question in the face of a changing reality.

For forty years, the socialist movement had not really challenged the Manifesto’s optimistic assumption that “National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto”. On one level this was true – we will return to this aspect shortly – yet by the 1890s the “national question” was coming to the forefront of the political scene as never before, precisely as a result of the phenomenal expansion of capitalist social relations and industrial production. With the development of modern conditions of production, new national bourgeoisies with modern national aspirations were appearing in Eastern and Central Europe. The resulting debate over the national question took on a new importance, above all for the Social-Democracy of Russia with regard to Poland, and of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with regard to the national aspirations of the Czechs and a multitude of smaller Slav peoples.

Luxemburgs critique of the nation state

The last thirty years of the 19th century thus transformed the way in which the national question was posed.

Firstly, as Luxemburg demonstrated in The national question and autonomy, once the bourgeois class has conquered its internal market, it must inevitably become a conquering imperialist state. More, in capitalism’s imperialist phase, all states are constrained to seek by imperialist means to make a place for themselves on the world market. Answering Kautsky’s postulate of capitalism’s evolution towards a single “super-state”9 Luxemburg writes: “The ‘best’ national state is only an abstraction which can be easily described and defined theoretically, but which doesn’t correspond to reality (…) The development of world powers, a characteristic feature of our times growing in importance along with the progress of capitalism, from the very outset condemns all small nations to political impotence...” (Part 1, “The right of nations to self-determination”). “The argument that an independent nation-state is, after all ‘the best’ guarantee of national existence and development involves operating with a conception of a nation-state as a completely abstract thing. The nation-state as seen only from a national point of view, only as a pledge and embodiment of freedom and independence, is simply a remnant of the decaying ideology of the petty bourgeoisie of Germany, Italy, Hungary – all of Central Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a phrase from the treasury of disintegrated bourgeois liberalism (…) ‘Nation-states’, even in the form of republics, are not products or expressions of the ‘will of the people’, as the liberal phraseology goes and the anarchist repeats. ‘Nation-states’ are today the very same tools and forms of class rule of the bourgeoisie as the earlier, non-national states, and like them they are bent on conquest. The nation-states have the same tendencies toward conquest, war, and oppression – in other words, the tendencies to become ‘non-national’. Therefore, among the ‘national’ states there develop constant scuffles and conflicts of interests, and even if today, by some miracle, all states should be transformed to ‘national’, then the next day they would already present the same common picture of war, conquest, and oppression” (Part 2, “The nation-state and the proletariat”).

For the smaller nationalities, this inevitably meant that their only possible “independence” meant detaching themselves from the orbit of one great imperialist state, to attach themselves to another. Nowhere was this more clearly illustrated than in the negotiations entered into by the Irish Volunteers (forerunners of the IRA) with German imperialism via the intermediary of the American Clan na Gael organisation, and Roger Casement who acted as an ambassador to Germany itself.10 Casement supposedly believed that 50,000 German troops would be necessary for a successful rising, but this was obviously out of the question without a decisive German victory at sea. The attempt to land a shipload of rifles from Germany in time for the 1916 rising ended in fiasco, but it remains a damning indictment of Irish nationalism’s readiness to participate in imperialist war.

By abandoning a marxist class analysis of imperialist war as the result of capitalism irrespective of nations, Connolly also abandoned the independence of the working class against the capitalists. How far he did so can be seen in the culpable naïvety of his idyllic depiction of “peaceful Germany”, combined with a semi-racist onslaught on the “half-educated” English workers:11Basing its industrial effort upon an educated working class, [the German nation] accomplished in the workshop results that this half-educated working-class of England could only wonder at. That English working class trained to a slavish subservience to rule-of-thumb methods, and under managers wedded to traditional processes saw themselves gradually outclassed by a new rival in whose service were enrolled the most learned scientists co-operating with the most educated workers (…) It was determined that since Germany could not be beaten in fair competition industrially, it must be beaten unfairly by organising a military and naval conspiracy against her (…) The conception meant calling up the forces of barbaric powers to crush and hinder the development of the peaceful powers of industry”. One wonders what the tens of thousands of Africans massacred during the Herero rising of 1904,12 or the inhabitants of Tsingtao annexed at gunpoint by Germany in 1898, might have thought of the “peaceful powers” of German industry.

Not only did “national states” tend inevitably to become conquering, imperialist states as Luxemburg demonstrated, they were also becoming less “national” as a result of industrial development and migration of the workforce from the countryside into the new industrial towns. In the case of Poland, by 1900 not only was the “Kingdom of Poland” (ie that part of Poland which had been incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th century) industrialising rapidly, the same was true of the ethnic-Polish areas under German13 (Upper Silesia) and Austro-Hungarian (Cieszyn Silesia) rule. Moreover, the industrial areas were less ethnic-Polish: workers in the great textile city of Lodz were Polish, German, and Jewish in origin, with a sprinkling of other nationalities including English and French. In Upper Silesia, workers were German, Polish, Danish, Ruthenian, etc. When Marx had called for Polish national independence as a bulwark against Tsarist absolutism a Polish working class barely existed: now, the question of Polish socialists’ attitude to Polish nationhood became acute, and led to a split between the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS) on the right and the Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy, or SDKPiL) on the left.14

For the PPS Polish independence meant Poland’s separation from Russia, but also the unification of those parts of historical Poland then under German or Austrian rule, where Polish proletarians worked side by side with Germans (and other nationalities). In effect, the PPS made proletarian revolution dependent on the “solution” of the “national question” – which could only, as Luxemburg said, lead to division within the ranks of the organised working class in German and Austria-Hungary. At best, this would be a distraction, at worst, destructive of workers’ unity.

For Luxemburg and the SDKPiL, on the contrary, any resolution of the national question was dependent on the seizure of power by the international working class.15 The only way for workers to oppose national oppression was to join the ranks of international social-democracy: by ending all oppression, the Social-Democracy would also end national oppression: “Not only did [the 1896 London Congress] set the Polish situation squarely on a level with the situation of all other oppressed peoples; it at the same time called for the workers of all such nations to enter the ranks of international socialism as the only remedy for national oppression, rather than dabbling off and on with the restoration of independent capitalist states in their several countries; only in this way could they hasten the introduction of a socialist system that, by abolishing class oppression, would do away with all forms of oppression, including national, once and for all”.

When Luxemburg undertook to oppose the PPS’ Polish nationalism within the Second International, she was well aware that she was attacking a sacred cow of the socialist and democratic movement: “Polish Socialism occupies – or at any rate once occupied – a unique position in its relation to international socialism, a position which can be traced directly to the Polish national question”.16 But, as she said and demonstrated very clearly, to defend in the 1890s the letter of Marx’s 1848 support for Polish independence was not only to refuse to recognise that social reality had changed, but to transform marxism itself from a living method for investigating reality, into a dried-up quasi-religious dogma.

Luxemburg went further than this. In effect, she considered that Marx and Engels had treated the Polish question as essentially a matter of “foreign policy” for the revolutionary democracy and the workers’ movement: “Even at first glance this standpoint [ie Marx’s position on Poland] reveals its glaring lack of inner relation to the social theory of Marxism. By failing to analyse Poland and Russia as class societies bearing economic and political contradictions in their bosoms, by viewing them not from the point of view of historical development but as if they were in a fixed, absolute condition as homogeneous, undifferentiated units, this view ran counter to the very essence of Marxism”. It is as if Poland – and indeed Russia as well – could be treated as somehow “outside” capitalism.

The development of capitalist social relations had essentially the same effect in Ireland as in Poland. Despite Ireland’s being above all a country of emigration, the Irish working class was by no means homogeneous: on the contrary, the most heavily industrialised area was Belfast (textile industry and the Harland & Wolff shipyards), whose workers were drawn from the Catholic, sometimes Gaelic-speaking Celtic population, and from the descendants of the Protestant, Scottish and English who had been “settled” in Ireland (thanks to the violent displacement of the original inhabitants) by Oliver Cromwell and his successors. And this very working class had already begun to show the road to the only possible solution of the “national question” in Ireland: by joining ranks in the massive Belfast strikes of 1907.17 Irish workers were present in all the major industrial areas of Britain, especially around Liverpool and Glasgow.

The moral question that Marx had posed – the problem of English workers’ sensation of superiority to the Irish – was no longer limited to Ireland and the Irish: capital’s constant need to call absorb more labour power led to mass migrations from agricultural economies to newly industrialising areas, while the expansion of European colonisation brought European workers into contact with Asians, Africans, Indians... all over the planet. Nowhere was immigration more important than in the capitalist powerhouse of the United States, which witnessed not only a huge influx of workers from all over Europe, but a massive importation of cheap labour from Japan and China and of course the migration of black workers from the cotton fields of the backward South into the new industrial centres of the North: the legacy of slavery and racial prejudice remains a “gaping wound” (to use Luxemburg’s expression) in America to this day. Inevitably, these waves of migration brought with them prejudice, misunderstanding, rejection... all the moral degradation that Marx and Engels had noted in the English working class was reproduced over and over again. The more migration mixed populations of different origins, the more absurd the idea of “national independence” as a solution to prejudice inevitably became. All the more so in that underlying all these prejudices was one, universal and far more ancient than any national prejudice, driven right through the heart of the working class: the unthinking assumption of male superiority to women. Marx and Engels had identified a real problem, a crucial one even. Unsolved, it would mortally weaken the struggle of a class whose only weapon is its organisation and its class solidarity. But it could, and can, only be solved through the experience of working and living together, through the mutual solidarity imposed by the demands of the class struggle.

What caused James Connolly to end his life in such flagrant contradiction with the internationalism he had espoused during it? Apart from the weaknesses inherent in his view of the national question, which he shared with the majority of the Second International, it is also possible – though this is pure speculation on our part – that his confidence in the working class had been shattered by two major defeats: the defeat of the Dublin strike of 1913, which was in large part due to the the abject failure of the British trade unions to give the ITGWU adequate and above all active support; and the disintegration of the International itself when confronted with the test of World War I. If such were the case, we can only say that Connolly drew the wrong conclusions. The failure of the Dublin strike as a result of the Irish workers’ isolation demonstrated, not that Irish workers should seek salvation in the Irish nation, but on the contrary that the limits of little Ireland could no longer contain the battle between capital and labour which was now being fought out on a far broader stage; and the Russian Revolution, only one year after the suppression of the Easter Rising was to show that workers’ revolution, not national insurrection, was the only hope of putting an end to imperialist war and the misery of capitalist domination.

Jens, April 2016


1 Against the concept of the "brilliant leader" in International Review n°33.

2 This article has been republished in World Revolution 373 and on our website.

3 At least in continental Europe. Arguably, the proletariat had already made its appearance in Britain first with the Luddite, then the Chartist movements.

4 In the original German the last words: “Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!”. Thus, a more correct translation would be “Proletarians [men and women] of all countries, Unite!”

5 The revolutionary syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World

6 Connolly was one of the founders of the ISRP in 1896. Although it probably never exceeded 80 members, it was influential in later Irish socialist politics, espousing the principle of a republic in Ireland before Sinn Fein. The party survived until 1904, and published the Workers’ Republic.

7If we were to attempt to estimate the relative achievements of Thompson and Marx we should not hope to do justice to either by putting them in contrast, or by eulogising Thompson in order to belittle Marx, as some Continental critics of the latter seek to do. Rather we should say that the relative position of this Irish genius and of Marx are best comparable to the historical relations of the pre-Darwinian evolutionists to Darwin; as Darwin systematised all the theories of his predecessors and gave a lifetime to the accumulation of the facts required to establish his and their position, so Marx found the true line of economic thought already indicated, and brought his genius and encyclopaedic knowledge and research to place it upon an unshakable foundation. Thompson brushed aside the economic fiction maintained by the orthodox economists and accepted by the Utopian, that profit was made in exchange, and declared that it was due to the subjection of labour and the resultant appropriation, by the capitalists and landlords, of the fruits of the labour of others (...) All the theory of the class war is but a deduction from this principle. But, although Thompson recognised this class war as a fact, he did not recognise it as a factor, as the factor in the evolution of society towards freedom. This was reserved for Marx, and in our opinion, is his chief and crowning glory” (from “Labour in Irish history”).

Marx was always scrupulous in citing his sources and giving credit to thinkers who had preceded him, and he does indeed cite Thompson’s work in Capital (in the chapter on “Division of labour and manufacture” in Volume 1).

8“Die Moderne Nationalität”, in Neue Zeit, V, 1887, translated in Les marxistes et la question nationale 1848-1914 (Haupt, Löwy, Weill), Editions L’Harmatton, 1997, p125.

9In Nationalität und Internationalität, 1908.

10See FSL Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, Fontana Press, 1971, pp340, 350.

11In an article titled “The war upon the German nation” in Irish Worker, 29th August 1914.

12In what was then known as Damaraland, in modern Namibia. An eye-witness account described one Herero defeat: “I was present when the Herero were defeated in a battle in the vicinity of Waterberg. After the battle all men, women, and children who fell into German hands, wounded or otherwise, were mercilessly put to death. Then the Germans set off in pursuit of the rest, and all those found by the wayside and in the sandveld were shot down and bayoneted to death. The mass of the Herero men were unarmed and thus unable to offer resistance. They were just trying to get away with their cattle”. The German High Command were fully aware of the atrocities and indeed approved them. See the article in Wikipedia

13Luxemburg herself was much in demand by the German SPD as one of their rare, and certainly their best, Polish-language orators and agitators.

14A number of outstanding figures of the revolutionary period came from the SDKPiL, among them Rosa Luxemburg herself, Karl Radek, Leo Jogisches, and Julian Marchlewski.

15It should perhaps be pointed out – though it is outside the scope of this short study – that there was a good deal of disagreement and uncertainty about what exactly identified a “nation”. Was it language (as Kautsky argued), or was it a more vaguely defined “cultural identity” as Otto Bauer thought? The question remains a valid – and open – one to this day.

16This and following quotations are taken from Luxemburg’s Foreword to the anthology The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement, which was a collection of documents from the London Congress of 1896 where Luxemburg successfully opposed the PPS’ attempt to make Polish independence and unification a concrete and immediate demand of the International.

 

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Dublin 1916

The IRA, soldiers of imperialism

The article that we are republishing here first appeared in World Revolution 21 in 1978. In the first paragraph it establishes the framework in which ‘national liberation’ struggles should be seen.

The 'small nations' like Ireland, which wanted to grab something for themselves, would have to try and exploit for their own interests the conflict between the big imperialist powers.”

This reality was identified by revolutionaries at the time of the 1916 Easter Rising. Trotsky (Nashe Slovo 4 July 1916) pointed out the military importance of Ireland in relation to British imperialism: "an ‘independent’ Ireland could exist only as an outpost of an imperialist state hostile to Britain”.

This lack of ‘independence’ is acknowledged in the Proclamation read out at the beginning of the Easter Rising when it declared that the Irish nationalists were “supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe”. This is a reference to funds received from supporters in the US and arms supplies from Germany. The ‘national’ struggle needed imperialist backers.

For more on the background to the 1916 events see “The national question 100 years after the Dublin Easter Rising” in this issue.

The 1978 article traces the development of the national situation and specifically the role of the IRA up to the early 1970s. If, after the passage of nearly 40 years, we can see that some of the formulations have not stood the test of time, the overall framework is still valid. And these formulations still pose important questions.

For example, the text talks about “the downfall of Unionism”. While it is true that the Unionist-dominated Parliament of Northern Ireland was abolished in the early 1970s, the pro-British Unionists have continued as a force to this day. But the dominance of their position has changed, especially after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

The text says that “the IRA will not disappear”. On the face of it, with the IRA’s declaration of an end to its armed campaign in 2005 and its statement that it would only pursue its goals by political means, this appears to be contradicted by events. However, the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, is now a leading part in Northern Ireland’s Executive, sharing power with Unionists as a fundamental pillar of the capitalist state’s political apparatus. That the article also mistakenly identifies Stalinist republicanism as a force for the future only demonstrates that the outcome of conflicts within the bourgeoisie can not be calculated in every detail. We can also add that the “armed wing” of Republicanism has not disappeared, even if it has taken the form of dissident breakaways from the IRA.

One other problematic aspect of the analysis (that is not limited to Ireland) can be seen in the idea that the difficulties of the Irish economy are due to “the fact that the world market is already divided among the great capitalist powers, and above all because the capitalist system itself prevents a global development of the productive forces.” The division of the world market between different national capitals is not fixed. Over the past 20 years, for example, we have seen a decline in the relative position of the Japanese economy and advances for Chinese capitalism. This is not to say that the decade of growth of the Celtic Tiger could have been sustained, but that, in the competition between capitals, the possibility of individual advances and retreats is not excluded. In addition there is in the quoted passage the implicit idea that there are no possibilities left for the expansion for capitalism. This is something that has marked other texts during the history of the ICC.

Above all, however, the article strikes exactly the right note when it finishes with the assertion that only the class war can confront the attacks of capitalism and its mobilisations for imperialist war.


The Easter Rising of 1916

The Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, typically petty bourgeois in its hopelessness--its heroism a product of pure desperation--opened a new period of social and political crisis in Ireland. Through the ruthlessness with which the British bourgeoisie crushed the Easter Rising, through the relatively disinterested and even hostile attitude of the Irish workers (their ears still ringing with the defeat of their strike wave in 1913) towards the goals of the ruling classes in Ireland, history had shown the Irish bourgeoisie that the era of the possibility of the bourgeois revolution in Ireland was at an end. The reality of the Great War was the violent re-division of the globe among the powerful but crisis-ridden imperialist powers. The 'small nations' like Ireland, which wanted to grab something for themselves, would have to try and exploit for their own interests the conflict between the big imperialist powers. Thus, after 1916, Sinn Fein’s1 policy revolved around the fight to gain admission to the post-war peace conference of the big powers, in the hope of gaining American backing for Irish independence against Britain. Similarly, the so-called Irish ‘Labour Movement' sent delegates to the wretched conference of Social Democratic reconciliation in Berne,2 in order to win the support of Europe's most eloquent butchers for the Irish cause.

Had Britain lost the war it might have been a different story. As it was, the Irish Nationalists were unable to persuade anyone. Their most radical factions had either stayed out of the war, or had attempted to enlist the support of German imperialism. Now they found themselves empty-handed.

Developments in the world during and immediately after the war had shaken the economy in Ireland. The massive concentration and centralisation of capital under the direction of the state in wartime Britain and Europe, and the grave economic crisis which followed the war and the dismantling of the war economy, threatened to ruin and eliminate the small manufacturing bourgeoisie in the South of Ireland. It was the desperate struggle for survival of such worn-out strata, faced as they were with the convulsions of a world capitalism itself in its death throes, which gave birth to that remarkable imperialist abortion - the Irish Free State. In this atmosphere, the bourgeoisie in the South was able to mobilise the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie for a guerilla war against the British forces. This became known as the War of Independence (1919–1921).

During this period, the Nationalists fashioned the nucleus of a separate state. It was modeled on the most modern lines: equipped with a parliament, a police force, courts, prisons, and--of course--an army. The Irish Republican Army was based on the Volunteer Brigades of 1916, but was well-disciplined and firmly wedded to the framework of the new state, itself a bulwark of capitalist order. The IRA entered the world with the blood of the proletariat dripping from its hands. In the South and the South-West, it didn't hesitate to move against striking workers (see 'James Connolly and Irish Nationalism' , WR 173). In the cities, its brutal terrorisation of the civilian population during the 'War of Independence" matched that dished out by the British Black and Tans.

Partition

Tottering on the brink of defeat, the Nationalists were forced to sign a treaty with Britain in 1921. This granted Ireland nominal independence. However, the country was to be partitioned: the industrial counties of the North-East received their own regional parliament and retained special connections with Britain.

The acceptance of the Treaty threatened to provoke an army coup. This didn't happen but it did lead to a split in the government and in the army in the South, with the Republican extremists wanting to hold out for a better deal from Britain.4 And although attempts were made to re-unite the IRA in order to launch an attack against Northern Ireland, in the face of the obvious impossibility of such a campaign, the Free State slid into a bourgeois faction fight still more savage than the War of Independence . This conflict ended with the victory of the pro-Treaty (British-backed) forces in the South.

These events show us not only the absolutely anti-proletarian character of 'Irish Independence and Unity’ in the present epoch, but its objective impossibility as well. Before 1916, the Ulster Unionists and the Southern Irish Nationalists were engaged in rival arms build-ups and the constitution of paramilitary armies. In the North, Craig--the Unionist leader--had generously sent the Ulster workers to the imperialist slaughter in order to show his love of King and Country. But the Unionists were prepared, even if it came to a show of arms, to resist any attempt by London to subordinate their interests in any way to the control of the Southern Irish bourgeoisie. Ulster's industry lived from, and produced for, the British and world market. It had no interest in supporting the stagnant Irish agricultural economy, or in becoming the victim of Southern protectionist policies.

The economic development of Ireland

In Ireland, only Ulster participated in the British industrial revolution. Politically and economically in control of the whole island, only the British bourgeoisie would have been capable of industrialising the South of Ireland. But within the United Kingdom, Ireland assumed the role of cheap supplier of agricultural products and labour power. If the Irish Republic finds itself in exactly the same situation today, then this is the result--not of '700 years of betrayals'--but of the fact that the world market is already divided among the great capitalist powers, and above all because the capitalist system itself prevents a global development of the productive forces. This, then, is no mere Irish question: we find ourselves in a beggar's world of hunger and misery, careering towards nuclear self-destruction if the resolution of the present crisis of capitalism is left up to the bourgeoisie.

The hostility of the North and South

The desperate hostility of the North and South in Ireland reflected the antagonistic imperialist aims of the Ulster and Southern bourgeoisies. In the face of a contracting world market, these aims could not be reconciled. But their conflict had a 'positive' aspect for capitalism in Ireland. The lords of the Belfast sweatshops, and the Republican Army of Dublin's men of property, ensured that the workers got caught in the cross-fire between them. In the industrial centres of the North, the Protestant and Catholic ghettos were made to compete against each other for whatever miserable jobs, wages and housing were going. Mobilised or intimidated behind the Orange and the Green, the class solidarity of the workers was answered with the tyranny of pogroms. In Belfast, the proletarian strike wave of 1919 was soon followed by bloody orgies, sparked off by the IRA's killing of Protestant workers, and taken up by Carson’s Ulster Volunteers. Over sixty died in this wave of barbarism. In the 1930s, the Republican and Unionist gangs would react with the same suspicion and hostility to the united struggle of the unemployed workers in Belfast.

Southern Ireland under de Valera

Through the Civil War, the pro-Treaty wing of the IRA established itself as the official army of the state in the South. Soon afterwards, de Valera and his supporters moved away from the extreme IRA and founded a political party, Fianna Fail, to represent the radical Republicans in parliament. In the face of the world economic collapse of 1929, de Valera came to power in the 1932 elections armed with a makeshift protectionist and state capitalist programme. His election victory owed much to the support given him by the IRA. However, although the Republicans took radical measures to shore up the national capital in Southern Ireland, they were unable to stimulate industrial growth. Their ‘Economic War’ with Britain led only to chaos in the vital, export-oriented agricultural sector. But despite the fiasco this policy represented, we can see how the Republicans established themselves during this period as the natural rulers of Irish capitalism. In the 1930s, de Valera was able to employ the full force of the state--plus the IRA.--in beating down the essentially pro-British Fascists of O'Duffy's Blueshirts. This was the time when the rebel IRA men flocked into the ranks of the official security forces of the state and the secret police to fight the fascist menace. And when the Blueshirts led farmers in withholding annuity payments to the government in an attempt to make de Valera call off the ‘Economic War’ with Britain, it was the Republican gunmen who confiscated these farmers' cattle and auctioned them off.

The ‘Economic War’ was a desperate response to the folding of the world market following the Great Crash. It neither did, nor could have posed, any threat to Britain's control economically over Ireland. And this is true despite the nostalgia of the Irish leftists today for this period. Between 1926 and 1938, the economic rate of growth in Southern Ireland was about 1% per annum. In the war years it would be nil. Out of necessity, the policy had to be abandoned before the outbreak of World War II. Indeed, London was quite prepared to make concessions in the immediate pre-war period. Chamberlain, when requested, evacuated the naval bases in Ireland. Later, Churchill would offer unification of Ireland to the Southern bourgeoisie in return for more open support from the 'neutral' Republic during the war. The idea of placing Ulster's war industries within the cocoon of Irish neutrality seemed tempting to the Southern bourgeoisie. But as ever, the intransigence of the Ulster Unionists--who were profiting from the British war economy--barred the way to this solution.

The legacy of 1916

‘Hatred of Britain' may have been the force animating the ‘men of 16’. But for the IRA, and for de Valera 's Republicanism, this legacy was used more as propaganda for their regime and as a recruiting weapon to win them support. Their aim, after all, was never to smash British imperialism, which (quite apart from being impossible in this epoch) would have amounted to slaying the hen which lays the golden eggs as far as they were concerned. The real world historical goal of the bourgeois forces behind the so-called Irish Revolution was either to cajole or force the British government into giving the Ulster Unionist bosses the kick in the teeth they had coming. And Britain was the only one around strong enough to do this.5 The Republicans reckoned that if they could bring together the industrial North with the agricultural South, they'd have tractors to plough their fields. They could then hope to feather their own nests while ‘invading' the British market. The plan was to reconcile Southern Irish and British imperialist interests at Ulster's expense. This grand expansionist strategy of the Republicans was referred to as 'the unification of Ireland’.

The outbreak of World War II seemed to change this situation. It presented to the Republicans the possibility of really toppling the Unionists themselves, and chasing the Brits out of Ireland by hanging on to the coat-tails of German imperialism. The 1939 bombing campaign in England (which involved the murder of British workers) was followed by hair-brained schemes of action worked out between the IRA anti-fascists and the Nazi government in Germany.6 However, the German bourgeoisie never seriously contemplated an Irish campaign, so the IRA succeeded only in bringing new waves of Fianna Fail repression upon itself. In moving against an unwanted political friend, the democratic Dublin government never hesitated to use concentration camps and open murder in its clampdowns against the IRA during the 1930s and 1940s. Just as today, the democratic government in Ireland organises systematic terror in defence of bourgeois ‘freedoms and civil liberties’ even while it breaks into floods of tears for the victims of the smaller-scale terror campaigns of the IRA.

The pulverisation of the IRA

By the 1960s, the IRA was militarily pulverised in the North and in the South. It had lost all its support among the ‘Catholic’ workers, who had been an important source of its cannon-fodder before. It then settled down to the formulation of a radical state capitalist programme to win back support and, as a result, began to lean towards the Russian imperialist bloc. The stunted Southern Irish economy, so as to benefit from the post-war boom, had had to lift its protectionist barriers. But with the close of the period of reconstruction after 1965, the Irish Republic found itself increasingly dependent on its more powerful neighbours. If its economy was to avoid collapse in the face of the world economic crisis, the Southern economy had to become more closely integrated into the Western bloc as a whole. Shortly thereafter, Ireland entered the EEC.

The IRA, would-be saviours of the nation. responded to the crisis- and to the alarming combativity of the working class in the South – by turning to Stalinism. But this smooth leftward swing was rudely interrupted by the events in Northern Ireland after 1969. The Ulster industrial caste, losers in the economic fight for survival, had become a real obstacle to Britain's political and economic management of the crisis. The bourgeoisie was aware it had to shift the Unionist rubbish heap. But when they tried to touch it, they found it crawling with angry rats. At this stage, with the Unionists resisting all reforms, the Dublin government intervened, first through its support for the civil rights movement in the North, and secondly by offering to support the Northern IRA in a new campaign. But this support was conditionally given. The Northern IRA had to agree to split from the Southern Irish IRA leadership.

These measures soon led to a split in the IRA. The Provisionals, straight-nationalist murder gangs, were based in the Ulster ghettos and the 'non-sectarian' Stalinists of the Southern Command comprised the Officials. As a result of its clever manoeuvre, the Dublin government hoped to achieve two things:

  1. preparations of the military shove needed to topple the Unionists, the main barrier to ‘Irish Unification’.

  2. the weakening of its Stalinist opponents in the IRA in the South.

Without going into the course of recent events in Ulster it is clear that the anti-proletarian part played by the IRA in this bloody holocaust marks a continuation of its bourgeois traditions. It has played its part, to be sure, in the downfall of Unionism. At the same time it has itself received a severe beating. Despite the IRA's continuing wild bombings and shootings, tomorrow and the future will see the British and the Irish security forces--the masters of the streets and the concentration camps, the armed anti-terrorists--as the main forces attempting to butcher the revolutionary movement of the proletariat on these islands. But however battered it may be, the IRA will not disappear. It remains the living symbol of a frustrated Irish imperialism. And particularly in its Stalinist form, it will have an important role to play in the coming fight against the workers.

Divided and demoralised by over fifty years of counter-revolution, the Ulster proletariat found itself driven into the ghettos in 1969, looking for security where none was to be found. Now it must emerge to meet the relentless attacks of capitalism as the economic crisis deepens. And gigantic as this task will be, there is no other way out. As militants of the working class, we denounce the cynical lies of the Irish and British bourgeoisie about reconciliations and a democratic 'settlement". And we call on the proletariat--North and South--to take up the class war.

Krespel, December 1978


1 Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone): Irish Republican political party. Founded in 1902 by Arthur Griffith, it came under the leadership of de Valera in 1917. After the ‘War of Independence' in 1919–21, a split occurred in 1922, Griffith and Michael Collins accepting the Partition and the establishment of the Irish Free State; de Valera in opposition to them formed another party, Fianna Fail.

2 Berne Conference of 1920 grouped all the 'Socialist' Parties, like the Independent Labour Party in Britain that had split with the IInd International when it capitulated to the war effort, but which refused to join the Communist International. The Communist International denounced this move as an attempt to resurrect the IInd International in spirit if not in name.

3 James Connolly and Irish nationalism, reprinted in World Revolution 373.

4 In order to get this better deal, de Valera acting for the extremists had even suggested that Britain should declare a 'Monroe Doctrine' regarding Ireland, i.e. that Britain should guarantee that the people of Ireland alone had the right to decide their own destiny.

5 There were basically two political tendencies involved here, represented by Fianna Fail hoping to manoeuvre, and the IRA hoping to force, the British bourgeoisie into handing over Ulster.

6 At one stage – in 1942 – the IRA demanded "That as a prelude to any co-operation between Oglaigh noh-Eireann and the German Government, the German Government explicitly declare its intention of recognising the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic (i.e. the IRA) as the Government of Ireland in all post-war negotiations affecting Ireland".

 

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Irish nationalism

The national situation in Germany

The joint conference of the sections of the ICC in Germany and Switzerland, and the nucleus in Sweden, held in March 2016, adopted, among other documents, a report on the national situation in Germany, which we publish here. This report makes no claim to completeness. Instead it concentrates on points we think it are particularly important to reflect on and discuss now. Since these aspects in general have the dramatic events of the current situation as their point of departure, we add to the report the presentation made at the conference, which is partly devoted to bringing the report more up to date. Critical comments to the report and presentation made in the course of the ensuing debate are added as footnotes to the presentation. In view of the importance of the developments in what is the most central country of European capitalism today, we hope that these texts can be a positive contribution to the necessary reflection, from the point of view of the proletariat, about the present world situation.


The competitiveness of German capital today

Since the German nation state was not constituted until 1870, and was late in joining the imperialist carve-up of the world, it never established itself as a leading financial or colonial power. The main basis of its economic might was and remains its highly efficient industry and work force. Whereas East Germany (the old German Democratic Republic, GDR) fell behind economically through becoming part of the Eastern bloc, post-World War II West Germany was able to build on this foundation and even consolidate it. By 1989, the latter had become the world’s leading export nation, with the lowest state deficit of all the leading powers. Despite comparatively high wage levels its economy was extremely competitive. It also benefited, economically, from the world wide trade possibilities opened up by membership of the Western bloc, and from having a restricted military budget as the main loser of two world wars.

At the political and territorial levels Germany then profited most from the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, absorbing the former GDR. Economically however, the sudden absorbing of this zone, which had hopelessly fallen behind international standards, also represented a considerable burden, above all financially. A burden which threatened the competitiveness of the new, bigger Germany. During the 1990s it lost ground on the world market, while the state budget deficit levels began to approach those of other leading powers.

Today, a quarter of a century later, Germany has more than regained the lost ground. As an exporter, it is second only to China. Last year, the state budget had a surplus of €26 billion. Its growth of 1.7% was moderate, but for a highly developed country still an achievement. Official unemployment has dropped to its lowest level since re-unification. To date, the policy of maintaining a highly developed industrial production based in Germany itself has been a success.

Of course, as an old industrial country, the bedrock of this success is a high organic composition of capital, the product of at least two centuries of accumulation. But within this context, the high skills and qualifications of its population is decisive for its competitive edge. Before World War I, Germany had become the main centre of scientific development and its application in production. With the catastrophe of National Socialism and World War II it lost this advantage and has shown no signs since of recovering it. What remains however is its know-how in the production process itself. Since the demise of the Hansa,1 Germany has never been a leading, long lasting maritime power. Although long an essentially peasant economy, its soil, on average, is less fertile than that of France, for example. Its natural advantages lay in its geographic location at the heart of Europe, and in precious metals already mined during the Middle Ages. Out of this emerged a high aptitude for artisan and industrial labour and co-operation and a know-how developed and passed on from generation to generation. Although its industrial revolution benefited considerably from large coal resources, the demise of heavy industries from the 1970s on made clear that the heart of Germany’s economic ascendency lay not here, but in its efficiency in the production of the means of production, and more generally in the transformation of living into dead labour. Today Germany is world-wide the main producer of complex machines. More than the car industry, this sector is the backbone of its economy. Behind this strength, there is also the know-how of the bourgeoisie which, already during capitalist ascendency, concentrated essentially on its economic and business activities, since it was more or less excluded from positions of political and military power by the Prussian landowner (Junker) caste. The passion for engineering which this bourgeoisie developed continues to find expression not only in the machine-tool industry, still often based on mid-sized, family-run units, but in the particular capacity of the ruling class as a whole to run the entire German industry as if it were a single machine. The intricate and highly effective inter-connection of all the different units of production and distribution is one of the main advantages of the German national capital.

Confronted with the dead weight of the collapsing GDR economy, the turning point in the recovery of its competitive edge was reached in the first decade of the present century. Two factors were decisive. At the organisational level, all the main companies, including the mid-sized machine-tool manufacturers (Maschinenbau) began to produce and operate on a world scale, creating networks of production all centred around Germany itself. At the political level, under the leadership of the SPD (the Social-Democrats), the attacks against wages and social benefits (the so-called “Agenda 2010”) were so radical that the French government even accused Germany of wage dumping.

This turning point was favoured by three major developments in the global economic context which turned out to be particularly favourable to Germany.

Firstly the transition from the Keynesian to the so-called Neo-Liberal model of state capitalism favoured more export oriented economies. While strongly participating in the post 1945 Keynesian economic order dominating the Western bloc, the West German “model” was from the onset influenced by “Ordo-Liberal”2 ideas (Ludwig Erhard, Freiberger School), never developing the kind of “Statism” which continues to hamper the competitiveness of France today.

Second was the consolidation of European economic cooperation after the fall of the Berlin Wall (creation of the European Union, the Euro currency union). Although partly driven by political, essentially imperialist motives (its neighbours’ desire to keep “control” of Germany), at the economic level Germany, as the strongest competitor, has been the main beneficiary of the EU and of the currency union. The financial crisis and the Euro crisis after 2008, confirmed that the leading capitalist countries still have the capacity to deflect the worst effects of the crisis onto their weaker rivals. The different international and European salvage packages, such as those for Greece, essentially served the propping up of German (and French) banks at the expense of the “rescued” economies.

Thirdly, Germany’s geographical and historical proximity to Eastern Europe helped to make it the main beneficiary of the transformation there, conquering markets previously out of reach, including the extra-capitalist3 leftovers.

Relationship between German imperialism’s economic and military power

To illustrate the importance of the consequences of this competitive strength at other levels, we now want to examine the link to the imperialist dimension. After 1989, Germany could put forward its imperialist interests with greater determination and independence. Examples of this were its initiative, under Helmut Kohl, in encouraging the break-up of Yugoslavia (beginning with the diplomatic recognition of the state independence of Croatia and Slovenia), or the refusal, under Gerhard Schröder, to support the second Iraq War. In the past 25 years there have certainly been advances at the imperialist level. Above all, both the “international community” and the population “at home” have become accustomed to German military interventions abroad. The transition from a conscript to a professional army has been made. The German armaments industry has increased its share of the world market. Nevertheless, at the imperialist level it has been unable to regain ground anything like to the same extent as economically. The problem of finding enough volunteers for the army remains unresolved. Above all, the goal of the technical modernisation of the armed forces and the significant increase of its mobility and firepower has not at all been achieved.

In fact, during this whole period after 1989, it was never the goal of the German bourgeoisie to try, either in the short or medium term, to “pose its candidature” as a potential bloc leader against the USA. At the military level, this would have been impossible, given the overwhelming military might of the United States, and Germany’s present status as “economic giant but military dwarf”. Any attempt to do so would also have led to its main European rivals ganging up against it. At the economic level, supporting the weight of what would have had to be an enormous re-armament programme would have ruined the competitiveness of an economy already struggling with the financial burden of re-unification - as well as risking confrontations with the working class.

But none of this means that Berlin has renounced its ambitions to regain its status at least as the leading European military power. On the contrary, ever since the 1990s it has pursued a long term strategy aimed at augmenting its economic power as a basis for a later military renaissance. Whereas the former USSR offered a reminder of how military power cannot be maintained in the long run without an equivalent economic basis, more recently China has revealed the other side of the same coin: how economic ascent can prepare a later military one.

One of the keys to such a long term strategy is Russia, but also the Ukraine. At the military level, it is the USA, not Germany, which gained most from the eastward extension of the NATO (in fact Germany tried to prevent some of the steps of this roll-back of Russia). Germany, by contrast, hopes to profit from this whole zone above all economically. Unlike China, Russia for historical reasons is unable to organise its own economic modernisation. Before the Ukraine conflict began, the Kremlin had already decided to attempt this modernisation in cooperation with German industry. In fact, one of the main advantages of this conflict for the USA is that it blocks (via the embargo against Russia) this economic cooperation. Here also lies one of the main motivations for the German chancellor Merkel (and the French president Hollande as her junior partner in this affair) to mediate between Moscow and Kiev. Despite the present desolate state of the Russian economy, the German bourgeoisie is still convinced that Russia would be able to finance such a modernisation itself. The oil price will not remain forever as low as it is today, and Russia also has a host of precious metals to sell. In addition, Russian agriculture has still to be put on a modern capitalist basis (this is even more true for the Ukraine, which – despite the Chernobyl disaster – still has some of the most fertile soil on the planet). In the middle term perspective of food shortages and rising prices for agricultural products, such agricultural areas can gain a considerable economic and even strategic importance. The fear of the USA is thus not unfounded that Germany could profit from Eastern Europe to increase further its relative economic and political weight in the world, and somewhat reduce that of America in Europe.

An example of how Germany already successfully uses its economic strength to imperialist ends is that of the Syrian refugees. Even if it wanted to, it would be very difficult for Germany to participate directly in the present bombing of Syria, on account of its military weakness. But since, on account of its relatively low unemployment, it can absorb part of the Syrian population in the form of the present refugee influx, it gains an alternative means of influencing above all the post-war situation there.

Against this background, it is not surprising that the USA, in particular, is presently trying to use juridical means to curb the economic power of its German competitor, for instance by bringing Volkswagen or the Deutsche Bank to court, threatening them with punitive fines of billions of dollars.

The difficulties of the working class

The year 2015 witnessed a series of strikes above all in transport (DB-German Railways, Lufthansa) and of kindergarten employees. There were also more local but significant movements such as that at the Charité hospital in Berlin, where there was a movement of solidarity between nurses and patients. All of these movements were very sectoral and isolated, sometimes partly focusing on the false alternative of big against small corporatist trade unions, blurring the necessity for autonomous self-organisation by workers. Although all the unions organised strikes so as to cause a maximum of annoyance to the public, the attempt to erode solidarity, at least in the form of public sympathy with those on strike, only partly succeeded. The argument accompanying the demands in the kindergarten sector, for instance, that the regime of particularly low wages in traditionally female professions has to come to an end, while contributing to the isolation of this strike, was popular within the class as a whole, which seemed to recognise that this “discrimination” is above all a means of dividing the workers.

It is certainly an unusual phenomenon that, in contemporary Germany of all places, strikes played such a prominent role in the media in the course of 2015. These strikes, while giving proof of a still-existing militancy and solidarity, are not however evidence of a continuing wave or phase of proletarian struggle. They should at least partly be understood as a manifestation of the particular economic situation of Germany as described above. In this context of relatively low unemployment and shortage of qualified labour, the bourgeoisie itself put forward the idea that, after years of sinking wages inaugurated under Schröder (they sank more radically than almost anywhere in Western Europe), the employees should at last be “rewarded” for their “sense of realism”. The new Grand Coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats itself set the trend by finally (as one of the last countries in Europe to do so) introducing a basic minimum wage law, and raising some social benefits. In the car industry, for instance, the big companies in 2015 paid bonuses (which they called “profit sharing”) of up to €9000 per worker. This was all the more possible because the modernisation of the production apparatus has been so successful that – at least for the moment – the German competitive edge depends much less on low wages than a decade before.

In 2003 the ICC analysed the international class struggle, beginning with the protests against attacks against the pensions in France and Austria, as a turning point (unspectacular, almost imperceptible) for the better in class struggle, essentially because of the beginning of a recognition by the present working generation (for the first time since the last world war) that its children will have not better but worse conditions than themselves. This led to first significant expressions of solidarity between the generations in workers’ struggles. However, because of the intimidation of strike movements by growing unemployment and precarious working conditions this evolution expressed itself, at the “point of production” more at the level of consciousness than of militancy – it became increasingly difficult and daunting to go on strike. In Germany itself the initial response of the unemployed to Agenda 2010 (the “Monday demonstrations”) also soon ran out of steam. But on the other hand, a new generation began to take to the streets, benefiting from not yet being under the direct yoke of wage labour, to express not only their own anger and concern about the future, but also (more or less consciously) that of the class as a whole. In this, they were often joined by the precariously employed. These protests, extending to countries like Turkey, Israel and Brazil, but reaching their culmination in the anti-CPE and Indignados movements in France and Spain respectively, even found a small, weak but still significant echo in the movement of students and pupils in Germany. And they were accompanied, not yet by the crystallisation of a new generation of revolutionaries, but by its potential precursor.

In Germany this was expressed by a small but combative “Occupy” movement, more open than before to internationalist ideas. The slogan of the first Occupy demonstrations was “Down with capital, the state and the nation”. For the first time in decades in Germany, therefore, a politicisation was beginning which did not seem to be dominated by anti-fascist and national liberation ideology. This was taking place in response to the financial crisis of 2008, followed by the Euro crisis. Some of these small minorities were beginning to think that capitalism was on the brink of collapse. The idea began to develop that if Marx was being proven right about the crisis of capitalism, he might also be right about the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. The expectation grew that the massive international attacks would soon be met with similarly massive international class struggle. “Athens today – Berlin tomorrow – international solidarity against capital” became the new slogan.

What followed was not an historic defeat, but the story of how the bourgeoisie smashed, for the moment, the political opening up begun in 2003, bringing this phase of the class struggle to a close. What began as the US sub-primes crisis posed a very real menace to the stability of the international financial architecture. The danger was acute. There was no time for long drawn out negotiations between governments about how to handle it. The bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers had the advantage of obliging governments in all the industrial countries to take immediate and radical measures to salvage the situation (as the Herald Tribune later wrote: “if it had not happened, the Lehman collapse would have had to be invented”). But it also had advantages at another level: against the working class. Perhaps for the first time, the world bourgeoisie responded to a major, acute crisis of its system, not by downplaying but by exaggerating its importance. The workers of the world were told that unless they immediately accepted the massive attacks, states and with them pension and insurance funds would go bankrupt, private savings melt away. This ideological terror offensive resembled the “shock and awe” military strategy employed by the US in the second Iraq war, aimed at paralysing, traumatising and disarming its adversary. And it worked. At the same time, the objective basis was there for not attacking all the central sectors of the world proletariat at the same time, since large sectors of the class in the US, Britain, Ireland and southern Europe suffered much more than in Germany, France and elsewhere in north-west Europe.

The second chapter of this offensive of terror and division was the Euro-crisis, where the European proletariat was successfully divided between north and south, between “lazy Greeks” and “arrogant Nazi Germans”. In this context, the bourgeoisie has another trump card up its sleeve: the economic success of Germany. Even the strikes of 2015, and more generally the recent increases in wages and social benefits there, were all used to hammer home the message, to the whole European proletariat, that making sacrifices in face of the crisis pays off in the end.

This message, that struggle does not pay, was further underscored by the fact that, in those countries where political and economic stability are particularly fragile, and the working class weaker, the protest movements of the young generation (the “Arab spring”) only succeeded in triggering off internecine civil and imperialist wars and/or new waves of repression. All of this reinforced the feeling of powerlessness and lack of perspective in the class as a whole.

The non-collapse of capitalism and the failure of the European proletariat to oppose the massive attacks also took its toll on the precursors of a new generation of revolutionary minorities. The increase in public meetings and demonstrations which characterised this phase in Germany gave way to a real phase of demoralisation. Since then, other demonstrations have taken place – against “Pegida”, TTIP,4 gene technology or the surveillance of the Internet – but devoid of any more fundamental criticism of capitalism as such.

And now, since the summer of 2015, the blows of the financial and Euro-crisis offensives were followed by another: the present refugee crisis. This is also being used to the maximum by the ruling class against any developing reflection within the proletariat. But more than the bourgeois propaganda, the refugee wave itself strikes a further blow against the first seeds of a recovery of class consciousness from the blow of 1989 (the “death of communism”). The fact that millions from the “periphery” of capitalism are risking their lives to gain access to Europe, North America and other “fortresses” can only, for the moment, reinforce the impression that it is a privilege to live in the developed parts of the world, and that the working class at the centre of the system, in the absence of any alternative to capitalism, might have something to defend within capitalism after all. Moreover, the class as a whole, stripped for the moment of its own political, theoretical and cultural heritage, tends to see the causes of this desperate migration, lying not within capitalism, not being linked to contradictions centred in the democratic countries, but in an absence or lack of capitalism and democracy in the conflict zones.

All of this has led to a renewed retreat of both militancy and consciousness within the class.

The problem of political populism

Although the phenomenon of right wing terror against foreigners and refugees is not new in Germany, particular since re-unification and particularly (although not only) in its new, Eastern provinces, until now the rise of a stable political populist movement in Germany has been successfully prevented by the ruling class itself. But in the context of the Euro-crisis, the acute phase of which lasted until the summer of 2015, and the “refugee crisis” which followed it, there has been a new upsurge of political populism. This has manifested itself mainly at three levels: The electoral rise of the “Alternative for Germany” (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), which was originally constituted in opposition to the Greek salvage packages, and on the basis of a vague opposition to the joint European currency; a populist right wing protest movement centred on the “Monday demonstrations” in Dresden (“Pegida”); a new resurgence of right wing terrorism against refugees and foreigners, such as the “National Socialist Underground” (NSA).

Such phenomena are not new on the German political scene. But until now, the bourgeoisie has always succeeded in preventing them leading to any kind of stable and parliamentary presence. By the summer of 2015, it seemed as if the ruling sectors would succeed in this once again. The AfD had been robbed of its theme (the “Greek” crisis) and of some of its financial resources, and had suffered its first split. But then this populism made a comeback – stronger than before – thanks to the new wave of immigration . And since this immigration question risks playing a more or less dominant role in the foreseeable future, the chances have increased of the AfD establishing itself as a new, more lasting component of the party political apparatus.

The ruling class is able to use all of this to make its electoral game more interesting, to boost the ideologies of democracy and anti-fascism, and also to spread division and xenophobia. Nevertheless, this whole process neither corresponds directly to its class interest, nor is it able to control the process completely.

That there is a close connection between the sharpening of the global crisis of capitalism and the advance of populism is illustrated by the Euro-crisis and its effects on the German political scene. The economic crisis not only augments insecurity and fear, intensifying the struggle for survival. It also fans the flames of irrationality. Germany economically would have the most to lose from any weakening of the cohesion of the EU and the Euro. Millions of jobs are directly or indirectly dependent on exports and the role the EU plays for Germany in this context. In such a country it is all the more irrational to put in question the EU, the Euro, the whole world market orientation of the national capital. At this level, it is no coincidence that the recent appearance of such xenophobic movements was triggered by worries about the stability of the new European currency.

Rationality is a vital moment of human reason, though not the only one. Rationality centres around the element of calculation in thinking. Since this includes the capacity to calculate one’s own objective interests, it is an indispensable element, not only of bourgeois society, but also of the proletarian liberation struggle. Historically, it appeared and developed to a large extent under the impetus of equivalent exchange. Since, under capitalism, money fully develops its role as universal equivalent, the currency and the confidence it inspires plays a major role in “formatting” rationality in bourgeois society. Loss of confidence in the universal equivalent is therefore one of the main sources of irrationality in bourgeois society. This is why currency crises and periods of hyperinflation are particularly dangerous for the stability of this society. The inflation of 1923 in Germany was thus one of the most important factors preparing the triumph of National Socialism ten years later.

The present wave of refugees and immigration, on the other hand, accentuates and illustrates another aspect of populism: the sharpening of competition between the victims of capitalism, and the tendency towards exclusion, xenophobia and scapegoating. The misery under capitalist rule gives rise to a triad of destruction: firstly the accumulation of aggression, hatred, maliciousness and a longing for destruction and self-destruction; secondly the projection of these anti-social impulses onto others (moral hypocrisy); thirdly the directing of these impulses, not against the ruling class, which appears too powerful to challenge, but against apparently weaker classes and social strata. This three-pronged “complex” flourishes therefore above all in the absence of the collective struggle of the proletariat, when individual subjects feel powerless in face of capital. The culminating point of this triad at the root of populism is the pogrom. Although the populist aggression also expresses itself against the ruling class, what it demands, so vocally, from it is protection and favours. What it desires is that the bourgeoisie should either eliminate what it sees as its threatening rivals, or tolerate the fact that it starts doing so itself. This “conformist revolt”, a permanent feature of capitalism, becomes acute in face of crisis, war, chaos, instability. In the 1930s the framework of its development was the world-historic defeat of the proletariat. Today this framework is the absence of any perspective: the phase of decomposition.

As already developed in the ICC’s Theses on Decomposition, one of the social and material bases of populism is the process of déclassement, the loss of any class identification. Despite German national capital’s economic robustness and its shortages of qualified labour, there is an important part of the German population today which, although unemployed, is not really an active factor of the industrial reserve army (ready to take the jobs of others and therefore exercising a downward pressure on wages), but which belongs rather to what Marx called the Lazarus layer of the working class. Because of health problems, or being unable to bear the stress of modern capitalist labour and the struggle for existence, or the lack of appropriate qualifications, this sector is “unemployable” from the capitalist point of view. Instead of pressuring wage levels, these layers increase the total wage bill for the national capital through the benefits they live off. It is this sector also which most feels the refugees today as potential rivals.

Within this sector, there are two important groups of proletarian youth, parts of which can be prone to mobilisation as cannon fodder for bourgeois cliques, but also as active protagonists of pogroms. The first is comprised of the children of the first or second generations of Gastarbeiter. The original idea was that these “guest workers” would not stay when they were no longer needed, and above all that they would not bring their families with them or found families in Germany. The opposite took place, and the bourgeoisie made no particular effort to educate the children of such families. The result today is that, because unskilled jobs have to a large extent been “exported” to what used to be termed “third world countries”, part of this segment of proletarian youth is condemned to an existence from state benefits, never being integrated into associated labour. The other group is the children of the traumatic mass sackings in East Germany after re-unification. Part of this segment, Germans rather than immigrants, which were not brought up to match the highly competitive “Western” form of capitalism, and did not dare make the move to West Germany to find a job after 1989, as the more intrepid ones did, has joined this army of people living from benefits. These sectors in particular are vulnerable to lumpenisation, criminalisation and decadent, xenophobic forms of politicisation.

Although populism is the product of its system, the bourgeoisie can neither produce this phenomenon at will, nor make it disappear at will. But it can manipulate it to its own ends, and encourage or discourage its development to a greater or lesser degree. In general it does both. But this is also not easy to dominate. Even in the context of totalitarian state capitalism it is difficult for the ruling class to achieve and maintain a coherence in such a situation. Populism itself is deeply rooted in the contradictions of capitalism. The reception of refugees today, for instance, lies in the objective interest of important sectors of German capitalism. The economic advantages are even more apparent than the imperialist ones. This is why the leaders of industry and the business world are the most enthusiastic supporters of the “welcoming culture” at the moment. They reckon that Germany would need an influx of about one million each year in the coming period in view of the predicted shortage of qualified labour and above all the demographic crisis caused by the country’s persistently low birth rate. Moreover, refugees from wars and other catastrophes often prove to be particularly diligent and disciplined workers, ready not only to work for low wages, but also to take initiative and risks. Moreover, the integration of newcomers from “outside”, and the cultural openness this requires, is itself a productive force (and a potential strength for the proletariat too, of course). An eventual success of Germany at this level could give it an additional advantage over its European competitors.

However, exclusion is, at the same time, the other side of the coin of Merkel’s inclusion policy. The immigration needed today is no longer the unqualified labour of the Gastarbeiter generations, now that the unskilled jobs have been concentrated in the periphery of capitalism. The new migrants should bring high qualifications with them, or at least the willingness to acquire them. The present situation requires a much more organised and ruthless selection than in the past. Because of these contradictory needs of inclusion and exclusion, the bourgeoisie encourages openness and xenophobia at the same time. It responds today to this need with a division of labour between left and right, including within Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party and her coalition government with the SPD. But behind the present dissonance between the different political groupings about the refugee question, there is not only division of labour, but also different concerns and interests. The bourgeoisie is not a homogeneous block. Whereas those parts of the ruling class and the state apparatus closer to the economy push for integration, the whole security apparatus is horrified by Merkel’s opening of the frontiers in summer 2015, and by the numbers coming ever since, because of the loss of control over who enters the state territory which this had temporarily led to. Moreover, within the repressive and legal apparatus there are inevitably those who sympathise with and protect the extreme right out of a shared obsession with law and order, nationalism etc.

As for the political caste itself, there are not only those who (depending on the mood in their constituency) flirt with populism out of opportunism. There are also many who share its mentality. To all of this we can add the contradictions of nationalism itself. Like all modern bourgeois states, Germany was founded on the basis of myths about shared history, culture and even blood. Against this background, even the most powerful bourgeoisie cannot invent and re-invent at will different definitions of the nation to suit its changing interests. Nor would it necessarily have an objective interest in doing so, since the old nationalist myths are still essential, and a powerful lever of “divide and rule” towards the inside, and of mobilising support for imperialist aggression towards the outside. Thus, it is still not self-evident today that you can have something like a black or a Muslim “German”.

The German ruling class faced with the “refugee crisis”

In the context of decomposition and economic crisis, the principle motor of populism in Europe in recent decades has been the problem of immigration. Today this problem has been sharpened by the biggest exodus since World War II. Why is this influx apparently much more of a political problem in Europe than in countries like Turkey, Jordan or even the Lebanon, which receive much bigger contingents? In the older capitalist countries, the pre-capitalist customs of hospitality, and the subsistence economic and social structures which go with them, have withered much more radically. There is also the fact that these migrants come from a different culture. This is of course not a problem in itself, on the contrary. But modern capitalism makes it a problem. In Western Europe in particular, the welfare state is the main organiser of social aid and cohesion. It is this state which is supposed to accommodate the refugees. This already places them in competition with the “indigenous” poor over jobs, housing and benefits.

Until now, because of its relative economic, political and social stability, immigration, and with it populism, has caused less problems in Germany than in much of western Europe. But in the present situation, the German bourgeoisie is increasingly confronted by this problem, not only at home but in the context of the European Union.

Within Germany itself, the rise of right wing populism disturbs its project of integrating part of the immigrants. This is a real problem since, to date, all the attempts to raise the birth rate “at home” have failed. Right wing terror also damages its reputation abroad – a very sensitive point in view of the crimes of the German bourgeoisie during the first half of the 20th century. The establishment of the AfD as a stable parliamentary force could complicate the formation of future governments. At the electoral level, it is at present a problem above all for the CDU/CSU, the leading governmental party, which, until now, under Merkel, has been able to attract both social democratic and conservative voters, thus cementing its leading position towards the SPD.

But it is above all at the level of Europe that populism today threatens German interests. The status of Germany as economically, and to a lesser degree politically, a global player, depends to an important degree on the existence and coherence of the EU. The arrival in government of populist, more or less anti-European parties in Eastern (already the case in Hungary and Poland) and above all in Western Europe, would tend to hamper this cohesion. This in particular is why Merkel has declared the refugee question to be the issue which will “decide the destiny of Germany”. The strategy of the German bourgeoisie towards this question is to attempt to convert, at the European level, the more or less chaotic migration of the post-war Gastarbeiter and de-colonisation period into a meritocratic, highly selective immigration more on the Canadian or Australian model. The more effective sealing of the external borders of the EU is one of the preconditions for the the proposed conversion of illegal into legal immigration. It would also entail the establishment of yearly immigration quotas. Instead of paying horrific sums to get smuggled into the EU, migrants are to be encouraged to “invest” in improving their own qualifications in order to increase chances of legal access. Instead of setting off towards Europe on their own initiative, those refugees accepted would be provided with transport, accommodation and eventual jobs already designated for them. The other side of this coin is that the undesired immigrants would be stopped at the borders, or quickly and brutally expelled if they have already managed to gain access. This conversion of the EU borders into selection ramps (already an ongoing process) is presented as a humanitarian project aimed at reducing the numbers drowning in the Mediterranean, which, despite all media manipulation, has become a source of moral disgrace for the European bourgeoisie. Through its insistence on a European rather than a national solution, Germany is assuming its responsibilities towards capitalist Europe, at the same time underlining its claim to political leadership of the old continent. Its goal is nothing less than to defuse the time bomb of immigration, and with it of political populism, in the EU.

It was in this context that the Merkel government, in summer 2015, opened the German borders to refugees. At that moment, the Syrian refugees, who until then were ready to remain in eastern Turkey, began to lose hope in returning home, thus setting off, en masse, towards Europe. At the same time, the Turkish government decided, in order to blackmail the EU, which was blocking Ankara’s candidature for European entry, not to prevent their departure. In this situation, the closing of the German borders would have created a pile-up of hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Balkans, a chaotic, almost uncontrollable situation. But by temporarily lifting the control of its borders, Berlin triggered a new flood of migration of desperate people who suddenly (mis)understood that they were being invited to Germany. All of this shows the reality of a moment of potential loss of control of the situation.

Because of the radical manner with which she has identified herself with “her” project, the chances of success for Merkel’s proposed “European solution” would considerably deteriorate were she to fail to be re-elected in 2017. One of the planks of Merkel’s re-election campaign seems to be an economic one. Given the present slowdown in Chinese and American growth, the export-oriented German economy would normally be heading towards recession. An increase of state spending and building activity “for the refugees” could avoid such an eventuality in the run up to the elections.

Unlike the 1970s (when in many leading Western countries left capitalist parties came to government: the “left in power”) or the 1980s (the “left in opposition) the present government strategy and electoral “game” in Germany is determined to a much lesser degree by the more immediate threat of the class struggle, and much more than in the past by the problems of immigration and populism.

The refugees and the working class

The solidarity with the refugees expressed by an important part of the population in Germany, although exploited to the hilt by the state to promote the image of a humane German nationalism, open to the world, was spontaneous and, at the beginning, “self-organised”. And still today, more than half a year after the beginning of the present crisis, the state management of the influx would collapse without the initiatives of the population. There is nothing proletarian about these activities in themselves. On the contrary, these people are partly doing the work which the state is unwilling or unable to do, often still without any payment. For the working class, the central problem is that this solidarity cannot take place presently on a class terrain. For the moment it takes on a very apolitical character, unconnected to any explicit opposition to the imperialist war in Syria for instance. Like the NGOs and all the different “critical” organisations of (in reality non-existent) civil society, these structures have more or less immediately been transformed into appendages of the totalitarian state.

But at the same time it would be a mistake to simply dismiss this solidarity as merely charity. All the more so since this solidarity is being expressed towards an influx of potential rivals on the labour and other markets. In the absence of pre-capitalist traditions of hospitality, in the old capitalist countries the associated labour and solidarity of the proletariat is the main social, material basis of any more generally felt solidarity. Its whole spirit has not been one of “helping the poor and weak”, but of co-operation and collective creativity. In the long term, if the class begins to recover its identity, consciousness and heritage, this present experience of solidarity can be integrated into the experience of the class and its search for a revolutionary perspective. Among the workers in Germany today, at least potentially, the impulses of solidarity express a certain kindling of a class memory and consciousness, recalling that in Europe also, the experience of war and massive population dislocation is not so very far away, and that the failure of solidarity in the face of this experience during the period of counter-revolution (before, during and after World War II) should not be repeated today.

The opposite pole of populism in capitalism is not democracy and humanism but associated labour – the main counter-weight to xenophobia and pogromism. The resistance to exclusion and scapegoating has always been a permanent and essential moment of the daily proletarian class struggle. There can today be the beginnings of a very unclear groping towards a recognition that the wars and other catastrophes which oblige people to flee are part of the violent separations through which, in a permanent process, the proletariat is constituted. And that the refusal of those who have lost everything to obediently stay where the ruling class wants them to, their refusal to renounce the pursuit of a better life, are constituting moments of proletarian combativeness. The struggle for its mobility, against the regime of capitalist discipline, is one of the oldest moments in the life of “free” wage labour.

Globalisation and the need for an international struggle

In the part on the balance sheet of the class struggle, we argued that the 2015 strikes in Germany were more an expression of a temporary, favourable, national economic situation, than an indication of a more widespread European or international militancy. It remains therefore true that it has become increasingly difficult for the working class to defend its immediate interests through strike action and other means of struggle. This does not mean that economic struggles are no longer possible, or have lost their relevance (as the so-called Essen Tendency of the KAPD wrongly concluded in the 1920s). On the contrary, it means that the economic dimension of the class struggle contains a much more direct political dimension than in the past – a dimension which it is extremely difficult to take responsibility for.

Recent ICC congress resolutions have rightly identified the intimidating weight of mass unemployment as one of the objective factors inhibiting the development of struggles in defence of immediate economic interests. But this is not the only, and not even the main economic cause of this inhibition. A more fundamental one lies in what is called globalisation – the present phase of totalitarian state capitalism – and the framework it gives for the world economy.

The globalisation of world capitalism is, in itself, not a new phenomenon. We already find it at the basis of the first highly mechanised sector of capitalist production: the textile industry in Britain was the centre of a triangle linked to the robbery of slaves in Africa and their labour in cotton plantations in the United States. In terms of world trade, the level of globalisation attained before World War I was not reached again until the end of the 20th century. Nevertheless, in the last three decades, this globalisation has acquired a new quality, above all at two levels: in production and in finance. The pattern of the periphery of capitalism providing cheap labour, agricultural plantation products and raw materials for the industrial countries of the northern hemisphere has been, if not wholly replaced, certainly substantially modified by global production networks, still centred in the more dominant countries, but where industrial and service activity is taking place all over the world. Inside this “Ordo-Liberal” corset, the tendency is for no national capital, no industry, no sector or business to be able to exempt itself anymore from direct international competition. There is almost nothing being produced in any part of the world which could not be produced somewhere else. Each nation state, each region, each city, each neighbourhood, each sector of the economy is condemned to compete with all the others to attract global investment. The whole world is spellbound, as if condemned to waiting for the salvation through the coming of Capital in the form of investments. This phase of capitalism is by no means a spontaneous product, but a state order introduced and imposed above all by the leading, old bourgeois nation states. One of the goals of this economic policy is to imprison the working class of the whole world in a monstrous disciplinary system.

At this level, we can perhaps divide the history of the objective conditions of the class struggle, very schematically, into three phases. In capitalist ascendency the workers were confronted first and foremost with individual capitalists, and could thus organise themselves more or less effectively in trade unions. With the concentration of capital in the hands of big enterprises and the state, these established means of struggle lost their effectiveness. Each strike was now directly confronted with the whole bourgeoisie, centralised in the state. It took time for the proletariat to find an effective answer to this new situation: the mass strike of the whole proletariat at the level of an entire country (Russia 1905), already containing within itself the potential for the seizure of power and spreading to other countries (the first revolutionary wave begun by Red October). Today, with contemporary globalisation, an objective historical tendency of decadent capitalism achieves its full development: each strike, each act of economic resistance by workers anywhere in the world, finds itself immediately confronted by the whole of world capital, ever ready to withdraw production and investment and produce somewhere else. For the moment, the international proletariat has been quite unable to find an adequate answer, or even to gain a glimpse of what such an answer might look like. We do not know if it will succeed in the end in doing so. But it seems clear that the development in this direction would take much longer than did the transition from trade unionism to mass strike. For one thing, the situation of the proletariat in the old, central countries of capitalism – those, like Germany, at the “top” of the economic hierarchy – would have to become much more dramatic than is today the case. For another, the step required by objective reality – conscious international class struggle, the “international mass strike” – is much more demanding than the one from trade union to mass strike in one country. For it obliges the working class to call into question not only corporatism and sectionalism, but the main, often centuries- or even millennia-old divisions of class society such as nationality, ethnic culture, race, religion, sex etc. This is a much more profound and more political step.

In reflecting on this question, we should take into consideration that the factors preventing the development by the proletariat of its own revolutionary perspective lie not only in the past, but also in the present; that they have not only political causes but also economic (more correctly: economico-political) ones.


Presentation on the national situation in Germany (March 2016)

At the time of the 2008 financial crisis there was a tendency within the ICC towards a kind of economic “catastrophism”, one expression of which was the idea, put forward by some comrades, that the collapse of central capitalist countries such as Germany might now be on the agenda. One of the reasons for making the relative economic strength and competitiveness of Germany an axis of this report is in the hope of contributing to overcoming such weaknesses. But we also want to enforce the spirit of nuance against schematic thinking. Because capitalism itself has an abstract mode of functioning (based on equivalent exchange), there is an understandable but unhealthy tendency to see economic questions too abstractly, for example judging the relative economic strength of national capitals only in very general terms (like the rate of organic composition of capital, labour intensive production, mechanisation, as mentioned in the report), forgetting that capitalism is a social relation between human beings, above all between social classes.

We should clarify one point: when the report says that the US bourgeoisie are using juridical means (fines against Volkswagen and others) to counter German competition, the intention was not to give the impression that the United States has no economic strengths of its own to throw into the scales. For example, the USA is presently ahead of Germany in the development of electric-powered and self-driving cars, and one of the hypotheses doing the rounds in the social media about the so-called Volkswagen scandal (that the information about the manipulation of emission measurements by that company may have been leaked to the American authorities from within the German bourgeoisie to oblige the German car industry to catch up at this level) are not wholly implausible.

On the way the refugee crisis is used for imperialist ends, it is necessary to bring the report up to date. At present, both Turkey and Russia are making massive use of the plight of refugees to blackmail German capital and weaken what remains of European cohesion. The way Ankara has been letting refugees move westwards is already mentioned in the report. The price for Turkish cooperation on this question will not only be many billions of Euros. As for Russia, it has recently been accused by a series of NGOs and refugee aid organisations of deliberately bombing hospitals and residential districts in Syrian cities in order to triggernew trails of refugees. More generally, Russian propaganda has been systematically using the refugee question to fan the flames of political populism in Europe.

As for Turkey, it is demanding not only money but also the acceleration of visa-free access of its citizens to Europe, and of negotiations towards membership in the EU. From Germany it is also demanding cessation of military aid to Kurdish unity in Iraq and Syria.

For Chancellor Merkel, who is the most prominent exponent of a closer collaboration with Ankara in the refugee question, and is a more or less staunch Atlanticist (for her, proximity to the United States is the lesser evil compared to proximity to Moscow), this is less of a problem than it is for other members of her own party. As the report already mentioned, Putin had planned the modernisation of the Russian economy in close collaboration with German industry, in particular its engineering sector which, since the Second World War, has been mainly located in the south of Germany (including Siemens, once based in Berlin and now in Munich, which seems to have been designated to play a central role in this “Russian operation”). It is in this context we can understand the link between the persistent critique of Merkel’s “European” (and “Turkish”) “solution” to the refugee crisis by the CDU’s companion party, the Bavarian CSU, and the spectacular semi-official visit by Bavarian party leaders to Moscow at the high point of this controversy5. This fraction would prefer to collaborate with Moscow rather than with Ankara. Paradoxically, the strongest supporters of the chancellor on this question today are not within in her own party, the CDU, but her coalition partner, the SPD, and the parliamentary opposition. We can explain this partly through a division of labour within the ruling Christian Democracy, the right wing of which is trying (for the moment not very successfully) to keep its conservative voters from defecting to the populists (AfD). But there are also regional tensions (since World War II, although the government was in Bonn and the financial capital in Frankfurt, the cultural life of the German bourgeoisie was mainly concentrated in Munich. It is only recently that this, following the move of the government there, has started to re-gravitate towards Berlin).

In relation to the present waves of immigration, there is not only an antagonism within Europe, of course, but also collaboration and division of labour, for instance between the German and the Austrian bourgeoisie. By initiating the “closing of the Balkan route”, Austria made Berlin less one-sidedly dependent on Turkey in holding up refugees, thus partly bolstering Berlin’s negotiation position towards Ankara6.

While an important part of the business world supported Merkel’s “welcoming policy” towards refugees last summer, this was far from being the case among the security organs of the state, who were absolutely horrified by the more or less uncontrolled and unregistered influx into the country. They have still not forgiven her for this. The French and other European governments were no less sceptical. They are all convinced that imperialist opponents from the Islamic world are using the refugee crisis to smuggle Jihadists into Germany, from where they can move on to France, Belgium etc. In fact, the criminal assaults of New Year’s Eve in Cologne already confirmed that even criminal gangs have been exploiting asylum procedures to position their members in the big European cities. You do not have to be a prophet to foresee that yet another expansion of the scale and importance of the police and secret services in Europe will be one of the principle results of the present developments7.

The report makes a connection between economic crisis, immigration and political populism. If we add the growing role of anti-semitism, the parallels with the 1930s become particularly striking. But it is interesting, in this connection, to examine how the situation in Germany today also illustrates the historical differences. The fact that there is no conclusive evidence, for the moment, that the central sections of the proletariat are defeated, disoriented and demoralised as they were 80 years ago, is the most important, but not the only difference. The economic policy favoured by the big bourgeoisie today is globalisation, not autarky, nor the protectionism advocated by “moderate” populists. This touches on an aspect of contemporary populism still underdeveloped in the report: opposition to the European Union. The latter is, at the economic level, one of the instruments of present day globalisation. In Europe, it has even become its main symbol. Part of the background of the formation of populist governments in central-eastern Europe recently is, for example, the negotiation of the TTIP trade agreement between North America and Europe, through which big industry and agri-business stand to benefit at the expense of small farmers and producers in places like the so-called Visegrad-states (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia).

As far as the situation of the proletariat is concerned, the concern expressed at the end of the report is that we should not only look at causes essentially lying in the past (such as the counter-revolution which followed the defeat of the Russian and world revolution at the end of World War I) to explain the difficulties of the working class to politically develop its struggle in a revolutionary direction after 1968. All these factors from the past, and which are all profoundly true explanations, nonetheless prevented neither May 68 in France nor the 1969 Hot Autumn in Italy. Nor should we assume that the revolutionary potential expressed at that time, in an embryonic manner, was condemned to failure from the onset. Explanations based one-sidedly on the past lead to a kind of determinist fatalism. At the economic level, so-called globalisation was an economic and political, state capitalist instrument which the bourgeoisie found to stabilise its system and to counter the proletarian threat, an instrument which the proletariat, in turn, will have to find an answer to. This is why the difficulties of the working class in the past 30 years to develop a revolutionary alternative are intimately linked to the politico-economic strategy of the bourgeoisie, including its capacity to postpone an economic Kladderadatsch (catastrophe) for the working class – and thus the threat of class war – in the old centres of world capitalism.


1 The Hanseatic League was a trading and industrial alliance in Northern Germany which dominated Baltic trade throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period.

2 “Ordoliberalism” is a German variant of political-economic liberalism which emphasizes the need for the state to intervene in ensuring that the free market produces close to its economic potential.

3 According to Rosa Luxemburg, extra-capitalist zones centre around production not yet directly based on the exploitation of wage labour by capital, whether subsistence economy or production for the market by individual producers. The purchasing power of such producers helps enable capital accumulation to take place. Capitalism also mobilises and exploits labour power and “raw materials” (i.e. natural wealth) coming from these zones.

4 The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the proposed free-trade agreement between Europe and the United States.

5 The discussion at the conference also rightly pointed out that the formulation of the report, according to which the business world in Germany supports, as if as a single block, the refugee policy of Merkel, is very schematic and as such incorrect. Even the need for fresh labour resources by employers is very varied from one sector to another.

6 Although this convergence of interests between Vienna and Berlin, as was pointed out in the discussion, is temporary and fragile.

7 This Jihadist infiltration, and the mounting likelihood of terrorist attacks is a reality. But so is the use of this and other means by the ruling class to create an atmosphere of permanent fear, panic and suspicion, antidotes to critical reflection and solidarity within the working population.

 

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Conference report 2016

2017 - International Review

International Review 158 - Spring 2017

The Trump election and the crumbling of capitalist world order

What can the world expect from the new Trump Administration in the USA? Whereas the traditional political elites across the globe are full of anxiety, the Russian government and the right-wing populists in America and throughout Europe see history on their side. And while big world-wide operating companies (such as in the car industry) fear reprisals now if they do not produce in the United States, the stock exchanges and economic institutes were initially confident, expecting increased growth for the US and even the world economy under Trump. As for Mr. President himself, he regularly contradicts not only his own new administration, but also himself. Thus NATO, free trade or the European Union can in one sentence be “essential” and in the next “obsolete”.

Instead of joining in with this crystal ball gazing about the near future of American state policy, we will try here first of all to analyse why Trump was elected president, although the traditional established political elites did not want him. Out of this contradiction between what Trump represents, and the interests of the US ruling class as a whole, we hope to win firmer ground for giving some first indications of what can be expected from his presidency, without falling into too much speculation.

The dilemma of the Republican Party

It is no secret that Donald Trump is looked on as a foreign body in the Republican Party which nominated him for election to the White House. He is neither religious nor conservative enough for the Christian fundamentalists who play such an important role in that party. His economic policy proposals, such as a state organised infrastructural programme, protectionism, or the replacement of “Obamacare” by a state-backed social insurance for everyone – are anathema to the neo-liberals who still play a central role in Republican circles, as they do in the Democratic Pparty. His plans for a rapprochement with Putin's Russia pit him against the military and intelligence lobby which is so strong both in the Republican and Democratic parties.

The presidential candidature of Trump was made possible by an unprecedented revolt of the Republican membership and supporters against their leaders. The other candidates, whether they came from the Bush clan, the Christian evangelists, the neo-libs or the Tea Party movement, had all been discredited by their participation in or support for the George W Bush administration which preceded that of Obama. The fact that, in the face of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/08, a Republican president had done nothing to help millions of small property owners and aspiring small property owners – who in many cases lost job, home and savings at one go – while bailing out banks with government money, was unforgivable to traditional Republican voters. Moreover, none of the other candidates had anything else to propose, at the economic level, than more of the same of what had not prevented the 2008 disaster.

Indeed, the rebellion of the traditional Republican voters directed itself not only against their leadership, but against some of the traditional “values” of the party. In this way, the candidature of Trump was not only made possible, it was virtually imposed on the party leadership. Of course, the latter could have prevented it – but only at the risk of estranging themselves from their mass basis and even of dividing the party. This explains why the attempts to foil Trump were but half-hearted and ineffective. In the end the “Grand Old Party” was obliged to try and make a “deal” with the intruder from the East Coast.

The dilemma of the Democratic Party

A similar revolt took place within the Democratic Party. After eight years of Obama, belief in the famous “yes we can” (“yes we can” improve the lives of the population at large) had seriously waned. The leader of this rebellion was Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “socialist”. Like Trump on the Republican side, Sanders was a new phenomenon in the modern history of the Democrats. Not that “socialists” as such are a foreign body within that party. But they belong to it as one minority among many, who underline the claim to multi-cultural plurality within that party. They are considered a foreign element when they stake a claim for candidature to the Oval Office. Whether under Bill Clinton or Barak Obama, contemporary Democratic presidents combine a social welfare touch with fundamentally neo-liberal economic policies. A direct interventionist state economic policy of a strong “Keynesian” character (such as that of FD Roosevelt before and during World War II) is as much anathema to the Democratic as to the Republican leadership today. This explains why Sanders never made a secret of the fact that on some issues his policies are closer to those of Trump than they are to those of Hillary Clinton. After the Trump election, Sanders immediately offered him his support in the implementation of his “insurance for all” scheme.

However, as opposed to what happened to the Republicans, the revolt in the Democratic Party was successfully crushed, and Clinton safely nominated instead of Sanders. This succeeded, not only because the DP is the better organised and controlled of the two parties, but also because the elite of this party had been less discredited than its Republican counterpart.

But paradoxically, this success of the party leadership only paved the way for its defeat at the presidential elections. By eliminating Sanders, the Democrats set aside the only candidate who had a good chance of defeating Trump. The DP realised too late that Trump would be the adversary, and that they were underestimating his electoral potential. They also underestimated the degree to which Hillary Clinton herself was discredited. This was above all due to her image as representative of “Wall Street”, of the “East Coast financial oligarchies” - popularly seen as a major “culprit” and at the same time major beneficiary of the financial crisis. In fact, she had become almost as much identified with the catastrophe of 2008 as the Republican leadership itself. The arrogant complacency of the Democratic elite and their blindness towards mounting popular fury and resentment was to characterise the whole of Clinton's electoral campaign. One example of this was her one-sided reliance on the more traditional mass media, whereas Trump's campaign team was using the possibilities of the new media to the hilt.

Because they did not want Sanders, they got Trump instead. Even for those within the US bourgeoisie with a strong dislike for a phase of neo-Keynesian economic experimentation, Sanders would undoubtedly have been the lesser evil. Sanders, not unlike Trump, wanted to slow down the process of what is called “globalisation”. But he would have done so moderately and with a much greater sense of responsibility. With Trump, the ruling class of the world's leading power cannot even be sure what it is getting.

The dilemma of the established political parties

The United States is a country founded by settlers and populated by waves of immigration. The integration of the different ethnic and religious groups and interests into a single nation is the historically evolving task of the existing constitutional and political system. A particular challenge for this system is the involvement of the leaders of the different immigrant communities in government, since each new immigrant wave begins at the bottom of the social ladder and has to “work its way up”. The alleged American melting pot is in reality a highly complicated system of (not always) peaceful co-existence between different groups.

Historically, alongside institutions such as the religious organisations, the formation of criminal organisations has been a proven means for excluded groups to gain access to power. The American bourgeoisie has a long experience with the integration of the best rackets from the underworld into the upper echelons. This is an oft-repeated family saga: the father a gangster, the son a lawyer or a politician, the grandson or granddaughter a philanthropist and patron of the arts. The advantage of this system was that the violence it relied on was not overtly political. This made them compatible with the existing two party state system. To which side the Italian, Irish or Jewish vote went depended on the given constellation and what Trump would call the “deals” Republicans and Democrats were offering the different communities and vested interests. In America, these constellations between communities constantly have to be dealt with, not only those between different industries or branches of the economy for instance.

But this essentially non-party political integration process, compatible with the stability of the party apparatus, began to fail for the first time in the face of the demands of the black Americans. The latter had come to America originally, not as settlers, but as slaves. They had from the onset to bear the full brunt of modern capitalist racism. To gain access to bourgeois equality before the law, and to power and privileges for a black elite, overtly political movements had to be created. Without Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement, but also a violence of a new kind – the riots in the black ghettoes in the 1960s and the Black Panthers – there could not have been the Obama presidency. The established ruling elite succeeded in meeting this challenge by attaching the Civil Rights Movement to the Democratic Party. But in this manner, the existing distinction between the different ethnic groups and the political parties was put in question. The black vote goes regularly to the Democratic Party. At first, the Republicans were able to develop a counterweight to this by gaining a more or less stable part of the Latino vote (first and foremost the Cuban exile community). As for the “white” vote, that continued to go to one side or other depending on what was on offer.

Until the 2016 elections. One of the factors which brought Trump into the White House was the electoral alliance he made with different groups of “white supremacists”. Unlike the old-style racism of the Klu Klux Klan with its nostalgia for the slave system which reigned in the southern states until the American Civil War, the hatred of these new currents directs itself against the urban and rural black but also Latino poor, condemned as criminals and social parasites. Although Trump himself may not be a racist of this type, these modern white supremacists created a kind of voting bloc in his favour. For the first time, millions of white voters cast their vote, not according to the recommendation of “their” different communities, and not for one or the other party, but for someone they saw as the representative of a larger “white” community. The underlying process is one of increasing “communitarisation” of American bourgeois politics. A further step in the segregation of the so-called melting pot.

The dilemma of the American ruling class and Trump’s “Make America Great Again”

The problem of all the Republican candidates who tried to oppose Trump, and then of Hillary Clinton, was not only that they were not convincing, but also that they did seem convinced themselves. All they could propose were different varieties of “business as usual”. Above all, they had no alternatives to Trump's “making America great again”. Behind this slogan there is not just a new version of the old nationalism. Trump's Americanism is of a new kind. It contains the clear admission that America is no longer as “great” as it used to be. Economically it has been unable to prevent the rise of China. Militarily it has suffered a series of more or less humiliating reversals: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. America is a power in decline, even if it remains economically and above all militarily and technologically by far the leading country. But not only this. America is not an exception in an otherwise flourishing world. Its decline has come to symbolise that of capitalism as a whole. The vacuum created by the absence of any alternatives coming from the established elites has helped to give Trump his chance.

Not that America has not already attempted to react in the face of its historical decline. Some of the changes announced by Trump already began beforehand, in particular under Obama. They include a greater priority for the Pacific zone, economically and above all militarily, so that the European NATO “partners” are asked to bear a heavier brunt than before; or at the economic level a more state-directed economic policy in dealing with the 2008 crisis and its aftermath. But this can only slow down the present decline, whereas Trump claims to be able to reverse it.

In the face of this decline, and also of growing class, racial, religious and ethnic divisions, Trump wants to unite the capitalist nation behind its ruling class in the name of a new Americanism. The United States, according to Trump, has become the main victim of the rest of the world. He claims that, while the US has been exhausting itself and its resources maintaining world order, all the rest have been profiting from this order at the expense of “God’s own country”. The Trumpistas are thinking here not only of the Europeans or the East Asians who have been flooding the American market with their products. One of the main “exploiters” of the United States, according to Trump, is Mexico, which he accuses of exporting its surplus population into the American social welfare system, while at the same time developing its own industry to such an extent that its automobile production is overtaking that of its northern neighbour.

This amounts to a new and virulent form of nationalism, reminiscent of “underdog” German nationalism after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. The orientation of this form of nationalism is no longer to justify the imposing of a world order by America. Its orientation is to itself put in question the existing world order.

Trump’s Russian roulette

But the question the world is asking itself is whether Trump has a real political offer in response to America's decline. If not, if his alternative is purely ideological, he is not likely to last for very long. Certainly Trump has no coherent programme for his national capital. Nobody is clearer about this than Trump himself. His policy, he repeatedly declares, is to make “great deals” for America (and for himself) whenever the opportunity presents itself. The new programme for American capital is, it would seem, Trump himself: a risk-loving, several times bankrupt businessman as head of state.

But this does not necessarily mean that Trump has no chance of at least slowing down the decline of America. He MIGHT at least partly succeed – but only if he is lucky. Here we are approaching the crux of Trumpism. The new president, who wants to run the world's leading state as if it were a capitalist enterprise, is ready, in the pursuit of his goals, to take incalculable risks – risks which no “conventional” bourgeois politician in his position would want to take. If they work, they can turn out to be to the benefit of American capitalism at the expense of its rivals, but without too much damage to the system as a whole. But if they go wrong, the consequences can be catastrophic for American and for world capitalism.

We can already give three examples of the kind of Va Banque policies Trump wants to launch into. One of them is his protectionist blackmailing policy. His goal is not to put an end to the present world economic order (“globalisation”) but to get a better deal for America within that order. The USA is the only country whose internal market is so big that it can threaten its rivals with protectionist measures on such a scale. The summit of the rationality of the policy of Trump is his calculation that the political leaders of his main rivals are less crazy than he is, i.e. that they will not risk a protectionist trade war. But should his measures unleash a chain reaction that gets out of control, the result can be a fragmentation of the world market comparable to what happened during the Great Depression.

The second example is NATO. Already the Obama administration had begun to pressure the European “partners” to bear a greater brunt of the alliance in Europe and beyond. The difference now is that Trump is ready to threaten the discarding or side-lining of NATO if Washington's will is not followed. Here again, Trump is playing with fire, since NATO is first and foremost an instrument to secure the presence of US imperialism in Europe.

Our last example here is Trump's project of a “great deal” with Putin's Russia. One of the main problems of the Russian economy today is that it has not really completed the transformation from a Stalinist command regime to a properly functioning capitalist order. This transformation was, during a first phase, hampered by the priority of the Putin regime of preventing strategically important raw materials or the armaments industry being bought up by foreign capital. The necessary process of privatisation was done half-heartedly, so that a large part of Russian industry still functions on the basis of an administrative allocation of resources. During a second phase, the plan of Putin was to tackle the privatisation and modernisation of the economy in collaboration with the European bourgeoisie, first and foremost with Germany. But this plan was successfully foiled by Washington, essentially through its policy of economic sanctions against Russia. Although the occasion of these sanctions was Moscow's annexation policy towards the Ukraine, it additionally aimed at preventing a strengthening of the economies both of Russia and of Germany.

But this success – perhaps the main achievement of the Obama presidency towards Europe – has negative consequences for the world economy as a whole. The establishment of more classical private property in Russia would create a cluster of new credit-worthy economic players who can vouch for the loans they take with land, raw materials etc. In view of the economic difficulties of the world economy today, where even in Chin growth is slowing down, can capitalism afford to renounce such “deals”?

No, according to Trump. His idea is that not Germany and Europe, but America itself should become Putin's “partner in transformation”. According to Trump (who of course also hopes for lucrative deals for himself), the Russian bourgeoisie, which is obviously unable to tackle its modernisation on its own, can choose between three possible partners, the third being the Chinese. Since the latter are the biggest threat to America, it is vital that Washington and not Peking assume this role.

However, none of Trump's projects have provoked such bitter resistance within the US ruling class as this one. The whole phase between the election of Trump and his arrival in office was dominated by the joint attempts of the “intelligence community”, the mainstream media and the Obama administration to sabotage the envisaged rapprochement with Moscow. Here they all think that the risks Trump wants to take are too high. Even if it is true that the main challenger today is China, a modernised Russia would constitute a considerable additional danger to the USA. After all, Russia is (also) a European power, and Europe still the heart of the world economy. And Russia still has the second largest nuclear arsenal after the US. Another possible problem is that, if the economic sanctions against Russia were lifted, the sphinx in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, is considered perfectly capable of outwitting Trump by re-introducing the Europeans into his plans (in order to limit his dependence on America). The French bourgeoisie, for instance, is already getting ready for this eventuality: two of the main candidates for the coming presidential elections there (Fillon and Le Pen) have made no secret of their sympathies for Russia.

For the moment, the outcome of this latter conflict within the American bourgeoisie remains open. Meanwhile, Trump’s argument remains one-sidedly economic (although it is not at all excluded that he can extend his adventurism to a policy of military provocation against Peking). But what is true is that an effective long term response to the Chinese challenge must have a strong economic component, and cannot take place solely at the military level. There are two areas in particular where the US economy has to bear a much heavier burden than China does, and which Trump would have to try to “rationalise”. One of them is the enormous military budget. Concerning this aspect, the policy towards Russia also has an ideological dimension, since, in recent years, the idea that Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union has been one of the main justifications given for the persistence of astronomic “defence” spending.

The other budget Trump wants to significantly reduce is the social welfare budget. Here, in attacking the working class, he can however count on the support of the ruling class as a whole.

Trump’s promise of violence

Alongside an attitude of irresponsible adventurism, the other major feature of Trumpism is the threat of violence. One of his specialities is to threaten internationally operating companies with reprisals if they do not do what he wants. What he wants, he says, are “jobs for American workers”. His way of harassing big business by tweet is also aimed at impressing all those who live in constant fear because their existences depend on the whims of such giant companies. These workers are invited to identify with his strength, which is allegedly at their service because they are good obedient honest Americans who want to work hard for their country.

During his electoral campaign, Trump told his challenger Hillary Clinton he wanted to “lock her up”. Later he declared we would show clemency towards her – as if the question of when other politicians land in prison depended on his own personal whims. No such clemency is foreseen for illegal immigrants. Already Obama deported more of them than any American president before him. Trump wants to jail them for two years before evicting them. The promise of bloodshed is the aura through which he attracts the growing multitude of those in this society whoare unable to defend themselves but who thirst for revenge. People who come to his meetings to protest he has beaten up under the eyes of the TV nation. Women, outsiders, so-called misfits are made to understand that they should count themselves lucky if it is only his verbal violence they are exposed to. Not only does he want to have a wall built to keep the Mexicans out – he promises to make them pay for it themselves. To exclusion is added humiliation.

These threats have obviously been a calculated part of Trump’s demagogic election campaign, but on assuming office he lost no time pushing through a number of ‘accomplished facts’ aimed at proving that he, unlike other politicians, is going to do what he says. The most spectacular expression of this - one which has caused enormous conflict both within the bourgeoisie and within the population as a whole – has been his “Muslim ban”, suspending the right of travellers from a selected number of Muslim-majority countries to enter or re-enter the US. This is above all a statement of intent, a sign of his willingness to target minorities and associate Islam in general with terrorism, however much he denies that this measure is aimed specifically at Muslims.

What America needs, Trump tells the world, is more guns and more torture. Our modern bourgeois civilisation produces no shortage of such bragging thugs and bullies, just as it admires and acclaims those who take for themselves whatever they can get at the expense of others. What’s new is that millions of people in one of the world's most modern countries want such a thug as head of state. Trump, like his model and would-be friend Putin, are popular not in spite of but because of their thuggery.

In capitalism there are always two possible alternatives, either equivalent exchange or non-equivalent exchange (robbery). You can either give someone else an equivalent for what you get, or you don't. In order for the market to function, its subjects have to renounce violence in economic life. They do so under threat of reprisals, such as prison, but also on the promise that their renunciation will pay off for them in the long run in terms of securing their existence. However, it remains the case that the basis of economic life in capitalism is indeed robbery: the surplus value the capitalists gain from the unpaid surplus labour of the wage workers. This robbery has been legalised in the form of capitalist private property of the means of production; it is enforced every day by the state, which is the state apparatus of the ruling class. Capitalist economy requires a taboo on violence at the market place. Buying and selling are supposed to be peaceful actions – including the buying and selling of labour power: workers are not slaves. Under “normal” circumstances, working people are ready to live more or less peacefully under such conditions, despite realising that there is a minority which refuses to do the same. This minority is composed of the criminal milieu, which lives from robbery, and the state, which is the biggest robber of all, both in relation to its “own” population (taxation), and in relation to other states (war). And although the state represses the criminals in defence of private property, at the upper echelons the top gangsters and the robber state tend to collaborate rather than oppose each other. But when capitalism can no longer credibly offer even the illusion of a possible improvement of the living conditions for society as a whole, the compliance of society to be revoked.

Today we have entered a period (not unlike that of the 1930s) where large sectors of society feel cheated and no longer believe their renunciation of violence pays off. But they remain intimidated by the threat of repression, by the illegal status of the criminal world. This is when the longing to be part of those who can rob without fear becomes political. The essence of their “populism” is the demand that violence against certain groups be legalised, or at least unofficially tolerated. In Hitler-Germany, for example, the course towards world war was a “normal” manifestation of the “robber state” which it shared with Stalin-Russia, Roosevelt-America etc. What was new in National Socialism was the systematic robbery, organised by the state, against part of its own population. Scapegoating and pogroms were legalised. The Holocaust was not first and foremost the product of the history of anti-Semitism or of Nazism. It was a product of modern capitalism. Robbery becomes the alternative economic perspective for sectors of the population sinking into barbarism. But this barbarism is that of the capitalist system itself. Criminality is as much part of bourgeois society as the stock exchange. Robbery and buying-selling are the two poles of advanced modern society based on private property. The profession of the robber can only be abolished by abolishing class society. When robbery starts to replace buying and selling, this is at once the self-realisation and self-destruction of bourgeois civilisation. In the absence of an alternative, of a revolutionary communist perspective, the longing to exercise violence against others grows.

The fish stinks from the head downwards

What happens when parts of the ruling class itself, followed by some of the intermediary layers of society, start to lose confidence in the possibility of sustained growth for the world economy? Or when they start to lose hope that they themselves can benefit from whatever growth still takes place? On no account will they want to give uptheir aspirations to a (greater) share of wealth and power. Should the wealth available no longer increase, they can still fight for a bigger share at the expense of the rest. Here lies the connection between the economic situation and the growing thirst for violence. The perspective of growth starts to be replaced by the perspective of robbery and pillage. If millions of illegal workers were to be expelled, so the calculation goes, there would be more jobs, housing, social care for those who remain. The same goes for all those who live from the system of social benefits without paying into it. As for ethnic minorities, some of them have businesses which could pass into the hands of others. This kind of thinking seeps up from the very depths of bourgeois “civil society”.

However, according to an old expression, the fish begins to stink from the head downwards. It is first and foremost the state and economic apparatus of the ruling class itself which produces this putrefaction. The diagnosis made by the capitalist media is that the Trump presidency, the victory of the Brexiteers in Britain, the rise of right wing “populism” in Europe, are the result of a protest against “globalisation”. But this is only true if violence is understood as the essence of this protest, and if globalisation is understood, not only as an economic option among others, but as a label for the extremely violent means through which a declining capitalism has, in recent decades, kept itself alive. The result of this gigantic economic and political offensive of the bourgeoisie (a kind of war of the capitalist class against the rest of humanity and against nature) was the production of millions of victims, not only among the working populations of the whole planet, but even within the apparatus of the ruling class itself. It is this not least this latter aspect which, in its dimensions, is absolutely unprecedented in modern history. Unprecedented also is the degree to which parts of the American bourgeoisie and its state apparatus itself fell victim to this devastation. And this is true even though the United States was the main instigator of that policy. It is as if the ruling class was obliged to lop off parts of its own body in order to save the rest. Whole sectors of the national industry were closed down because their products could be produced more cheaply elsewhere. Not only these industries themselves had to shut down – whole parts of the country were laid waste in the process: regions and administrations, local consumer, retail and credit branches, providers of parts, the local building industry etc. were all shattered. Not only workers, but big and small businesses, civil servants and local dignitaries were among its victims. Unlike the workers, who lost their livelihoods, these bourgeois and petty bourgeois victims lost their power, privileges and social status.

This process took place, more or less radically, in all the old industrial countries over the past three decades. But in the US there has been, in addition, a kind of earthquake within the military and so-called intelligence apparatus. Under Bush Jr. and Rumsfeld, parts of the armed and security forces and even of the intelligence services were “privatised” - measures which cost many high-ranking leaders their jobs. In addition, intelligence had to face the competition of modern media concerns such as Google or Facebook which in some ways are as well informed, and as important for the state, as the CIA or FBI. In the course of this process, the balance of forces within the ruling class itself has shifted, including at the economic level, where the credit and finance sectors (“Wall Street”) and the new technologies (“Silicon Valley”) are not only among the main beneficiaries of “globalisation” but also among its main protagonists.

As opposed to these sectors, who supported the candidature of Hillary Clinton, the supporters of Donald Trump are not to be located within specific economic fractions, although his strongest supporters are to be found among the captains of the old industries which have declined so much in recent decades. Rather, they are to be found here and there throughout the state and economic apparatus of power. These were the snipers producing the crossfire from behind the scenes against Clinton as the alleged candidate of “Wall Street”. They included business tycoons, frustrated publicists and leaders of the FBI. For those among them who have lost hope of making themselves “great again”, their support for Trump was above all a kind of political vandalism, blind revenge on the ruling elite.

This vandalism can also be seen in the willingness of important factions of the ruling class – above all those linked to the oil, coal and gas industries – to back Trump’s wholesale rejection of the science explaining climate change, which he has famously dismissed as a hoax invented by the Chinese. This is a further manifestation of the fact that significant parts of the bourgeoisie have so lost any vision of any future for humanity that they are openly prepared to put their (“national”) profit margins above any considerations for the natural world, and thus risk undermining the fundamental basis for all human social life. The war against nature which was vastly intensified by the “neo-liberal” world order will be waged even more ruthlessly by Trump and his fellow vandals.

What has happened is very grave. Whereas the leading fractions of the American bourgeoisie still adhere to the existing economic world order, and want to engage in its maintenance, the consensus about this within the ruling class as a whole has started to crumble. This is firstly because a growing part of it no longer seems to care about this world order. It is secondly because the ruling fractions were unable to prevent the arrival of a candidate of these desperadoes into the White House. The erosion both of the cohesion of the ruling class, and of its control over its own political apparatus, could hardly have manifested itself more clearly. Ever since, with its victory in World War II, the American bourgeoisie took over from its British counterpart the leading role in the running of the world economy as a whole, it has continuously assumed this responsibility. In general the bourgeoisie of the leading national capital is best placed to assume this role. All the more so when, like the United States, it disposes of the military might to lend its leadership additional authority. It is remarkable that today neither the USA nor its predecessor Britain are able to assume this role – and basically for the same reason. This is the weight of political populism, which is taking London outside the European economic institutions. It was a sign of something close to desperation when, at the beginning of the new year the Financial Times, one of the important voices of the City of London, called on the German chancellor Angela Merkel to assume world leadership. Trump, at all events, seems unwilling and unable to assume this role, and there is no other world leader for the moment who could replace him. A dangerous phase lies ahead for the capitalist system and for humanity.

The weakening of working class resistance

The weakening of the principle of solidarity clearly indicates that the victory of Trump is not only result of a loss of perspective by the capitalist class, but also by the working class. As a result, many more workers than otherwise would be the case are negatively influenced by what is called populism. It is significant, for instance, that along with millions of white workers, many Latinos also seem to have voted for Trump, despite his diatribes against them. Many among those who were among the last to gain access to “God’s own country” - precisely because they are afraid of being among the first to be evicted - were lured into thinking that they would be safer if the gate were closed firmly behind them.

What has happened to the working class, to its revolutionary perspective, to its class identity and its traditions of solidarity? Over half a century ago, there was a comeback of the working class on the stage of history, above all in Europe (May 1968 in France, Autumn 1969 in Italy, 1970 in Poland etc.) but also more globally. In the “New World” this renaissance of the class struggle manifested itself in Latin America (above all 1969 in Argentina), but also in North America, in particular in the United States. There were two main expressions of this resurgence. One was a whole development of often large scale wildcat strikes and other, often radical struggles on an economic terrain, for working class demands. The other was the reappearance of politicised minorities among the new generation, attracted towards revolutionary proletarian politics. Particularly important was the tendency to develop a communist perspective against Stalinism, which was more or less clearly recognised as counter-revolutionary. The return to centre stage of the workers’ struggles, class identity and solidarity, and a proletarian revolutionary perspective, went hand in hand. During the 1960s and 70s probably several million young people in the old industrial countries were politicised in this manner – a hope and strength of humanity.

Apart from the suffering of the working class, the two most burning issues at the time in the United States were the Vietnam War (the American government, moreover, had introduced universal conscription) and the racist exclusion of and violence against black people. Originally, these issues were at least partly additional factors of politicisation and radicalisation. However, lacking any political experience of their own, lacking the guidance of an older generation politicised in any proletarian sense, the new activists harboured enormous illusions about the possibilities of a rapid social transformation. In particular, the class movements of the time were still much too weak either to oblige the government to end the Vietnam War, or to protect blacks and other minorities against racism and discrimination (unlike the 1905 revolutionary movement in Russia, for instance, which included the revolt against the Japanese-Russian war as well as the protection of the Jews in Russia against pogroms). Since fractions developed within the American bourgeoisie which, in its own class interest, wanted to end its engagement in Vietnam, and to allow a black American bourgeoisie to share in power, many of these young militants got drawn into bourgeois politics, turning their backs on the working class. Others, while wanting to remain committed to the cause of the workers, because they were overwhelmed by impatience, stood as left candidates for state elections, or engaged themselves in the trade unions in the hope of achieving something immediate and tangible for those they claimed to represent. Hopes which were invariably disappointed. The workers developed a more and more open hostility towards these leftists, who moreover often discredited themselves and the reputation of the revolution by their identification with brutal, counter-revolutionary, essentially Stalinist regimes, and by their bourgeois manipulative approach to politics. As for these militants themselves, they in turn developed a hostility towards the working class, which refused to follow them – a hostility which often turned into hatred. All of this amounted to a large-scale destruction of political revolutionary class energy. It was a tragedy of almost a whole generation of the working class which had begun so promisingly. What followed was the collapse of Stalinism 1989 (misunderstood and misrepresented as the collapse of communism and of marxism) and the closing down of whole traditional industries in the old capitalist countries (misunderstood and misrepresented as the disappearance of the working class in that part of the world). In this context (as for instance the French sociologist Didier Eribon has pointed out) the political left (which, according to the ICC, is the left of capital, part of the ruling apparatus) were among the first to declare the disappearance of the working class. It is revealing that, during the recent electoral campaign in the USA, the candidate of the Democrats (who used to claim to represent “organised labour”) never referred to anything like a working class, whereas the multi-millionaire Donald Trump constantly did. In fact, one of his main electoral promises was to prevent the disappearance of the American working class (understood only as blue collar workers) from “extinction”. His working class is an essential part of the American nation, and is the one capitalists dream of: patriotic, hard-working, obedient.

The disappearance, for the moment, of working class identity and solidarity from the forefront of the scene is a catastrophe for the proletariat and for humanity. In face of the present incapacity of either of the two main classes of modern society to put forward a credible perspective of their own, the very essence of bourgeois society comes more clearly to the light of day: de-solidarisation. The principle of solidarity which was the safety net, more or less, of all pre-capitalist societies based on natural rather than “market” economy, is replaced by the safety net of private property – for those who have it. In bourgeois society, you have to be able to help yourself, and the means to this end are not solidarity, but credit-worthiness and insurance. For many decades, in the main industrial countries, the welfare state – although an integral part of the credit and insurance economy – was used to hide this elimination of solidarity from the social “agenda”. Today the rejection of solidarity is not only not hidden, but gaining ground.

The challenge to the working class

The demonstration of millions of people, mainly women, all over the United States, against the new president the day after his inauguration, made it clear that large parts of the working population of America support neither Trump nor the tendency he stands for. However, far from succeeding in opposing Trump's nationalism, these demonstrations tended to answer Trump on his own ground by claiming: “We are the true America”.

These demonstrations show in fact that the populist policy of exclusion and scapegoating is not the only danger for the working class. This young generation which is expressing its protest, while not falling for Trump, is in danger of falling for the trap of defending “democratic” and “liberal” bourgeois society instead. The ruling fractions of the bourgeoisie would be delighted to enlist the support of the most intelligent and generous sectors of the working class in the defence of the present version of an exploitation system which – even without “populism” - has long become a menace to the existence of our species, and which moreover is itself the producer of the “populism” it wants to keep in check. It is undeniable that today, to many workers, in the absence of a revolutionary alternative they can have confidence in, an Obama, Sanders or Angela Merkel can appear as a lesser evil compared to a Trump, Farage, Le Pen or the “Alternative für Deutschland”. But at the same time, these workers also feel indignant about what “liberal society” has done to humanity in the past decades. The class antagonism remains.

It should also be pointed out that the resistance within the working class to populism is not in itself a proof that these workers follow the bourgeois liberals and are ready to sacrifice their own class interests. Millions of workers at the heart of the globalised system of production are above all very much aware that their material existence depends on a world-wide system of production and exchange, and that there can be no reverting to a more local division of labour. They are also aware that what Marx called the “socialisation” of production (the replacement of individual by associated labour) teaches them to collaborate with each other on a world scale, and that only on such a scale can the present problems of humanity be surmounted. In the present historical situation, in the absence of class identity and a perspective of a struggle for a classless society, the revolutionary potential of contemporary society takes refuge, for the moment, in the “objective” conditions: the persistence of the class antagonisms; the irreconcilable nature of class interests; the world wide collaboration of the proletarians in the production and reproduction of social life. Only the proletariat has an objective interest in and capacity to resolve the contradiction between world-wide production and private and nation-state appropriation of wealth. Since humanity cannot go back to local market production, it can only go forward by abolishing private property, by putting the international production process at the disposal of the whole of humanity.

On this objective basis, the subjective conditions for revolution can still recover, in particular through the return of the economic struggle of the proletariat on an important scale, and through the development of a new generation of revolutionary political minorities with the necessary daring to take up now more than ever the cause of the working class, and to do so with the profundity needed to convince the proletariat of its own revolutionary mission.

Steinklopfer Late January, 2017

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Trump presidency

Russia 1917 and the revolutionary memory of the working class

For all those who still consider that mankind’s last best hope is the revolutionary overthrow of world capitalism, it is impossible to greet the beginning of the year 2017 without recalling that it is the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution. And we also know that all those who insist that there is no alternative to the present social system will recall it in their own way.

Many of them will ignore it of course, or downplay its significance by telling us that this is just ancient history. Everything has changed since then – and what is the point of talking about a working class revolution when the working class no longer exists, or has been so degraded that the term ‘working class revolution’ can even be assimilated to protest votes in favour of Brexit or Trump in old industrial centres decimated by globalisation?

Or if the upheaval which shook the world in 1917 is brought to mind, in the majority of cases it is painted as a kind of horror story, but one with a very definite ‘moral’: behold, this is what happens when you challenge the present system, if you fall for the delusion that a higher form of social life is possible. You get something much worse. You get terror, Gulags, the omnipresent totalitarian state. It began with Lenin and his fanatical band of Bolsheviks whose coup d’Etat in October 1917 killed off Russia’s fledgling democracy, and it ended up with Stalin, with the whole of society transformed into a forced labour camp. And then it all collapsed, which demonstrated once and for all that it is impossible to organise modern society other than by the methods of capitalism.

We are under no illusion that, in 2017, explaining what the Russian revolution really meant is going to be easy. This is a period of extreme difficulty for the working class and its small revolutionary minorities, a period which is dominated by feelings of hopelessness and loss of any perspective for the future, by the sinister growth of nationalism and racism which serves to divide the working class against itself, by the hate-filled demagogy of the populists on the right, and on the left by clamorous appeals to defend ‘democracy’ against this new authoritarianism.

But this is also a moment for us to recall the work of our political ancestors, the left communist fractions who survived the terrible defeats of the revolutionary movements sparked off by the events in Russia 1917 and tried to make sense of the resulting degeneration and demise of the very communist parties which had been formed to lead the way to revolution. Resisting both the open terror of the counter-revolution in its Stalinist and fascist forms, and the more veiled deceptions of democracy, the most lucid left communist currents, such as those grouped around the reviews Bilan in the 1930s and Internationalisme in the 40s, began the enormous task of drawing the ‘balance sheet’ of the revolution. First and foremost, against all its denigrators, they reaffirmed what had been essential and positive about the Russian revolution. In particular, they insisted

  • That the “Russian” revolution only had a meaning as the first victory of the world revolution, and that its only hope had been the extension of proletarian power to the rest of the globe;

  • That it had confirmed the capacity of the working class to dismantle the bourgeois state and create new organs of political power (most notably the soviets or councils of workers’ delegates);

  • That it demonstrated the necessity for a revolutionary political organisation defending the principles of internationalism and working class autonomy.

At the same time, the revolutionaries of the 1930s and 40s also began the painful analysis of the costly errors made by the Bolsheviks in the teeth of an unprecedented situation for any workers’ party, in particular:

  • The growing tendency for the party to substitute itself for the soviets, and the fusion of the party with the post-October state, which undermined not only the power of the soviets but also the capacity of the party to defend the class interests of the workers, even in opposition to the new state;
  • The recourse to the ‘Red Terror’ in response to the White Terror of the counter-revolution – a process which led to the Bolsheviks implicating themselves in the suppression of proletarian movements and organisations

  • The tendency to see state capitalism as a transitional stage towards socialism, and even as being identical with it.

The ICC, from its inception, has attempted to carry on with this work of drawing the lessons of the Russian revolution and the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23. We have over the years developed quite a library of articles and pamphlets dealing with this absolutely vital era in the history of our class. In the coming year, and beyond, we will be making sure that these texts are more accessible to our readers, by compiling an updated dossier of our most important articles on the Russian revolution and the international revolutionary wave. Each month or so we will headline articles which most directly correspond either to the chronological development of the revolutionary process or which contain responses to the most important questions posed by the attacks of bourgeois propaganda or by discussions in and around the proletarian political milieu. So this month we will be ‘promoting’ to the front page of our website an article on the February revolution first written in 1997. It will be followed by articles on Lenin’s April Theses, the July days, the October insurrection, and so on; and we intend to keep this process going over a long period, precisely because the drama of the revolution and counter-revolution lasted for a number of years and was by no means limited to Russia, but had its echoes all across the globe, from Berlin to Shanghai, from Turin to Patagonia, and from the Clydeside to Seattle.

At the same time, we will be seeking to add to this collection with new articles which deal with issues that we have not yet examined in depth (such as the onslaught against the revolution by the ruling class at the time, the problem of ‘Red Terror’, and so on); articles which respond to the current campaigns of capitalism aimed against the revolutionary memory of the working class; and articles which will look at the conditions for the proletarian revolution today – at what they have in common with the time of the Russian revolution, but also and above all at what significant changes have intervened over the past 100 years.

The aim of this publishing venture is not simply to “celebrate” or “commemorate” long-past historical events. It is to defend the view that the proletarian revolution is even more of a necessity today than it was in 1917. Faced with the horrors of the first imperialist world war, the revolutionaries of the time concluded that capitalism had entered its epoch of decline, posing humanity with the alternative between socialism and barbarism; and the even greater horrors – symbolised in place-names like Auschwitz and Hiroshima - that followed the defeat of the first attempts to make the socialist revolution starkly confirmed their diagnosis. A century later, capitalism’s continued existence poses a mortal threat to the very survival of humanity.

Writing from her prison cell in 1918, and on the eve of the revolution in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg expressed her fundamental solidarity with the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik party, despite all her very serious criticisms of the errors of the Bolsheviks, in particular the policy of the Red Terror. Her words are as relevant to our own future as they were to the future she herself confronted:

What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescencies in the politics of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: “I have dared!”

This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia, the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.

ICC

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1917 - 2017

The 1950s and 60s: Damen, Bordiga, and the passion for communism

Prior to our excursion into the attempts of Spanish anarchism to establish ‘libertarian communism’ during the war in Spain of 1936-39, we had published the contribution of the Gauche Communiste de France on the state in the period of transition1, a text based on the theoretical advances of the Italian and Belgian left fractions in the 1930s, while already advancing beyond their conceptions in several respects. The GCF was part of a certain resurgence of proletarian political organisations in the wake of the Second World War, but by the early 1950s, the proletarian milieu was facing a serious crisis as it became increasingly evident that the profound defeat suffered by the working class had not been dispersed by the war – on the contrary, the victory of democracy over fascism had further exacerbated the disorientation of the proletariat. The end of the counter-revolution which had begun in the 1920s was still a long way ahead.

In our book The Dutch and German Left, particularly chapter 11, “The Communistenbond Spartacus and the ‘councilist current’ (1942-50)” we looked at the significant developments that took place in a part of the Dutch communist left: the attempt by the Communistenbond Spartacus to open up to discussions with other currents (such as the GCF) and to re-appropriate some of the old positions of the KAPD – this was a turn away from the anti-party ideas developed in the 30s. However, these advances were fragile and the basically anarchist ideas which had been adopted by the majority of the Dutch-German left in reaction to the degeneration of Bolshevism soon returned in force, contributing to a long-drawn out process of dispersal into mainly local groups focused on the immediate struggles of the workers.

In 1952, the GCF broke up: partly the result of a mistaken diagnosis of the historic course, leading to the conclusion that a third world war was imminent and to the departure of Marc Chirik, the most influential member of the GCF, to Venezuela; and partly due to a combination of personal tensions and unexpressed political differences. Marc fought against these difficulties in a series of ‘letters from afar’, in which he also tried to outline the tasks of revolutionary organisations in the historic conditions they now encountered, but he was unable to halt the disintegration of the group. Some of its former members joined the Socialisme ou Barbarie group around Cornelius Castoriadis, of which more in a later article.

In the same year, a major split took place between the two major tendencies within the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy – tendencies which had existed more or less from the beginning but which had been able to establish a kind of Modus Vivendi when the party was going through a euphoric phase of growth. As the retreat in the class struggle became increasingly obvious, the organisation, faced with the demoralisation of many of the workers who had joined it on a superficial activist basis at the beginning, was inevitably compelled to reflect on its future tasks and direction.

The 1950s and early 60s was thus another dark period for the communist movement, which faced a real prolongation of the deep counter-revolution that had descended on the working class in the 30s and 40s, but this time dominated by the image of a triumphant capitalism which appeared to have recovered – perhaps definitively – from the catastrophic crisis of the 30s. It was the triumph, in particular, of US capital, of democracy, of an economy which passed relatively quickly from post-war austerity to the consumer boom of the late 50s and early 60s. Certainly this ‘glorious’ period had its shadow side, above all the relentless confrontation between the two imperialist giants with its proliferation of local wars and the overarching threat of a nuclear holocaust. Along with this, in the ‘democratic’ bloc, there was a real surge in paranoia about communism and subversion, exemplified by the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the USA. In this atmosphere, revolutionary organisations, where they existed at all, were even more reduced in scale, even more isolated than they had been in the 1930s.

This period thus marked a profound rupture in continuity with the movement that had shaken the world in the aftermath of the First World War, and even with the courageous minorities which had resisted the advancing counter-revolution. As the economic boom continued, the very idea that capitalism was a transient system, doomed by its own inner contradictions, appeared far less evident than it had done in the years 1914-1945, when the system seemed to be caught up in one gigantic catastrophe after another. Perhaps marxism itself had failed? This was certainly the message being pushed by any number of sociologists and other professional bourgeois thinkers, and such ideas would soon penetrate the revolutionary movement itself, as we saw in our recent series on decadence2 .

All the same, the generation of militants who had been steeled by the revolution or by the fight against the degeneration of the political organisations it had created had not altogether vanished. Some of the key figures of the communist left remained active after the war and into the period of retreat in the 50s and 60s, and for them, despite everything, the perspective of communism was by no means dead and buried. Pannekoek, though no longer linked to an organisation, published his book on workers’ councils and their role in the construction of a new society3; and right into his old age he remained in contact with a number of the groups that appeared after the war, such as Socialisme ou Barbarie. Militants who had broken with Trotskyism during the war, such as Castoriadis and Munis, maintained a political activity and tried to outline a vision of what lay beyond the capitalist horizon. And Marc Chirik, though ‘unorganised’ for over a decade, certainly did not abandon revolutionary thought and inquiry; when he returned to organised militant life in the mid-60s, he would have clarified his views on a number of questions, not least on the problems of the transition period.

We will return to the writings of Castoriadis, Munis and Chirik in subsequent articles. We think it is valid to talk about their individual contributions even though the work they carried out was nearly always done in the context of a political organisation. A revolutionary militant does not exist as a mere individual, but as part of a collective organism which, in the final analysis, is engendered by the working class and its struggle to become conscious of its historical role. A militant is by definition an individual who has committed him or herself to the construction and defence of a political organisation, and who is thus motivated by a profound loyalty to the organisation and its needs. But – and here, as we shall see below, we part company with the conceptions developed by Bordiga – the revolutionary organisation is not an anonymous collective, in which the individual sacrifices his personality and thus abandons his critical faculties; a healthy political organisation is an association in which the individuality of different comrades is harnessed rather than suppressed. In such an association, there is room for the particular theoretical contributions of different comrades and, of course, for debate around the differences raised by individual militants. Thus, as we have found throughout this series, the history of the communist programme is not only a history of the struggles of the working class, not only a history of the organisations and currents that have drawn the lessons from these struggles and elaborated them into a coherent programme, but also of the individual militants who have led the way in this process of elaboration.

Damen and Bordiga as revolutionary militants

In this article, we return to the work of the Italian communist left, which before the war, in the shape of the Fraction in exile, had made such an irreplaceable contribution to our understanding of the problems of the transition from capitalism to communism. This contribution had also been constructed on the marxist foundations laid down by the left current in Italy during the preceding phase, the phase of imperialist world war and of the post-war revolutionary wave; and after the second imperialist war, the theoretical legacy of the Italian left did not disappear in spite of the errors and schisms that afflicted the Internationalist Communist Party. And throughout this whole period, whether we are examining the question of the transition period or other issues, it is impossible to ignore the inter-action, and often the opposition, of two leading militants of this current – Onorato Damen and Amadeo Bordiga.

During the stormy days of war and revolution from 1914 to 1926, Damen and Bordiga demonstrated very clearly a capacity to stand against the dominant order that is the hallmark of a communist militant. Damen was jailed for agitating against the war; Bordiga fought tirelessly to develop the work of his fraction inside the Socialist Party and then to push for a split with the right wing and the centrists and the formation of a communist party on solid principles. When the new Communist International itself embarked upon an opportunist course in the early 1920s, Bordiga was again in the front line of opposition to the tactics of the United Front and the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the CPs; he had the immense courage to stand up at the meeting of the CI’s Executive Committee in Moscow in 1926 and denounce Stalin, to his face, as the gravedigger of the revolution. That same year, Bordiga himself was arrested and exiled to the island of Ustica4. Damen meanwhile was also active in resisting the attempts of the CI to impose its opportunist policies on the Italian party, which had initially been dominated by the left. Along with Forticiari, Repossi and others he formed the Comitato di Intesa in 19265. During the fascist period he went through more than one episode of confinement and exile, but he was not silenced, leading a prisoners’ revolt in Pianosa.

At this juncture, however, there was a difference in the reaction of the two militants which was to have very long term consequences. Bordiga, placed under house arrest and obliged to abjure all political activity (how mild the fascists seemed then!), avoided all contacts with his comrades and concentrated entirely on his work as an engineer. He recognised that the working class had suffered a historic defeat, but did not draw the same conclusion from this as the comrades who formed the Fraction in exile. The latter understood that it was as necessary as ever to maintain an organised political activity, even if it could no longer be in the form of a party. Thus at the time of the formation of the Italian Fraction, and all through the extremely fertile decade that followed, Bordiga was entirely cut off from these theoretical developments6. Damen on the other hand maintained contacts and regrouped a number of comrades from the Fraction on their return to Italy with the idea of contributing to the formation of the party. These included militants like Stefanini, Danielis and Lecci, who had remained faithful to the essential positions of the Fraction throughout the 30s and the war. In 1943, the Partito Comunisa Internazionalista (PCInt) was proclaimed in the north of Italy ; the party was then ‘re-founded’ in 1945 following a somewhat hasty regroupment with elements around Bordiga in the south of Italy7.

As a result, the unified party, formed around a platform written by Bordiga, was from the very beginning a compromise between two tendencies. The one around Damen was much clearer on many basic class positions and these were to no small extent connected to the developments undertaken by the Fraction – for example, the explicit adoption of the theory of the decadence of capitalism and the rejection of Lenin’s position on national self-determination.

In this sense – and we have never hidden our criticism of the profound opportunism involved in the formation of the party from the very beginning - the ‘Damen’ tendency showed a capacity to assimilate some of the most important programmatic gains made by the Italian Fraction in exile, and even to take on some of the key questions raised within the Italian Fraction and advance towards a more worked out position. This was the case with the union question: within the Fraction, this had been an unresolved debate, in which Stefanini had been the first to defend the idea that the unions had already been integrated into the capitalist state. Although it cannot be said that the position of the Damen tendency has ever been totally consistent on the union question, it was certainly clearer than what became the dominant ‘Bordigist’ view after the 1952 split.

This process of clarification also extended to the tasks of the communist party in the proletarian revolution. As we have seen in previous articles in his series8, the Fraction had, despite some lingering notions about the party exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat, essentially gone beyond this position by insisting that a key lesson of the Russian revolution was that the party should not become entangled with the transitional state. The Damen tendency went even further and made it clear that the task of the party was not to exercise power. Its 1952 platform, for example states that “no time and for no reason should the proletariat surrender its role in the struggle. It should not delegate its historical mission to others or transfer its power to other – not even its own political party”.

As we show in our book The Italian Communist Left, these insights, quite logically, were linked to certain developments on the question of the state:

Much bolder was the position that the PCInt took up on the question of the state in the period of transition, where it was visibly influenced by Bilan and Octobre. Damen and his comrades rejected the assimilation of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the rule of the party, and in the face of the proletarian state called for the widest democracy in the councils. They did not rule out the hypothesis, verified at Kronstadt, of confrontations between the workers’ state and the proletariat, in the which case the communist party should be on the site of the latter: ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat can in no sense be reduced to the dictatorship of this party, even if this is the party of the proletariat, the intelligence and guide of the proletarian state. The state and the party in power, as organs of such a dictatorship, bear the seeds of the tendency towards compromise with the old world, a tendency which as the Russian experience shows develops and strengthens through the momentary inability of the revolution in a given country to spread, by linking itself to the insurrectionary movement in other countries Our party a)would have to avoid becoming the instrument of the workers’ state and its would have to defend the interests of the revolution even b) in confrontations with the workers’ state; c) would have to avoid becoming bureaucratised, by making its directive centre or its more peripheral centres a field of manoeuvres for the careerism of functionaries; d)would have to prevent class politics being thought out or carried out through formalist and administrative criteria’”9.

However, the most crucial insight of the Fraction – the notion of the fraction itself, the form and function that the revolutionary organisation must take on in a period of defeat in the class struggle – was entirely lost on the Damen tendency, as was the closely connected notion of the historic course, the necessity to understand the global balance of forces between the classes that can undergo profound alterations within the epoch of decadence. Unable to make a real critique of the momentous error made in 43 – the constitution of a ‘party’ in one single country in a period of profound counter-revolution – the Damenists compounded the mistake by theorising the party as a permanent necessity and even as a permanent reality. Hence, despite quickly shrinking to a ‘mini-party’, the original emphasis of the regroupment of 43-45 on building up a presence within the working class and giving a decisive lead in its struggles remained, at the cost of what was really needed: a focus on theoretical clarification about the necessities and possibilities of the period.

The opposing tendency around figures like Bordiga and Maffi was, in general, much more confused about the most important class positions. Bordiga more or less ignored the acquisitions of the Fraction and advocated a return to the positions of the first two congresses of the Third International, which for him were based on Lenin’s ‘restoration’ of the communist programme. An extreme suspicion of opportunist ‘innovations’ to marxism (which, it’s true, were beginning to flourish in the soil of the counter-revolution) led him to the notion of the “invariant” programme which had been fixed in stone in 1848 and only needed to be disinterred when it was periodically buried by the opportunists and traitors10. As we have often pointed out, this notion of invariance is based on a highly “variant” geometry, so that for example Bordiga and his followers could both affirm that capitalism had entered its epoch of wars and revolutions (a fundamental position of the Third International) and yet polemicise against the notion of decline as being founded on a pacifist and gradualist ideology11.

This questioning of decadence had important repercussions when it came to analysing the nature of the Russian revolution (defined as a dual revolution, not unlike the councilist vision), and in particular when to came to characterising the struggles for national independence which were proliferating in the former colonies. Mao, instead of being seen for what he was, an expression of the Stalinist counter-revolution and a real product of capitalist decay, was hailed as a great bourgeois revolutionary in the mould of Cromwell. Later on the Bordigists were to come out with the same appreciation of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and this deep incomprehension of the national question was to cause havoc in the Bordigist party in the later 1970s, with a sizeable element abandoning internationalism altogether.

On the party question, on the errors of the Bolsheviks in the running of the Soviet state, it was as if the Fraction had never existed. The party takes power, wields the state machine, imposes the Red Terror without mercy…even the important nuances of Lenin on the need for the working class to be wary of the bureaucratisation and autonomisation of the transitional state seem to have been forgotten. As we argue in a previous article in this series12, Bordiga’s most important contribution on the lessons of the Russian revolution in the post World War Two period, ‘Force, violence and dictatorship in the class struggle’ (1946), certainly contains some insights on the problem of degeneration, but its rather dogmatic anti-democratism didn’t enable it to recognise the problem of the party and state substituting for the proletariat (see final note below).

However: even though the Bordiga tendency also never openly put into question the formation of the party in 1943, it was able to understand that the organisation had entered into a far more difficult period and that different tasks were on the order of the day. Bordiga had been sceptical about the formation of the party in the first instance. Without showing the slightest understanding of the notion of the fraction – indeed, he rather buried his own experience of fraction work prior to the First World War under his subsequent theorisations about the formal and the historic party13 - there was a certain understanding that simply maintaining a routine of intervention in the immediate struggle was not the way forward, and that it was essential to return to the theoretical foundations of marxism. Having rejected the contribution of the Fraction and other expressions of the communist left, this work was not completed , or even attempted, with regard to the key programmatic positions. But when it came to certain more general theoretical questions, and particularly those relating to the nature of the future communist society, it seems to us that during this period it was Bordiga, rather than the ‘Damenists’, who has left us with the most important legacy.

The passion for communism: Bordiga’s defence of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

The book Bordiga et la passion du communisme, a collection of writings put together by Jacques Camatte in 1972, is the best testimony to the profundity of Bordiga’s reflections about communism, in particular two major presentations given at party meetings in 1959-60, which are dedicated to Marx’s 1844 Economic and Political Manuscripts: ‘Commentaries on he 1844 manuscripts(1959-60), and ‘Immutable tables (?) of the communist theory of the party’‘ (page references are to the first text unless indicated).

This is how Bordiga places the 1844 MS within the corpus of Marx’s writings

Another very vulgar commonplace is that Marx was a Hegelian in his youthful writings, that it was only afterwards that he became the theoretician of historical materialism, and that, when he was older, he became a vulgar opportunist. It is a task of the revolutionary marxist school to make it clear to all its enemies (who have the choice to accept everything or reject everything) the monolithism of the whole system from its birth to the death of Marx and even after him (the fundamental concept of invariance, the fundamental rejection the ‘enriching’ evolution of the party doctrine” (p120)

Here we have both the strengths and weaknesses of Bordiga’s approach in one paragraph. One the one hand: the intransigent defence of the continuity of Marx’s thought and the repudiation of the notion that the 1844 MS are the product of a Marx who was still essentially idealist and Hegelian (or at least Feuerbachian), a notion that has been associated in particular with the Stalinist intellectual Althusser and which we have already criticised in earlier articles in this series.14

For Bordiga, the 1844 MS, with their profound exposé of capitalist alienation, and their inspiring description of the communist society that will overcome it, already indicate that Marx had made a qualitative break with the most advanced forms of bourgeois thought. In particular, the 1844 MS, which contain a large section devoted to the critique of the Hegelian philosophy, demonstrate that whatever Marx had assimilated from Hegel in matters of the dialectic, his rupture with Hegel - which meant overturning him, “turning him on his head” - and the adoption of a communist world outlook, take place at exactly the same moment. Bordiga emphasises in particular Marx’s rejection of the very starting point of the Hegelian system: the individual ‘I’. “What is clear is that for Marx Hegel’s error is to build his whole colossal speculative edifice, with its rigorous formalism, on an abstract basis, ‘consciousness’. As Marx would say many times, you have to begin from being, and not from the consciousness it has of itself…Hegel is shut in on himself, from the beginning, in the vain eternal dialogue between subject and object. His subject is the ‘me’ extended in an absolute sense…” (p119).

At the same time, it is evident that for Bordiga, the 1844 MS provide evidence for his theory of the invariance of marxism, an idea which we think is contradicted by the real development of the communist programme which we have traced throughout this series. But we will return to this question later on. What we share with Bordiga’s view of the 1844 MS is, above all: the centrality of Marx’s conception of alienation, not only to the MS, but to the whole of his work; a number of fundamental elements in Bordiga’s conception of the dialectic of history; and the exalted vision of communism which, again, Marx never repudiated in his later work (although he did, in our view, enrich it).

The dialectic of history

Bordiga’s references to the concept of alienation in the 1844 MS inform his whole view of history, since he insists that “the highest degree of man’s alienation has been reached in the current capitalist epoch” (p124). Without abandoning the understanding that the emergence and development of capitalism, and the destruction of the old feudal mode of exploitation, is a precondition for the communist revolution, he pours scorn on the facile progressivism of the bourgeoisie which vaunts its superiority over previous modes of production and ways of experiencing the world. He even suggests that bourgeois thinking is in certain senses empty in comparison with the much derided pre-capitalist viewpoints. For Bordiga, marxism has demonstrated that “your affirmations are empty and inconsistent lies, much more clearly so than the most ancient opinions of human thought which, you, bourgeois, believe you have buried once and for all under the fatuousness of your illuminist rhetoric”(p168). Consequently even when both bourgeoisie and proletariat formulate their critique of religion, there is again a rupture between the two class standpoints: “even in the cases (not general) where the ideologues of the bourgeoisie dared to break openly with the principles of the Christian church, we marxists do not define this superstructure, atheism, as a platform common to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” (p 117).

With such affirmations, Bordiga seems to connect his thought with some of the ‘philosophical’ critics of the marxism of the Second International (and, by extension, of the official philosophy of the Third) such as Pannekoek, Lukacs and Korsch, who rejected the idea that, just as socialism is the logical next step in historical evolution and only requires the ‘taking over’ of the capitalist state and economy, so historical materialism is simply the next step in the advance of classical bourgeois materialism. Such views are based on a profound underestimation of the antagonism between the bourgeois and proletarian world outlooks, the unavoidable necessity for a revolutionary rupture with the old forms. There is continuity, of course, but it is anything but gradual and peaceful. This way of approaching the problem is entirely consistent with the idea that the bourgeoisie can only see the social and natural world through the distorting lens of alienation, which under its reign has reached its ‘supreme’ phase.

The slogan ‘Against immediatism’ features more than once in the sub-headings of these contributions. For Bordiga it was essential to avoid any narrowing of focus to the present moment of history, and to look beyond capitalism backwards as well as forwards. In the current epoch, bourgeois thought is perhaps more immediatist than ever, more than ever fixated on the particular, the here and now, the short term, since it lives in mortal fear that regarding present-day society with the eye of history will enable us to discern its transient nature. But Bordiga also develops a polemic against the classical “grand narratives” of the bourgeoisie in its more optimistic age: not because it was grand, but because the bourgeoisie’s narrative deformed the real story. Just as the transition from bourgeois to proletarian thinking is not merely another forward step, so history in general is not a straight line going from darkness to light, but is an expression of the dialectic in movement: “The progress of humanity and of knowledge in the much tormented homo sapiens is not continuous, but moves through great isolated leaps punctuated by sinister and obscure plunges into social forms degenerating to the point of putrefaction” (p168). This is no accidental formulation: elsewhere in the same text he says “the banal conceptions of the dominant ideologies see this path (of human history) as a continuous and constant ascent; marxism does not share this vision, and defines a series alternating between rises and descents, interlaced by violent crises” (p152). A clear answer, one would think, to those who reject the concept of the ascendance and decadence of successive modes of production….

The dialectical vision of history sees movement as resulting from the clash – often violent – of contradictions. But it also contains the notion of the spiral and the “return at a higher level”. Thus the communism of the future is, in an important sense, a return of man to himself, as Marx puts it in the 1844 manuscripts, since it is not only a rupture with the past, but a synthesis of everything that was human within it: “man returns to himself not as he began at the origin of his long history, but finally having at his disposal all the perfections of an immense development, acquired in the form of all the successive techniques, customs, religions, philosophies whose useful sides were – if we can be permitted to express ourselves in this way – imprisoned in the zone of alienation” (p125).

A more concrete example of this: in a short article about the inhabitants of the island of Janitzio in Mexico15, written in 1961, and included in Camatte’s collection, Bordiga develops the idea that “in natural and primitive communism” the individual, still linked to his fellow human beings in a real community, does not experience the same fear of death that emerged with the social atomisation engendered by private property and class society; and that this provides us with an indication that in the communism of the future, where the individual’s destiny will be linked to that of the species, the fear of personal death and “any cult of the living and the dead” will be overcome. Bordiga thereby confirms his continuity with that central strand of the marxist tradition which affirms that in a certain sense “the members of primitive societies were closer to the human essence” (p175) – that the communism of the distant past can also be understood as a pre-figuration of the communism of the future16.

What communism is not

Bordiga’s defence of the 1844 MS is, to a large extent, a long diatribe against the fraud of ‘really existing socialism’ in the countries of the eastern bloc, which had gained a new lease of life in the wake of the ‘anti-fascist war’ of 1939-45. His attack was mounted at two levels: negation and affirmation. Negation of the claims that what existed in the USSR and similar regimes had anything whatever to do with Marx’s conception of communism, first and foremost at the economic level; affirmation of the fundamental characteristics of communist relations of production.

According to one version of a ubiquitous joke from the old USSR, an instructor in the party school is lecturing Young Comsomol members on the key question: will there be money in communism?

historically, comrades, there are three positions on this question. There is the right wing, Proudhonist-Bukharinite deviation: under communism, everyone will have money. Then there is the ultra-left, infantile deviation: under communism, no one will have money. So what then is the dialectical position of Marxism-Leninism? It is clearly this: under communism, some people will have money, and others won’t have any money”.

Whether Bordiga was acquainted with this joke or not, his response to the Stalinists in his Commentaires goes in a similar direction. A preface to one of the Stalinist editions to the 1844 MS points out that Marx’s text contains a polemic against Proudhon’s theory of equal wages, the implication being that for the authentic marxism practised in the USSR, under socialism there must be unequal wages. But, in the ensuing section headed ‘Either wage labour or socialism’, Bordiga points out that in the 1844 MS as well as in other works such as The Poverty of Philosophy and Capital, Marx actually “refutes the Proudhonist vacuity which conceives of a socialism where wages have been conserved, as they are conserved in Russia. Marx is not hitting out at the theory of equality, but on the existence of wages. Even if you could level them, wages are the negation of socialism. Even more so, not levelled, not equal, they are even more evidently the negation of socialism” (p129)

And the following section is headed ‘Either money or socialism’: just as wage labour persists in the USSR, so must its corollary: the domination of human relations by exchange value, and thus by money. Returning, to the deep critique of money as an expression of alienation between human beings, which Marx, citing Shakespeare and Goethe, developed in the 1844 manuscripts and returned to in Capital, Bordiga insisted that “the societies where money circulates are societies of private property; they remain inside the barbaric prehistory of the human species” (p137).

Bordiga in fact demonstrates that the Stalinists have more in common with the father of anarchism than they would like to admit. Proudhon, in the tradition of a ‘crude communism’ which Marx already recognises as reactionary at the point that he himself embraced communism, envisages a society in which “annual revenue is socially divided in equal parts among all members of society, who have all become waged workers”. In other words, this notion of communism or socialism was one in which the misery of the proletarian condition was generalised rather than abolished, and in which “society” itself becomes the capitalist. And in response to those – not only the Stalinists, but also their leftwing apologists, the Trotskyists - who denied that the USSR could be a form of capitalism because it had (more or less) got rid of individual owners of capital, Bordiga replies: “The question where are the capitalists has no meaning. The response has been there since 1844: society is an abstract capitalist”(p132).

The polemical target of these essays is not restricted to the overt defenders of the USSR. If communism abolishes exchange value, it is because it has abolished all forms of property17 – not only state property as in the programme of Stalinism, but also the classical anarcho-syndicalist version (which Bordiga also attributes to the contemporary Socialisme ou Barbarie group with its definition of socialism as workers’ management of production): “land to the peasants and the factories to the workers and similar pitiful parodies of the magnificent programme of the revolutionary communist party”(p178, ‘I’). In communism the individual enterprise must be abolished as such. If it continues to be the property of those who work in it, or even of the local community around it, it has not been truly socialised, and the relations between the different self-managed enterprises must necessarily be founded on the exchange of commodities. We will return to this question when we look at the vision of socialism developed by Castoriadis and the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

Like Trotsky in the visionary concluding passages of Literature and Revolution18 – who, in 1924, is unlikely to have had knowledge of the 1844 MS – Bordiga then ascends from the sphere of the negation of capitalism and its alienation, from an insistence on what socialism is not, to the positive affirmation of what humanity will be like in the higher stages of communist society. The 1844 MS, as we pointed out in an early article in this series19, are full of passages describing how relations between human beings and between humanity and nature will be transformed under communism, and Bordiga quotes extensively from the most significant of these passages in his two texts, most notably where they deal with the transformation of relations between men and women, and where they insist that communist society will permit the emergence of a higher stage of conscious life.

The transformation of relations between the sexes

Throughout the 1844 MS Marx repudiates the ‘crude communism’ which, while attacking the bourgeois family, still regards woman as an object and speculates about a coming ‘community of women’. On the contrary: Bordiga quotes Marx the degree to which the relationship between man and woman has become humanised is a measurement of the real advance of the species. But at the same time, under capitalism, woman, and the relation between the sexes, will remain a prisoner of commodity relations.

After resuming Marx’s thinking on these questions, Bordiga digresses for a moment on the problem of terminology, of language.

In citing these passages, it is necessary to alternate between the word man and the word male to the extent that the first word indicates all the members of the species... When a half century ago the estimable marxist Filippo Turati made an enquiry into feminism, that miserable bourgeois deviation founded on the atrocious submission of woman in societies of property, he responded with these simple words: woman… is man. That means: she will be in communism, but for your bourgeois society she is an animal, an object”. (p150)

Feminism a bourgeois deviation? This is a position strongly rejected by those who argue that there can be a ‘socialist feminism’ or an ‘anarcha-feminism’. But from Bordiga’s standpoint, feminism has a bourgeois starting point because it aims at ‘equality’ of the sexes inside the existing social relationships; and this leads logically to the demand that women should be ‘equally’ able to fight in imperialist armies or rise to becoming company directors and prime ministers.

Communism did not need the addition of feminism or even ‘socialist feminism’ to have been, from the beginning, an advocate of the solidarity of men and women in the here and now, but this can only be realised in the class struggle, in the fight against capitalist oppression and exploitation and for the creation of a society in which the ‘original form of exploitation’ – that of woman by man - will no longer be possible. More than this: marxism has also recognised that the female of the species - because of her double oppression and her more advanced moral sense (linked in particular to her historic role in the rearing of children) - is often in the vanguard of the struggle, for example in the revolution in1917 in Russia, which began with demonstrations of women against bread shortages, or more recently in the massive strikes in Egypt in 2007. Indeed according to the anthropological school of Chris Knight, Camilla Power and others, which identifies with the marxist tradition in anthropology, female morality and solidarity played a crucial role in the very emergence of human culture, in the primal “human revolution”20. Bordiga is in accord with this way of looking at things in the section of the Commentaries headed ‘Love, a universal need’, when he argues that the passive function assigned to women is purely a product of property relations, and that in fact “in nature, love being the basis of reproduction, women is the active sex, and the monetary forms of love are revealed to be against nature” (p156). And he continues with a summary of how the abolition of commodity relations will transform this relationship: "In communism without money, love will, as a need, have the same weight for both sexes and the act which consecrates it will realise the social formula that the other's human need is my human need, to the extent that the need of one sex is realised as the need of the other”.

Bordiga then explains that this transformation will be based on the material and social changes introduced by the communist revolution: “This cannot be proposed simply as a moral relationship founded on a certain physical connection, because the passage to a higher form of society is effected in the economic domain: the care of children is no longer just the concern of the two parents but of the community". It is from this starting point that future humanity will be able to break through the limitations imposed by the bourgeois family.

Conscious life at another level

In an earlier article in this series21, we argued that certain passages in the 1844 MS only make sense if we see them as anticipations of a transformation of consciousness, of a new mode of being, which communist social relations will make possible. The article looked at some length at the passage from the chapter ‘Private Property and communism’ where Marx talks about the way in which private property (understood in its broadest sense) has served to restrict the human senses, to obstruct – or, to use a more accurate term from psychoanalysis, repress – human sensual experience; consequently communism will bring with it the “emancipation of the senses”, a new bodily and mental rapport with the world which can be compared with the “inspired” state experienced by artists at their most creative moments.

Towards the end of Bordiga’s text ‘Tablets of stone’ there is a section headed ‘’Down with the personality, that is the key!’ We will take up this question of ‘personality’ later on, but we want first to look at the way Bordiga, in his interpretation of the 1844 manuscripts, envisages the alteration of human consciousness in the communist future.

He begins by affirming that in communism we will “have left behind the millennia-old deception of the lone individual facing the natural world, stupidly called ‘external’ by the philosophers. External to what? External to the ‘I’, this supreme deficiency; but we can no longer say external to the human species, because the species man is internal to nature, part of the physical world.” And he goes on to say that “in this powerful text, object and subject becomes, like man and nature, one and the same thing. We can even say that everything becomes object: man as a subject ‘against nature’ disappears, along with the illusion of a singular me.”(p190)

This can only be a reference to the passage in the ‘Private property and communism’ chapter where Marx says

it is only when objective reality universally becomes for man in society the reality of man's essential powers, becomes human reality, and thus the reality of his own essential powers, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, objects that confirm and realize his individuality, his objects, i.e. he himself becomes the object".

Bordiga continues:

We have seen that when you pass from the individual to the species, the spirit, this absolute unfortunate, is dissolved into objective nature. The individual brain as a poor passive machine is replaced by the social brain. What’s more, Marx points to a collective human sense that has gone beyond the isolated corporal sense”. And he goes on to quote the 1844 Manuscripts on the emancipation of the senses, insisting that this also indicates the emergence of a kind of collective awareness – what we might term a passage from the ‘common sense’ of the isolated ego to the communising of the senses.

What do we make of these conceptions? Before dismissing them as science fiction, we should remember that while, in bourgeois society above all, we often take the ego to be the absolute centre of our being (“I think, therefore I am” ), there is also a long tradition of thought that insists that the ego is only a relative reality, at best a particular fraction of our being. This view is certainly central to psychoanalytical theory, for which the adult ego only emerges through a long process of repression and division between the conscious and unconscious part of ourselves – and is, furthermore, the “sole seat of anxiety”22 because, caught as it is between the demands of external reality and the unfulfilled urges buried in the unconscious, it is constantly preoccupied with its own overthrow or extinction.

It is also a view that has been put forward in a number of the ‘mystical’ traditions east and west, although it was probably most coherently developed by Indian philosophy, and above all by Buddhism with its doctrine of ‘anatta’ – the impermanence of the separate self. But all these traditions tend to concur that it is possible, through directly penetrating the unconscious mind, to surpass the everyday ego-consciousness – and thus the torment of perpetual anxiety. Shorn of the ideological distortions that inevitably accompanied these traditions, their most lucid insights do raise the possibility that human beings are capable of attaining another kind of consciousness in which the world around us is no longer seen as a hostile other, and the focus of awareness shifts, not merely intellectually, but through a direct and very bodily experience, from the isolated atom to the standpoint of the species – indeed, the standpoint of something even more than the species: of nature, of an evolving universe, becoming conscious of itself

It is difficult to read the above passages by Bordiga and conclude that he is talking about something entirely different. And it is important to note that Freud, in the opening sections of Civilisation and its Discontents, acknowledged the reality of the “oceanic feeling”, this experience of erotic unity with the world, although he could only see it as a regression to the infantile state prior to the emergence of the ego. However, in the same section of the book, he also accepts the possibility that the mental techniques of yoga can open the door to “primordial states of mind which have long been overlaid”. The question for us to raise theoretically - and perhaps for future generations to investigate more practically – is whether the age-old techniques of meditation can lead only to regression, a collapse back into the undifferentiated unity of the animal or the infant; or whether they can be part of a dialectical “return become conscious”, a self-aware exploration of our own minds. In which case the instances of the “oceanic feeling” point not only to the infantile past, but towards the horizon of a more advanced and more universal human consciousness. This was certainly the view adopted by Erich Fromm in his study Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, for example when he writes about what he calls the “state of non-repressedness”, defined as “a state in which one acquires again the immediate, undistorted grasp of reality, the simpleness and spontaneity of the child; yet, after having gone through the process of alienation, of development of one’s intellect, non-repressedness is return to innocence on a higher level; this return to innocence is only possible after one has lost one’s innocence.”23

Against the destruction of the environment

But Bordiga’s theoretical writings during this period did not only pose the question of man’s relationship with nature at this very ‘philosophical’ level. He also raised it in his far-sighted reflections on the question of capitalist catastrophes and the problem of the environment. Writing on contemporary disasters like the flooding of the Po valley in 1957 and the sinking of the liner Andrea Doria in the year before, Bordiga again brings to bear his specialist knowledge as an engineer and above all his deep rejection of bourgeois ‘progress’ to show how its drive to accumulate contains the seeds of such catastrophes, and ultimately of the destruction of the natural world itself24. Bordiga is particularly vehement in his articles about the frenzy of urbanisation which he could already discern in the post-war reconstruction period, denouncing the cramming of human beings into ever more limited urban spaces and the accompanying philosophy of ‘verticalism’ in construction. He argues that this reduction of human beings to the level of ants is a direct product of the needs of accumulation and will be reversed in the communist future, reaffirming Marx and Engels’ demand for overcoming the separation between town and country: "When, after the forcible crushing of this ever-more obscene dictatorship, it will be possible to subordinate every solution and every plan to the amelioration of the conditions of living labour , to fashion with this aim everything that has come from dead labour, from constant capital, from the infrastructure that the human species has built up over the centuries and continues to build up on the earth’s crust, then the brutal verticalism of the cement monsters will be made ridiculous and will be suppressed, and in the immense expanses of horizontal space, once the giant cities have been deflated, the strength and intelligence of the human animal will progressively tend to render uniform the density of life and labour over the habitable parts of the earth; and these forces will henceforth be in harmony, and no longer ferocious enemies as they are in the deformed civilisation of today, where they are only brought together by the spectre of servitude and hunger" (published in ‘Space against cement’ in The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust (Espèce Humaine et Croûte Terrestre, Petite Bibilotheque Payot, p168). It is also worth noting that when Bordiga, in 1952, formulated a kind of “immediate revolutionary programme”, it included demands for halting what he already saw as the inhuman congestion and pace of life brought about by capitalist urbanisation (a process that has reached much greater levels of irrationality since then). Thus the seventh point out of nine calls for “halting construction of houses and workplaces in the big cities and even the smaller ones, as a starting point for the uniform distribution of the population in the countryside. Reduction of the speed and volume of traffic and forbidding it when it is useless” (in a future article we intend to come back to the other demands in this “programme”, because they contain a number of formulations which can, in our view, be strongly criticised) .

It is interesting to note that, when it comes to demonstrating why all this so-called progress of the capitalist city was nothing of the kind, Bordiga had recourse to a concept of decadence which he tends to throw out of window in other polemics – for example in the title ‘Weird and wonderful tales of modern social decadence’25. Such a term is on the other hand entirely consistent with the general view of history we noted above, where societies can “degenerate to the point of putrefaction” and go through phases of ascent and descent. It is as if Bordiga, once removed from the ‘narrow’ world of contending political positions, and obliged to return to the basics of marxist theory, had no choice but to recognise that capitalism, like all previous modes of production, must also enter an epoch of decline – and that this epoch has long been upon us, regardless of the marvels of capitalism’s “growth in decay” which are smothering humanity and threatening its future.

The problem with “invariance”

We must now return to Bordiga’s notion that the 1844 MS provide evidence for his theory of the “invariance of marxism”. We have argued on various occasions that this is a religious conception. In a stinging polemic with the Bordigist group that publishes Programma Comunista, Mark Chirik noted the real similarity between the Bordigist concept of invariance and the Muslim attitude of submission to an immutable doctrine26.

The target of this article was, it’s true, mainly the epigones of Bordiga, but what did Bordiga himself say about the relationship between marxism and the sources of “invariant” doctrine in the past? In a seminal text titled precisely ‘The historical invariance of marxism’27, he writes:

Consequently, despite the fact that the ideological legacy of the revolutionary working class, unlike that of the classes that preceded it, does not assume the form of revelation, myth or idealism, but of “positive” science, it nonetheless needs a stable formulation of its principles, and even of its rules for action, that performs the role and possesses the efficacy that dogmas, catechisms, tablets of law, constitutions and guide-books such as the Vedas, the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights once performed and possessed. The profound errors with regard to form and substance in those compilations did not deprive them of their enormous organizational and social power (at first a revolutionary power, then a counterrevolutionary power, in dialectical succession); what is more, in many cases these ‘deviations’ contributed precisely to the creation of this power.”

In his Commentaries, Bordiga was already aware of the accusation that such ideas led him back to the religious world-view:

When, at a certain point, our banal contradictor ... says that we are building our mystique, himself posing as a mind who which has gone beyond all fideism and mysticism, when he holds us in derision for kneeling down to the Mosaic or talmudic tablets of the Bible or the Koran, to gospels and catechisms, we reply to him .... that we do not consider as an offense the assertion that we can indeed attribute to our movement - as long as it has not triumphed in reality (which in our method precedes any ulterior conquest of human consciousness) - the character of a mystique, or, if you want, a myth.

Myth, in its innumerable forms, was not a delirium of minds whose physical eyes were closed to reality…but was an irreplaceable step in the single road to the real conquest of consciousness”(p169).

Bordiga is right to consider that mythical thought was indeed an “irreplaceable step” in the evolution of human consciousness, and that the Bible, the Koran, or the Declaration of Human Rights were, at a certain stage of history, authentically revolutionary products. He is also right to recognise that adherence to such “tablets of the law” became, at another stage in history, counter-revolutionary. But the mechanism through which they became counter-revolutionary in new historical circumstances was precisely the notion that they were unchanging and unchangeable. Islam, for example, considers its revelation purer than that of the Jewish Torah because it is argued that while the latter had been subject to subsequent revision and editing, not a single word of the Koran had been altered from the moment the angel Gabriel dictated it to Mohammed. The difference between the marxist view of the communist programme and myth or religious dogma is that marxism sees its concepts as the historical product of human beings and thus subject to confirmation or refutation by succeeding historical growth or experience, and not as a once and for all revelation from a superhuman source. Indeed, it insists that mythical or religious revelations are themselves products of human history, and thus limited in their scope and clarity even at their highest points of achievement. In accepting the idea that marxism is itself a kind of myth, Bordiga loses sight of the historical method that he is able to use so well elsewhere.

Of course it is true that the communist programme itself is not infinitely malleable and does have an unchanging core of general principles such as the class struggle, the transient nature of class society, the necessity for the proletarian dictatorship and communism. Furthermore, there is a sense in which this general outline can appear like a sudden flash of inspiration. Hence Bordiga can write:

A new doctrine cannot appear at just any historical moment, but there are certain quite characteristic—and even extremely rare—eras in history in which a new doctrine can appear like a blinding flash of light; if one has not recognized the crucial moment and fixed one’s gaze on this terrible light, in vain would one have resort to the candle stubs with which the academic pedant or the combatant of little faith attempts to illuminate the way forward” (‘Historical invariance of marxism’)

Quite possibly Bordiga has in mind the incredibly rich phase of Marx’s work which gave rise to the 1844 MS and other fundamental texts. But Marx for one did not regard these texts as his final words on capitalism, the class struggle, or communism. Even though, in our view, he never abandoned the essential content of these writings, he regarded them as ‘first drafts’ which had to be developed and given a more solid grounding by further research, itself closely connected to the practical/ theoretical experimentation carried out by the real movement of the proletariat.

Bordiga, in the Commentaries (p 161) also points to a specific passage in the 1844 MS as proof of invariance. This is where Marx writes that “The entire movement of history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.

And Bordiga adds that the subject of this consciousness cannot be the individual philosopher: it can only be class party of the world proletariat. But if communism is, as Marx says, the product of the entire movement of history, then it must have begun to emerge long before the appearance of the working class and its political organisations, so that the source of this consciousness must be older than both – just as, within capitalist society, it is also wider than the political organisations of the class, even if they are generally its most advanced expression. Moreover, since communism can only become clear to itself, “comprehended and known” when it becomes proletarian communism, surely this is further evidence that communism and communist consciousness is something that evolves, that it is not static, but is a process of becoming – and thus cannot be invariant.

Individual and species

The critique of individualism has a long history in marxism, going back to Marx’s criticisms of Hegel and in particular his assault on Max Stirner; and in arguing against the philosophical standpoint of the isolated thinker, Bordiga is on solid ground, citing the The German Ideology’s cutting remark on Saint Max that “philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love”. And as we have seen, the idea that the ego is in some sense an illusory construct also has a long pedigree. But Bordiga goes further than this. As already noted, the section of ‘Tablets of Stone’ (Tables immuables) which we cited earlier, where Bordiga predicts that communist humanity will be able to access a kind of species or cosmic consciousness, is headed ‘Down with the personality, that is the key!’. It is as if Bordiga wants the individual human being to be subsumed in the species rather than realised through it.

The experience of a state of awareness which goes beyond the ego tends to be a peak experience rather than a permanent state, but at any rate, it does not necessarily abolish the personality. Personality as a mask, perhaps, personality as a kind of private property, personality as the outward face of the illusion of an absolute ego – one could argue that this form of personality will be transcended in the future. But nature itself has a need for diversity if it is to move forward, and this is no less true for human society. Even the Buddhists did not argue that enlightenment made the individual vanish. There is a Zen story which recounts how a student approached his teacher after hearing that the latter had achieved satori, the lightening flash of illumination. The student asks the master “how does it feel to be enlightened?” To which the master replies: “As miserable as ever”.

And in the same section of ‘Tablets of Stone’ (Tables immuables), Bordiga cites the “splendid expression” from the 1844 MS: that mankind is a being who suffers, and that if he does not suffer, he cannot know joy. This fleshly, mortal, individual human being will still exist in communism, which for Marx is “the only society in which the original and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase” (German Ideology, ‘The free development of individuals’)

These are of course questions for the far future. But Bordiga’s suspicion of the individual personality has far more immediate implications for the question of the revolutionary organisation.

We know that Bordiga made a trenchant critique of the bourgeois fetish of democracy, based as it is on the false notion of the isolated citizen and on the real foundation of a society atomised by commodity exchange. The insights he developed in The Democratic Principle and elsewhere enable us to expose the essential vacuity of the most democratic structures of the capitalist order. But there comes a point in Bordiga’s thinking where he loses sight of what was authentically ‘progressive’ in the victory of commodity exchange over all the older forms of community: the possibility of critical, individual thought without which “positive science” – which Bordiga still reclaims as the standpoint of the proletariat – would not have emerged. Applied to Bordiga’s conception of the party, this line of thought leads to the concept of the “monolithic”, “anonymous” and even “totalitarian” organisation – all which terms have been used approvingly in the Bordigist canon. It leads to theorising the negation of individual thought and thus of internal differences and debates. And as with all totalitarian regimes, there is always at least one individual who becomes anything but anonymous – who becomes the object of a personality cult. And this is precisely what was justified within the post-war Internationalist Communist Party by those who saw in Bordiga the “brilliant leader”, the genius who could (even when he was not actually a member of the party!) come up with answers to all the theoretical problems posed to the organisation. This was the aberrant way of thinking attacked in the GCF’s article ‘Against the concept of the brilliant leader’28

Bordiga’s contribution

We have sometimes criticised Bordiga’s idea that a revolutionary is someone for whom the revolution has already happened. In so far as it implies the inevitability of communism, those criticisms are valid. But there is also a truth in Bordiga’s dictum. Communists are those who represent the future in the present, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, and in this sense they measure the present – and the past – in the light of the possibility of communism. Bordiga’s ‘passion for communism’ – his insistence on demonstrating the superiority of communism over anything that class society and capitalism had engendered – enabled him to resist the false visions of capitalist and ‘socialist’ progress that were being drummed into the working class in the 1950s and 60s and, perhaps most importantly, to demonstrate in practice that marxism is not in fact an invariant dogma but a living theory, since there is no doubt that Bordiga’s contributions on communism enrich our understanding of it.

Earlier in this article we referred to Damen’s obituary of 1970, which sought to assess Bordiga’s overall political contribution29. Damen begins by listing all the things “we owe to Bordiga”, above all the immense contribution he made in his ‘classic’ period on the theory of abstentionism and the relationship between party and class. But, as we have seen, he quite rightly does not spare Bordiga from criticism over his withdrawal from political activity from the late 20s to the early 40s, his refusal to comment on all the economic and political dramas that fill this period. Examining his return to political life at the end of the war, Damen is also scathing about Bordiga’s ambiguities about the capitalist nature of the USSR. He could have gone further and showed how Bordiga’s refusal to recognise the acquisitions of the Fraction led to a clear political regression on key issues such as the national question, the unions, and the role of the party in the proletarian dictatorship. But what is missing from Damen’s text is an appraisal of the real contribution to our understanding of communism which Bordiga undertook in his later years – a contribution which the communist left still needs to assimilate, not least because it has subsequently been taken up by others with dubious agendas, such as the ‘communisation’ current (of which Camatte was one of the founding fathers), who have used it to produce results which Bordiga himself would certainly have disowned. But that will require a further article, and before we get there, we want to look at the other ‘theories of proletarian revolution’ which were being developed in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

C D Ward


3 https://libcom.org/article/workers-councils-anton-pannekoek. See also the article referenced in footnote 1.

4 On Ustica, he encountered Gramsci who had played a central role in imposing the CI’s line in the Italian party and pushing Bordiga out of the leadership. By now Gramsci was already ill and despite their considerable differences Bordiga didn’t hesitate to take up the defence of his basic needs, and to work with him in the formation of a marxist educational circle.

5 This text was recently re-published in English as a pamphlet by the Internationalist Communist Tendency.

6The practical problems facing Bordiga during this period were certainly considerable: he was followed by two police agents wherever he went. Nevertheless there was also a voluntary element in Bordiga’s isolation from his comrades and Damen, in a kind of obituary written shortly after Bordiga’s death in 1970, is sharply critical of Bordiga at the level of political comportment: His political behaviour, his constant refusal to take on a politically responsible attitude, has to be considered in this particular climate. Thus many political events, some of great historic importance, such as the Trotsky-Stalin conflict and Stalinism itself were disdainfully ignored without an echo. The same was true for our Fraction abroad in France and Belgium, the ideology and the politics of the party of Livorno, the Second World War and finally the alignment of the USSR with the imperialist front. Not a word, not a line on Bordiga’s part appeared throughout this historic period which was on a wider and more complex level than the First World War”. https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2011-01-21/amadeo-bordiga-beyond-the-myth-and-the-rhetoric-0. A study of Bordiga’s ‘years of obscurity’ has been published in Italian: Arturo Peregalli and Sandro Saggioro, Amadeo Bordiga. – La sconfitta e gli anni oscuri (1926-1945). Edizioni Colibri, Milan, November 1998

9 See p 164 in the English edition. These insights into the potential dangers emanating from the ‘proletarian’ state seem to have been lost, judging by the surprise the delegate of the PCInt/Battaglia Comunista expressed, at the Second Congress of the ICC, after reading a proposed resolution on the state in the period of transition which was based on the insights of the Fraction and of the GCF. The resolution was eventually adopted at the Third Congress: Resolution on the State in the Transition Period. See also The period of transition: Polemic with the P.C.Int.-Battaglia Comunista

10 In his preface to Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory (Russie et Révolution dans la Théorie Marxiste, Spartacus 1975, Jacques Camatte shows that the Bordiga of the revolutionary years after World War One did not defend the notion of invariance, referring in particular to the first article in the collection, ‘The lessons of recent history’, which argues that the real movement of the proletariat can enrich theory, and which openly criticises certain of Marx’s ideas about democracy and some of the tactical prescriptions in the Communist Manifesto “the system of critical communism must naturally be understood in liaison with the integration of historical experience subsequent to Marx’s Manifesto, and, if necessary, in an opposite direction to certain tactical behaviours by Marx and Engels which proved to be wrong”.

15 ‘In Janitzio they’re not afraid of death’

16See also a previous article in this series: The Mature Marx - Past and Future Communism

17A rather clear exposition of Bordiga’s conception of socialism can be found in an article by Adam Buick of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, who, for all their other faults, have always understood very clearly that socialism means the abolition of wage labour and money.

19 Communism: the real beginning of human society This article, like others in the series, also refers to Bordiga’s writings on communism

22 Freud, New Introductory Lectures, London 1973, p 117

23 Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, 1960, p 91 of the 1986 Allen and Unwin edition. Fromm, a descendant of the Frankfurt School who has also written extensively about the early writings of Marx, considers that, taken to its logical conclusion, the true goal of psychoanalysis (which could only be attained on a wide scale in a “sane society”), is not simply to relieve neurotic symptoms or to subordinate the instincts to intellectual control, but to make the unconscious conscious and thus reach the non-repressed life. He thus defines the method of psychoanalysis in relation to this goal:“ it examines the psychic development of a person from childhood on and tries to recover the earlier experiences in order to assist the person in experiencing what is now repressed. It proceeds by uncovering illusions within oneself about the world, step by step, so that parataxis distortions and alienated intellectualisations diminish. By becoming less of a stranger to himself, the person who goes through this process becomes less estranged to the world; because he has opened up communication with the universe within himself, he has opened up communication with the universe outside. False consciousness disappears, and with it the polarity conscious-unconscious” (ibid p 107). Elsewhere (p 105) he compares this method with that of Zen, which uses different means, but also proceeds through a series of smaller realisations or ‘satoris’ towards a qualitatively higher level of being in the world

24 See the collection Murdering the Dead: Amadeo Bordiga on capitalism and other disasters, Antagonism Press, 2001 Review See also our article Flooding: the shape of things to come which looks at Bordiga’s notion of the role of destruction in capitalist accumulation.

Post-scriptum (final note): p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; }a:link { color: rgb(0, 0, 255); }

As pointed out in a recent article by C Derrick Varn on the blog Symptomatic Commentary, ‘The brain of society: notes on Bordiga, organic centralism, and the limitations of the party form’ , Bordiga seemed reluctant to abandon the notion of the party not only persisting but even acting as the incarnated ‘social brain’ during the higher phase of communism.

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Not just a nice idea...

From Soweto 1976 to the ANC in power 1993

In the previous article on the workers’ movement in South Africa (in International Review n° 155) we highlighted the effectiveness of the apartheid system combined with the action of the trade unions and parties up until the late 1960s when, faced with an unprecedented development of the class struggle, the bourgeoisie had to “modernise” its political apparatus in order to preserve its system. It was forced to do this faced with a South African proletariat whose mass movements showed that it was part of the global waves of struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In this introduction we want to draw the reader’s attention to the importance of these questions. Although, in the face of new social movements, the South African bourgeoisie relied on its most barbaric traditional weapons, the police and military forces, the dynamic of class confrontation was unprecedented: the working class had never before shown such combativity and development of consciousness, faced with a bourgeoisie that had never had to develop such sophisticated manoeuvres, including extensive use of the weapon of rank and file unionism animated by the extreme left of capital. In this clash between the two real historic classes, the determination of the proletariat would go so far as to provoke the dismantling of the system of apartheid, resulting in the unification of all fractions of the bourgeoisie with the aim of confronting the surge in the struggle of the working class.

Before that, in 1976, following the wave of struggles that marked the 1973-74 period,1 we witnessed a vigorous continuation of this episode of struggle: the uprising of the school pupils. In June of that year some ten thousand young people took to the streets to protest against compulsory education in Afrikaans and more generally against the bad living conditions imposed by the apartheid system. A movement of young people was immediately followed by the mobilisation of thousands of adults, active and unemployed workers. Shaken by this formidable proletarian explosion, the regime responded in its customary way by unleashing its guard dogs – the forces of repression – on the protesters and killing hundreds of demonstrators including children:

Since the great strikes of 1973-74, another front of struggle opened in South Africa: that of black schoolchildren and students whose anger exploded in June 1976 in Soweto. Thereafter, the popular insurrection hardly knew a lull. The violent police repression (about 500 deaths in the city of Soweto alone, hundreds of others across the country, thousands wounded) united the entire black population in this common fight.

Many of the young people behind the popular movement were shot by police during non-violent protests or during civilian militia raids in black neighbourhoods. Adults, struck by the courage and determination of the younger generation, joined them, and followed the slogans raised by their spokespeople: workers’ strikes and transport were organised several times in the black areas of Johannesburg and Cape Town. They were massively followed, including by the Coloured populations of the Cape Province. The destruction of school buildings, drinking places, administration buildings and means of transport which marked the beginning of the popular revolt were followed by more orchestrated but equally successful campaigns. Boycotts of classes and exams until the release of imprisoned youths, general mourning in memory of the victims of repression, boycott of drinking establishments, department stores, Christmas celebrations.2

We are in the presence here of a great proletarian insurrectional movement against the general misery imposed by one of the most brutal forms of capitalism: apartheid. An uprising of indignation by youth echoed the resurgence of international class struggle marked by huge workers’ strikes in the early 1970s in countries around the world. A movement that eventually spread to the major industrial areas of the country, leading to and mixing into a single struggle of workers and people of all ages. Faced with a struggle of this magnitude, with a surge of proletarian anger threatening to undermine the system, the barbaric regime could not hide its panic and responded with a bloody terror, even though this aroused widespread outrage in the country and amplified the anger and mobilisation of the whole population of Soweto and beyond. Workers, the unemployed and families with children joined the school students’ fight. Police batons and bullets left thousands dead and injured.

But the savagery of the killings only served to radicalise the movement, which continued until 1977 with massive strikes and demonstrations and tended to politicise itself by generating countless struggle committees called “civics”3, consisting mainly of workers (unionised or not), the unemployed, young people and their parents.

The civics developed rapidly in the Cape at the end of the 1970s. They extended in a certain way the forms of organisation within the townships which had arisen during the movements of June 1976 in the Transvaal. There were practically as many specific histories as there were organisations, since these were very often born out of the particular needs of a township or neighbourhood. Many appeared in the form of struggle committees either for the boycott of public transport against an increase in fares or for a boycott of rents against their rise. Some took the form of political committees dealing with all the problems of the community. The movement was infinitely diverse: cultural, religious associations, youth, students or high school students, students’ parents, were gradually assimilated to the concept of ‘civics’. Also, there was not just one committee per ward or township but a complex web of activist memberships and areas of intervention.4

Here was a powerful social movement that crystallised at a high level some of the characteristics of the wave of struggles on an international scale. We can see that the strong combativity of the working class which lay behind the massive strikes also expressed itself in a strong will for self-organisation, and this explains the extraordinary proliferation of civics. To our knowledge this is the first time we have witnessed, on this scale, in South Africa (and on the African continent), such forms of self-organisation, where for several years the social life of neighbourhoods was literally in the hands of the inhabitants themselves who debated every subject and took charge of all the problems concerning them. This was the most worrying aspect for the bourgeoisie, which saw its authority slipping away. Certainly one can note that some committees took, here and there, an inter-classist character or religious connotation, especially to the extent that bourgeois forces (unions, parties, churches, etc.) infiltrated them. However, it should be clear that the civics, despite their ideological heterogeneity, were fundamentally the product of a genuine proletarian class struggle. Moreover, the aspect of self-organisation in the Soweto uprising shows a further step in relation to the politicisation that had characterised the South African proletariat in the powerful movement of struggle in the years 1973-1974, particularly in terms of solidarity and unity in the class struggle. Therefore a clear link can be established in the continuity between the two movements of struggle, the second taking over from the first to go further in the development of class consciousness, as illustrated by the following evaluation of the preceding wave of struggles:

The development of solidarity of black workers in action and growing consciousness of their class unity were stressed by many observers. This achievement of the struggles, though unquantifiable, was considered by them as the most positive for the progress of the organisation of the black workers’ movement. (...) These strikes were also political: the fact that the workers demanded the doubling of their wages is not a sign of the naivety or stupidity of Africans. Rather, it expresses the rejection of their situation and their desire for a totally different society. The workers returned to work with some modest achievements, but they were less satisfied now than they were before the strikes.5

From this fact, we can deduce that many of the actors in the 1973-74 strikes joined the insurrectional movement in Soweto, and that thanks to their previous experience, they could play a decisive role in its radicalisation and politicisation. Such potentialities for the development of militancy and consciousness could only shake the bourgeoisie which, moreover, was forced to become fully aware of it at the inter-imperialist level.

The great imperialist powers get involved

The Soweto movement was prolonged by strikes and demonstrations until 1977 when police repression still claimed many victims, notably the teenager Steve Biko, a militant of the “Black Consciousness” movement. The murder of this young man in a local police station refuelled the struggles and amplified the protests, the victim thus becoming a martyr of apartheid, especially in the eyes of all the defenders of the “black cause” around the world. Thus, in Africa, as in America and especially in Europe, where there were numerous demonstrations against the apartheid regime, led mainly by trade unions and leftist parties, one could read (in France) slogans such as: “Against Franco-South African friendly relations (tourism, sport, culture); against French emigration in South Africa; against deliveries of weapons and technology to South Africa; against imports of South African products, etc.6

Conscious of the intensification of the movement, in particular with the radicalisation of the proletarian youth of Soweto, the NATO imperialist bloc increased the pressure on its South African ally (including at the economic level by boycotting South African products) to prevent the political destabilisation that threatened its future, but above all to deal with the ideological exploitation of events by the Russian bloc which, not content with arming and funding the ANC, also began openly to manipulate the various demonstrations around the world against the apartheid regime. It is in this context that South African officials finally accepted the “advice” of their Western sponsors to face up to the risks their system posed. Thus even among the most extreme South African leaders there was a change of tone or tactics towards the strikers:

Unless we succeed in creating a strong middle class among the blacks, we will have serious problems” (Botha, minister of defence). “We must give enough to the blacks for them to believe in separate development (a euphemism for the apartheid system) so that they will carefully protect what they have from the agitators. Nothing will happen to us if we give these people enough to be afraid of losing what they have (...) A happy person cannot become a communist.” (Kruger, minister of police and justice).

The Pretoria government therefore decided to make a number of concessions in line with the demands of the young people in struggle, for example by withdrawing its law imposing education in Afrikaans on African students and by lifting the ban on the inhabitants of Soweto owning or building their own homes, while recognising the right to association implied by the existence of trade union and political organisations.

In truth, South African capital (at least its most “enlightened” sector) had not waited for the Soweto movement to start implementing plans to relax the apartheid regime the better to thwart the workers’ struggles:

Society had shifted. The system was no longer safe from destabilisation. The government and the South African employers would therefore make some adjustments, in order to keep these socio-political changes in as bureaucratic a framework as possible. The Bantu Labour Regulation Act of 1973 thus completed the arsenal of labour regulations. It established two types of factory committees: works committees composed only of workers’ representatives; liaison committees made up of employer and employee representatives in equal numbers (...) And the Urban Training Project played the game and tried to use these factory committees to stabilise the trade unions it coordinated.7

The implementation of this device well before the outbreak of the Soweto revolt clearly expressed the intent of the South African bourgeoisie to take into account the evolution of a situation which threatened to escape its control. Indeed, in drawing the lessons from the first wave of struggles in the years 1972-74, it had been forced to take a number of bold steps, the principal ones being to give more “power” to the African trade unions by greatly increasing their number and expanding their “rights” with the aim of avoiding “political turmoil”.8 It found, however, that this was not enough to prevent the development of struggles, as shown by the Soweto movement.

The proletarian class struggle shakes the apartheid system

In an apparent effort to counter the proletarian class struggle, the South African regime undertook a major new political direction towards nothing less than the progressive dismantling of the apartheid system, which meant the dissolution of racial barriers and the integration of black nationalist movements into the democratic political circus. But to get to this point, the apartheid regime had to be shaken to its foundations. Everything changed in the mid-1970s due to the eruption of the class struggle, but up until then the bourgeoisie had not really been disturbed by the social question:

The events of Soweto in June 1976 were to confirm the political change underway in the country. The youth revolt in the Transvaal combined with the rebirth of the black workers’ movement to unleash the major social and political movements of the 1980s. After the strikes of 1973, the clashes of 1976 ended the period of defeat.9

This represented a real reversal of the situation, given that apartheid was designed above all against the class struggle with the aim of avoiding the development of a multiracial working class10 through segregation and the attribution of “rights and privileges” to fractions of the working class. In other words, the theory of the so-called “supremacy” of whites over blacks concretely translated into (skilled) jobs and other benefits reserved exclusively for workers of European origin, while their fellow Africans, Indians and Coloureds had to be content with unfavourable conditions of work, wages and existence.11 In so doing, the apartheid regime succeeded in corrupting a large part of the working class of European origin by making it voluntarily or passively adhere to its segregationist system. And all this succeeded over a long period (between 1940 and 1980) in dividing the South African proletariat, hampering its capacity to develop struggles that might obstruct the smooth running of capitalism.

A historic turning point in the apartheid system

This reversal of the situation was also reflected in a rapprochement between the two factions of the bourgeoisie from the two former colonial powers, namely the British and Dutch. Faced with the rise of the proletariat, and a tendency towards the unity of all its ethnic components, they decided to forget their ancestral ideological hatred and divergences in order to unite behind the national capital of South Africa as a whole.

This marked a truly historic turning point in the life of the South African bourgeoisie in general and within the Afrikaner faction in particular. Since the terrible “Boer Wars” of 1899-190212, when the British crushed the Afrikaners, hatred between the descendants of English and Dutch settlers remained visible until the eve of the end of apartheid, even though they had to govern the country together on several occasions. A significant faction of Afrikaners had long dreamed of taking revenge on the British Empire, as shown by the fact that during the Second World War a good part of the Afrikaner leaders (including the military) openly showed their support for the Hitler regime which was their ideological reference point, and by the decision of the Afrikaner regime to leave the Commonwealth and change the name of the country from the Union of South Africa to the Republic of South Africa).

To address this major historical turning point in the dismantling of apartheid, South African capital found a sizable strategic ally, namely trade unionism, but of a new kind, in this case a “radical”, “rank and file” unionism (discussed below), as the only one capable, in its eyes, of stemming a tide of struggle that threatened to become more and more dangerous. And this time, given the importance of the stakes of the epoch, all the decisive principal actors of the South African bourgeoisie clearly assumed this new orientation, including the most reactionary, not to say fascist, apartheid supporters like Botha, Kruger, etc. Similarly, as will be seen later, it was the latter, together with De Klerk (former president), who directly steered the negotiation process with Mandela’s ANC with a view to dismantling the apartheid system.

To save its system of production the bourgeoisie gives birth to new unions

Faced with the collapse of the old union apparatus provoked by the explosion of struggles in the 1970s, and this despite the reinforcement by the state of the means at their disposal, the bourgeoisie decided to resort outright to what could be called “rank and file unionism” or “shop stewards”, taking the form of new “fighting” trade unions that wanted to be independent of the large union centres:

(…) During the 1970s, several union currents developed and differentiated themselves amid the resurgence of social conflicts. Their stories intertwine to the rhythm of splits and unifications. Three union projects thus developed on the basis of some distinct political and ideological assumptions.

The first was constituted (or reconstituted) around the union tradition of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and its link to the African National Congress (ANC). The second was formed from the new Black Consciousness Movement, forming in particular the Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA). The last, finally, appeared in an original way, with no apparent link to a known political current. It was founded in 1979 as the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU).13

This was a radical reorganisation of the trade union system with the function of neutralising the workers’ struggles if they could not be prevented. But what this shows first is that the leadership of the South African regime was fully aware of the danger of the development of the class struggle from 1973 up to the Soweto movement in 1976 and beyond. It realised that the apartheid system in all its forms was no longer adapted to the rise of the workers’ growing militancy and consciousness. Clearly, the bourgeois regime had to take note of the fact that the system of unionisation based on the division of workers according to their ethnic origins was no longer appropriate and that the apparatus of the large unions, such as TUCSA (Trade Union Council of South Africa) were no longer credible among the combative workers, especially the younger generation. Hence the emergence of these new unions to play the role of a “fighting”, “base” unionism, “independent” of the union apparatus.

The following passage relating to FOSATU (Federation of South African Trade Unions) speaks volumes as to the reality of these new unions:

(…) Our study is particularly devoted to this union current (FOSATU), which was formed from networks of intellectuals and students, themselves the products of a specific phase of the socio-economic evolution of the country.

(…) Thus, in barely ten years, a group of intellectuals (mainly white) and black workers would create a new form of union organisation. It would initially present itself as a point of reference independent of the ANC and radically opposed to the Communist Party. It would lead a large part of the strike movements of the 1980s.14

This was a very “radical” and “critical” trade union group vis-à-vis the union and political apparatus, but it was an unprecedented development in the period of apartheid in that it was able to join together black and white workers and intellectuals, radical political opponents of various kinds. In short, it was a new union apparatus called to play a major role in South African political life.As was the case for the bourgeoisie of the large European industries, faced with the radicalisation of the workers’ struggle, South African capital was forced to use “base unionism”.15 Similarly, as in Europe, in these “radical unions” was usually found a large number of leftists; this was the case with FOSATU, which was led more or less openly by elements close to the “Unity Movement”, that is to say, Trotskyists. We will come back to this later. How would the new base unions, once formed, accomplish their dirty work at the head or inside of the movements of the Soweto struggle?

The struggles of Soweto poisoned by the trade unions and the ideological confusions of the proletariat

As might be expected, the regime’s concessions could not really calm the Soweto movement; on the contrary they merely served to radicalise it, but also to divide its participants, both in the schools and among the workers. For example, some organisations more or less satisfied themselves with the government’s concessions while others with a more radical appearance demanded more. In fact there was a division of labour in the work of the unions. Besides FOSATU (among the new radical unions), the Black Allied Workers’ Union (BAWU) played an important role. Created in 1973 in the wake of the major strikes in Johannesburg, it campaigned for the exclusive regrouping of black workers of all categories and industrial sectors:

(…) Its aims were primarily: “To organise and unify the black workers in a powerful workers’ movement, able to gain the respect and recognition of the employers and the government; to improve the workers’ knowledge through general and specialised educational programmes, in order to promote their qualification; to represent black workers and their interests in the workplace.16

This was a union created exclusively by and for black workers, hence its opposition to all other unions (even those that were 99% black). But this orientation was particularly pernicious because it gave the impression of creating “positive segregation” by claiming to fulfil legitimate objectives such as improving the knowledge of black workers, or promoting their qualification. And in doing so it was able to “seduce” a large number of class conscious workers. In other words, it acted as an obstacle to unity in the struggle between workers of all ethnic origins. Besides this, to drive the point home, the BAWU immediately approached the “Black Consciousness Movement”:

This position reflects the general attitude of the various organisations that made up the black consciousness movement, in particular of black students (South African Students’ Organisation – SASO – which was separate from the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) in order, according to its militants, to escape the paternalism shown by all whites vis-à-vis blacks.17

Thus the groups in the student milieu adopted openly and without difficulty the orientation of the BAWU union; that is, becoming openly racist and playing the same role of division of the workers’ ranks as the most racist white unions. In short, it was far from defending the common interests of the South African proletariat, and even those of the black fraction of the working class. And indeed, behind this regroupment or alliance between workers and students we can see the harmfulness of the race question, especially when it is couched in terms of “black consciousness” as opposed to “white consciousness” , rather than the consciousness of the proletarian class. And this even as the conditions were largely met for unity in the struggle as shown by the strike movements taking place in the country where many sectors of workers were fighting for class and not racial demands, which were in fact often successful. Moreover, to the difficulties of the alliance between workers and students linked to racial and trade union divisions was added the corporatism and petty bourgeois spirit of the intellectuals who were strongly present in this struggle movement. As a result, despite the strong momentum created by the general resurgence of the struggle in the early 1970s, the combativity of the workers and youth of Soweto was diverted into a dead end:; the movement was diverted and divided by ethnic rivalries between ethnic, corporatist and petty bourgeois cliques, which ultimately stifled every purely proletarian attempt at giving the struggle a direction:

(…) One of the most important and surprising aspects of the creation of African trade unions in Natal is the role played by groups of academics, students or white teachers. The importance of the role of the handful of intellectuals who made a deep commitment to the African workers does not mean that the South African university was the vanguard of protest and combat for the liberation of the black masses. Far from it. The conservatism and racism of Afrikaner youth, the recklessness of Anglophone students and the corporatism of professional intellectuals were the general rule. As for black students, having voluntarily left the white student organisations (in 1972), it seems that their struggle for their own survival as a group and their participation in the Black Consciousness Movement captured their entire militant energy.18

Clearly, in these conditions the real proletarian vanguard could hardly put itself forward because it was tied down and corralled by the nationalist or racist trade unions, and sometimes by the corporatist factions of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, manipulated by various political groups like the CP, ANC and leftist elements. From this point on, we can see more clearly the limits of the development of class consciousness, especially among the young people of Soweto, whose struggle was their first experience as members of the proletarian class.

The ANC diverts the youth struggle of Soweto towards the imperialist armed struggle

Having infiltrated the various organs of the working class youth of Soweto, the ANC extended its control over a large number of radical youths coming from the “civics” and managed to enrol them in the armed struggle by sending them to military training camps in neighbouring countries. The ANC especially targeted the most active elements of the Soweto movement, those who were seeking to escape the police repression of the South African regime, promising them “training” to better fight against the apartheid regime. And once there, many critical youths were systematically punished by imprisonment or even death:

Those ANC soldiers unhappy with this policy did not have the right to discuss it, under the pretext of discipline. In 1983, the ANC participated in the Angolan civil war, sending protesting soldiers there to get rid of them. And when hundreds of returned survivors mutinied the following year, they were suppressed. For this there was an ANC prison camp in Mozambique, the Quatro, where torture was used against recalcitrant internal opponents.19

Clearly, even before coming to power, the ANC already conducted itself as an executioner of the working class. But what the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière, which we have just cited, does not say is that the party of Mandela was involved in the war in Angola in the 1980s on behalf of the Russian imperialist bloc, where it received support from neighbouring countries (opponents of the NATO bloc): Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, etc. This was the period when the ANC and CP articulated their struggle for “national liberation” with confrontations between the imperialist powers of the east/west blocs, clearly relying on the support of Moscow. Similarly, while internally the struggle was being broken militarily, externally South Africa was playing the role of “deputy gendarme” of the western imperialist bloc in southern Africa, hence its military involvement, like all its rivals, in the war in Angola and other neighbouring countries.

From FOSATU to COSATU, South African trade unionism at the service of the national capital

Since the entry of capitalism into decadence (marked by the first imperialist world conflict in 1914), trade unionism has ceased to be a real organ of struggle for the working class, and even worse, has become a counter-revolutionary instrument in the service of the capitalist state. This is illustrated by the history of the class struggle in South Africa.20 But the study of the history of trade unionism in the case of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) shows us the power of a new unionism capable of simultaneously exerting influence on a highly combative proletariat and on the archaic apartheid regime. FOSATU made use of its “genius” for organising, to the point of being simultaneously heard by both the exploited and the exploiter in order to astutely “manage” the conflicts between the two antagonists – which meant, in the final analysis, serving the bourgeoisie. Similarly, it played the role of “facilitator” in the “peaceful transition” between the “white power” and the “black power” resulting in the establishment of a “national unity” government.

Birth and characteristics of FOSATU: Founded in 1979, it was the result of a trade union re-organisation following the disappearance or self-dissolution of the main former trade unions in the aftermath of the vigorous strike action of 1973, which shook the entire country.

This new union current gave birth to the most important unions in industry (except the mines): automobiles, metallurgy, chemicals, textiles, etc. The same year that FOSATU was founded, the South African state facilitated its role by deciding to grant the title of “employee” 21 to all blacks including those in the Bantustans, followed soon after by African workers from neighbouring countries. This hugely promoted the unionisation of workers in all sectors of the country, amply benefitting FOSATU by allowing it to create its own “development project”:

In the early 1980s (this union movement) developed an original trade union project, based on a conception explicitly independent of the main political forces, formed from networks of intellectuals and students, themselves produced from a specific phase of the socio-economic evolution of the country; it corresponded to a real social and economic change in the country and accompanied the gradual transformation of the organisation of the labour market.22

It was, therefore, in this context that this trade union movement was propelled by its desire to be both a “trade union left” and a “political left”, and that many of its leaders were influenced by Trotskyist and Stalinist ideology:

Towards the end of the 1920s, militants adhering to Trotskyist critiques split from the Communist Party. Some of them were leaders of a broad movement in the 1940s called the Unity Movement. Furthermore, a renowned trade unionist in the thirties and forties, Max Gordon, was a Trotskyist.

This current fragmented and greatly weakened in the late fifties. But there still existed in Cape Town, in the seventies, a strong presence of these groups, mainly among Coloured teachers”.

(...) In interviews done in Cape Town in 1982 and 1983, we were able to verify that the leader of the municipal workers’ union, John Erentzen, had been a member of the Unity Movement. Marcel Golding, before entering the miners’ union leadership, was part of a study group of Trotskyist orientation.”

(...)Alec Elwin (First Secretary of FOSATU) said he was influenced initially by the French Althusser and Poulantzas. He mentioned the importance for people like him of the debate that existed in Britain in the seventies on the question of shop stewards, that is to say, workshop delegates and rank and file organisation. Another important factor for this generation of radical intellectuals was the contribution of a renewed Marxist analysis of apartheid (by people like Martin Legassick) regarding capitalist relations of production. Thus there gradually emerged an alternative theory to that of the Communist Party.

From these quotes we can see clearly the role played historically23 by the Trotskyist current or its “nebula” in the unions in general and in base unionism in particular. We have seen previously that the Trotskyist current was involved in the formation of new radical unions in the wake of the struggles of the 1970s. In this context it is worth noting a specific facet of the contribution of Trotskyism to the counter-revolution, namely “entryism”24 into the social democratic parties (and trade unions); that is, joining (clandestinely) these bourgeois organisations supposedly to seize (in due course) their leadership (for the revolution). In fact, this practice is anti-proletarian and expresses a clear contempt for the working class in whose name its (hidden) practitioners claim to act.25 Another consequence of this practice is that it is impossible to positively identify “entrists”, to know, even approximately, the number of FOSATU leaders who were under Trotskyist influence at one time or another during their stay in the South African Trade unions.

Here we can put forward the idea that the leaders of the "trade union left" embodied by FOSATU/COSATU were marked by various bourgeois ideological influences: ranging from Trotskyism to Social-Democracy through Stalinism, “Solidarnosc” trade unionism (Poland), Lula’s “Workers’ Party” (Brazil):

In October 1983 the newspaper FOSATU Work News” published a double page centrefold article on Solidarity and Poland. The thread is pretty similar to what the leaders of the FOSATU thought about the South African process: industrial growth, little improvement of the workers’ status, repression, control of demand, internal differentiation in the union and the evolution of the Walesa group ... And the article ends: the struggle of Polish workers is an inspiration to all other workers in struggle”. (...) In 1985, issues 39 and 40 published a long article reporting on the Workers’ Party of Brazil (PT).26

Here we can clearly see the similarities in the approach of unions like FOSATU and those of Walesa and Lula, especially in terms of their preparations to accede to the highest levels of the state.

Thus armed with its experience of politico-trade union maneuvering in the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, FOSATU could openly enter the service of South African national capital by taking advantage of its “aura” to work for the constitution of a new trade unionism rid of the archaic apartheid trade union apparatus, making its hazy union doctrine prevail by relying essentially on the industrial workers, as indicated in the text of its first congress:

The federation will essentially consist of unions of industrial branches to the extent that this is, within the framework of existing industrial structures, the best way to promote workers’ unity and the interests of workers, and as far as this is also the best way for it to concentrate on the areas of workers’ concerns. This, however, does not reflect support for current industrial relations”.

(...) The absence of racial divisions (non-racialism), workers’ control, trade union branches, grassroots organising, international workers’ solidarity, trade union unity.27

If we situate FOSATU’s politico-union manoeuvring in the context of apartheid, we can understand the relative ease with which the Federation was able to attract a number of workers struggling or conscious of the necessity of the need for unity in the struggle across ethnic boundaries. Besides its status as the first union in the industrial sector, it made particular use of its combative image in the eyes of many workers from the struggles in the 1970s-80s to earn their trust. With its well-organised apparatus of “fighting unionism” it entered into discussions with all the other unions which had retained some influence, with a view to federating them, although not without great difficulties, especially with those under control of the ANC/CP. It also had to contend with the hostility or reluctance of other trade union movements before convincing or marginalising them, like the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) or some unions close to the “Black Consciousness” Movement.

FOSATU prepares to integrate itself into the political apparatus

At its origin in 1979, FOSATU consisted of three registered (legal) trade unions and nine unregistered unions,28 which meant that the latter were dominant and their weight was reflected in the Federation’s ideological and strategic choices. This was until the moment when FOSATU decided to initiate a shift towards its institutional integration, that is to say, by becoming more and more involved in power, albeit remaining “radical”:

The debate on registration took the form of a sharp polemic against the unions of FOSATU that were registered. The attack came from the GWU (pro-Black Consciousness) and, in a much more virulent way, from the SAAWU (pro-ANC). The arguments were roughly similar: loss of independence vis-à-vis the state and obstructing a true democratic functioning of the trade unions which had to comply with the constraints of official control, etc.

(...) Other debates were conducted during negotiations. And it was the shape of the future confederation which most troubled the FOSATU leadership. It was convinced that the model of FOSATU was best suited to its company union sections, its industrial branch unions, regional structures (inter-professional, in the terminology of French unionism), its grassroots democracy based on shop stewards, etc.”

(...) The leadership of FOSATU finally convinced the majority of its partners on these union issues. But it is important to note here that the unification process towards the foundation of COSATU was finally clarified when the SAAWU changed position, in our opinion, after the leaders in exile of the ANC and the Communist Party themselves decided to change their attitude. And also when the NUM, the mining union member of CUSA and by far its biggest affiliate, decided in December 1984 to break with its federation and participate fully in the launch of COSATU.29

By integrating the mining union (NUM), FOSATU definitively imposed itself in the decisive sectors of the national economy and became from that moment the obligatory partner of the regime. It thus reinforced its control over the most combative sectors of the working class and successfully took the initiative in uniting the main trade unions. This was a remarkable journey for FOSATU, which managed to bring together the major influential trade unions in a great confederation throughout the country, leading to the creation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Once again, FOSATU showed its “political genius” and organisational expertise by evolving from a radical opposition of the left to a union alongside the great nationalist bureaucratic apparatus with the aim of acceding to bourgeois power; and this without any openly hostile working class reaction. It is notable that these “pimps” of the working class for the left bourgeois apparatus had to proceed methodically step by step. First: by opting for a left political and union “radicalism” to better seduce the combative workers; second: by unifying the union apparatus, and third: by promoting the constitution of a broad trade union and political front in order to “wisely” govern the post-apartheid country.

In its quest for trade union and political unity, COSATU was unable to integrate two currents close to the “Black Consciousness” movement and the PAC. Both of them preferred to remain in opposition with their own unitary federation, the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU). There were also other small white or corporatist unions. However, they had no decisive influence on the organisation of struggles compared to COSATU.

It is through this that the ex-FOSATU leaders would continue to pursue their “trade union mission”, to the point that many are now playing their role of managers in charge of South African capital, as ministers or big business owners.

Control of the civics at stake in the bitter struggles of the union/political apparatus

By becoming widespread and taking over the whole of social life in the main districts of the industrial cities over a period of time (generally between 1976 and 1985), the civics eventually became the central prize for all the organs of power in South Africa and the struggle for control over them provoked bitter clashes between union/political gangsters:

One of the major problems facing the new union movement was the development of another form of organisation of the black population, the civics, or community associations. This term was often used to group all associative forms emerging in the townships.

Considerable work remains to be done on these movements because they have not received the same attention as the trade unions from researchers.

(...) It seems that the development of the civics started mainly in the Cape under the impact of two competing political currents at the time in this region: one of the independent political left (nebulous political heir to the Unity Movement”) and the other related to or influenced by the ANC. Networks of associations were divided according to political sympathies. Thus, in the Cape, militants of the Unity Movement formed with the associations they controlled the Federation of Cape Civic Associations and militants of the ANC and the Communist Party formed their own Cape Area Housing Action Committee (CAHAC). This cartelisation then developed at the national level with, in addition, the activity of the AZAPO party (heir to the Black Consciousness Movement) and of militants and supporters of the PAC (Pan Africanist Congress). In the mid-eighties the majority of the political currents appeared publicly under the banner of the groupings of the civics they controlled”. 30

We can only share the opinion of the author of the quote that the “civics” have not received the same attention from researchers as the unions and that much work remains to be done on these movements. This being said, the other major point to emphasise is the relentlessness with which the union and political vultures attempted to neutralise the organisations resulting from the insurrectionary struggles of Soweto. In order to catch up with the movement they had not initiated, all these bourgeois forces proceeded by infiltration and sordid maneuvers to sabotage the various committees under the name of civics and finally managed to control them and use them as instruments in their struggle for influence in order to gain power. In 1983, we saw a series of demonstrations and strikes mobilising more and more people, especially in Soweto but also in other regions. This was the moment chosen by the ANC to intensify its control over the social movements by creating an organisation called the “United Democratic Front”, a kind of “forum” or simple “net” in which Mandela’s party managed to catch many of the civics. And the ANC’s rivals were not slow to respond by chasing the same autonomous groups, accompanied by criminal violence on both sides:

(...) More and more violent polemics developed at the rhythm of major social conflicts: a general strike, a local or regional stay-away, or even a boycott of white-owned businesses, indiscriminately aimed at factory employees and the population of the townships; and in these areas, such as Port Elizabeth or East London, where at least 50% of the unemployed were already at that time, it was not possible to organise movements of this magnitude without relying on the complementarity of the civics and the trade unions. Each party obviously had such a unitary conviction. But the political stakes were such that each sought to exert hegemonic pressure on the other. There were all sorts of conflicts including between associations controlled by AZAPO (the People's Organisation of Azania) and certain unions.

(...) Examples abound of cases of physical violence. FOSATU leaders complained that, because there was no real centralization, groups of young people linked to the civics sometimes attacked workers carrying out their normal work. Bus drivers could be attacked or even killed by young people who did not understand or simply ignored the trade union opposition to this or that appeal.31.

In short, this is how the “civics” were scuttled by the various trade union, nationalist and democratic forces vying for control. In other words, we see that the ANC and its rivals did not hesitate to train many young people to kill each other or to attack and kill active workers like bus drivers. And this for the greater good of the common enemy, namely the national capital. Certainly, the ANC reached the pinnacle of crimes committed against the youth of Soweto for having enlisted a large number of former civic members into an imperialist camp and sending them to the slaughter for so-called “national liberation” (see previous section).

The strikes return in the midst of an economic recession

In 1982/83, strikes broke out in many areas against government austerity measures, particularly in the mines and automobile industry, mobilising tens of thousands of workers and seriously hitting the factories of General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, etc. Like many other countries at this time, South Africa was hit by the economic crisis that plunged it deep into recession.

In the recession that opened in 1981-82, the whole system was running out of steam, including at the institutional level. Between 1980 and 1985, corporate bankruptcies rose by 500%. The interest rate went from 9.5% to 17% in 1981; it reached 18% in 1982 and 25% in August 1985. In 1982, the country still enjoyed a net inflow of 662 million rand;; in 1983, it had a deficit of 93 million rand. The rand which was worth $1.09 in 1982 was worth less than $0.37 at the end of 1985. The total of investments went from 2.346 million rand in 1981 to 1.408 in 1984. That same year, the external debt reached $24.8 billion, including $13 billion in short term debt. The volume of manufacturing output and exports fell, labour costs increased, and unemployment rose.32

Faced with the scale of the recession, the South African government had to take drastic measures against the living conditions of the working class - mass lay-offs and wage cuts, etc. For its part, despite being weakened by the struggles for control waged between the ANC and rival cliques, the working class could not remain arms crossed and therefore had to go into struggle, showing once again that its combativeness remained intact. In this respect, as an illustrative example, one can take the year 1982 when most of the conflicts concerned wage claims (170), followed by problems of lay-offs and downsizing (56), whereas conflicts for trade union recognition resulted in only 12 strikes. This last aspect is important because it means that the workers clearly did not feel the need to unionise to enter into struggle.

In the period 1982-83 South Africa was marked by an uninterrupted growth of strikes. In this context, once again the anti-working class role of radical trade unionism was notable:

It was the unions of FOSATU which were responsible for the most strikes, including those in metalworking and automobiles. It was therefore the regions where these industries were particularly present which recorded the most conflicts. The Eastern Cape region, notably the cities of Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, experienced the highest strike rates: 55,150 strikers in 1982, of whom 51,740 were in the automobile industry. It was in the East Rand that there were the most movements in metalworking: 40 with a total of 13,884 strikers. These figures can be compared with 30,773 strikers throughout the Johannesburg region, all sectors combined (...) Such comparisons allow us to measure, at this time, the relative weight of FOSATU in the whole independent trade union movement ...33

Even when corralled, the working class remained combative and struggled on a class terrain by refusing to submit without responding to the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie. Of course, it was clearly noticeable that the workers in struggle were strongly under the control of unionism, particularly base unionism, which took the lead in the movement in order to take control of it, eventually scuttling the strikes before they compromised the interests of South African national capital. In this sense, it is remarkable that during the strike movements in 1982, no role was assigned to the “civics”, on the contrary everything was the work of the trade unions, in particular of FOSATU, which could rely on its radicalised base organisations to ensure the supremacy of its version of militancy, and deter any attempt at autonomous organisation outside the apparatus constituted as the negotiator with the state.

In 1984-85, important strikes broke out in the Transvaal/Port Elizabeth, mobilising tens of thousands of workers and involving the population by combining multiple demands (wages, education, housing, right to vote, etc.). In parallel to the miners’ strikes and those of other employees, businesses owned by whites and public transport were actively boycotted, and thousands of young people refused to serve in the military.

Faced with the protest movements, the South African regime responded by offering a “small carrot” in one hand and a “big stick” in the other. It decided, on the one hand, to grant citizens of colour (Indians and Coloureds) and blacks the right to elect their own MPs or municipal representatives from their communities. On the other hand, its only response to demands for higher wages and better living conditions from the protesters was the declaration of a state of emergency, and it used the opportunity to go after the strikers it accused of conducting “political strikes” to help justify a barbaric repression that led to the dismissal of 20,000 miners, the murder of a large number of workers and the imprisonment of thousands of others.

1986-90, strikes against the backdrop of political manoeuvering within the bourgeoisie

Between 1982 and 1987 the country experienced an uninterrupted growth of strikes, protests and deadly clashes with the forces of order:

On 9 August 1987, the NUM unleashed a strike in the mines. 95% of the unions consulted by law voted in favour of the strike. This affected all the mines where the NUM was implanted, 28 gold mines and 18 coal mines. The conflict was by far the longest strike in the South African mines, lasting 21 days (the 1946 conflict lasted 5 days) and representing 5.25 million days lost. (...) The NUM threw all its strength into this battle which was its biggest challenge since its creation in 1982. It demanded a 30% wage increase, a risk premium, 5 years’ salary given to families of miners killed in accidents instead of two years’, 30 days paid leave and June 16, the anniversary of the uprisings in Soweto, designated as a paid holiday.

Mining companies lost 17 million rand in this conflict but yielded on almost nothing. The coordination of the Chamber of Mines proved effective. Their leaders remained extremely firm, led by those of Anglo-America.”34

Once again the working class demonstrated its will to fight, even if this was clearly not enough to force back the bourgeoisie, which refused to yield on the main demands of the strikers. Moreover, employers and the state knew they could count on the unions to keep control of the workers, that the unions might have been “radical” but were very “responsible” when it came to protecting the interests of the national capital. Yet despite this, the working class refused to give up, returning to the fight massively in the following year (1988), when there were almost 3 million workers on strike, from 6 to 8 June.

But at the political level, the most significant event of this period took place in 1986. This was the year that saw the real political change that marked the end of the apartheid regime, embodied chiefly by the Afrikaners who had made it their mode of government. After definitively settling the “union question” by integrating the main unions into the bosom of the state (cf. the case of FOSATU/COSATU), those in power decided to implement the policy of constitutional reform. In this context, meetings were held (in secret) between the white South African leaders35 and ANC officials, including Mandela who, from prison, between 1986 and 1990 regularly received emissaries of the Afrikaner government with a view to the reconstruction of the country on a new non-racial basis and in accordance with the interests of the national capital. The negotiations between the African nationalists and the South African government continued until 1990, the year of Mandela’s release and the end of apartheid, the lifting of the ban on the South African CP and ANC. It goes without saying that the international context had something to do with this.

On the one hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the sudden and brutal collapse of the main ally of the ANC/CP, the Soviet bloc, and a loss of prestige for the “Soviet model” that the ANC had adopted up until then; this forced the ANC to reconsider its previous “anti-imperialist” stance. On the other hand, the disappearance of the Soviet bloc meant that the prospect of the ANC’s arrival in power was no longer a threat, on the imperialist level, for the pro-Western South African bourgeoisie. And this sheds light on the announcement by the South African president, Frederick de Klerk, in February 1990, before Parliament, of his decision to legalise the ANC, the CP and all the banned organisations, in a perspective of global negotiation. The following are the reasons for his decision:

The current dynamic in international politics has also created new opportunities for South Africa. Significant progress has been made, among other things, in our external contacts, particularly where there were previously limitations of an ideological order. (...) the collapse of the economic system in Eastern Europe is also a signal (...) Those who seek to impose on South Africa such a bankrupt system should engage in a full revision of their point of view.

And indeed, “those who sought to impose on South Africa such a bankrupt system” (the coalition that governs South Africa today) then decided to engage in a full revision of their point of view by entering definitively into the ranks of the managers of the national capital, starting with COSATU:

In early 1990 the debate on the working charter in COSATU finally turns to the development of a set of basic rights (...) accompanying the constitutional proposals of the ANC. It is no longer a question of a political programme”(...);

  • In 1990, nationalist figures of NUMSA (unions affiliated to COSATU) join the Communist Party. Among others, Moses Mayekiso is elected member of the provisional leadership of the newly legal party;
  • In July 1991 the fourth congress of COSATU confirms an alliance between the union of the miners (NUM) and that of the automobile-metalworkers (NUMSA). They together account for 2,000 delegates of the 2,500 present;

(...) One of the resolutions adopted at the union congress says:We are in favour of training our members and encourage them to join the ANC and the Communist Party’.”36

From then on, the whole of the South African bourgeoisie was united in a new so-called “democratic” era and of course the whole population, including the working class, was invited to unite behind the new leaders in the construction of the democratic multiracial state, and the “party” could begin…

Co-option has only just begun, but already there is not a single big company that is not looking for a certain number of ANC managers to integrate into its leadership. A veritable ‘Mandela generation’ has been absorbed into public or private structures quickly losing their fidelity to the old doctrines. The call for ‘civil society’ has become the keystone of all discourse in order to bridge the gap between the still strong social movement and the arrangements at the top. But for those who remember the political themes of the eighties there is no doubt that the terminological shift is not a mere form.” 37

Ultimately, by virtue of its bourgeois class nature, the political-trade union left could absolutely not go against the capitalist system, despite its ultra-radical and anti-capitalist, workers’ verbiage allegedly for the “defence of the working class”. In the end, the trade union left proved to be a simple and formidable pimp for the left of the capital. But its main contribution was undoubtedly the fact of having succeeded in knowingly constructing the “democratic/national unity” trap in which the bourgeoisie was able to imprison the working class. Moreover, taking advantage of this climate of “democratic euphoria”, largely as a result of the liberation of Mandela and company in 1990, the central power could rely on its “new union wall” consisting of COSATU and its “left wing” to systematically divert the struggle movements into demands for “democracy”, “civil rights”, “racial equality “, etc. And this even when workers went on strike for wage demands or seeking to improve their living conditions. Indeed, between 1990 and 1993, when a transitional government of “national unity” was formed, strikes and demonstrations became scarce or had no effect on the new government. The poison of democratic illusions was compounded by a terrible tragedy in the black working class when, in 1990, the troops of Mandela and those of the Zulu chief Buthelezi clashed militarily for the control of the populations of the townships. This conflict lasted four years and caused more than 14,000 deaths and massive destruction of workers’ dwellings. For revolutionary marxists this bloody struggle between the black nationalist cliques merely confirmed once more the bourgeois (and backward) nature of these gangsters, who thus expressed their readiness to comply with the state’s orders to prove their ability to manage the best interests of South African capital. Besides, this was the central objective of the bourgeoisie’s project when it decided the process which led to the dismantling of apartheid and to the “national reconciliation” of all the bourgeois factions that had been killing each other under apartheid.

This project would be implemented faithfully by Mandela and the ANC between 1994 and 2014, including the massacre of workers resisting their exploitation and repression.

Lassou


1 We often speak of the years 1973-74 and ‘76 without referring to 1975. Indeed, that year experienced fewer struggles and appeared as a moment of “pause” before the storm of Soweto.

2 Brigitte Lachartre, Luttes ouvrières et libération en Afrique du Sud, Editions Syros, 1977.

3 Civics or CBOs (Community Based Organisations): “Popular associations, often on the basis of a geographical area or street, whose members organise themselves and decide the organisation’s goals”. This definition is from the book La figure ouvrière en Afrique du Sud, Karthala, 2008.

4 Claude Jacquin, Une gauche syndicale en Afrique du Sud (1978-1993), Editions l’Harmattan, 1994. The author is a journalist and researcher specialising in the new South African trade unions.

5 Jacquin, Op. Cit.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 In the words of a South African leader quoted in the article From the Second World War to the mid-1970s” in International Review n° 155.

9 Jacquin, Op. Cit.

10 On the basis of apartheid and its harmful effects on the working class struggle see the article “From the birth of capitalism to the eve of the Second World War” in International Review no 154.

11 In fact, the first discriminatory measures were introduced in South Africa in 1924 by the Labour government, in which the Afrikaners participated.

12 On this conflict, with its hundreds of thousands of victims, and repercussions for relations between the two former colonial powers, see the article in International Review n° 154.

Jacquin, Op. Cit.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 See the ICC pamphlet Unions against the working class, which widely addresses the issue of “base unionism” and its nature.

16 Lachartre, Op. Cit.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

20 See the articles in the International Review n° 154 and 155.

21 Under apartheid a South African black worker, even if they had worked for decades in the country, was not considered an “employee” because this term was reserved for “rights-holders”, that is essentially white workers (and to a lesser degree Mestizo and Indian workers).

22 Jacquin, Op. Cit.

23 See in this regard the articles in International Review, no 154 and 155.

24 The infiltration of the left parties (SP/CP) was theorised by Trotsky in 1930. For more on this see the ICC pamphlet in French Le trotskisme contre la classe ouvrière.

25 It is certainly no accident that many of these grass roots leaders (including Marcel Golding) left unionism at the end of the apartheid regime to become rich businessmen and influential politicians (discussed in the next article).

26 Jacquin, Op. Cit.

27 Ibid.

28 Under apartheid, registered unions were unions recognised by the state, while those not registered were tolerated up to certain limit but not recognised by law.

29 The NUM was created in 1982. It claimed 20,000 members in 1983 and 110,000 in 1984. Initially it was hostile to state registration (Jacquin, Op. Cit.).

30 Jacquin, Op. Cit.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 This company, whose boss (Oppenheimer) was one of the biggest supporters of the unionisation of Africans, was particularly fierce when faced with the demands of employees, unionised or not (Jacquin, Op. Cit.).

35 A delegation of South African employers went to Zambia in 1986 to meet with the ANC leadership. An exchange of correspondence developed from 1986-90 between Mandela and Botha, head of state of South Africa, then with De Klerk who succeeded him in 1989. This all led to the release of the ANC leader in 1990, which announced the end of apartheid.

36 Jacquin, Op. Cit.

37 Ibid.

 

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Class struggle in South Africa

Rosa Luxemburg: the Bolsheviks represent the honor of the revolution

The Russian Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War. Its outbreak, its unexampled radicalism, its enduring consequences, constitute the clearest condemnation of the lying phrases which official Social-Democracy so zealously supplied at the beginning of the war as an ideological cover for German imperialism’s campaign of conquest. I refer to the phrases concerning the mission of German bayonets, which were to overthrow Russian Czarism and free its oppressed peoples.

The mighty sweep of the revolution in Russia, the profound results which have transformed all class relationships, raised all social and economic problems, and, with the fatality of their own inner logic developed consistently from the first phase of the bourgeois republic to ever more advanced stages, finally reducing the fall of Czarism to the status of a mere minor episode – all these things show as plain as day that the freeing of Russia was not an achievement of the war and the military defeat of Czarism, not some service of “German bayonets in German fists,” as the Neue Zeit under Kautsky’s editorship once promised in an editorial. They show, on the contrary, that the freeing of Russia had its roots deep in the soil of its own land and was fully matured internally. The military adventure of German imperialism under the ideological blessing of German Social-Democracy did not bring about the revolution in Russia but only served to interrupt it at first, to postpone it for a while after its first stormy rising tide in the years 1911-13, and then, after its outbreak, created for it the most difficult and abnormal conditions.

Moreover, for every thinking observer, these developments are a decisive refutation of the doctrinaire theory which Kautsky shared with the Government Social-Democrats according to which Russia, as an economically backward and predominantly agrarian land, was supposed not to be ripe for social revolution and proletarian dictatorship. This theory, which regards only a bourgeois revolution as feasible in Russia, is also the theory of the opportunist wing of the Russian labor movement, of the so-called Mensheviks, under the experienced leadership of Axelrod and Dan. And from this conception follow the tactics of the coalition of socialists in Russia with bourgeois liberalism. On this basic conception of the Russian Revolution, from which follow automatically their detailed positions on questions of tactics, both the Russian and the German opportunists find themselves in agreement with the German Government Socialists. According to the opinion of all three, the Russian Revolution should have called a halt at the stage which German imperialism in its conduct of the war had set as its noble task, according to the mythology of the German Social-Democracy, i.e., it should have stopped with the overthrow of Czarism. According to this view, if the revolution has gone beyond that point and has set as its task the dictatorship of the proletariat, this is simply a mistake of the radical wing of the Russian labor movement, the Bolsheviks. And all difficulties which the revolution has met with in its further course, and all disorders it has suffered are pictured as purely a result of this fateful error.

Theoretically, this doctrine (recommended as the fruit of “Marxist thinking” by the Vorwärts of Stampfer and by Kautsky alike) follows from the original “Marxist” discovery that the socialist revolution is a national and, so to speak, a domestic affair in each modern country taken by itself. Of course, in the blue mists of abstract formulae, a Kautsky knows very well how to trace the world-wide connections of capital which make of all modern countries a single integrated organism. The problems of the Russian Revolution, moreover – since it is a product of international developments plus the agrarian question – cannot possibly be solved within the limits of bourgeois society.

Practically, this same doctrine represents an attempt to get rid of any responsibility for the course of the Russian Revolution, so far as that responsibility concerns the international, and especially the German, proletariat, and to deny the international connections of this revolution. It is not Russia’s unripeness which has been proved by the events of the war and the Russian Revolution, but the unripeness of the German proletariat for the fulfillment of its historic tasks. And to make this fully clear is the first task of a critical examination of the Russian Revolution.

The fate of the revolution in Russia depended fully upon international events. That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political far-sightedness and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their policies. In it is visible the mighty advance which capitalist development has made in the last decade. The revolution of 1905-07 roused only a faint echo in Europe. Therefore, it had to remain a mere opening chapter. Continuation and conclusion were tied up with the further development of Europe.

Clearly, not uncritical apologetics but penetrating and thoughtful criticism is alone capable of bringing out treasures of experiences and teachings. Dealing as we are with the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history (and one taking place at that under the hardest conceivable conditions, in the midst of the world-wide conflagration and chaos of the imperialist mass slaughter, caught in the coils of the most reactionary military power in Europe, and accompanied by the most complete failure on the part of the international working class), it would be a crazy idea to think that every last thing done or left undone in an experiment with the dictatorship of the proletariat under such abnormal conditions represented the very pinnacle of perfection. On the contrary, elementary conceptions of socialist politics and an insight into their historically necessary prerequisites force us to understand that under such fatal conditions even the most gigantic idealism and the most storm-tested revolutionary energy are incapable of realizing democracy and socialism but only distorted attempts at either.

To make this stand out clearly in all its fundamental aspects and consequences is the elementary duty of the socialists of all countries; for only on the background of this bitter knowledge can we measure the enormous magnitude of the responsibility of the international proletariat itself for the fate of the Russian Revolution. Furthermore, it is only on this basis that the decisive importance of the resolute international action of the proletariat can become effective, without which action as its necessary support, even the greatest energy and the greatest sacrifices of the proletariat in a single country must inevitably become tangled in a maze of contradiction and blunders.

There is no doubt either that the wise heads at the helm of the Russian Revolution, that Lenin and Trotsky on their thorny path beset by traps of all kinds, have taken many a decisive step only with the greatest inner hesitation and with the most violent inner opposition. And surely nothing can be farther from their thoughts than to believe that all the things they have done or left undone under the conditions of bitter compulsion and necessity in the midst of the roaring whirlpool of events, should be regarded by the International as a shining example of socialist polity toward which only uncritical admiration and zealous imitation are in order.

It would be no less wrong to fear that a critical examination of the road so far taken by the Russian Revolution would serve to weaken the respect for and the attractive power of the example of the Russian Revolution, which alone can overcome the fatal inertia of the German masses. Nothing is farther from the truth. An awakening of the revolutionary energy of the working class in Germany can never again be called forth in the spirit of the guardianship methods of the German Social-Democracy of late-lamented memory. It can never again be conjured forth by any spotless authority, be it that of our own “higher committees” or that of “the Russian example.” Not by the creation of a revolutionary hurrah-spirit, but quite the contrary: only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgement on the part of the masses, whose capacity was systematically killed by the Social-Democracy for decades under various pretexts, only thus can the genuine capacity for historical action be born in the German proletariat. To concern one’s self with a critical analysis of the Russian Revolution in all its historical connections is the best training for the German and the international working class for the tasks which confront them as an outgrowth of the present situation.

The first period of the Russian Revolution, from its beginning in March to the October Revolution, corresponds exactly in its general outlines to the course of development of both the Great English Revolution and the Great French Revolution. It is the typical course of every first general reckoning of the revolutionary forces begotten within the womb of bourgeois society.

Its development moves naturally in an ascending line: from moderate beginnings to ever-greater radicalization of aims and, parallel with that, from a coalition of classes and parties to the sole rule of the radical party.

At the outset in March 1917, the “Cadets“, that is the liberal bourgeoisie, stood at the head of the revolution. The first general rising of the revolutionary tide swept every one and everything along with it. The Fourth Duma, ultra-reactionary product of the ultra-reactionary four-class right of suffrage and arising out of the coup d’état, was suddenly converted into an organ of the revolution. All bourgeois parties, even those of the nationalistic right, suddenly formed a phalanx against absolutism. The latter fell at the first attack almost without a struggle, like an organ that had died and needed only to be touched to drop off. The brief effort, too, of the liberal bourgeoisie to save at least the throne and the dynasty collapsed within a few hours. The sweeping march of events leaped in days and hours over distances that formerly, in France, took decades to traverse. In this, it became clear that Russia was realizing the result of a century of European development, and above all, that the revolution of 1917 was a direct continuation of that of 1905-07, and not a gift of the German “liberator.” The movement of March 1917 linked itself directly onto the point where, ten years earlier, its work had broken off. The democratic republic was the complete, internally ripened product of the very onset of the revolution.

Now, however, began the second and more difficult task. From the very first moment, the driving force of the revolution was the mass of the urban proletariat. However, its demands did not limit themselves to the realization of political democracy but were concerned with the burning question of international policy – immediate peace. At the same time, the revolution embraced the mass of the army, which raised the same demand for immediate peace, and the mass of the peasants, who pushed the agrarian question into the foreground, that agrarian question which since 1905 had been the very axis of the revolution. Immediate peace and land – from these two aims the internal split in the revolutionary phalanx followed inevitably. The demand for immediate peace was in most irreconcilable opposition to the imperialist tendencies of the liberal bourgeoisie for whom Milyukov was the spokesman. On the other hand, the land question was a terrifying spectre for the other wing of the bourgeoisie, the rural landowners. And, in addition, it represented an attack on the sacred principle of private property in general, a touchy point for the entire propertied class.

Thus, on the very day after the first victories of the revolution, there began an inner struggle within it over the two burning questions – peace and land. The liberal bourgeoisie entered upon the tactics of dragging out things and evading them. The laboring masses, the army, the peasantry, pressed forward ever more impetuously. There can be no doubt that with the questions of peace and land, the fate of the political democracy of the republic was linked up. The bourgeois classes, carried away by the first stormy wave of the revolution, had permitted themselves to be dragged along to the point of republican government. Now they began to seek a base of support in the rear and silently to organize a counter-revolution. The Kaledin Cossack campaign against Petersburg was a clear expression of this tendency. Had the attack been successful, then not only the fate of the peace and land questions would have been sealed, but the fate of the republic as well. Military dictatorship, a reign of terror against the proletariat, and then return to monarchy, would have been the inevitable results.

From this we can judge the utopian and fundamentally reactionary characters of the tactics by which the Russian “Kautskyans” or Mensheviks permitted themselves to be guided. Hardened in their addiction to the myth of the bourgeois character of the Russian Revolution – for the time being, you see, Russia is not supposed to be ripe for the social revolution! – they clung desperately to a coalition with the bourgeois liberals. But this means a union of elements which had been split by the natural internal development of the revolution and had come into the sharpest conflict with each other. The Axelrods and Dans wanted to collaborate at all costs with those classes and parties from which came the greatest threat of danger to the revolution and to its first conquest, democracy.

It is especially astonishing to observe how this industrious man (Kautsky), by his tireless labor of peaceful and methodical writing during the four years of the World War, has torn one hole after another in the fabric of socialism. It is a labor from which socialism emerges riddled like a sieve, without a whole spot left in it. The uncritical indifference with which his followers regarded this industrious labor of their official theoretician and swallow each of his new discoveries without so much as batting an eyelash, finds its only counterpart in the indifference with which the followers of Scheidemann and Co. look on while the latter punch socialism full of holes in practice. Indeed, the two labors completely supplement each other. Since the outbreak of the war, Kautsky, the official guardian of the temple of Marxism, has really only been doing in theory the same things which the Scheidemanns have been doing in practice, namely: (1) the International an instrument of peace; (2) disarmament, the League of Nations and nationalism; and finally (3) democracy not socialism.

In this situation, the Bolshevik tendency performs the historic service of having proclaimed from the very beginning, and having followed with iron consistency, those tactics which alone could save democracy and drive the revolution ahead. All power exclusively in the hands of the worker and peasant masses, in the hands of the soviets – this was indeed the only way out of the difficulty into which the revolution had gotten; this was the sword stroke with which they cut the Gordian knot, freed the revolution from a narrow blind-alley and opened up for it an untrammeled path into the free and open fields.

The party of Lenin was thus the only one in Russia which grasped the true interest of the revolution in that first period. It was the element that drove the revolution forward, and, thus it was the only party which really carried on a socialist policy.

It is this which makes clear, too, why it was that the Bolsheviks, though they were at the beginning of the revolution a persecuted, slandered and hunted minority attacked on all sides, arrived within the shortest time to the head of the revolution and were able to bring under their banner all the genuine masses of the people: the urban proletariat, the army, the peasants, as well as the revolutionary elements of democracy, the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

The real situation, in which the Russian Revolution found itself, narrowed down in a few months to the alternative: victory of the counter-revolution or dictatorship of the proletariat – Kaledin or Lenin. Such was the objective situation, just as it quickly presents itself in every revolution after the first intoxication is over, and as it presented itself in Russia as a result of the concrete, burning questions of peace and land, for which there was no solution within the framework of bourgeois revolution.

In this, the Russian Revolution has but confirmed the basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy, resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counter-revolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution. And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.

Take the course of the English Revolution from its onset in 1642. There the logic of things made it necessary that the first feeble vacillations of the Presbyterians, whose leaders deliberately evaded a decisive battle with Charles I and victory over him, should inevitably be replaced by the Independents, who drove them out of Parliament and seized the power for themselves. And in the same way, within the army of the Independents, the lower petty-bourgeois mass of the soldiers, the Lilburnian “Levellers“ constituted the driving force of the entire Independent movement; just as, finally, the proletarian elements within the mass of the soldiers, the elements that went farthest in their aspirations for social revolution and who found their expression in the Digger movement, constituted in their turn the leaven of the democratic party of the “Levellers.”

Without the moral influence of the revolutionary proletarian elements on the general mass of the soldiers, without the pressure of the democratic mass of the soldiers upon the bourgeois upper layers of the party of the Independents, there would have been no “purge” of the Long Parliament of its Presbyterians, nor any victorious ending to the war with the army of the Cavaliers and Scots, or any trial and execution of Charles I, nor any abolition of the House of Lords and proclamation of a republic.

And what happened in the Great French Revolution? Here, after four years of struggle, the seizure of power by the Jacobins proved to be the only means of saving the conquests of the revolution, of achieving a republic, of smashing feudalism, of organizing a revolutionary defense against inner as well as outer foes, of suppressing the conspiracies of counter-revolution and spreading the revolutionary wave from France to all Europe.

Kautsky and his Russian co-religionists who wanted to see the Russian Revolution keep the “bourgeois character” of its first phase, are an exact counterpart of those German and English liberals of the preceding century who distinguished between the two well-known periods of the Great French Revolution: the “good” revolution of the first Girondin phase and the “bad” one after the Jacobin uprising. The Liberal shallowness of this conception of history, to be sure, doesn’t care to understand that, without the uprising of the “immoderate” Jacobins, even the first, timid and half-hearted achievements of the Girondin phase would soon have been buried under the ruins of the revolution, and that the real alternative to Jacobin dictatorship – as the iron course of historical development posed the question in 1793 – was not “moderate” democracy, but ... restoration of the Bourbons! The “golden mean” cannot be maintained in any revolution. The law of its nature demands a quick decision: either the locomotive drives forward full steam ahead to the most extreme point of the historical ascent, or it rolls back of its own weight again to the starting point at the bottom; and those who would keep it with their weak powers half way up the hill, it drags down with it irredeemably into the abyss.

Thus it is clear that in every revolution only that party capable of seizing the leadership and power which has the courage to issue the appropriate watch-words for driving the revolution ahead, and the courage to draw all the necessary conclusions from the situation. This makes clear, too, the miserable role of the Russian Mensheviks, the Dans, Zeretellis, etc., who had enormous influence on the masses at the beginning, but, after their prolonged wavering and after they had fought with both hands and feet against taking over power and responsibility, were driven ignobly off the stage.

The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan – “All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry” – insured the continued development of the revolution.

Thereby the Bolsheviks solved the famous problem of “winning a majority of the people,” which problem has ever weighed on the German Social-Democracy like a nightmare. As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the home-made wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to a revolution: first let’s become a “majority.” The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs.

Only a party which knows how to lead, that is, to advance things, wins support in stormy times. The determination with which, at the decisive moment, Lenin and his comrades offered the only solution which could advance things (“all power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry”), transformed them almost overnight from a persecuted, slandered, outlawed minority whose leader had to hid like Marat in cellars, into the absolute master of the situation.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary program; not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics.

Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and all the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western Social-Democracy lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.

This is the first chapter of Rosa Luxemburg's work on the Russian Revolution, published on marxists.org

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Russian Revolution 1917

The revolutionary movement and the Second World War

Interview with Marc Chirik, 1985

We are publishing an interview with Marc Chirik in which he talks in some detail about the revolutionary movement during the Second World War1. Marc, a founding member of the ICC, had also been one of that small handful of revolutionaries who stood up to the enormous ideological and physical pressures of the “war against fascism” and who throughout the conflict remained loyal to the fundamental principles of internationalism, defended by Lenin, Luxemburg and others during the “war to end wars” of 1914-18. In 1939, following the defeat of the wave of revolutions and mass strikes which had brought the first imperialist war to a close, revolutionaries were far more isolated than they had been in 1914, and the history of internationalist opposition to the equally imperialist Second World War is not at all well known. And indeed the ruling class would be very happy for it to remain unknown, since it challenges their whole narrative of 1939-45 as the “good war”, the one that had to be fought - a view shared by right and left of the bourgeoisie, with the left in particular contrasting the “futile” and even “imperialist” slaughter of the First World War to the “necessary sacrifice” demanded by the Second. Indeed, the small groups of communists who denounced this fraud at the time were then, and are still, slandered as agents of fascism – a slander that was more than once translated into murderous deeds, such as the assassination by Stalinist hit-squads of Aquaviva and Atti, two militants of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy; Marc himself had a very close shave with the Stalinist killers in France, after a raid where the Stalinists found internationalist leaflets written in French and German and addressed to the soldiers of both camps. Marc’s memoirs are thus a precious contribution to reconstructing the history of this war from a proletarian standpoint.

This interview was held in 1985 and first printed in the book Marc Laverne et La Gauche Communiste de France, volume 1, 1920-70, a compilation of texts written by Marc between 1931 and 1969. The book was put together and published by Pierre Hempel, who also conducted the interview. At the time Hempel was a member of the ICC, but left the organisation in the 1990s. He publishes a blog called le Proletariat Universel which contains much that we disagree with, not least with regard to the ICC and to Marc himself. But we think that the interview itself provides us with an accurate picture of the real political and personal capacities of Marc Chirik.


Before the war

PH: Let’s try to understand the march to war. Certain phenomena are apparent: the development of the ideologies of the counter-revolution, Stalinism and Nazism. Liberal bourgeois ideology adds to this by saying that the Communist parties at this time – opportunist but not yet bourgeois - with their tactic of “class against class”, which refused an alliance with the degenerated Socialist parties - helped the rise of Nazism. We must debunk this false idea of a liberal united front as the only obstacle to the seizure of power by the Nazis, who are equally capitalist. Regularly the newspaper Le Monde, along with all the Trotskyists, lament the lack of unity of the "labour movement" as the main cause of the victory of Nazism.

MC: It’s the question of the united front, which dates back to the Third Congress of the Communist International. The Bolsheviks, and the Comintern in general - contrary to what they had announced at the First Congress, which considered that the Socialist parties after the split must considered as organs of the bourgeoisie - immediately after the Third Congress begin to consider that the social democratic parties are part of the workers’ movement. After the defeat of the revolution in Germany, they posed the question of winning over the majority of the workers. It was essential at all costs to reach the workers. How to reach the socialist workers if not by offering a "United Front" to the Socialist parties with a minimum programme of defending the immediate interests of the workers? And in this context they could denounce the non-defence of workers’ interests by the Socialist parties in practice. Treint, secretary general of the CP, used the phrase "plucking the Socialist chicken”, a bit like the cook who approaches the fowl to pull out its feathers. And we did not agree with Treint in these debates. This policy dominated the entire politics of the CPs, except the Italian party, Bordiga, etc2. However, Bordiga, while in the majority in the Italian CP, renounced the leadership, obeying the principle that the party is a unified world party; it is not possible that a section, in a separate country, should have a leadership at odds with the leadership of the International. Very ‘fair play’. Bordiga did not give up fighting for this orientation, but generously renounced the leadership. The battle would be waged, but Bordiga had abandoned the leadership, leaving it to Gramsci/Togliatti.

There were also reactions in the French party, never among the clearest. These were often emotional reactions. One of the delegates of the French left declared: "how can I sit at the table with those who murdered Rosa Luxemburg? Never!" Such an argument, based only on the fact that they had murdered Rosa Luxemburg, was insufficient. It was necessary to prove the fundamental question: were these workers’ parties or not? The International gave credibility to the “workers’” parties a little like the Trotskyists do now with the left parties. But this policy of the left turn, of "class against class", etc., in the 30s, corresponded to the needs of Russia to push the European bourgeoisies not to ally with Germany.

PH: But it was doomed anyway, even if the left democrats were allied with the Stalinists, this would not have counter-balanced the rise of Nazism.

MC: Absolutely! We have the evidence of the national union in France, for example, behind De Gaulle, which did not prevent the right coming to power, from spending many years in government. Alliances and united fronts have never prevented the arrival in government of the various factions of the right. This was not a terrain of struggle for the working class. We also have the example of the united front with Kemal Pasha3, who ended up carrying out an incredible massacre of all the communists, who were beheaded. One cannot make a united front with the bourgeoisie. If in the 19th century it made sense to talk about progressive factions of the bourgeoisie against feudal tendencies, such as the alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie against Bismarck, this no longer has any meaning after the first imperialist world war. The whole bourgeoisie, the bourgeois system, enters into decadence. Progressivism is not progressive. If the bourgeoisie advances, this already shows that the proletariat is hesitant. For the Nazis to come to power and dominate the state in Germany, there had first to be a whole work of undermining on the part of social democracy, in order to demoralise the proletariat. And also the undermining work of the Stalinists, for whom after the Treaty of Versailles Germany had to struggle for national and social revolution at the same time; it was first necessary to destroy the Treaty of Versailles, which was the watchword of the Nazis, of the Nazi bourgeoisie. So if the alliance with the social democrats had existed, as the Trotskyists imagined, it would have done nothing at all. The question was: had the proletariat lost its class terrain? The proletariat had to fight not for the liberation of Germany but against the German bourgeoisie. But this struggle was abandoned in the name of the fight against fascism, the new hobbyhorse, as in Italy in the years after 1922 against Mussolini. It was "democracy" that paved the way for fascism. It needed fascism. And in this sense, the proletariat could not change it, it was already beaten. Thus the arrival of fascism only proved the defeat of the proletariat, a proletariat that had been driven for years onto a terrain of democratic and nationalist mystifications. From this point of view there was no question of "saving the country" against fascism and social democracy.

PH: In the 70s, the Bordigists argued that the communists were the first "anti-fascists" in Italy and Germany.

MC: This is wrong! The communists defended the necessity of grouping the working class on its class terrain, to confront fascism on its class terrain, but not on the side of the "democratic" bourgeoisie. At the time of Bordiga’s leadership of the Italian party, the party refused any alliance with the bourgeois parties which would supposedly prevent the coming to power of Mussolini. The Italian Left, including our Fraction in France, never identified with the anti-fascist struggle. It denounced the United Front in Germany; this is one of the reasons for the rupture of the Italian Fraction with Trotsky. And similarly, concerning Spain, it refused any alliance with or support for the Republicans against Franco. The fight against fascism yes, but on the terrain of the class, not in the name of the defence of the so called "democratic" republic.

The position of the Left was clear: no alliance, no United Front with the parties of the bourgeoisie. This was not a moral position. We denounced precisely the ideology of the bourgeoisie, who will always advance the faction that suits it the most.

PH: We are thus in a period where, globally, with the Laval-Stalin pact in 19344, the opportunist CP which was in the workers' movement passes into the camp of the bourgeoisie; on 1st May 34, it marches behind the tricolor flag and Jeanne d'Arc. It submits itself to the war aims of the bourgeoisie...

MC: This is the climax. It is the completion of a process of degeneration of the CI and the communist parties since the 1920s, on the national question, the question of the United Front, etc., which leads directly, not to being a semi-workers’ party, but a party of the Russian state and the capitalist state.

PH: Overall the left, from the Social Democrats to the Stalinists, has all the cards now to prepare the proletariat for the idea of the inevitability of war. From 1934, they are on a forced march to bind the proletariat hand and foot, say in 3 or 4 years.

MC: And thanks to "anti-fascism". This mystification was crucial to march the workers to war. Without the Popular Front, it would have been impossible to go to war. It took the Popular Front, the events in Spain, the history of "anti-fascism" to bind or at least confuse the workers. The workers did not take part in the Second World War as they did in the First, full of innocent enthusiasm. They left disoriented, believing they were fighting for freedom, but not being very sure. But for years they had been dragged onto the bourgeois terrain of the Popular Front, of anti-fascism, to the point where they no longer knew where to turn. Once dislodged from their class terrain, they could only go - with fear and without enthusiasm – to the front in the war of France against Germany.

But there was so little enthusiasm that it can be verified by comparing the time it took diplomatically and militarily for the occupation of Poland (about 6 weeks) and the time it took for France to collapse. The collapse of France was in eight days. That’s a stampede. And even at the beginning, to a certain extent in the French population, there is Petainism; when Petain starts to speak about stopping the war, everyone welcomes it: "we’re fed up with the war!" So the workers do not go enthusiastically to this war that all the parties were calling them to.

PH: But the workers were not strong enough to prevent it!

MC: They were no longer on their class terrain.

PH: So the ‘Communist’ Party of France supports the Nazi-Soviet pact5. It demands the official reappearance of L'Humanité. But at the same time, at the moment of the declaration of war it appears to defend something like a revolutionary policy. What was it?

MC: Yes, and we must remember that this was a few weeks before the war. This pro-Russian turn immediately provoked splits in the CP. This "defeatist" argument, which consisted of supporting German and Russian imperialism and explaining that this is how to prevent Germany attacking Russia, when it wasn’t even at war, didn’t work. A whole part of the CP split. Gitton, a member of the Political Bureau and secretary general of the CGT, left the party, denouncing the treaty. He didn’t break with the party on a class terrain, but around a political action, lining up with the anti-Russian bloc, and then finding himself on the terrain of national defence, with those who wanted to reconstruct France. A large part of these people naturally found themselves in the government of Petain, starting with Marion who was for 15 years the representative of the CP in the CI. The whole St Denis group also, who were once, in 1923, the most militant young Communist elements. They ended up in Vichy.

PH: And these were people that you had once fought alongside.

MC: Yes. Yes of course. It was Doriot himself who had excluded us. They had reached a nationalist impasse. If they fought on a nationalist terrain, they were nationalists. Especially since Petain stood for "No to the war and defend France."

Then the CP, in turn, changed policy rapidly, coming up with the idea of "national resistance". So the workers were caught in several vices: either you march in the defence of France, or march in the defence of the USSR, or march in defence of Germany, or against Germany. There's a whirlwind in the heads of the workers.

In any case, the story of the "resistance" above all made it possible to drag the workers onto the terrain of national defence, all the more so with the massacres perpetrated by Germany. It was possible to make the workers think that their fate depended on victory against the occupier.

PH: Now let's look at the state of the revolutionary milieu on the eve of the war, those who resisted the degeneration of the First International, who left or were excluded by the then chauvinist CP. There was the empty and premature proclamation of the still-born 4th International. There were a certain number of groups that pronounced against the war. But, with the declaration of war most of them broke apart. The Trotskyists fell into the camp of national resistance. Why was it that the clearest group of the time - the "Bordigists", who came from Bilan - collapsed? Why did no-one in the revolutionary milieu take up revolutionary defeatism in the sense that Lenin did?

MC: Let’s not dwell on the group "Union Communiste"6 who already had a position on the Spanish question which supported or half-supported the POUM7 and the Republic. They broke apart at the moment of the war, and what’s more, they were surprised by the war. But those that had seen the war coming since the beginning of the 30's were above all the Italian Fraction. They had underlined that we had entered into a period of defeats and that these defeats would lead irreversibly to war.

The victory of the Nazis in 33 meant for us that the historic course was henceforth towards war. In view of this a deep reflection was to be undertaken. We had understood that the events in Spain were part of the general rehearsal for war, against those, in particular the Trotskyists, who were affirming that the Popular Fronts opened up the era of revolution.

The successive concessions of the Anglo-French bloc to Germany at the end of the civil war in Spain, and above all Munich, letting them occupy Czechoslovakia, etc., forced us to begin to pose questions.

Vercesi, who was the great theoretician, the great leader of the Italian Fraction, began to wonder: effectively, the crisis and unemployment in Germany had completely disappeared with the advent of Hitler. The development of the armaments industry - as they moved towards war, with Germany in front, and the other western countries close behind – was patent. There was a development of the war economy which effectively reabsorbed unemployment. Towards 38 and the beginning of 39, production reached the levels of 1928, whereas before they had fallen by 40%. World production took off again. There was little unemployment. Workers were back in work. Vercesi also posed the question: "In the first place, can the war economy be an economic solution to the capitalist crisis?" And it seemed to him that it was. It’s of little import who you are working for, the fact is that unemployment has been reabsorbed. Thus there is no necessity for imperialist war. The contradictions of international capitalism seemed to him to have been attenuated thanks to the war economy. And on the other side, there's a series of small wars such as Ethiopia, Manchuria, the war in Spain. All these ended up in terrible massacres, mostly of the workers. Thus Vercesi poses the question: why is there local but not international war? And he ends up by saying that the war economy reabsorbs the contradictions of the capitalist system. He also considers that inter-imperialist tensions are lessening and begins saying that the essential reason for world imperialist war consists of a class to class response, of capitalism to the proletariat. Thus, in his theory the war was a phenomenon aimed at massacring the proletariat. But he says that in order to massacre the proletariat capitalism has no need for a world war; it can massacre it bit by bit. Thus it massacres in Italy with the war in Ethiopia, it massacres in China and Japan with the war in Manchuria. It massacres the civilian population in Spain. Thus world war has ceased to be a necessity for capitalism since it can easily massacre the workers a piece at a time. Munich8, for those who thought like Vercesi, was the new Treaty of Versailles! That was it, it was the end of the war! We were going to see local wars but no longer world wars. There was no process leading towards a world war. That's what the leadership of the Fraction thought, but there was a minority in the Fraction, notably the comrades in Belgium like Mitchell, and then us, the group in Marseilles, who said "all this is madness! It's a complete revision".

PH: But at the beginning you were impressed since it was Vercesi who was talking.

MC: Yes, but our reaction was immediate: "no, no, that doesn't work, all these new theories... the war economy which magically reabsorbs the problems of capitalism…war is a product of imperialist tensions, not of the class struggle”

PH: Bordiga didn't react?

MC: Bordiga wasn't about. He was sleeping! He was in Italy. He never made contact. He refused contact. We tried to make contact with him but he absolutely refused any contact with the outside.

PH: Why?

MC: He didn't give any explanation. This was his position when we asked him why he remained in Italy - and he was there under surveillance by the police, he had been deported to the islands first of all then repatriated to house arrest in Naples - no, I must devote myself to the Italian proletariat, I must remain here because when the situation turns around I will be here! He thus refused any contact abroad, an attitude which went against all the work typical of the Bolsheviks who were obliged to work outside Russia. In France, in Belgium, he would have been able to undertake the work that was impossible for him to do in Italy. On the other hand Damen moved around thirty-six times during the war.

But with this position which dominated the Fraction and which reckoned that we were looking at a resurgence of the workers' movement, after Munich and after Spain, the title of the review Bilan was changed to Octobre. Bilan was the balance-sheet of the defeat, Octobre announced a revolutionary upsurge. Obviously, when war broke out it was those comrades that were most surprised. Thus the whole theory went up in flames. As always in such a case the justification came afterwards through a theoretical sleight of hand. With the war breaking out, we, the minority, asked them for an account of what happened. So? Your position didn't stand up before, and now here's the war, Poland first of all and then France enters the war?

They replied: Oh no! All these are local wars. The war of France and Germany is a local war. With Britain it's also a local war. With Russia's entry into the war it's still local. With the United States it's still local. Throughout the war they continued to support the idea that it wasn't a world imperialist war. For them it was a whole series of local wars. With such an idea their position is simple: if the war expanded that meant that the proletariat had disappeared. It wasn't only defeated. It had disappeared as a political and social force. And as the proletariat had disappeared, a political group could not express a class position. Consequently the group must dissolve itself, that’s it, and stop tilting at windmills.

During the war

PH: What did you do then?

MC: In practice the war was upon us. Activity became difficult. It became difficult to maintain links. In 1940 in Marseilles I myself was mobilised and sent to the front - but I was back there again in June 40. We kept up the life of the group in Marseilles. The group maintained itself. I was in Marseilles from 38. I had been a prisoner and escaped. With Jacob, a member of the leadership of the Fraction, with Cl., my partner9, and other comrades we decided to re-establish links with the different sections in Paris, Lyon, Toulon, Aubagne, and with Belgium. Jacob, as a member of the leadership, opposed it. However, the section in Marseilles took the decision to reconstitute the Fraction. It held a conference. We began by renewing contacts with Toulon first of all, with Lyon and then with Paris, and then Brussels. The comrades of Belgium refused. Some of the Paris comrades joined us, Lyon as well. Thus in 1942, we held the first conference for the reconstitution of the Fraction. It posed the question of pronouncing against the war. But we had no material. We had to procure a typewriter.

PH: Nobody was arrested then?

MC: Jacob was arrested and then deported. He didn't come back. He was stupidly arrested in the street during a round-up. He had false papers and genuine papers. He pulled both out at the same time! We tried to get him out of prison at Aix, but without luck. He was deported to Germany and disappeared. As Mitchell did later....

So it was necessary to find a typewriter. Nobody had one. It was indispensable for publishing anything. We ended up finding one. Our correspondence up to then with the other sections were hand-written. From 41, we had some contacts around us, French comrades and RC. of Belgium.

PH: So in 1942 then you still hadn't made a leaflet against the war?

MC: We hadn't been able to up to then. But when the French comrades arrived, one of whom was a former Trotskyist, we decided to form the French Nucleus of the Communist Left and we produced a "Declaration of Principles" in 1942. It saw itself as part of the International Communist Left and we worked together. This immediately allowed us to produce leaflets.

PH: So you made your first leaflets in 1942? How did you distribute them?

MC: At the beginning it was simply a handful of copies, 50 odd with several carbons re-typed several times with our one typewriter. It was crazy work. We gave them out around us mostly, people who were close. Marseilles was really a place where all the political elements and refugees were coming from Paris. Ten million people had left the north for the south. In Marseilles there was a whole Parisian fauna including surrealists, Victor Serge, etc. Thus the Nucleus was set up and we began to organise our discussions.

PH: Parallel to you another group existed, the RKD, the CR (Revolutionary Communists), who had put out leaflets against the war since its beginning in Italian, German and French. When did you make contact with these groups for the first time? Where did they come from and where were they going?

MC: The RKD was a Viennese Trotskyist group10. They came from Austria. Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschland. They were Austrian but preferred to speak in the name of the German proletariat. The group was formed at the beginning of the 30's in Austria in the Left Opposition. It had undergone several splits. When Germany occupied Austria some elements fled and sought refuge in Paris, where one of its leaders still subscribes to Révolution Internationale. They were used to clandestine work. Their position in Paris at the time of the constitution of the Fourth International was to consider that it was premature while remaining in agreement with all the other Trotskyist positions, on the United Front, etc. They considered it too early and the situation not ready for it. They had better positions than Trotsky on the march towards war, like the group of Vereeken11. They didn't join the Fourth International, which allowed them to evolve. When the war broke out they said: struggle against the war. And when the Russian question was posed, they pronounced against the defence of Russia. The Hitler-Stalin Pact had shown for them that it had ceased to be a proletarian state. Others, like Shachtman, who didn't have a very clear position, clearly said however: no defence of Russia, but "defeatism". As the RKD were used to clandestine work, they had kept printing material and could write leaflets and undertake illegal revolutionary work. Further they were in Paris and in touch with all the Trotskyist groups. They had a certain audience that we didn't have.

PH: Finally, they were better prepared than you with the declaration of war?

MC: They kept themselves as they were. They were prepared for clandestine activity whereas the Italian Fraction was absolutely unprepared with the erroneous perspectives of its leadership. The Fraction hadn't kept up links. And then in the Fraction there was the question of political refugees above all during the phoney war which preceded the entry into war proper. The great majority of them had no papers at all. The outbreak of war meant that as Italians they were part of the enemy camp. Or else they had to make pro-French declarations or be sent to a concentration camp. Or else they had to return to Italy. But returning to Italy...

There was a whole discussion in the Fraction: what to do? What's the best solution? A single position dominated: no declarations of support for this side or the other.

PH: Were there those who lay low to save their skin?

MC: No! Some were captured by the Petainist police or the Gestapo and sent to the Italian authorities. Others returned to Italy by their own means and participated in the formation of the Internationalist Communist Party. Others stayed. Before Italy officially entered the war France was already defeated. Which didn't give time to anyone to hesitate in making a pro-this or that declaration. France was at war, thus no longer demanded anything, still less with its rapid defeat.

In any case up to the French rout, the question of choosing between a French concentration camp or an Italian prison was our main concern. These were all the difficulties of the comrades of the Italian Fraction.

For the German refugees the question was simple: France arrests us and delivers us to Germany, including social-democrats like Hilferding. The RKD had already sorted out false papers before the war. They were ready to go underground. Some came from rich families, Viennese Jews who had fled German occupation and who had bought large sums of money with them and so provided themselves with adequate printing material. Whereas the Italians were all poor workers in irregular situations. But the RKD, which had been outside of the Fourth International since 38, made contact with the Vereeken group in Belgium. C was part of the Vereeken group and acted as an intermediary between us, fleeing Paris and coming to Marseilles. The RKD moved around France looking for other Trotskyist groups like themselves, also meeting C who presented himself as a member of the French Nucleus of the Communist Left. The Austrians were interested and asked to make contact with us, particularly when they learned that we were against the war and against the defence of the USSR. We made contact. They then came to Marseilles and showed us their savoir-faire. They were really used to clandestine work. They sent us or gave us documents that they generally transported in boxes of food, with pasta or something else. They were at enormous risk since they travelled around. They had financial means, but even so they travelled on false papers. It took some courage. They'd had the experience of the Gestapo in Austria. One example of a heroic moment in their work: one of their comrades, a German comrade, was arrested. At the time of her arrest she made out that she was ill. She was thus sent to the hospital in Marseilles. At the time politicals were under direct surveillance, in this case by the Gestapo.

In the hospital corridor two members of the Gestapo did 12-hour shifts in order to guard the door of the room containing the false patient. At midday two others from the Gestapo came in to take over the shift.

Comrades of the patient decided to organise her escape. They got hold of German military uniforms. They were of Germanic origin, blond and spoke the language. They came a few minutes before the shift changeover at midday. They told the two guards that it was their turn to take over. The latter didn’t suspect anything, especially as the RKD had worn the uniforms of officers, so they left. The RKD comrades opened the door. The woman left. They had parked a car like that of the Gestapo in the hospital square and then left without obstruction. They were really formidable. None of them fell during the war!

PH: Very good! So these were the famous "hitlero-trotskyists"12 who gave out leaflets in German and who the French bourgeoisie, with the Stalinists at their head, during the period of the Resistance and the Liberation, had wanted to liquidate, having assimilated them with the collaborators because they were anti-patriots (laughter)! And didn’t the French Trotskyists in the Resistance also give out leaflets in German?

MC: The Trotskyists in general did nothing against the war. The RKD did propaganda work in several languages and in German, even towards German soldiers. Even if the Trotskyists produced leaflets in German, it was always with bourgeois positions for the defence of the USSR. We should also remember that when Hitler occupied France there was a discussion within official Trotskyism where some posed the question like the Stalinists: couldn't we get the occupiers to allow the reappearance of our publications? The majority evidently rejected this but a minority envisaged working legally like the Stalinists Duclos and company. Coming back to the RKD, there were only a dozen or so but they undertook formidable work. But they were very activist.

PH: They thought that the war would end in revolution?

MC: Everyone thought so. For us it was the memory of 1917 which predominated. All the remaining theories since 17 held that war opens up possibilities towards revolution. Thus, we thought that if the war is here, the course could be overturned towards a resurgence of class struggle. That's what we were thinking. We questioned this very much later. But the memory of 1917 Russia and 1919 Germany remained a living memory. In the Italian Fraction you couldn't imagine the atmosphere during the war, and above all from 33, we were so isolated. The Trotskyists defended the USSR, the Popular Fronts, carried out entryism into the Socialist parties and the PSOP of Pivert13. They participated in the Amsterdam-Pleyel conference.

PH: What was your analysis of the role of the unions during the war?

MC: Already before the war we were posing the question: are the unions still organs of the working class? But the question was only posed. We posed above all the question of the nature of the Russian state.

PH: But nonetheless minorities of the Dutch Left and the German Left of the 20's had already understood the anti-working class nature of the unions.

MC: Yes. But in the Fraction the dominant position was the necessity to work within union organisations in the tradition of the 3rd International. When the Fraction fought the United Front, it fought the political United Front because it considered that the Socialist parties were a part of the bourgeoisie, while the unions were only reformist and it was possible to work within them despite everything.

PH: But when you began to seriously pose the question during the war you began to reflect on the contribution of the Dutch Left. But up till then you didn't call into question this idea of working within the unions?

MC: Yes, but in the Fraction there was already a debate from the 30's. Some elements posed the question about whether the unions were still organs of the working class. It was a debate that was at its beginnings; it was pursued during the war and it ended with the Liberation. The group Internationalisme henceforth had a clear position on the question, whereas the others with Vercesi remained prisoners of the idea that the unions were, despite everything, organs of the working class.

PH: What did you think of the strikes during the war? What for example did you make of the strike by miners in Pas de Calais which were not initially controlled by the PCF, contrary to what they boasted about afterwards?

MC: Behind the whole question of strikes... there weren't many strikes, above all there were campaigns against the STO, compulsory work in Germany - which was manna for the nationalist Resistance - but which signified super-exploitation and deportation of the workers. The Italian Fraction said that it wasn't a question of ignoring it, it recognised that the workers' protests responded to a will not to work for the occupier, but underlined that the Stalinists profited from it by recruiting for the Resistance, claiming that this was the way to save workers from deportation.

PH: What did you do then?

MC: Inasmuch as we had possibilities to talk, to contact those around us, we supported the validity of workers' resistance, of the refusal to line up with the war, while denouncing the idea of joining the Maquis. Otherwise what choice was there? The workers were asked either to participate in the war in Germany or join the war here in the Resistance. Whereas it was absolutely necessary to struggle against both.

PH: This miners' strike then, did you try to do something towards it?

MC: Not this strike in particular. Generally our hope rested in waiting for a workers' uprising. It was a traditional point for us that the workers would revolt against the war. An anecdote can illustrate the validity of this. I worked in Marseilles as an electrician. I put up the telegraph poles. One day, one of our overseers said to us "come down here, war is declared! Mobilisation is underway!" Each of us avoided the temptation to go home. A large number of workers were immediately mobilised. I recall going directly to the house of a comrade. His wife was there in tears. I asked her what she was crying about? She replied, war has broken out, it is terrible! I responded: listen, now it will happen. What was difficult was the wait. Now we are going to wait for revolution! Finally, things will move!

For me, as for my comrades, it was the eve of the storm when you can no longer bear the tension. Ah! At last! The storm is breaking and then we wait for its consequences.

Whereas the leadership of the Fraction in Belgium declared the dissolution of the group, for us on the contrary, it was the moment we were going to continue the work, but in clandestinity, during the war in order to constitute the revolutionary forces.

PH: Why did they declare the dissolution?

MC: On the basis that the proletariat had disappeared as a social class!

PH: They were the modernists of the time (laughter).

MC: Then we stayed with the idea that a new period was opening up. We remained on the look-out for any movement of the workers that could come from discontent with the war. In France we thought that it would be small sparks that would ignite it. It's true that the miners' strike or other strikes were an expression of the discontent of workers who no longer believed the ideas told to them about working harder. There were reactions against misery, around the problems of bad provisions. Any movement of discontent by the workers in this sense is a premise for the revolt against war.

Also in 1943, when the movement in Italy broke out, some movements in Turin, Milan, etc., against the war, we said that it was the beginning of an international workers' reaction against the war. Of course the workers were straight away hemmed in from all sides...14

PH: Did you exaggerate the significance of this workers' uprising in Italy?

MC: We didn't have concrete, precise elements on these events. We had a paper from Geneva published in Swiss and, despite everything, the French press. The Petainist press denounced this movement: they're the enemies of Mussolini, infiltrated by Anglo-Americans, etc. For us the fact that French radio and press was strongly denouncing this workers' movement meant that the truth was very much contrary to what our class enemies were saying!

It was on the basis of these elements and our conviction of fact that the war was necessarily finished and that the general discontent would develop, that we were optimistic.

We organised a conference of the French Nucleus in Marseilles where we took a position, calling for vigilance about what would develop on the international level. What reinforced this conviction, regarding the question of our overestimation, was the declarations of Churchill. Since the south of Italy with Badoglio went over to the Allies, the entire front between north and south remain closed. There was no offensive from the Anglo-American bloc to try to force the issue. There was such immobilisation that it allowed the Germans, while Mussolini had been arrested and deported to an island, to go by plane and free him. It was incredible and the British didn't budge. And when the question was posed to Churchill in England about what are we waiting for - the Italian front is about to collapse? Churchill replied, it's intentional, we must let the Italian situation "stew in its own juice" for a time. And they gave the Germans, who were occupying the north at that time, the possibility of carrying a massacre, a formidable repression against the workers. The workers of Milan and Turin could only save themselves by joining the Maquis. The Maquis strengthened in Italy following the defeat of Mussolini which paved the way for German repression. The Allies had good reason for leaving them to "stew", in order to preserve capitalist social peace. They preferred to let this repression happen. They had no need of the workers for conquering the country, their military force was sufficient. What was at stake was the need to smother workers' discontent against the war. A win/win situation: by letting the Germans carry out the repression, they pushed the workers into the arms of the "democratic" ally. With the support of the Stalinists and all the democrats, there was a real development of the Italian Maquis, which didn't exist before, contrary to France.

For us this business demonstrated that the bourgeoisie are intelligent. Churchill knew what he was doing. He didn't jump the gun. He let the massacre of workers who were about to rise up happen, nipping it in the bud at the first symptoms.

Liberation

PH: And what was the position of Bordiga at this moment?

MC: It was unknown! We hadn't made contact with him. Bordiga was in the south, in free Naples. He was at liberty to speak. Democracy came back with the government of Badoglio. Many papers appeared, a whole press, all sorts of declarations. But these declarations above all focused on the massacre of the workers of Milan and Turin by the Nazis. This avoided the fundamental problem. Basically it was inculcated in the workers of the south that they should fight Mussolini and fascism first of all – in other words, the same anti-fascism that had sent the workers to war. Now the bourgeoisie wanted the defeat of Mussolini. A whole heap of half-Trotskyist, half-Stalinist groups arose in terrible confusion posing the question: what is this war? And people calling themselves Left Communists appeared also, quoting Bordiga and bringing out papers.

One day we heard Henriot, government spokesman for Petainist propaganda, on the radio. He gave a speech saying in particular that Bordiga had just made a declaration saying that the conquests of the Red Army in Europe are not capitalist conquests but are in favour of the world revolution.

PH: Are you sure you heard this declaration?

MC: Yes, yes. And immediately, at its conference, the Fraction took a position: if it was true what the radio and press had just said about the declaration of Bordiga, that the Red Army supported revolution in Europe, we declared that Bordiga is not part of the Fraction and we will combat him and we will fight Stalinism. Bordiga was paying the price of 15 years of retirement and isolation. He wasn't up to speed with the evolution of our discussions.

A first question developed with Vercesi again. He said: Mussolini has fallen like rotten fruit. The situation of Italian capitalism was such that Mussolini could no longer represent it. Consequently the bourgeoisie had let him fall. We asked therefore: does the situation in Milan and the uprising of workers count for nothing? For Vercesi the war was finished but it was finished by "the exhaustion of the war economy"!

PH: Not by the mutual exhaustion of the combatants?

MC: No, by the exhaustion of the war economy. And according to him in this case there will be a new crisis. And since the working class doesn't exist, there's no question of a resurgence nor of a workers' reaction to stop the war. There's no longer any need for Mussolini in Italy because there is a crisis of the war economy. Thus, we discussed amongst ourselves the significance of 43.

PH: German refugees were also bombed at this time?

MC: That started. The war took a very violent turn in northern Italy after the Allied landings.

The resistance of the German soldiers was desperate. Then again there was the landing in France where we saw the Germans pushed back. In Russia, it was the same after Stalingrad at the end of 44.

For the repression of the routed Germans, the Allied bourgeoisie applied the same principles as that of Churchill in Italy. When the German army found itself at the gates of Warsaw, the Red Army stopped: it let the massacre happen for 8 days. The Red Army didn't budge, it needed Warsaw "to stew in its own blood". Then the German army withdrew and the Russians entered a cemetery.

As the German army retreated, the same thing happened in Budapest for example. Again the Russian stopped. There was an uprising in the capital of Hungary, more or less confused obviously. And letting them be massacred was at least as important as in Warsaw. After the massacre was accomplished the Russians entered the town with ease, as the gravediggers of a cemetery.

The whole of this plan was applied from 43, a policy of wiping out workers. A plan above all implicating Germany - which in any case was finished - in order to make it responsible for the massacre of the workers so that there was no possibility of the workers understanding who was really responsible.

PH: And the aim of the bombings?

MC: They bombed, they destroyed entire towns that had no military objective: Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig... A crazy massacre! But there was something else. As the German army retreated there begun, on the German front as well, there was a series of demonstrations and discontent against the war, with the question of provisions at the heart of them. At the front itself there were demonstrations against the war. At Stalingrad the Germans had suffered enormous losses. But the campaign for the conquest of Germany was a riposte against the general tendency to desertion. In the absence of the press it was difficult to get a clear account of the state of things. It was sufficient to see the reaction of the German military apparatus. Along the road of its debacle from Russia, thousands of German soldiers were hung in order to dissuade the others. This previously unheard of repression was testimony to a general tendency towards desertion.

Inasmuch as we were able to talk in Marseilles, I had the opportunity to work in an area where there was a unit of German soldiers. I talked with some veteran soldiers. All were afraid to return to the Russian front. That meant a terrible massacre for them. They said that Germany was kaput, Hitler was kaput. They also wanted the end of the war. It should be said that with the Liberation a large number of German soldiers wanted to desert although the officers tried to keep them together "in order to retreat together". Many were those who tried to desert. But, in France, it was something dreadful for the German soldier. It was better for them to stay in the corps making up the German army than try to desert! The French population was unleashed. I have never seen such chauvinism in my life. Any German risked being lynched. This hysteria was stoked up by the whole of the French press, with L’Humanité at its head howling "to each his Boche!". It wasn't just words, but an appeal to public murder. Even Le Libertaire - contrary to those of us who were saying "in the final analysis, it's not the fault of the German people, but of the Nazi regime" - affirmed that "there was a general culpability of the German people!".

Sometimes, when the hysteria died down in Marseilles, we prevented some small groups of arrested German soldiers being lynched by the crowd.

Faced with that, I should say that the German soldiers in Marseilles locked themselves up in a fortress, saying that they didn't want to continue the war, but above all they didn't want to give themselves up to the FFI, the French Interior Forces: "we will only give ourselves up to the Americans". For them the American army was more of a guarantee that they wouldn't be given over to an unbridled mob. The German prisoners did not want to give themselves up individually and above all not to the French forces. They would only let themselves be disarmed by the Americans.

We saw arbitrary and improbable arrests. For example we knew some people from Alsace who were part of the German army, since Alsace was considered part of Germany. They were friends who had been mobilised against their will. They stayed working at the rear in offices. When the Americans arrived they tried to desert. They dressed in civilian clothes and escaped to Marseilles, arriving at Aubagne. It was two couples and they talked among themselves in Alsatian. The populace arrested them, said that they were German spies. They didn't hide the fact that they were Alsatians and had been part of the German army. They were tortured and killed.

PH: And among you, the communist minority during the war, did you also lose comrades?

MC: During the war some had been arrested and deported. But, at the Liberation, no, because we knew that it was necessary to be careful. That didn't prevent us from bringing out a leaflet at that time (May 1st 1945) calling on workers to fraternise.

PH: How many copies? And you weren't beaten up?

MC: We didn't give them out hand to hand (laughter). We went to train stops and left them in the coaches. We distributed them at night in letter boxes. It was too risky during the day with the exacerbated chauvinism. For example, one day when a group of soldiers were being led under escort by the FFI we saw an intolerable scene. There were older German soldiers who had been in the rearguard. All along the route the crowd threw stones, spat in their faces, struck them, all sorts of things. The FFI had rounded up the scattered soldiers in the town in order to take them to prison. Then myself, with some of my comrades, stood up against it and spoke: - but these are men, stop hitting them, these are only soldiers recruited by force. What you're doing is scandalous.

I hadn't finished speaking when I was immediately trapped, surrounded by a threatening crowd: Who are you? And your accent is not quite French?

It could have been my turn to be lynched, my comrades quickly grabbed my hand and pulled me loose from this mess. We got out very quickly. It was impossible to say a word in public; it was shameful!

PH: It was the worst period of your life?

MC: I had never seen such a thing!

PH: You could still believe in the working class at times like these?

MC: Ah, yes! You could not stop believing in the working class. It was the only force which could react to the barbarity. Chauvinism can evaporate little by little afterwards... Thus the end of the war didn't happen easily. In Germany in particular there were very marked movements of desertions, on the Russian front as well as in Europe. The uprisings in Germany were notable as all the young forces had been sent to the front and the ones who remained in the country were the foreign slave workers, the old and the women. A local militia was rapidly set up for each town. In several towns the population rose up, arrested the Nazis and massacred them. But the policy of the European democratic bloc consisted first of all of not letting the prisoners return. The general order was to prevent prisoners returning to their families in the towns and villages. The memory was present of the risk represented by this return, as in 17-18, when the sailors of the German navy in Kiel rose up against the war. The bourgeoisie had this fact in its head. In France about 2 million German soldiers were held prisoner. It was the same in Italy. But they were kept prisoner for 5 or 6 years! This force, this youth, if they had been returned to Germany, would have been equivalent to an enormous mass of unemployed and there would have been more important uprisings than those of the old and women. Germany was occupied and the Russians and Americans forbade any relation between soldiers and civil society.

PH: Now I'm trying to understand better why the war ended. You describe how the Russian and western bourgeoisie tried hard to counter any risk of an uprising of any scale by the massacre of refugees and the prolonged internment of German soldiers, leaving proletarian reactions to "stew in their own juice". How did the Second World War finish? It finished anyway with a victory for capitalism.

MC: As in all capitalist wars it terminated in defeat for some and victory for others. Here, the western bourgeoisie, with the USA at its head, along with Russia, completely changed the balance of forces that existed before the war. Germany could fight on one front, but not on two...

PH: Revolution wasn't possible at the time then?

MC: That's something else. That is a question which can only be raised from the point of view of the proletariat. From a capitalist point of view, and the different sides of capitalism, it was a question of avoiding an uprising of the class. Together they worked hard to smother any manifestations of proletarian struggle. For 3 or 4 years it was Germany that was the gendarme of Europe, it had the keys to the safe for the maintenance of social order; but when it began to weaken, the western bloc and Russia knew that they had to step in, fill the breach and take up this function of gendarme against any show of proletarian resurgence.

For those of us who understood that the war was a world war, this had to precipitate, sooner or later, a revolutionary uprising. On what did we base this? We based it on the lessons of history. Each great war had brought about a proletarian movement: the experience of 1871 with the Paris Commune, the Russian-Japanese war of 1905. But that only happened in the defeated countries: that's what we didn't draw out sufficiently. The First World War produced 1917 in Russia and 1917 and 1919 in Germany. The war produced the first revolutionary combats of the century.

We thus went into the Second World War with the conviction that the proletariat would be put in the situation where, after a series of massacres, it would say "better to rise up than to die". For us it was the classic, most comprehensible position. Those who didn't recognise what an imperialist war signified, as the majority of the Fraction beginning with Vercesi, considered that there would simply be massacres and not simply a generalised war, and that the proletariat had disappeared during the war, and they thus gave up hope of a proletarian uprising. For them the sole perspective was that the war would end with a crisis of the capitalist economy. Shortages would be so great in one of the blocs that they would no longer have the forces to continue the war. They were waiting for the crisis of armaments during the war. Nothing could happen for them, and when it did, they denied the importance of it; they denied the importance of 43 in Italy, of the uprising of Budapest and Warsaw, of revolts in Germany. They didn't understand why the western bloc took the responsibility of holding prisoner 5 million German soldiers. It didn't occur to them why it was that the finest flower of the world proletariat before the war, in Germany, had been disarmed and decimated15.

On the situation in the victorious countries in 17, on which revolutionaries had not sufficiently reflected: there was no uprising like in the defeated countries. It's the victorious countries that became the gendarmes against the uprisings in the defeated countries. France and Britain were in coalition against Russia. They took Poland in order to separate Russia from Germany. And when uprisings broke out in the defeated country of Germany they set up a cordon-sanitaire and when the revolution failed, they maintained 5000 soldiers and furnished them with arms for keeping domestic order. In the years after, uprisings did not stop in Germany: the Kapp putsch16, etc. Against that France occupied the Ruhr. It was the lesson of WWI that we hadn't seen. It’s not until today that this has become clearer, and even then the ICC alone has managed to draw out the idea that wars do not provide the best conditions for the revolution. The defeated bourgeoisie, weakened, called for help from the victors. In the Second World War this was much clearer than after the first. When the German government which succeeded Hitler proposed talks with the Allies, the latter refused because any German government in their absence would be too weak and this would lay the ground for revolution. No question of talks then; the Allies did not stop the war. They went on to occupy all the German territory...

PH: We know from official histories now that the Americans raced the Russians for the occupation of German territory.

MC: It's of little importance. They had the same interests. It was a race in order not to leave the ground free to the rival. The question of getting there first depended on the resistance of the German army.

PH: No, no. It seems that Truman made a blunder, was taken in by Stalin whose army was decisively implanted in Europe, in East Berlin.

MC: Perhaps. But it's not a problem for us to know who was faster than the other...

PH: But there was a problem, I insist on that. In the workers' movement revolutionaries classically say "war or revolution". But here was a "liberation" from which no revolution came, where world war stopped, where the imbeciles of Trotskyism hid behind the idea of a national insurrection. According to the mass of recent works concerned with this war, it appears that the 3rd world war was already being prepared in the middle of the 2nd. Already the antagonisms between Russia and American were building and many in the west would have preferred an alliance with Hitler against Stalin; and in any case many were posing the problem of war against Russia.

MC: In any case, in the war, at the beginning, yes there was a problem. They weren't certain of their alliances. But when it was necessary for Russia to enter the war the alliance was formed. Henceforth, they marched together hand in hand, with each trying to act for their own account. Exactly as in the case of the Hitler-Stalin bargain on the division of Poland which took place very quickly. But that always exists in imperialist conflicts. The same for tensions between France, America and the English. France didn't want to pay the costs of the war.

PH: But in the revolutionary movement you talked of a possibility of a third world war at the end of the second?

MC: Before coming to that, the question was: how to end the 2nd? What is the perspective from 43 onwards? Germany was heading for defeat, no-one had any illusions about that. The question was: does the perspective of a workers' uprising remain valid? As far as we were concerned, yes. We were waiting for a new wave of uprisings in line with the Paris Commune and above all based on the lessons of 1917. But did this perspective exist? Some denied any perspective of possible workers' uprisings given the famous notion of the disappearance of the working class. A banal defeatist position from those who didn't understand and couldn’t see.

Our position was to situate ourselves vis-à-vis these uprisings, to participate in them, contribute to them. We should note that these uprisings had indeed taken place. It had begun began a little like at the time of the First World War, by a struggle within armies, desertions in Germany, strikes which announced the awakening of the working class from being chloroformed as it had been in 1914. There was real discontent but above all, once again in the defeated countries: in Italy, in Germany, in Poland. As I already said, in numerous small towns in Germany, there was a control by some popular militias. What was new was that the bourgeoisie understood it. It had drawn the lessons from World War One and it wasn't going to let flashpoints of struggle develop. It faced up to them, preventing prisoners from returning to Germany and occupying the country. Japan was the same.

There was above all the fact that the bourgeoisie know perfectly well how to play on chauvinist sentiments against the Nazi massacres. Within the populations an anti-German sentiment of revenge predominated. The western and Russian bourgeoisie played on this scale with all their forces. To such a point that the anarchists, the Trotskyists and all those situated on the left of Stalinism exalted the "victory against Nazism". It was their way of taking part in the unleashing of chauvinism.

In the beaten countries, there was the onslaught of the Americans and Russian armies. And in the victorious countries there was the unleashing of an incredible chauvinism, much worse than at the time of the First World War.

It was necessary to draw lessons from it. We saw the Russians and Americans in a race. They were leaving no no-man's land. The German army was chased out of each town and they took their place. They massacred any hint of proletarian resistance.

On the contrary, the others, Vercesi and co., what they hadn't understood as a perspective before, they now considered that we were going into a period of the development of class struggle where the proletariat would move towards the reconstitution of the party. Our position in 45 was contrary to that: no reconstitution of the party, the movement wasn't there for it. We were still in a period of reaction.

The end of the war didn't resolve any problems. There was now the Russian/American antagonism, we were going to continue in the course of war and probably towards a third. The war in Korea confirmed this idea for us.

PH: But before coming to that, you had seen a war more terrifying than the first. But Jaures had said that if there was another world war, it would be frightening, would result in millions of deaths and leave humanity drained of blood. You saw the unspeakable capacity for capitalist destruction, massive destructions of populations: did this irrational destructiveness of capitalism produce a discouragement in the revolutionary minority or among others – the idea that whatever happened they would destroy you?

MC: The idea of Jaures has not been verified. On the contrary, the communist position was valid. If the proletariat didn't make a revolution (as the First Congress of 1919 said), if the wave of revolution did not develop, then, inevitably, a second world war would be prepared since the problems of capitalism were not resolved by the first. For us this was still more valid after the Second World War. This was only a continuation of the first. The second war was different, new blocs would be set up at the end of it. The same classical problem of marxism remained: there is no place in decadent capitalism for the development of the productive forces in relation to the markets. Consequently, another war will take place. What we did see was the this capacity of Russian and American occupation, this taking hostage of 5 million German soldiers from Germany who were put into work camps, and all the triumphant chauvinism, so we concluded that we had to again wait until a situation arose where a revolution would be possible. The attempts of 43 and 45 had failed. Consequently there inevitably opened a period of reaction for quite a long time in a situation comparable to that of the 30's.

Reconstruction

PH: Capitalism went on to a reconstruction.

MC: We hadn't seen the possibilities of reconstruction. We only saw the continuation of war. And, effectively, when you make a balance sheet - it's easier to judge today - the number of massacres, wars and destruction since 45 is greater than the Second World War cost humanity. Entire countries in Africa and Asia have been ravaged by war. There have been incredible massacres in Indo-China, Cambodia, etc. That has been the continuation of the world war in other forms, because capitalism has no solution.

But in the main industrial countries, in Europe above all, capitalism ensured a reconstruction which has allowed it to breathe life into the centre of capitalism and not the periphery.

We thought that the continuation of the war under other forms would lead the world proletariat against a brick wall, those of the victorious countries this time, faced with shortages of provisions. It took close to 6 years in Europe in order to assure normal provisions. Up until 1950 there were ration books in France. The precarious conditions of war persisted up to the 1950's.

PH: That's the reason why I have been well-fed, since I was born in 1950 (laughter).

MC: Immediately afterwards came the Korean War. What was also new is that for us it wasn't a new period of reconstruction and disarmament, as after the First World War where we saw disarmament and speeches about peace. It was only by the 30's that rearmament took off and assured the development of the war economy. Here, after the Second World War, rearmament didn't let up. The Americans distributed their surplus, implemented the Marshall Plan, but the development of armaments didn't stop. The whole period from 1950 to 1970 was a period of the continuation of the war economy. Rearmament had only restarted beforehand in 1934, 16 years after the war. Here, on the contrary, no armaments crisis, but an immense development of sophisticated armaments that were more and more destructive, and a continual massacre in the world.

PH: You have been reproached for exaggerating the war in Korea as an imminent preclude to a new world war.

MC: Tensions between the two blocs reached incredible paroxysms. There were more than a million deaths. It wasn't only MacArthur who envisaged using the atomic bomb. The most powerful imperialism in the world was engaged here, the United States. The Russians didn't have the atomic bomb yet. Korea was supported by China which was friendly with Russia. The configuration of the blocs that we know today was established following the world war. Some small countries changed places, but the heads of the bloc remained the same.

Thus this reproach of exaggeration is stupid, since the situation lacked very little for war to break out. MacArthur was only an army general but there were all the councillors of the White House who came from Trotskyism like Shachtman and Burnham. It's enough to read Burnham's book of the time which says: "Russia hasn't got the atomic bomb, we have it, why are we waiting to use it preventively, when we recall that on the eve of the war we allowed Germany to reconstruct."

When you read the press of the time, you see a debate in the United States: do we use the bomb and lose China or do we simply try to divide Korea. When this debate unfolded, we had in our memory all the conferences between France-Britain and Hitler where each time the former gave concessions in order to stop war. In the end, Munich resolved none of the problems and led to war. Just as today, they filled our ears with peace conferences and destroyed some obsolete missiles. There was in fact a new preparation for the use of better arms. That was the state of mind in which we found ourselves in 1950. They were going to war... there was a cold war for a whole period. There were all the wars for decolonisation. We considered that it was a different period from the one between the world wars, 1919-30, where great illusions in peace predominated.

The crisis in Cuba was serious. It was only at the last second that the Russians understood that they were badly placed to take Cuba, which was too far away...

PH: After the war, what became of the revolutionary minorities who had resisted on proletarian positions during the war? The RKD, Bordiga's party, Battaglia Comunista and you?

MC: After the Liberation, let's look first of all at the RKD. They were disappointed Trotskyists. They were fundamentally against the defence of the USSR, but apart from that they remained Trotskyists. There was a crisis in general among Trotskyists in 46.

But you have to bear in mind that in this period there was a halt in the development of revolutionary groups. Two years after the Liberation. Whereas just at the end of the war we saw a development, two years later revolutionaries again found themselves particularly isolated. We found ourselves in the same situation as in the 30's.

The RKD focussed on anti-Stalinism, being anti-Russian became an essential question for them. It was the Evil Empire for them. They began to lose the marxist method and that led them towards anarchism.

To be clear here it was during the war that we had envisaged holding international conferences, open to the Dutch Left (with Canne Meier, etc) and several councilist groups, with the RKD and the OCR.

PH: Who are the OCR?

MC: These were the Trotskyists that the RKD had enticed away from Trotskyism by their platform at the end of the war. They were in the 4th International in Toulouse. Organisation Communiste Révolutionnaire. The two groups more or less evolved together.

The Dutch Left were mixed together with some elements close to Sneevliet17. They were also against the defence of the USSR. Sneevliet, who came from Spartacusbond18, was at least firmer on the question of the party, on the necessity for an organisation, whereas the Dutch Left did not support the idea of political organisation; it preferred the notion of working groups, thus it separated from Sneevliet.

All the groups were invited, even the ICP.

PH: But you were an irritant to the ICP?

MC: yes, of course. And the ICP didn't want to participate in this conference after the war. They considered that the Bordigist party was the single, unique expression. From 45 to 46, the ICP comprised 3000 people, which was already enormous.

Contrary to the position of the RKD, who thought that Russia was enemy number 1, Bordiga on the other hand thought that it was the USA. Bordiga hadn't accepted the idea of Russian state capitalism. He said: in Russia there are agents who work for American imperialism, who exploit the Russian workers and serve to transfer the benefits to American capital. He didn't recognise that they worked for their own account. For him the real enemy wasn't bureaucratic Russia but the American state. I made several attempts for the ICP to come, especially because the conference was taking place in Brussels.

PH: What became of Vercesi? When did he participate in the Brussels anti-fascist committee?

MC: It was at the beginning of 1945. We made a resolution for the exclusion of Vercesi but at the time when the Fraction was united.

Contacts in the USA were very sparse.

Soon after the exclusion of Vercesi the ICP reconstituted itself, but the crisis in the Italian Fraction also existed in the French nucleus on the fundamental question of perspectives. We recognised that at the end of the war the dark period, the reactionary course, would continue and that there would not be an immediate resurgence in the class struggle throughout the world. We kept the same position that we took in the 30's: it was stupid to form the party in such periods. Whereas the Italians, the party constituted around Bordiga and Damen, considered that a revolutionary period was starting up again: they participated in elections. The fact that they were 3000 strong led to the vision that it was the small foreign groups who should adhere to the party. They opened their arms to all the world, to those who had gone off to fight in the war in Spain, to those who remained with Vercesi.

We were evidently not in agreement on immediate perspectives, and above all we were against the idea of forming a party which included people who had been excluded, who did not renounce their positions.

PH: It seems that according to the documents you were also for the formation of the party?

MC: At the beginning, that was the line from 43 to 45. As the war finished we changed position: the revolution will not happen, it has been nipped in the bud preventively, thus no possibility of the party for the moment. There is only the possibility of an organisation of revolutionaries as in the 30's.

All the old members of the Union Communiste were caught up in this creation of the party (D., L., etc).

Two positions emerged: one is that the party is reconstituted and we no longer have any reason to exist as a separate group; the Fraction must dissolve itself and enter the party in Italy as individuals - the majority of them were Italian refugees (as some said at the time "the Italian proletariat has golden balls"!). The authority of Bordiga did the rest. The other position, for us the majority of the French group, held that if founding the party in 43 might have been valid, now it was no longer so, so our position was: we should go to Italy to discuss their platform with these people, because in fact we had no basis, no document. We couldn't judge. We couldn't dissolve without knowing the positions and the usefulness or not of joining as a fraction, etc.

It thus produced a split in the Fraction; a part of the French nucleus joined the ICP.

We continued to lay claim to the tradition of the IIIrd International: the party couldn't be formed anytime and anyhow, we couldn't dissolve just like that.

When the conference took place in Brussels, Vercesi was there also; we maintained a high personal regard. When I asked him for some explanation for his participation in the anti-fascist committee, he replied: this committee represented the soviets for me.

I replied to him that it wasn't true: the anti-fascist committee represented a conglomeration of parties, whereas the soviets were unitary organs of the proletariat.

Vercesi was still part of the Fraction in Belgium as an opportunist element. When we were talking about making common work at the end of the war, with the RKD and the councilists, he said to us: what? This is the United Front, etc. There was no longer any need to hold conferences, at all costs it was necessary to join the newly-created party.

PH: Can you say something about the evolution of Bordiga's party?

MC: It was formed in 43 in the north of Italy on the clearest positions against the war. In the north it was above all old comrades from the Fraction. In the platform of 43 they had much clearer positions in relation to Russia and in relation to the war. But, at the same time, in the south where the government of Badoglio was established, a number of more or less confused groups were formed, more or less against the war, but above all against fascism. Bordiga's and Vercesi's positions were equivocal.

But, up to 45 they evolved in parallel. In 45, with the reunification of Italy, the two halves of the party found each other. They then published the platform of 45 which is much more ambiguous, less clear on the question of Russia - it's the contribution of Bordiga. And that continued like that up to 52, where we see the split between the two19. In fact it was an unlikely, confused unity. Many comrades from abroad, in France, joined the party of Bordiga.

However, in 52, Bordiga and Suzanne20 recognised that it was an error to form the party. But against this, those of the north continued to defend the validity of it. The question of the ICP on the unions remained orthodox, along the lines of the International, but at root closer to those of Trotskyism. Those in the north were in favour of participation in elections.

It was easier to discuss with Battaglia Comunista. But numerically ICP-Programma developed with a more particular sense of its activity.

PH: On the whole did the two parties continue with a correct denunciation of bourgeois anti-fascism?

MC: Yes but with many difficulties and ambiguities, from the fact that the minority had never been condemned for its position on Spain when it came into the party. In order not to embarrass these comrades who had been in Spain, they preferred not to talk about it; nor about Vercesi and his anti-fascist committee in Belgium. We had to wait 4 years for them to pronounce on it. We recalled that he had been excluded for this position and asked: how is he now a member of the central committee of the new ICP?

It was four years after that there was a small paragraph in their press saying that it was an error to have participated in such a committee.

PH: The RKD reproached you, and yourself in particular, for not wanting the split immediately with the revisionists of Vercesi. I'll quote an extract of the RKD bulletin of April 45: "... it took a direct and open betrayal to advance the group of Marco21 which then formed the left wing of the French and Italian Fraction but which didn't want to separate from Vercesi and company. Even after the entry of the revisionist fraction into the imperialist coalition, comrade Marco pronounced against an immediate split out of a concern that the discussion would suffer from it".

MC: The RKD were above all Trotskyists, with correct positions against the war and on Russia. But on other questions, the national question, on the question of the party, they had the position of Lenin. They kept to their Trotskyist methods. They were for entryism vis-a-vis Trotskyism. They wanted to provoke splits among other groups. In relation to the Trotskyists I wanted to see splits, but not in the Fraction. Thus we were debating the question of the anti-fascist committee. When the question of joining the Italian party came up, some comrades said: it is necessary to make a split on this question. It was a fundamental question to discuss, and we really wanted to discuss it. We had wanted to go to Italy. And we did go there. We had been discussing the question of what the party was. Bordiga was there. There was a refusal by Bordiga.

PH: Last question. What came out of the conference of 45? Why did you disappear in 1952, leaving the ground free for Trotskyists groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie? During this whole period of the triumph of the ideologies of national liberation, there was no longer a revolutionary voice against a bourgeois point of view. All the existing groups from the Bordigists to the Trotskyists wanted to support this farce of national independence for 20 years. You were irresponsible in leaving the ground free to them like this. And finally you did not contribute to theoretically arming the proletariat on the eve of the historic resurgence of 68.

M.C: In the fifties, all the revolutionary groups began to run out of breath in their isolation. Their numbers fell. The Stalinists ruled on the streets. As we reached a clear position on the anti-working class nature of the unions and the workers were sticking with them like never before, we were cut off from the situation. So we brought out Internationalisme and L'étincelle in print.

PH: A printed paper was costly.

M.C: It was dear but it came out of our pockets although we were only about a dozen of us. It came out with from 2 to 300 copies. After that we had no more means so we brought out Internationalisme only in a roneoed form. We settled on beginning anew the work of Bilan while waiting for the situation to decant.

After the conference of 45, we tried along with comrades of the Dutch Left to launch an international review for clarification together which could be a pole of reference for dispersed elements. There was only a single issue. We had some correspondence with Mattick22 who had the same positions as Canne Meier23 on the question of organisation. These councilist groups disappeared very quickly. We remained in contact with Spartacusbond ...

The period didn't allow the emergence of new groups.

The Bordigists in Italy shrunk from 3000 to about a hundred. All that was left after the departure of Battaglia Communista was Programma, which diminished in numbers in its turn because discussion was not possible within it. If there was a discussion there was a split. All the old comrades disappeared little by little. But the group kept going because it had a platform around Maffi and Bordiga. But they were engaging in an activism around union struggles, around struggles for national liberation, saluting Che Guevara. It was the time that Dangeville and Camatte left. They gathered together a number of unprincipled types.

Internationalisme in its turn underwent difficulties. Some left for Socialisme ou Barbarie, seduced by the theories of Chaulieu on the third bureaucratic system. In this period comrades began to leave. And then the question of the Korean War. Some left for the United States. We went to Venezuela.

We thought that France would be at the heart of the next war and it was important that the activity of the group didn’t stop. The idea was to continue working from abroad.

PH: What do you think about this polemic on the gas chambers24?

MC: I know nothing about it. I don't care how they were killed. They were killed in their millions. Guillaume and Co. are imbeciles.


1 A more developed account of Marc’s life and work can be found in International Review n°65 and International Review n°66.

2 The Bordigist current draws its heritage from the Left of the pre-1914 Italian Socialist Party, grouped around Amadeo Bordiga. This current was the first in the socialist, then communist movement to refuse on principle any participation in parliamentary elections. Bordiga fought within the Third International for the adoption of strict terms of membership, which would exclude from member parties all those who had supported participation in World War I, or adopted a centrist attitude on this key question. After World War II, the current around Bordiga participated in the formation of the Internationalist Communist Party in 1943-45, only to split in 1952 to form the International Communist Party. After a series of splits (each one creating a new "International Communist Party”), the main organisation representing the Bordigist tradition largely disintegrated in the 1980s as a result of its own opportunism and its infiltration by leftists and Arab nationalists.

3 Kemal Ataturk, founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. After the First World War and the allied occupation of the Ottoman Empire, this career army officer refused to allow the Ottoman Empire be dismembered by the Sevres treaty. He led a partisan revolt against the imperial government and set up a second political power in Ankara. It was from this city that he headed the war of Turkish resistance against the occupiers (cf Wikipedia). “Despite the fact that he had executed the leaders of the Turkish Communist Party in 1921, the Bolsheviks continued to see a ‘revolutionary’ potential in Ataturk’s nationalist movement. Only when the latter openly sought to compromise with the Entente imperialisms in 1923 did the Bolsheviks begin to reconsider their policy towards him, and by this time there was nothing revolutionary at all in the foreign policy of the Russian state. And Kemal was no accident but simply an expression of the new epoch, of the utter irreconcilability of nationalism and proletarian revolution, of the complete inability of any faction of the bourgeoisie to stand independently of imperialism”. From our pamphlet ‘Nation or Class’ 

4 “But it was only in mid-May 1935 that a decisive factor intervened: the Laval-Stalin pact in which the latter declared that he approved the programme of French national defence. This was one of the first attempts of the Stalinist USSR to join in the concert of the great imperialist powers. This time, the PCF reacted in 24 hours: it ran to support the national capital in a definitive and irreversible manner. From one day to the next, it began exalting eternal France, Joan of Arc and the Marseillaise. Vaillaint-Couturier presented the Communists as the true heirs of the Capetian kings of France. Finally giving in to a pressure that had been held down for too long, the PCF now gave vent to torrents of exacerbated patriotism” ‘How the PCF left the proletarian camp’ 

5 “The Nazi-Soviet pact, which went directly against anti-fascism and the PCF’s war preparations, pushed the latter into multiple contortions. Overnight it became the mouthpiece of the Nazi-Soviet alliance which it praised as a victory for peace, at the same time rediscovering the pseudo-internationalist language of revolutionary defeatism while continuing to act in the name of the defence of the national interest, denouncing the Paul Raynaud government of the day for carrying out an imperialist policy in the interest of Britain, insisting that collaboration with the USSR was the only possible means of ensuring global peace” 

6 It is at this point that another oppositional group known as the ‘15th Rayon group’, whose best-known militant is Gaston Davoust (Chaze) issue an invitation to all the oppositional currents to hold a series of meetings aimed at programmatic clarification and eventual regroupment.

The conference does not succeed in unifying all the groups that had taken part, nor in creating a French Fraction: in a period of defeat, the dominant tendency is inevitably towards dispersal and isolation. But a partial regroupment does take place and this too is significant: the Fraction de Gauche, Davoust’s group, and later on the minority of the Communist League – a minority of 35 members whose departure virtually crippled the League – unite to form the Union Communiste group which continued up until the war. Although it begins with a heavy baggage of Trotskyism, and is later found wanting when it comes to the ordeal of the Spanish civil war, a process of evolution does take place in this group: it calls the ideology of anti-fascism into question and by 1935 has concluded that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a new bourgeoisie. A similar position is adopted by the Ligue Communiste Internationaliste in Belgium”. See "Unravelling the Russian enigma

7 Founded in September 1934, the POUM (Party of Marxist Unification’) was a centrist party, without any real principles, regrouping the ‘Communist Left of Spain’ and J Maurin’s ‘Workers’ and Peasants' Bloc'.

"July 19th 1936 - the workers of Barcelona, barehanded, crushed the attack of Franco's battalions which were armed to the teeth. May 4th 1937 - the same workers, now equipped with arms, left many more dead on the streets than in July when they had to fight back against Franco. This time it is the anti-fascist government - including the anarchists and receiving the indirect solidarity of the POUM - which unleashes the scum of the forces of repression against the workers....Are the military fronts a necessity imposed by the current situation? No! They are a necessity for capitalism if it is to contain and crush the workers: May 4 1937 is stark proof of the fact that after July 19 1936, the proletariat had to fight Companys and Giral just as much as Franco. The military fronts can only dig a grave for the workers because they represent the fronts of capitalism's war against the proletariat. The only answer the Spanish workers can give to this war is the one given by their Russian brothers in 1917: revolutionary defeatism in both camps of the bourgeoisie, the Republican as well as the ‘fascist'; the transformation of the capitalist war into a civil war for the total destruction of the bourgeois state." (Bilan, ‘Bullets, Machine Guns, Prisons: this is the reply of the Popular Front to the workers of Barcelona who dared to resist the capitalist offensive').

8 The Munich accords were signed between Germany, France, Britain and Italy, represented respectively by Adolf Hitler, Édouard Daladier, Neville Chamberlain and Benito Mussolini (who took part as an intermediary), at the end of the Munich conference of 29 and 30 September 1938. The Czech president, Edvard Benes, and the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, were not invited. The aim of these accords was to bring an end to the Sudetenland crisis but, indirectly, they were the death knell of Czechoslovakia as an independent state, allowing Hitler to annex the regions of Czechoslovakia populated by German speakers. The Munich accords are seen as bringing to an end the first Czech Republic, the ‘second republic’ only lasting a few months after the dismemberment of the Czech state.

10 The RKD (Revolutionary Communists of Germany). “They were an Austrian Trotskyist group opposed to the foundation of Fourth International in 1938 because they felt it was premature. In exile, this group moved farther and farther away from this ‘International'. They were particularly opposed to participation in the Second World War in the name of the defense of Russia, and in the end came out against the whole theory of ‘degenerated workers' state' so dear to Trotskyism. In exile this group had the enormous political merit of maintaining an intransigent position against the imperialist war and any participation in it for any reason whatsoever. In this regard it contacted the Fraction of Italian and French Left during the war and participated in the printing of a leaflet in 1945 with the French Fraction addressed to the workers and soldiers of all countries, in several languages, denouncing the chauvinistic campaign during the ‘liberation' of France, calling for revolutionary defeatism and fraternization. After the war, this group rapidly evolved towards anarchism where it finally dissolved”. IR 32 ‘The task of the hour: formation of the party or formation of cadres’, 

11Poppe had two meetings in 1944 with the group ‘Against the Stream' (Tegen de Stroom, led by Vereeken). Although this group rejected the defence of Russia in June 1941, it remained linked to the French Communist Internationalist Committee of Henri Molinier. It joined the IVth International after the war. More significantly was the fact that even within the Sparta­cus Bond, the last hesitations on the defence of Russia were not totally eliminated. A small part of the organization - which was against the defence of the Russian camp in World War II - took a stand in favour of this defence in case of a third world war between the western Allies and the USSR” ‘A contribution to the history of the revolutionary movement: “Communistenbond Spartacus” and the councilist current (1942-1948)’ 

12 Hitlero-Trotskyists: at the Moscow trials Stalin liquidated the Bolshevik old guard by accusing them of being ‘Hitlero-Trotskyists’

13 PSOP: The Socialist Workers’ and Peasants’ Party. In June 1936, the PSOP was created after the exclusion of the Seine Federation from the SFIO: “Under the pretext of defending democratic freedoms threatened by fascism the proletariat was led to accept the sacrifices necessary for the health of French capital, and finally to sacrifice their lives in the slaughter of World War II. The Popular Front found effective allies in its executioner’s task amongst its left-wing critics: Maurice Pivert’s Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan … the Trotskyists and the anarchists. All played the part of touts amongst the most combative elements of the class and were constantly posing as the ‘most radical’, though the only thing radical about them was the mystification they peddled. The Jeunesses Socialistes de la Seine (‘Socialist youth of the Seine’), or Trotskyists like Craipeau and Roux, practiced entryism, and were the first to argue in favour of and organise the anti-fascist militia; Pivert’s friends within the PSOP were the most virulent in criticising the ‘cowardice’ of Munich. All were unanimous in defence of the Spanish Republic alongside the anti-fascists and all would take part later in the inter-imperialist bloodbath as part of the Resistance. All did their bit in defence of the national capital, they have all deserved well of the fatherland!” ‘1936: How the Popular Front in France and Spain mobilised the working class for war’ 

14 See IR 75, ‘1943: the Italian proletariat opposes the sacrifices demanded for the war’, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/075_1943.html

15 See International Review 95, ‘Berlin 1948: the Berlin Airlift hides the crimes of allied imperialism’, https://en.internationalism.org/node/3865

16 Kapp Putsch: after the defeats of 1919, the working class returned to the offensive in response to the extreme-right Kapp putsch in 1920. But at the international level the revolutionary dynamic was beginning to decline. Democracy inflicted a defeat on the working class. See our article in IR 90, ‘The Kapp Putsch’.

17 Sneevliet: the Communistenbond Spartacus was created in 1942 from a split in the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, which had itself come out of the RSAP (Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party). The latter, whose leading figure was Henk Sneevliet, was an organisation which after being banned by the Dutch government in 1940 oscillated between Trotskyism and the POUM, with anti-fascist, trade unionist positions, defending national liberation and the Russian state. The MLL Front which came after it carried out illegal internationalist work, denouncing all the fronts of the capitalist war: and in 1941 its leadership, minus one Trotskyist voice, decided not to support the USSR, denouncing the German-Soviet war as a new front of the imperialist war. The arrest of the MLL Front leadership – including Sneevliet – and their execution by the German army decapitated the MLL front in 1942. A few months later the Front split in two; one, a small Trotskyist minority which chose its capitalist camp; the other the internationalist militants who were to form, at first in considerable confusion, the Communistenbond Spartacus.

18 Spartacusbond, see note 16

19 Battaglia Comunista with Damen and Programma Comunista with Bordiga

20 Suzanne: alongside the Italian Fraction, in 1942, under the impulsion of Marc Chirik who was also a member, and on the basis of a declaration of principles, the French Nucleus of the Communist Left was formed, with 8 militants and an executive commission of 3 members ( see ‘For the formation of the Fraction in France’, internal bulletin, October 1944). Among the members of the Nucleus there were: Mousso (Robert Salama) Frederic (Suzanne V), Alberto (Vega, ex-member of the POUM Youth) Robert C, a former Trotskyist. Jean Malaquais was a close ‘fellow traveller’. This Nucleus and the Italian Fraction managed to re-establish contact with the occupied zone in Northern France and with Belgium

21 Marco: Marc Chirik

22 Paul Mattick. Joined the KAPD in 1920 and took part in revolutionary events. Settled in the USA in 1926 where he was a militant of the IWW. See our article ’20 years since 1968, Evolution of the political milieu (part one, 1968-77)’, in IR 53.

23 Canne Meier was a militant of the council communist current in the 1930s alongside Anton Pannekoek. See our article mentioned in note 21.

24 Guillaume: “the informal magma called the ‘ultra-left’ has nothing to do with the organisations of the proletarian milieu. A heterogeneous conglomeration of various intellectuals driven by petty bourgeois radicalism, with no real historical and organisational tradition, it has always been a zone of passage for all kinds of modernist re-readings of marxism, typical of the petty bourgeois impatience which is disappointed in the working class. Made up of people who are much more attached to the sound of their own voice than in defending class positions, it’s also a magnet for all kinds of adventurism. This is the case with the P. Guillaume bookshop which, at the beginning of the 1980s, saw in the theories of R. Faurisson an opportunity to make some publicity; this was already a way of faithfully serving the ruling class. First because the ‘negationist’ theories , with or without the ‘ultra-left’ epithet, has never had any function than to undermine the denunciation of capitalism, by denying the historical truth of its most monstrous crimes. Second because by making the worn-out theories of the anti-Semite Faurisson fashionable again, the ‘negationist ultra-left’ , just like le Pen, gave a boost to the propaganda of the left wing of the bourgeoisie, aimed at drawing workers behind the defence of the democratic state faced with the ‘return of the fascist danger’ ‘The ‘ultra-left swamp serves the campaigns of the bourgeoisie’

See also https://en.internationalism.org/ir/088_antisacsim_barbarity.html

 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

People: 

Rubric: 

Marc Chirik

International Review 159 - Autumn 2017

Presentation

This issue of the International Review brings together four documents that express our present concerns regarding the world situation and our role as revolutionaries within it.
First a new statement about Catalonia. We have already taken take position on these events, as readers of our publications, above all the website will have noticed. In October 2017 we distributed the leaflet “Confrontations in Catalonia: Democracy and the Nation are the reactionary past, the proletariat is the future”, translated into different languages. A number of other articles have appeared, in particular on our Spanish-language page, but these events will require a close following in the period ahead and the latest statement will certainly not be the last.
The independence movement in Catalonia is in direct contradiction with the “rational” management of the capitalist state and economy at the levels of Catalonia, Spain and the European Union. The only ones in the ranks of the bourgeoisie who could profit from a further deepening of this process would be the likes of Putin, the rivals of a strong EU in the world wide inter-imperialist competition. But the aspect that must concern us most of all is the impact of these events on the proletariat. The nationalist fever around Catalonia’s “independence” is a heavy blow against the working class not only in this area, but internationally, given the global importance of the class struggle in Spain.
We are seeing many of those who took part in the “Indignados” revolt in 2001, a movement which strove towards internationalism, towards proletarian principles, abandoning any idea of a fight against capitalism to join the demonstrations for or against independence. Proletarian families are torn apart between those who support Puigdemont or other fractions of the Catalonian cause and the Españolistas who think that Spain should remain one country. And where are the internationalists? They are currently a beleaguered minority, but the need for them to speak out is greater than ever.
The second article ‘The United States at the heart of the growing world disorder’ is about the life of the bourgeoisie of the strongest economic and military power. It is part of an analysis of the ruling class in the main Western countries. The complete article has been published online. The article highlights the great difficulties of the ruling class in the US after almost one year of Trump as president. An important chapter is dedicated to the relationship between the two former bloc leaders, to the role Russia plays today in America’s strategic options.
These assessments  should be seen as a continuation of the orientation decided at the 21st international congress in 2015 to critically analyse the international situation, not excluding a self-critical reflection on possible mistakes we committed at this level in the past (cf. "40 years after the foundation of the ICC” in International Review 156").
The third text in the present review is our Manifesto on the October revolution, Russia 1917, one century after the first successful proletarian revolution. We published it online in October and organised a series of public meetings on the issue. First, we have to defend the internationalist character of the October revolution as part of a world class movement against capitalism. Without this reference point, together with a fearless examination of all the errors committed and the weaknesses encountered, a successful new attempt in the future will not be possible. The Russian revolution is part of our history, part of the proletarian story, despite its degeneration and the atrocities committed in its name afterwards. The Manifesto not only answers the present bourgeois campaigns but also draws the lessons and tries to give indications for the perspective of communism today. Although the revolution did not spread to the whole world and the process remained isolated and thus without a real perspective to overcome capitalism, “the October insurrection is to this day the highest point achieved by the proletarian class struggle – an expression of its ability to become organised on a mass scale, conscious of its goals, confident of taking the reins of social life. It was the anticipation of what Marx called ‘the end of prehistory’, of all conditions in which humanity is at the mercy of unconscious social forces; the anticipation of a future in which, for the first time, humanity will make its own history according to its own needs and purposes.”
The last text in this review is the Resolution on the international class struggle, a document of the last international congress of the ICC in spring 2017.     
With this global analysis of the situation we start the reporting of the results of our congress which traditionally has the fundamental task of deciding the general orientations for our activities in the period ahead. The analysis of the world situation is a crucial element in this. 
The resolution is focussed on the social situation, the balance of forces between the two main classes of present capitalist society – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Almost three decades after the collapse of the old bloc system and the onset of what we call the period of decomposition we are still trying  to get a better understanding of the  challenges facing  revolutionaries today, to sharpen our concepts of the historic course and of decomposition: "The class movements that erupted in the advanced countries after 1968 marked the end of the counter-revolution, and the continuing resistance of the working class constituted an obstacle to the bourgeoisie’s ‘solution’ to the economic crisis: world war. It was possible to define this period as a ‘course towards massive class confrontations’, and to insist that a course towards war could not be opened up without a head-on defeat of an insurgent working class. In the new phase, the disintegration of both imperialist blocs took world war off the agenda independently of the level of class struggle. But this meant that the question of the historic course could no longer be posed in the same terms. The inability of capitalism to overcome its contradictions still means that it can only offer humanity a future of barbarism, whose contours can already be glimpsed in a hellish combination of local and regional wars, ecological devastation, pogromism and fratricidal social violence. But unlike world war, which requires a direct physical as well as ideological defeat of the working class, this ‘new’ descent into barbarism operates in a slower, more insidious manner which can gradually engulf the working class and render it incapable of reconstituting itself as a class. The criterion for measuring the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes can no longer be that the proletariat holding back world war, and has in general become more difficult to gage." (Resolution point 11)

Which criteria do we need today for an appropriate assessment of the balance of class forces?

  • The capacity of the working class to resist the austerity policy of the bourgeoisie and the degree of solidarity developed within its ranks are certainly relevant factors for such an assessment.
  • However, there is also the question of the perspectives. If the proletariat is not able to perceive itself as a distinct class and develop a perspective going beyond the existing society which subjects us to the alienated logic of profit for the profit's sake, there is no future to strive for – and this state of mind affects the proletariat's capacity to resist. "After 1989, with the collapse of the ‘socialist’ regimes, a qualitatively new factor emerged: the impression of the impossibility of a modern society not based on capitalist principles. Under these circumstances, it is more difficult for the proletariat to develop, not only its class consciousness and class identity, but even its defensive economic struggles, since the logic of the needs of the capitalist economy weigh much heavier if they appear to be without any alternative." (Point 13)
  • More specifically the resolution points to the pernicious effects of the loss of solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat: "In particular, we are seeing the rise of the phenomenon of scapegoating, of ways of thinking which blame persons – onto whom all of the evil of the world is projected – for whatever goes wrong in society. Such ideas open the door to the pogrom. Today populism is the most striking, but far from being the only manifestation of this problem, which tends to permeate all social relations. At work and in the everyday life of the working class, it increasingly weakens cooperation, and favours atomisation and the development of mutual suspicion and of mobbing." (point 19)

We do not think that the point of no return has been crossed, that the class in the established centres of world capitalism, along with the enormous proletariat of China, has been defeated. We still see a potential for the development of what we call the political-moral dimension of the proletarian struggle: the emerging of a deep seated rejection of the existing way of life on the part of wider sectors of the class (point 24).

This difficult situation also affects our tasks as a minority of the class. The revolutionary minorities are a product of the class and have a specific role – in the present period to be an organisational bridge from the past revolutionary struggles to those of the future, even if a huge distance has to be travelled.


November 2017   
 

 

Spain, Catalonia : The workers have no country

Catalonia, and Barcelona in particular, is one of those places inscribed in the memory of the Spanish and world proletariat. The struggles, the victories and defeats of the working class in this region have left their mark in the history of our class. Therefore, in the present situation, the ICC, through this article and others which have appeared in our territorial press, aims to alert our class to the danger of the proletariat being dragged into the unfolding nationalist squabble, which can only damage it.

From the hope generated by the Indignados movement in 2011…

In the same place, only a few years apart, two social scenarios that are not just different, but completely opposed to each other.

Barcelona, a few days after 15 May 2011: during the movement of the Indignados, Catalonia Square is a nub of meetings and assemblies. More than 40 different commissions are looking into questions from the environmental catastrophe to solidarity with the struggles in Greece against the cuts in social benefits. There are no flags, but there are improvised libraries brought along by anonymous participants and available to all, with the aim of widening the vision of the movement, which is essentially an expression of indignation about the ravages of the capitalist crisis, of concern about the sombre future which the survival of this system implies for the whole of humanity. Places like this in Barcelona or elsewhere in Spain, in a movement initiated at the Puerta de Sol in Madrid, are seeing people of all ages, all languages, different conditions, coming together and debating with a sense of respect and a desire to listen. Day after day workers’ demonstrations converge on the assemblies, demonstrations against the cuts in health benefits, delegations from neighbourhoods looking for solidarity in their fight against evictions and so on. The assemblies function as a collective brain which tries to link together the different expressions of the struggle into a common, unifying cause. “We are against the system because the system is inhuman”, this is what is proudly proclaimed. The movement is subjected to ruthless repression[1]. This violent attack is denounced, but the movement also raises the slogan “violence is also being paid 600 euros a month”.

…to the backward step into nationalism in 2017

And today, in the same streets, hundreds of thousands are demonstrating “for the independence of Catalonia”, but in this they can only be manipulated, can only operate as a mass to be manoeuvred, can only follow actions called by shadowy forces, actions which follow a script written by others. This is what happened to those who suffered the blows of police truncheons when they defended the ballot boxes during the October 1st referendum, those who saw how, in the days that followed the referendum, the organisations behind it relativised its significance and reduced it to a purely “symbolic” act. It’s what happened to those who got caught up in the euphoria of “we are already a republic” after the pantomime of the proclamation of the Catalan republic on 27 October. As the independence leaders later insisted, this was a virtual, “symbolic” action. In complete contrast to 15th May movement 15M in 2011, when you join in with nationalist actions, the slightest critical spirit can only be an obstacle. All you need is to learn by heart the national “narrative”. This is true of all nationalism, but in the case of Catalonia and other countries which don’t have their own state, this narrative is real mess where everything is mixed up and where no critical voices can be heard. So there are demands for a lost Arcadia , for a Catalan fatherland that never existed. In this process an enemy is needed and this can only be the central state with its “fascist” vestiges. And a scapegoat: the “Spanish” in general and everything which goes with them, presented as the cause of all the suffering of this society. And then you are ready to respond to the calls on social media and march, head down, eyes closed, alongside Catalan exploiters, corrupt Catalan politicians, the Catalan police, the Catalanist “ultras” dedicated to pointing the finger at and intimidating anyone who’s not fervent enough in their anti-Spanish feelings. And it’s the same ignoble schema we see again in the demonstrations which, a few days later, in the same streets, march “against the independence of Catalonia”. This time the lost paradise is the “peaceful co-existence of all Spaniards”. This time, the scapegoats, those to blame for poverty or uncertainty about the future are those who “defy the law” or “those who want to break up Spain”. And again, you march with a cohort of corrupt and repressive exploiters, and with another set of ultras who follow the same path of more or less open violence and intimidation[2].

Two diametrically opposed options for the future of society

Between the Indignados movement in 2011 and the recent orgies of Catalan or Spanish patriotism, there is a class frontier, a gulf in perspectives. The first, despite the undeniable difficulties this movement had, was the expression of a class – the proletariat – which carries within itself the possibility of social transformation on a planetary scale, a class which needs to find a coherent explanation for all the problems facing the world, a class whose struggle creates the basis for a real unification of humanity, overcoming divisions of class, race, culture etc. A movement based on the quest for a revolutionary solution for humanity, for a future free from the chains of exploitation. These patriotic orgies, by contrast, are based on an atavistic yearning for a mythified past. Not only that: marching under nationalist flags justifies and deepens the separation between class brothers and sisters. Their perspective is not one of a revolutionary step forward, but of a reactionary step backwards to a past full of fear and distrust. It is fuelled not by a search for a new social organisation aimed at satisfying the needs of all, but by the decomposition of the old social order whose watchword is “every man for himself”.

How did it come to this?

Various circumstantial and local explanations are put forward. According to the Catalan nationalists, we are seeing the resurgence of the Francoist vestiges which remained in Spain after the transition to democracy. According to the Spanish nationalists, the movement for independence is a way of diverting attention from the corrupt practises which have characterised Catalan administrations for decades. The main refutation of these apologetics is the behaviour of the main actors in this process. For decades, the main party of the Generalitat (the autonomous Catalan administration), formerly known as CiU and now the PDECat[3], based its hegemony on a corrupt, client-centred regime. But this didn’t stop successive Spanish governments of right and left from handing out succulent subsidies to this party from the coffers of the central state. And for their part, the Catalan nationalists have never had any qualms about working with the “residues of Francoism” in the Spanish state they talk about so much, making agreements with the Popular Party on the right[4] and then with the Socialist Zapatero[5] on the left (the tripartite governments of ERC and Iniciativa[6], who are now part of the supporters of the Mayor of Barcelona). When the PDECat came back to the Generalitat in 2010, Artur Mas[7] – the successor anointed by Pujol himself[8] – didn’t hesitate to count on the PP to carry out a programme of implacable austerity against living standards which would later inspire Mariano Rajoy[9] himself.

This is why we can say that the explanation for the separatist drive in Catalonia can’t be found in the specific historical evolution of Catalonia or Spain but in world historic conditions, in the fact that world capitalism as a whole has entered into its final phase, its phase of social decomposition.

The historic causes

This is why we can say that the explanation for the separatist movement in Catalonia doesn’t have its origins in the specific elements of historical evolution in Catalonia or Spain, but in world historic conditions, in the entry of global capitalism into its final phase, the phase of social decomposition.

Marxism has never denied the existence of particular factors in the evolution of capitalism in each country. In particular, in the case of the different separatist movements in Spain, which function as a supplementary and reactionary barrier to the capacity of the proletariat to recognise itself as an indivisible class, it recognises the weight of the uneven development between those zones more open to commerce and industry, and others more caught up in isolation and unable to catch up with the rest[10]. But marxism also explains how the evolution of these local conflicts and contradictions is conditioned by the course of capitalism on world scale. This is especially obvious in the case of nationalism. While in the 18th and 19th centuries the formation of certain new nations could represent a decisive advance in the demolition of feudal structures and the development of the productive forces, once capitalism had reached the end of its ascendant phase at the beginning of the 20th century, “national liberation” became a clearly reactionary myth used to dragoon the population, and the revolutionary class in particular, in and for imperialist war[11] This is why genuine revolutionaries have always denounced the anti-proletarian character of separatism in Spain, as a means to defend exploitation, as an enemy of the working class. The proletariat in Catalonia, one of the oldest in the world workers’ movement, has been obliged on a number of occasions to recognise this.

The history of the proletariat in Catalonia and the grip of nationalism

It’s not by chance that Barcelona was the theatre for the first general strike on Spanish territory, in 1855, or that this city was the seat of the Congress of the Workers of the Spanish Region, which in 1870 formed the basis of the First International in Spain[12]. It was equally no coincidence that, faced with the most advanced expressions of the class struggle, such as the “La Canadiense” strike in Barcelona in 1919, the Catalan bourgeoisie, in 1920-22, made use of the bosses’ “pistolero” gangs against strikes and the militants of anarcho-syndicalist organisations[13]. It’s not by chance that Catalan nationalism (under the leadership of Francisco Cambó), along with the most backward sectors of the Spanish army, was the main promoter of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship of 1923-30. And it was again not by chance that it was the Catalan Generalitat (Companys supported by the Stalinists and with the complicity of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT itself) that became the bastion of the Republican state, diverting the workers – through both mystifications and force of arms - from their class terrain, from the fight against exploitation, towards the military fronts and the conflict between the fascist and democratic camps which prefigured the camp that lined up in the second world imperialist butchery. It was not fortuitous that it was the Catalan Generalitat which was charged with the criminal mission to put down in fire and blood the rising of the proletariat of Barcelona in May 1937, the last attempt of the proletariat to fight on its own terrain against the exploiters of all camps and all fatherlands[14].

Neither was it an accident that it was the workers of Catalonia, who had sometimes come from the most backward regions in the country, who in 1970 transformed their struggles (Bajo Llobregat in 1973, SEAT in 1975) into real beacons for the struggles of the whole working class in Spain. The working class in Catalonia, through its own development and its accumulated experience, is a central link in the chain of the associated production of social wealth, a process embodied in the international proletariat which comes up against the private, national appropriation of this wealth. In the region of Barcelona you will find workers from more than 60 nationalities, from trainee American engineers to immigrant workers from Sub-Saharan Africa. All of them are an integral and fundamental part of the same world working class, even if capitalist ideology, above all through its forces on the extreme left, constantly seeks to confer a “national” identity on the proletariat, which can only serve to undermine its class unity.[15]

What’s at stake for the proletariat of Catalonia and for the proletariat of the world

Today, it’s the whole potential accumulated over decades of workers’ struggles which is threatened by the advance of capitalist social decomposition. This is not a social situation in which the workers are prepared to submit, like cannon fodder, to the quarrels between different factions of the exploiting class. That would mean the complete victory of the bourgeois solution to the historic crisis of capitalism. This is illustrated by the current situation in Catalonia, by the fact that the workers are not following with any great enthusiasm the calls for a general strike in favour of “independence”. But neither does it mean that the workers are aware that they represent an alternative for the future of humanity, a future which can banish forever the war of each against all which decomposing capitalism carries in its entrails.

Particularly dangerous to the consciousness of the working class are the alternatives which claim that there is a “rational” solution to these tensions within the exploiting class, when capitalist decomposition is throwing up increasingly irrational “populist” answers, such as the call to leave the European Union (proposed for example by the CUP or parts of Podemos[16]), or the total acceptance of the Spanish state, as put forward by the “constitutionalist” parties. Nationalism can only end in violence. The illusion of a “revolution of smiles” peddled by Catalan separatism, or the dream of a “return to normal” by the supporters of Spanish unity, is a mystifying fiction. As we already stressed in our 1990 article (International Review 62), “The East: nationalist barbarism” , “all expressions of nationalism, big or small, necessarily and fatally lead into the march of aggression, of war, of each against all’, of exclusivism and discrimination”.

The alternative of the world proletariat is a completely different perspective for humanity. As we underline in this article on nationalist barbarism:

“The struggle of the proletariat contains the seed for overcoming national, ethnic, religious and linguistic divisions with which capitalism ­continuing the work of the oppressors of the previous modes of production has tortured humanity. In the common body of the united struggle for class interests these divisions will naturally and logically disappear. The common bases are the conditions of exploitation, which everywhere will tend to worsen with the world crisis, the common interest is the affirmation of their necessities as human beings against the inhuman necessities, each time more despotic, of the commodity and the national interest”.

What’s at stake in the situation of the fraction of the world proletariat in Catalonia is the necessity for the revolutionary class to defend the interests of humanity as a whole, to advocate international class solidarity against the social disintegration which decadent capitalism is bringing about.

Faced with the search for a refuge in false local identities, with the notion of “every man for himself” to the detriment of everyone else, with growing social pessimism and national divisions, the proletariat must have confidence in its own forms of association. It must understand that the barbarism of the present world is the result of submitting the planet to the capitalist laws of profit and competition.  And above all, it is the duty of those groups who aim to stand in the forefront of the class struggle to denounce all the traps which divide our class and, above all, those elements who try to justify their support for one or another faction of the ruling class because they claim that they are “less repressive” or more favourable to the interests of the proletarian struggle. If the world-wide revolutionary alternative of the proletariat fails, the perspective can only be a war of each against all, in which it will be difficult to say which faction is the most cruel or the most inhuman in its attempt to ensure its survival at the expense of the rest of the human race.

When the police tried to tear down the camps of the 15M movement in Barcelona 2011, the cry went up: “we are all Barcelona”. It was raised in all the squares and all the demonstrations, and nowhere more loudly than at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. The upsurge of nationalism in Catalonia is a blow to the head not only to the proletariat of Barcelona, but to the proletariat in the whole of Spain, since throughout the country proletarians have been pulled into mobilisations for or against the unity of the Spanish state. This poison has also affected the many immigrants from Spain now working in other European countries, where there have been small but significant demonstrations around the same theme. And a blow against the proletariat of Spain, precisely because of the depth of its revolutionary traditions, is a blow against the entire world proletariat. As ever, solidarity with the workers of Spain can only lie in the development of the international class struggle.

Valerio, 5 December 2017



[1] On 27 May 2011 the Catalan police carried out a brutal attack on the orders of the Catalan nationalist government, working closely with the Spanish interior minister, and aiming to “clear” Catalonia Square. More than 100 people were injured.

[2] This climate of seeking the source of all society’s ills in the other half of the population was also encouraged in the demonstrations against the terrorist attacks of 17 August. See Acción Proletaria: September 2017 ‘Atentados terroristas en Cataluña: la barbarie imperialista del capitalismo en descomposición

[3] Convergence and Union (CiU) was a right-wing Catalan coalition which governed the region since the transition (1978) with a few intervals where the left ran the show. It had two components: one more nationalist and the other more autonomist, but both in favour of a pact with the central power and above all solidly united behind the cronyism which made the CiU one of the corrupt parties in Spain. The coalition disappeared and the more nationalist wing, who are now separatists, set up the European democratic Party of Catalonia (PDECat), led by Puigdemont.

[4] The PP is the party of Rajoy which governs Spain today. It’s another champion in corruption.

[5] Zapatero was the head of the Spanish socialist government between 2004 and 2011. After minimising the economic crisis of 2008, he brought in anti-working class measures which paved the way to their brutal acceleration by the Rajoy government.

[6] The Catalan government of 2003-2010 formed by the “left”: SP, ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia) and a coalition, Iniciativa, made up of the CP plus the Greens

[7] A Mas was president of the Generalitat between 2010 and 2016. After drawing the right wing towards a pro-independence policy, he organised the referendum for independence. He was succeeded by Carles Puigdemont

[8] Pujol was the leader of the party Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) from 1974 to 2003, and President of Catalonia Generalitat  from 1980 to 2003.

[9] Rajoy is the right-wing head of the Spanish government. He put in place article 155 of the Constitution in order to take direct charge of the Catalan Generalitat, sacking its ministers and putting some of them in jail. President Puigdemont took refuges in Belgium.

[10] This in turn was, as Marx pointed out, the result of the exceptional conditions behind the development of capitalism in Spain, which for centuries had a whole world in which to invest its capital without having any need to embark upon a generalised modification of its feudal structures and to industrialise the “mother country”. We have summarised this analysis of separatism in Spain in a recent online article ‘The Catalan quagmire shows the deepening decomposition of capitalism’.

[11] See our pamphlet Nation or Class, and also our articles denouncing the reactionary character of the demand for “the right of peoples to self-determination” in International Review 34, 37 and 42.

[12] The name of the territory given to the Congress (“the Spanish region” and absolutely not “the Catalan nation”) is an indication of the internationalist climate which reigned during these first steps of the workers’ movement, which saw each region as one that would be inhabited by a liberated world humanity.

[13] Which provokes all the more indignation when we see people claiming to be the heirs of the “Rosa de Foc” (the Fiery Rose, the name  the anarchists gave to Barcelona in the 1920s and 30s, because it was the centre of so many social conflagrations) while bowing down to those who proclaim the fight against “the national oppression of Catalonia”

[14] We encourage readers to refer to the texts of the Italian communist left on this question, republished in International Review 4, 6 and 7.

[15] The current campaign being led by the extreme left of capital, such as the CUP and Podemos, which tries to identify social interests with national interests is the heir – with an even more aberrant tone, if that is possible – of the campaign of the 70s and 80s led by the Stalinists, aimed at subordinating the class struggle to the demands of “democratic freedoms” or an “autonomous status” for Catalonia.

[16] On Podemos, see our online article, ‘Podemos, new clothes at the service of the capitalist emperor’, April 2016. This is a national Spanish party with regional “franchises”. The one in Catalonia, along with its allies such as the mayor of Barcelona, isn’t really sure which national garb to dance in. But it has been in favour of a referendum agreed to with the central power. 

 

Geographical: 

Rubric: 

Spain

The United States at the heart of the growing world disorder

Last year, the ruling “elites” of world capitalism were shocked by the outcome of the referendum in the United Kingdom about British membership in the European Union (“Brexit”), and by the result of the presidential elections in the United States (President Trump). In both cases, the results obtained did not correspond to the intentions or the interests of leading factions of the bourgeois class. We are therefore embarking on a series of interconnected pieces which will aim at making an initial balance sheet of the political situation in the United States and Britain in the aftermath of these events[1]. To widen the scope of our examination, we will also develop an analysis of the politics of the ruling class in the two main countries of continental Europe, France and Germany. In France, presidential and parliamentary elections took place in the early summer of this year. In Germany, the general elections to the Bundestag took place in September. The bourgeoisie of both countries is obliged to react to what has taken place in Britain and the USA – and they have reacted.

In choosing to concentrate on these four countries, these pieces will not attempt an analysis of the political life of the bourgeoisie in two countries – Russia and China – which play a key role in the capitalist, imperialist power constellation today. A study of the situation there remains to be done. Having said this, we should point out that both Russia and China play an extremely prominent role in our analysis of the political situation of the four old central “western” capitalist countries to be examined in these pieces. We will also concentrate on the political life of the ruling class, without entering into that of the proletariat. Here again, it is clear that the present situation poses a series of questions and challenges to the working class which revolutionary organisations have to take up and help clarify, and which we will attempt to do in future articles. For the moment, we recommend readers to consult the resolution on the international class struggle from our last international congress, published in this issue of the International Review.

The historical background to these political developments is provided by a deeper process: the accelerating decomposition of the capitalist social order. We highly recommend that the reading of this and following articles be supplemented by a reading or re-reading of our “Theses on Decomposition”, available on our site. For us, the present situation is a strong confirmation of what we outlined in that text, written over a quarter of a century ago. In particular, the concrete examination of the present situation confirms that it is indeed the ruling class itself which is first and foremost affected by this decomposition of its system, and that (except in face of a proletarian menace) the bourgeoisie has increasing difficulties to maintain its political unity and coherence.

(Steinklopfer. First written 23.08.2017 but subsequently updated)

[1] These pieces, which are intended to be read as a unity, were first written in the summer of 2017 after the general elections in Britain and the presidential elections and those to the National Assembly in France, but before the Bundestag elections in Germany.  For various reasons this work could not be published at the time. Some updating and editing has been done, but we have chosen not to alter the section in Germany where the situation even after the elections remains extremely uncertain. For an analysis of the elections in Germany, see our article on IKS website. It was also written before the latest crisis in the relations between the United States and North Korea and between the United States and Iran about the atomic and rocket programmes of what Washington calls “rogue states”. For the North Korea crisis, see our article "Threat of war between North Korea and the US: it is capitalism which is irrational". 

 

People: 

Recent and ongoing: 

Trump and the sharpening global trade war

In reaction to the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, the media in the rest of the world, and the spokespersons of “liberalism” in America itself, painted a grim picture of a planet soon to be plunged by Trump into the throes of a protectionist catastrophe such as already happened after 1929. The assumption was that protectionism is the programme of political “populism” in general, and of Donald Trump in particular. Already at that time, in our articles about populism and about the election of Trump, we argued that a particular economic programme (protectionist or otherwise) is not a major characteristic of right wing populism. On the contrary, what characterises this kind of populism, at the economic level, is the lack of any such coherent programme. Either these parties have little or nothing to say on economic questions, or – as in the case of Trump – they demand one thing one day and its opposite the next. Although Trump in power has already proven his penchant for “unilateralism” by threatening or beginning the withdrawal of the United States from two of the most important trade agreements: that of NAFTA (with North America) and TPP (with Asia without China). In the first case, this remains a threat and one that will be opposed by many important US companies. In the second, the actual agreement has never been signed so a formal withdrawal by the US is not necessary. At the same time Trump has suspended the TTIP negotiations with the European Union – his intentions in so doing remain unclear. According to his own claims his goal is to impose a “better deal” for America. Throwing in the whole weight of the United States to pressurise the others, Trump is gambling with high stakes, as we predicted he would. The outcome remains unpredictable. What is clear however is that, at the level of economic policy, the ruling classes of the other countries have profited from the protectionist rhetoric of Trump in order to one-sidedly blame the USA for something which is first and foremost a product of global capitalism. What we have witnessed recently is nothing less than a qualitatively new stage in the economic life or death struggle between the leading capitalist powers - something which had already started before Trump became president. And at the same time as the other governments issue loud statements in “defence of free trade” against Trump, in reality they have all begun to adopt his rhetoric against dumping and for “free but also fair trade”. Once a slogan of NGO's, “fair trade” is today the war cry of the bourgeois economic struggle. Protectionism is neither new nor the monopoly of the USA. It is part of capitalist competition, practised by all countries.

Formal market protectionism however is only one of the forms which this conflict takes. Another one is the weapon of sanctions. The economic sanctions against Moscow promoted above all by the United States are aimed against the European economy almost as much as against the Russian. In particular the recent American renewal and sharpening of these sanctions (imposed by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, against the will of the president), openly put into question new oil and pipeline deals by western Europe with Russia, and have provoked a storm of protest, above all in Germany. Already under Obama, the American bourgeoisie had also begun to legally prosecute German companies operating in the United States such as the Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen. It would not be an exaggeration to speak of an offensive American trade war against Germany, first and foremost against its car industry. We do not doubt for a moment that the likes of VW or Mercedes are guilty of all the dirty tricks they are being accused of (centred round the falsification of pollution controls). But this is not the main reason they are being prosecuted, and the proof is that other “culprits” are hardly being affected by the legal procedures.

Although Trump, unlike his predecessor, has for the moment not taken such measures, he continues to massively threaten, not so much Europe, but above all China. From his point of view, he has good reason to do so. Already at the economic level, China is presently mounting two gigantic threats to the interests of the United States. The first of them is the so-called new Silk Road, a massive infrastructure programme aimed at linking southern Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe to China through a vast system of modern railways, highways, harbours and airports by land and by sea. Peking has already pledged a thousand billion dollars to this, the most ambitious such infrastructure programme in history to date. The second threat is that China (but also Japan) have started to withdraw capital from the United States and the dollar zone, and to establish bilateral agreements with other governments (the so-called BRICS states, but also Japan or South Korea) to accept payment in each other's currencies instead of paying with dollars. Although there are of course objective limits to how far China and Japan can go in this without harming themselves, these moves represent a serious threat to the United States: “Sooner or later, the currency markets will mirror the relation of forces in international trade – meaning a multi-polar order with three centres of power. In the foreseeable future the Dollar will have to share its leading role with the Euro and the Chinese Yuan” (...) That will affect not only the economy and the social sector but also the military armament of the world power[1]. This would indeed risk undermining, in the long term, the overwhelming military superiority of the United States, since it presently finances its gigantic military machine, and its state debt, to a considerable extent thanks to the role of the dollar as the currency of world trade.

Although both the United States and the European Union are threatening China with custom duties in response to what they call Chinese dumping, what they above all want to achieve is that Peking is stripped of its status, in the international economic institutions, of a “developing country” (which gives China many legal possibilities to protect its own markets). The element in the economic programme of Trump, however, which has most impressed the ruling class, not only in the United States, is his planned “tax reform”. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany declared that it would constitute – should it ever be realised – nothing less than a “tax revolution[2]”. Its main idea is not new in itself, but goes in the same direction as similar “reforms” in the “neo-liberal” era: that of taxing consumption rather than production as much as possible. Since everybody pays consumer tax, all such shifts constitute a kind of tax cut for the owners of the means of production. Convinced that the United States is the only major country where such a tax system could be imposed in a really radical manner, Trump hopes, by making production in the United States virtually tax free, to bring American companies, their headquarters now in places like Dublin or Amsterdam, but also some of their overseas production, “back home” - and to become more attractive for foreign investors and producers. This above all seems to be the counter-offensive which Donald Trump has in mind in the present stage of the economic war.

At the economic level, Trump is anything but the opponent of “neo-liberalism” which he sometimes claims to be. If anything, the goal of his government of billionaires is more like the “completion” of the “neo-liberal revolution”. Behind the rhetoric of his former adviser, Steve Bannon, about the “destruction of the state” there lurks the  neo-liberal state, a particularly brutal and powerful form of state capitalism. But the problem of the Trump administration today is not only that its economic programme is self-contradictory. It is also that those elements of his programme which could be of most use to the American bourgeoisie are very unsure of ever being put into operation. The reason for this is the chaos in the political apparatus of the leading ruling class in the world


[1]Josef Braml: Trump's Amerika. Page 211. Braml works for the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP)

[2]Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02.04.2017. The FAZ newspaper is one of the leading mouthpieces of the German bourgeoisie.

 

People: 

Recent and ongoing: 

The political crisis of the American bourgeoisie

Today, there is a president in the Oval Office who wants to run the country like a capitalist business, and who appears to have no understanding of things like the state and statesmanship, or diplomacy. This in itself is a clear sign of political crisis in a country like the US. Since 2010, the political life of the bourgeoisie in the United States has been characterised by a tendency for the main protagonists to reciprocally block each other. Radical Republicans held up the budgetary planning of the Obama Presidency, for instance, to such an extent that, at critical moments the state was on the brink of being unable to even pay the wages of its employees. The mutual obstruction between the president and the Congress, between the Republicans and the Democrats, and within each of the two parties (in particular within the former) has reached a scale where it has begun to seriously hamper the capacity of the USA to fulfil it role of maintaining a minimum of global capitalist order. An example of this the reform of the structures of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which became necessary in response to the growing weight in particular of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in the world economy. President Obama recognised that, if  US-inspired and led international economic institutions were to continue to perform their function of providing certain “rules of the game” of the world economy, there was no way of avoiding giving the “emerging countries” more rights and votes within them. But this restructuring was blocked by the US congress for no less than five years. As a result, China took the initiative in creating the so-called Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Worse still: Germany, Britain and France decided to participate in the AIIB (March 2015). A major step had been taken in the creation of an alternative, Chinese-led institutional architecture for the world economy. Nor did the opposition within America even succeed in preventing the “reform” of the IMF.

Donald Trump wanted to put an end to this tendency towards a creeping paralysis in the American system of power by breaking the power of the “establishment”, of the established “elites”, in particular within the political parties themselves. Needless to say, this establishment has no intention of surrendering its power. The result of the Trump presidency, at least to date, has transformed this tendency towards blockage  into a full scale crisis of the US political apparatus. A furious power struggle has opened up between the Trumpists and their opponents, between the president and the judiciary system, between the White House and the political parties, within the Republican Party itself – which Trump more or less kidnapped as part of his presidential bid – and  even within the entourage of the president himself. A power struggle which is also being fought out in the media: CNN and the East Coast press versus Breitbart and Fox News. The courts and the municipalities are blocking Trumps immigration policy. His “health reform” to replace Obamacare lacks the support of his “own” Republican Party. The funds to build his wall against Mexico have not been granted. Even his foreign policy is openly contested, in particular his intention of making a “great deal” with Russia. The frustrated, hot headed, twittering president has been firing one prominent member of his own team after the other. Meantime, step by step, the opposition against him is constructing a fire-wall around him, composed of media campaigns, investigations and the threat of prosecution and even impeachment. His capability to rule the country, and even his mental sanity, are being questioned in public. This development is not specific to the United States. The past two years, for instance, have witnessed a series of mass demonstrations against corruption, whether in Latin America (for example Brazil), Europe (Rumania) or in Asia (South Korea). These are protests, not against the bourgeois state, but against the idea that the bourgeois state is doing its job properly (and of course they are protests against certain factions –often to the advantage of another faction). In reality, so-called corruption is but a symptom of deeper-lying problems. The permanent managing, not only of the economy, but of the whole of bourgeois society by the state, is a product of the decadence of capitalism, the global epoch inaugurated by World War I. The decline of the system necessitates a permanent control by the state with an increasingly totalitarian tendency: state capitalism. In its present form, the existing state capitalist apparatus, including the administration, the decision-making process and the political parties, are a product of the 1930s and/or of the post-World War II period. In other words, they have been in existence for decades. In the course of time, their innate tendency towards inertia, inefficiency, self-interest and self-perpetuation become more and more marked. This also goes for the “political class”, with an increasing tendency for politicians and political parties and other institutions to pursue their own vested interests to the detriment of those of the national capital as a whole. “Neo-liberalism” developed partly in response to this problem. It tried to make bureaucracies more efficient by introducing elements of direct economic competition into their mode of functioning. But in many ways the “neo-lib” system has worsened the illness it wanted to cure. The “economisation” of the functioning of the state has given rise to a gigantic new apparatus of what is known as lobbyism. Out of this lobby system has developed in turn the sponsoring, by private individual or groups, of what in the United States are called Political Action Committees (PAC): “think tanks”, political institutes and so-called grass root movements. In March 2010, the US Court of Appeals granted unlimited funding rights to such bodies. Since then, powerful private groups have increasingly been assuming a direct influence on national politics. One example is the “Grover Norquist Initiative” which succeeded in getting a large majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives to take a public oath never again the vote for tax increases. Another example is the Cato Institute and the Tea Party Movement sponsored by the Koch brothers (oil tycoons). Perhaps the most relevant example, in the present context, is Robert Mercer, apparently a brilliant mathematician, who used his mathematical skills to become one of the leading hedge fund billionaires (a kind of right wing equivalent of the “liberal” George Soros) and to create a powerful instrument for the investigation and manipulation of political opinions called Cambridge Analytica. The latter, along with his white supremacist news network Breitbart, were probably decisive in winning the presidency for Donald Trump, and have also been implicated in manipulating opinion for a pro-Brexit result in the UK referendum[1].

The clearest indication that the mutual obstruction within the US ruling class have reached a new quality – that of a full scale political crisis - is the fact that, much more than in the recent past, the imperialist orientation, the military strategy of the super-power has itself become the principle bone of contention and object of obstruction.


[1] For a more detailed analysis of the contradictions between the policies of Trump and the interests of the main fractions of the American bourgeoisie, see our article on the Trump election, which also develops on the context of the global decline of the United States and the still growing cancer of militarism which weighs on its economy. 

 

Recent and ongoing: 

The United States and the Russian question

One of the peculiarities of the 2016 US presidential elections was that (like in the proverbial “banana republics”) neither of the two candidates would accept their defeat. Trump already announced this before Election Day, but without saying what he would do in the case of his defeat. As for Hillary Clinton, instead of blaming someone else for her defeat (for instance herself)[1], she decided to blame it on Vladimir Putin. In the meantime, a large part of the US political establishment has taken up this theme, so that “Russia-Gate” has become the principle instrument of opposition to the Trump administration within the American ruling class. As the world now knows, Trump's connections with Russia go back all the way to the year 1987, when Moscow was still the capital of the USSR and the “Empire of Evil” in the eyes of the USA. According to a recent documentary film shown on ZDF, the second state TV channel in Germany[2], it was Trump's Russian connection, not least his business links to the Russian underworld, which (possibly several times) rescued Trump from going bankrupt. At all events, the main idea of the investigations against Trump about Russia is that someone has become president of the United States who is dependent on the Kremlin, and is perhaps even being blackmailed by it. What is certainly true is that the new president has business and other connections there. Not only Trump, but many from the inner circle of power he gathered round him when he entered the White House, including Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus and Jeff Sessions. What is true above all is that the Trumpists wanted and still want to radically change the Russia policy of the United States, to make a “great deal” with Putin.

Here it is necessary to briefly recall the history of American-Russian relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the heady days of the US “victory” in the Cold War, there was a strong feeling in the American ruling class that its former superpower rival could become a kind of subordinate state and above all a source of abundant profits, The first Russian president Boris Yeltsin relied on American (“neo-lib”) advisers in the process of converting the existing Stalinist system into a “market economy”. What resulted was an economic disaster. As for the US “expert” advisers, their main concern was to as much as possible get the fabulous raw material wealth of Russia under American control. The Yeltsin presidency (1991-1999) a mafia type government, was more or less ready to sell out the resources of the country to the highest bidder. The administration which succeeded it, that of Vladimir Putin, although it has excellent connections to the Russian underworld, soon proved to be a regime of a very different kind,  run by secret service officers determined to defend the independence of mother Russia, and to keep its wealth for themselves. It was Putin therefore who prevented the planned American takeover of the Russian economy. This serious loss corresponded to a more global decline in US authority, in which most of its former allies and even a number of secondary, dependent powers began to challenge the hegemony of the world’s only remaining superpower.

Ever since Putin’s ascendancy, the so-called Neo-Cons, the “conservative” and openly belligerent institutes and think-tanks in the United States, have been publically advocating “regime change” in Moscow. Once again, Russia under Putin became a kind of “Empire of Evil” for the war propaganda of US imperialism. Despite the abrupt change in the US policy of Russia under Putin, the American policy towards Russia remained, until 2014, basically the same. Its main axis was the military encirclement of the Russian Federation, first and foremost through the deployment of NATO ever closer to the heartlands of Russia. Through the integration of the former Baltic states of the USSR into NATO, the US military machine found itself surrounding the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, almost within marching distance of the suburbs of St Petersburg, the second city of Russia. However, when Washington offered NATO membership to two other former components of the Soviet Union – the Ukraine and Georgia - this was prevented by other NATO “partners”, in particular Germany, who realised that this step was likely to provoke some kind of military reaction by Moscow.

Instead, the western “partners” agreed on a more subtle procedure: the European Union offered the Ukraine a “free trade” agreement. But since the Ukraine already had a similar agreement with the Russian Federation, the consequence of the deal between Brussels and Kiev would be that European goods, via the Ukraine, could gain free access to Russia. Brussels however had deliberately excluded Moscow from its negotiations with Kiev. The reaction of Moscow to the deal between Brussels and Kiev therefore came promptly: the Ukraine would have to choose between a shared market with the EU, or one with Russia. A situation arose which led to an open confrontation between “pro-western” and “pro-Russian” forces in the Ukraine. In the wake of the massacre on the Maiden Square in Kiev (20.02.2014), president Viktor Janukovich was toppled and fled to Russia. At the time, the Grand Old Master of US diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, told CNN that regime change in Kiev was a kind of dress rehearsal for what would happen in Moscow[3]. But then something happened which nobody in Washington seems to have been expecting: a Russian military counter-offensive. Its three main components were the Moscow- backed separatist movement in the eastern Ukraine, the annexation of the Crimean peninsula on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and the military intervention of Russia in Syria. A new situation had arisen, in which the coherence and unity of the US policy towards Russia began to crumble.

Agreement could still be reached in Washington about the economic strangulation of Russia, seen as an adequate response to the counter-offensive of Moscow. The three pillars of this policy – still in place – are economic sanctions; hurting the Russian energy sector by keeping the price of oil and gas on the world market as low as possible; and the stepping up of the arms race with a Russia economically unable to keep the pace. But from 2014 on there was growing dissent about how America should respond to Russia at the military level. A hard line faction emerged, which was to give its support to Hillary Clinton at the 2016 presidential election. One of its representatives was the commander of NATO forces in Europe, Philip Breedlove. In November 2014 and again in March 2015 Breedlove spread what turned out to be the fake news that the Russian army had invaded the east of the Ukraine. It looked like an attempt to create a pretext for a NATO intervention in the Ukraine. The German government was so alarmed that both Chancellor Merkel and foreign minister Steinmeier condemned in public what they called the “dangerous propaganda” of the NATO commander[4]. Breedlove, evidently, was not breeding love, but war. According to the German review Cicero ((04.03.16) Breedlove also proposed to the US Congress to attack Kaliningrad, the Russian Port on the Baltic Sea, as an adequate response to Russian aggression further south. He was not the only one in such a mood. Associated Press reported that the Pentagon was considering the use of atomic weapons against Russia. And at a conference of the US Army Association in October 2016, American generals argued that a war with Russia, and even China, was “almost unavoidable”.[5]These pronouncements have been extreme, but they do show the ingrained strength of the “anti-Russian” position within US military circles.

Alarmed by this escalation, the last head of state of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, wrote a contribution for Time Magazine (27.01.17) entitled “It looks as if the world is preparing for war”, where he warned of the danger of a nuclear catastrophe in Europe. Gorbachev was reacting not least to an idea increasingly put forward by conservative think- tanks in the United States: that the risks imposed by a nuclear conflict with Russia have become calculable and can be “minimised” - at least for the United States. According to this “school of thought” such a conflict would not be declared, but would develop out of the present “hybrid war” (Breedlove) with Russia, where the distinctions between armed clashes, conventional warfare and nuclear war become blurred. It was in response to such “thinking aloud” in Washington that the Kremlin “assured” the world that the Russian nuclear second strike capacity was such, that not only Berlin but also Washington would be “razed to the ground” if NATO attacked Russia.[6]

In the face of this growing consideration of the military option against Russia, opposition developed not only within NATO, but also within the US ruling class. The NATO summit of September 2014 in Wales rejected proposals to intervene militarily in the Ukraine, and abandoned, at least for the moment, the idea of Kiev becoming a NATO member. And from that moment on, Barak Obama, as long as he was in office, while contributing to the modernisation of the Ukrainian armed forces, always rejected a direct American military engagement there. But the politically most important reaction within the US bourgeoisie to the situation with Russia was that of Donald Trump.

To understand how, in this context, a new position on policy towards Russia came to be formulated within the American bourgeoisie, it is important to keep in mind that Russia does not have the same significance for the United States as it had a quarter of a century ago, during the “honeymoon phase” between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin. At that time, the main goal of America's Russia policy was Russia itself, the control of its resources. Today American control of Russia would be more a means to a new end: the military encirclement of the new enemy No. 1, which is China. In this changed context, Donald Trump poses a very simple question to the rest of his class: If China is now our main enemy, why can't we try to win over Moscow for an alliance against China? Russia is neither the natural friend of China, nor the natural enemy of the United States.

The question which is of more interest to the “mainstream” of the US bourgeoisie (in particular the supporters of Hillary Clinton) at the moment, however, is a different one: did the Kremlin influence the outcome of the last US presidential elections? The answer to this question is in fact not difficult. Not only did Putin influence the election, he even helped to create the group within the US bourgeoisie open to making deals with Moscow. The principal means he used to this end was the most legitimate one possible in bourgeois society: the proposal of business deals. For example, the deal offered to Exxon Oil and its president Rex Tillerson – now US secretary of state (foreign minister) - is said to have been worth 500 billion dollars. We can thus understand how, after all the bourgeois talk in recent decades about fossil energy sources belonging to the past, there is a government in Washington today with a strong over-representation of the oil and even the coal industry: they are the part of the US economy to which Russia can offer the most.

Although Trump has apparently succeeded in convincing Henry Kissinger of his proposal (Kissinger has become an adviser of Trump and an advocate of “detente” with Russia) he is very far from having convinced the majority of his top brass opponents. One of the reasons for this is that what Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech as president of the United States (17.02.1961) called the “military-industrial complex” feels threatened in its existence by a possible deal with Russia. This is because Russia, for the moment, continues to be the main justification for the maintenance of such a gigantic apparatus. Unlike Russia, China, at least for the moment, although it is an atomic power, has no comparable array of intercontinental nuclear rockets directly targeting the major cities of the United States.


[1] Her husband, ex- president Bill Clinton, was allegedly hopping mad about how incompetently her campaign had been managed

[2]ZDF Zoom: Gefährliche Verbindungen – Trump und seine Geschäftspartner (“Dangerous Connections – Trump and his Business Partners“) by Johannes Hano and Alexander Sarovic.

[3]Youtube 17.08.2015.

[4]Der Spiegel, 07.03.2015. “NATO Oberbefehlshaber Breedlove irritiert die Allierten”. (NATO Commander in Chief Irritates the Allies)

[5]Wolfgang Bittner: Die Eroberung Europas durch die USA (The Conquest of Europe by the USA), Page 151.

[6]YouTube 05.02.2015

 

Britain: The Ruling Class Divided

In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May had called early elections for June 2017, with the goal of winning a larger majority for her Conservative Party before entering negotiations about the conditions under which the country would leave the European Union. Instead, she lost the majority she had, making herself dependent on the support of the Ulster (North of Ireland) protestant Unionists from the DUP. The only success of the Prime Minister at these elections was that the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP, the hard liner Brexiteers to the right of the Conservative Party) are no longer represented in the House of Commons. Despite this, , the latest electoral debacle for the Conservatives made it clear that the fundamental problem remains unresolved –the problem which, a year ago, made it possible that the referendum about British membership of the European Union produced a result –the “Brexit”- which a majority of the political elites had not wanted. This problem is the deep division within the Conservatives –one of the two main state parties in Britain. Already when Britain joined what was then the “European Community” in the early 1970s, the Tories were divided over this issue. A strong resentment against “Europe” was never overcome within the Tory ranks. In recent years, these inner party tensions developed into open power struggles, which have increasingly hampered the capacity of the party to govern. In 2014, the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron managed to checkmate the Scottish Nationalists by calling a referendum about Scottish independence, and winning a majority for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Emboldened by this success, Cameron attempted to silence the opponents of British membership of the European Union in a similar manner. But this time, he had seriously miscalculated the risks. The referendum resulted in a narrow majority to leave, whereas Cameron had campaigned to stay in. A year later, the Tories are as divided on this question as ever. Only that today, the conflict is no longer about membership or not in the EU, but about whether the government should adopt a “hard” or a “soft” attitude in negotiating the conditions under which Britain will leave. Of course, these divisions within the political parties are emanations of deeper lying tendencies within capitalist society, the weakening of its national unity and cohesion in the phase of its decomposition.

To understand why the ruling class in Britain is so divided on such issues, it is important to recall that, not so long ago, London was the proud ruler of the largest and most far flung Empire in human history. It is thanks to this golden past that the British high society is still today the richest ruling class in western Europe.[1] And whereas an average German bourgeois engages himself or herself traditionally in an industrial company, an average British counterpart is likely to own a mine in Africa, a farm in New Zealand, a ranch in Australia, and/or a forest in Canada (not to mention real estate and shareholding in the United States) as part of a family inheritance. Although the British Empire, and even the British Commonwealth, are things of the past, they enjoy a very tangible “life after death”. The “White Dominions” (no longer so-called) Canada, Australia and New Zealand, still share with Britain the same monarch as formal head of state. They also share, for instance (along with the former crown colony: the USA) a privileged cooperation of their secret services. Many among the ruling class of these countries feel as if they still belong, if not to the same nation, than to the same family. Indeed they are often interconnected by marriage, by shares in the same property and by business interests. When Britain, in 1973, under the Tory Prime Minister Heath, joined what was then the European “Common Market”, it was a shock and even a humiliation for parts of the British ruling class that their country was obliged to reduce or even sever its privileged relations with its former “crown colonies”. All the resentment accumulated over decades about the loss of the British Empire began, from this time on, to vent itself against “Brussels”. A resentment which was soon to be augmented by the neo-liberal current (very important in Britain from the Thatcher days onwards) to whom the monstrous “Brussels bureaucracy” was anathema. A resentment shared by the ruling classes in the former dominions such as Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media billionaire, today one of the most fanatical Brexiteers. But  quite apart from the weight of these old links, it was humiliating enough that a Britain which once “ruled the waves” had the same voting rights in Europe as Luxemburg, or that the tradition of Roman law held sway in the continental European institutions rather than the old Saxon one.

But all of this does not mean that the “Brexiteers” have or ever had a coherent programme for leaving the European Union. The resurrection of the Empire, or even of the Commonwealth in its original form, is clearly impossible. The motive of many of the leading Brexiteers, apart from resentment and even a certain loss of reality, is careerism. Boris Johnson, for instance, the leader of the “Leave” fraction of the Tories last year, seemed even more amazed and dismayed than his opponent, the party leader Cameron, when he heard the result of the referendum. His goal did not seem to be Brexit, in fact, but replacing Cameron at the head of the party.

The fact that it is the Conservatives, more than the Labour Party, which are so divided over this issue is equally a product of history. Capitalism in Britain triumphed, not through the elimination, but through the bourgeoisification of the aristocracy: the big land owners themselves became capitalists. But their traditions directed their interest in capitalism more towards the ownership of land, real estate and raw materials than towards industry. Since they already owned more or less the whole of their own country, their appetite for capitalist profits became one of the main motors of British overseas expansion. The larger the Empire became, the more this land- and real estate owning- layer could get the upper hand over the industrial bourgeoisie (that part which had originally pioneered the first capitalist “industrial revolution” in history). And whereas the Labour Party, through its intimate links to the trade unions, is traditionally closer to industrial capital, the big land and real estate owners tend to assemble within the ranks of the Tories. Of course, under modern capitalism, the old distinctions between industrial, land owning, merchant and finance capital tend to become dissipated by the concentration of capital and the domination of the state over the economy. Nonetheless, the different traditions, as well as the different interests they partly still express, still lead a life of their own.

Today there is a risk of a partial paralysis of the government. Both wings of the Conservative Party (who at the moment present themselves as the proponents of a “hard” versus a “soft” Brexit), are more or less poised to topple Prime Minister May. But at least at present, neither side seems to dare to strike the first blow, so great is the fear of widening the rift within the party. Should the party prove unable to resolve this problem soon, important fractions of the British bourgeoisie may start to think about the alternative of a Labour government. Immediately after the Brexit referendum, Labour presented itself, if anything, in an even worse state than the Conservatives. The “moderate” parliamentary fraction was disgruntled about the left rhetoric of its party leader Jeremy Corbyn, which they felt was putting off voters, and about his refusal to engage himself in favour of Britain remaining in the EU. They also seemed poised to topple their leader. In the meantime, Corbyn has impressed them with his capacity to mobilise young voters at the recent elections. Indeed, if the tragic Grenfell Tower fire (for which the population holds the Conservative government responsible) had taken place before instead of just after the elections, it is not unthinkable that Corbyn would now be Prime Minister instead of May. As it is, Corbyn has already begun to prepare himself for government by ditching some of his more “extreme” demands such as the abolition of the Trident nuclear armed submarines presently being modernised.


[1] Magazines such as Fortune publish annual figures about the world’s wealthiest banks, companies, families and individuals.

 

France: Macron Rescues the Situation – But For How Long?

In France, Emmanuel Macron and his new movement “La République En Marche” (LREM) spectacularly won the summer 2017 presidential and legislative (parliament) elections. This victory of the best possible candidate to defeat populism in France was the product of its ability to garner broad support around this goal among the French bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of the European Union and influential political figures such as Angela Merkel. The Front National (FN), the main “populist” party in the country, had no chance in the second round of the presidential elections against Macron. Weighed down by the backwardness of its origins, in particular by the domination of the Le Pen clan, the double electoral defeat of the FN has plunged it into open crisis. In a front page editorial about the situation there, under the title “France is Falling Apart at the Seams”, the often astute Swiss daily, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote that “the French party system is falling apart”. This analysis was published February 4th 2017, long before the victory of Macron could draw attention away from the crumbling of the established parties. If, as we have seen, the Republican Party in the United States has been hijacked by Donald Trump, and the Conservative Party in Britain is divided, in France both of the main established state parties are presently floundering. The conservative “Les Républicains” (LR) won only 22% of the votes, whereas the Socialist Party (PS) did even worse, gaining only 5,6% at the legislative elections. Beforehand, neither of the candidates of these two parties succeeded in qualifying for the second round of the presidential elections (where the two candidates with the most votes in the first round fight it out). Instead the spectacularly incompetent populist candidate Marine Le Pen lost against the new shooting star Macron, who did not even have a party behind him.

At the beginning of the presidential campaign, most pundits had expected a fight  between the president in office at the time, Francois Hollande from the PS, and Alain Juppé from LR, a “moderniser” much favoured by important currents within the French bourgeoisie. Five years previously, Hollande had become president after being nominated by the Parti Socialiste in a highly media-promoted “primary” - a voting procedure of the presidential candidate on the American model. Les Republicans, thinking that what worked for the Socialists could not fail for them too, decided to hold their own “primary”. In so doing, they lost control of the nomination process. Instead of Juppé or another, more or less solid candidate, Francois Fillon was nominated. Although the favourite of the Catholic vote and of parts of the High Society, it was clear to an important part of the French bourgeoisie that Fillon would in no way be assured of victory against Marine Le Pen if he did qualify for the second round. But if political judgement was not a particular quality of the candidate Fillon, stubbornness was. Despite the scandals directed against him, Fillon refused to resign, and LR were stuck with their “lame duck” candidate. On the side of the Socialists, the president in office Hollande renounced a second candidature in view of the absence of electoral or party internal support for him. As for the Prime Minister under Hollande, Manuel Valls, he failed at the party primary, where, out of protest against the leadership, the base nominated instead the hardly known candidate Hamon.

The loss of control by the established parties was the opportunity for Emmanuel Macron. The latter had already tried his hand as an economic and political reformer when he served as an  adviser to the first PS led government under president Hollande, and then as member of the second government led by Valls. At that time, his goal seems to have been to start an economic modernisation process in France something along the lines of the “Agenda 2010” of Gerhard Schröder in Germany. But Macron did not stay long in this government, soon realising that, unlike the SPD in Germany, the Parti Socialiste was not strong, disciplined and united enough to put through such a programme.

By the beginning of the year 2017, a very dangerous situation had arisen for French capitalism. In face of the incompetence of the main established parties, the danger of an electoral victory of the Front National could no longer be ruled out. Its ideas about taking France out of the Euro Zone and even out of the European Union were in flagrant contradiction with the interests of the leading fractions of French capital. In face of this danger, it was Macron who rescued the situation. He did so, to an important extent, by using the methods of populism against the populists.

First,Macron succeeded  in stealing from the populists one of their favourite current themes: that the traditional right and the traditional left have both failed historically because they have been too busy opposing each other ideologically and in their power struggles to properly serve the “cause of the nation”. But Macron did not only adopt this language, he put it into practise by deliberately recruiting support and supporters both from the left and from the right for his new movement “En Marche”. His claim to serve “neither the left nor the right, but France alone” helped him to politically disarm Marine Le Pen. He was even able to present the FN as itself belonging to the “establishment”, as a longer standing right wing party.

Secondly, Macron responded to the growing general disgust towards the existing parties by putting forward, not a party, but a movement, and above all by putting forward… himself. In doing so, he took into consideration a growing mood within parts of bourgeois society: a longing for the authority of a strong leader. If an “irresponsible” politician like Trump could be successful with such a tactic, why not Macron (who sees himself as a highly responsible one). Instead of hijacking one of the two main established parties, Macron instead incited, from the outside, a kind of partial mutiny and defection from within both of them. As such, he contributed seriously to damaging these parties. According to a theory of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), “charismatic leadership” is one of the three forms of bourgeois rule. In post-World War II in France, it has a tradition: That of General De Gaulle (1890-1970) who, in 1958 “saved” a nation in the throes of the war in Algeria. In doing so, De Gaulle altered the constitutional and party political structure of France in a manner which, in the longer term, proved not to be particularly efficient and stable.

But Macron does not only stand in the tradition of De Gaulle. He is also the expression of a new trend within the bourgeoisie in response to the rise of “populism”. At the spring elections of this year in the Netherlands, the Prime Minister in office, Mark Rutte, described the electoral win of the “pro Euro and pro EU” parties over the enfant terrible of right wing populism, Geert Wilders, as the victory of “good” over “bad” populism. In Austria, in an attempt to counter the populist FPÖ, the conservative ÖVP, for the first time, went into the electoral campaign, not under its own, once prestigious name, but as the “electoral list Sebastian Kurz–ÖVP”. In other words, the party decided to hide itself behind the name of a hoped for “charisma” of the young vice chancellor and foreign minister who recently threatened to mobilise tanks on the frontier to Italy against refugees.

Thirdly, Macron followed the example of the German chancellor Angela Merkel in openly defending the “European Project”. Whereas the established parties undermined their own credibility by adopting the anti-European rhetoric of the NF, while in reality continuing to uphold French membership of the European Union, the Euro-Zone and the Schengen- Zone. This clear stance helped to remind a bourgeois society in disorder that French capital is one of the main beneficiaries of these European institutions.

Like De Gaulle in the 1940s and 1950s, Macron is a stroke of good luck for the French bourgeoisie today. It is mainly thanks to him that France has been able to avoid landing in a similar political dead end to that in which its American and British counterparts presently find themselves. But the longer term success of this rescue operation is anything but guaranteed. In particular, if anything happens to Macron, or if his political reputation becomes seriously damaged, his République En Marche risks falling apart. This is the characteristic liability of “charismatic leadership”. The same goes for the new political star of the French left opposition, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who succeeded in responding to the demise of the traditional bourgeois left (Socialist and Communist Parties, Trotskyism) by creating a left movement around himself, in a manner strikingly resembling that of Macron himself. Mélenchon has lost no time taking up his role of canalising proletarian discontent in face of the coming economic attacks into bourgeois dead ends. Overnight, the division of labour between the two M's, Macron and Mélenchon, has become one of the axes of the politics of the French state. But here again, the movement around Mélenchon remains unstable for the moment, liable to fall apart if its leader falters.

People: 

Recent and ongoing: 

Germany between Russia and the United States

General elections in Germany are scheduled for mid-September. Germany also has seen the rise of a right wing populist protest party, the “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD). But although this party seems likely to enter the national parliament, the Bundestag, for the first time, it has little chance, for the moment, of upsetting the plans of the main fractions of the politically and economically still relatively stable German bourgeoisie. The present electoral campaign of Chancellor Merkel reveals a lot about the situation of German capitalism. Her slogan is: stability. Without using the same words, her approach seems to be inspired by that of her post war predecessor, the Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who once campaigned under the motto:“no experiments”. Under the present circumstances, “no experiments” expresses the self-understanding of Germany as being more or less the only haven of political stability among the major powers of the western world at present. But behind this fixation on stability, there is also a growing alarm. The main source of the consternation of the German ruling class is the United States. We have already mentioned Trump's protectionist threats. There is also his unilateral withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, and in particular the American offensive against the German car industry started under the Obama administration. But the threat to the interests of German imperialism does not limit itself to economic or environmental issues. It concerns first and foremost the military and so-called security questions. A brief historical recapitulation is necessary here.

Under the Social Democratic led “Red-Green” coalition of Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005), Germany had moved closer to Putin's Russia, pioneering joint energy projects, and joining Moscow (and Paris) in refusing to support George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Schröder’s successor Merkel, like many politicians from the former East Germany (GDR) a staunch “Atlanticist”, changed this orientation, reaffirming the “partnership” with America as the cornerstone of German foreign policy. Under Obama, Washington offered Berlin the role of junior partner of the United States in Europe. Germany was called on to assume a greater share of the work of NATO in Europe, allowing America to concentrate more on the Far East and its main challenger China. In return for this enhanced status, Merkel had to abandon the “special relationship” with Moscow inaugurated by Schröder. But at the same time, Washington reassured Berlin that it was not “abandoning Europe to its fate” by modernising the US military presence in Germany, including at the military level. But under the surface, already during Obama's second term in office, tensions mounted between Berlin and Washington. One moment when this became visible was during the “refugee crisis” of summer 2015. The calls of the German bourgeoisie for US support went almost demonstratively unheeded. What Berlin was asking for was not that the USA take Syrian or other refugees, but that it should intervene politically and even militarily in some way to stabilise the situations in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin. But Washington did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, Obama affirmed repeatedly that the “refugee crisis is the problem of Europe alone”.

But it was above all concerning the policy toward Russia that the relations between Berlin and Washington became increasingly conflictual. Germany under Merkel supported and supports the NATO policy of encirclement of Russia, and hopes as America's junior partner to be one of its main beneficiaries. But it opposed and opposes the American strategy (championed by Hillary Clinton much more than by Barak Obama) of replacing the Putin government in Moscow. Indeed, on this question, the opposition within the European bourgeoisie is growing, even if it does not always express itself openly.[1] After the fall of Schröder's Red-Green coalition, the fraction of the German bourgeoisie with close links to Russia neither disappeared nor became inactive. In particular, with the formation of the Grand Coalition government between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats four years ago, the “friends of Putin” within the SPD returned to power. One can speak of a certain division of labour between the Merkel and Schröder fractions, and it is probably more astute and favourable for German interests, if the friends of Schröder only play the role of junior partner in the government (as is presently the case). But there have also been behind the scenes activities of this fraction. According to the first results of the public investigations about Trump's Russia connections in the United States, the Deutsche Bank played a central role in promoting business and other transactions between Trump and the “Russian Oligarchy”. They prefer to see Putin propped up rather than brought down by “the west”. It is also known that parts of German industry made generous financial contributions to Trump's electoral campaign. And it is an open secret that one of the strongholds of the Schröder-Gabriel[2] fraction in Germany is the province of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen company which that provincial state partly owns and runs. In this light we can better understand that the court cases against Volkswagen and the Deutsche Bank in the United States are motivated not only economically but above all politically, and why, seven weeks before the national general elections, a power struggle has broken out in Lower Saxony (and in Volkswagen), bringing down the Red-Green coalition in Hanover. Although she does not necessarily share their orientation, Chancellor Merkel has, to a certain extent, tolerated the activities of this other fraction and tried to benefit from their links both to Putin and to Trump. Today however, the anti-Russian hawks in Washington are mounting their pressure not only on the Trump, but also on the Merkel government. Merkel's response to this has been typically two faced. On the one hand, she maintains her contacts with the Trumpists. On the other hand, she maintains a demonstrative distance from the new US leadership in public. There is hardly a country in western Europe where the criticism of the new administration in Washington has been so open and severe, and so much shared by almost the whole political class in Germany. Alongside Erdogan, Trump has eclipsed Putin as the favourite “bad guy” of the German media. We are entitled to conclude that the German bourgeoisie has taken advantage of the political and other bad manners of the Trump people in order to politically distance itself from the United States to a degree which, under other circumstances, would probably have provoked an international scandal. Under these circumstances, the pressure from Washington (augmented by Trump) for the European NATO “partners” - in particular Germany – to increase their military budgets, is in reality more than welcome (even if many of their politicians affirm the opposite in public). Berlin has already begun this augmentation. The plan is to raise military spending from the present 1.2% of German GNP to 2% by 2024 – almost double the present rate. If it were to conform to Trumps's demand of 3% of GNP, Germany would have the biggest military budget of any state in Europe (at least 70 billion Euros annually). Moreover, Germany has recently officially changed its “defence doctrine”. After the end of the Cold War, it was officially declared that Germany and western Europe no longer stand under any direct military threat. Today this doctrine has been revised, stating that “territorial defence” is once again the main goal of the Bundeswehr. With this new doctrine, the German state reacts not only to the recent military counter-offensive of Russia in the Ukraine and Syria, but also to growing fears about the political stability of Russia, and about the chaos which might develop there.  Germany is also profiting from “Brexit” in order to increase the militarisation of the structures of the European Union and a certain independence from NATO (something Britain was able to prevent as long as it was an active EU member). Under the slogans of the “war against terrorism” and the “war against the smuggling of immigrants”, the EU has been declared to be no longer only an economic or political, but also (and even “above all” according to Merkel and Macron) a “security union”.


[1]For instance, at a symposium in Berlin this summer organised by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, it was put forward that the main danger to the stability of Europe is not the Putin regime, but the possible collapse of the Putin regime.

[2]Schröder is officially on the pay roll of the German pipeline project with the Russian Gazprom. Gabriel, who recently came out in favour of a “federal solution“ to the Ukraine conflict not unlike that propagated by Moscow, is Germany's new foreign minister.

 

Recent and ongoing: 

The French-German Tandem

The German bourgeoisie was among the very first to recognize the political talent and potential of Emmanuel Macron. From an early stage in the French electoral campaign, most of the political class in Germany and almost the whole of the media strongly supported his candidature. Of course, the German bourgeoisie has only limited means of directly influencing a French election. The general public in France follow neither the German media nor what politicians there say. But the French “political elite” necessarily takes note of what is being said and done on the other side of the Rhine. Through their clear stance in his favour, the German bourgeoisie helped to convince the powers that be in France that Macron is a serious and capable politician. This German support for Macron was motivated not only by the will to stop Marine Le Pen and save the European Union. Macron was also the only presidential candidate to make the renewal of the French-German tandem one of the central points of his electoral programme.

Macron takes this Paris-Berlin axis very seriously. According to him France is not yet able to assume its role in such an “alliance”, because it has not yet resolved its economic problems. Only an economically revitalised France, he says, could be anything like an equal partner of Germany. He sees its relative loss of economic competitiveness as the main threat to the stature of France as a global player on an international scale. For this reason, Macron poses the acceptance of his economic programme as the precondition for the constitution of a solid axis with Germany. By posing things in such terms, he has formulated a programme of action which can appear as being at once desirable and realistic to the ruling class of his own country. He presents his “reforms” as the condition for the maintenance of the imperial glory of France, and at the same time as something attainable – because it will be supported by Germany. But by the same token, he has formulated a goal both desirable and attainable to the German ruling class. Whether towards Russia or towards the United States, Berlin needs the backing of Paris. To obtain it, Berlin will have to support the economic “modernisation” of France.

The insistence of Macron on his economic programme as the precondition for everything else does not mean that he has a narrow economic view of the problems facing France. According to an old analysis of one of his predecessors as French president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the main economic problem of France is not its industrial and agricultural apparatus, which produces for the most part efficiently at a high level, but its backward political apparatus, and the rigid, bureaucratic nexus which links politics to its economy (the existing “systeme étatique” in France, which Helmut Schmidt and other German leaders have been criticising for decades). Macron wants to confront this problem today. Not unlike Trump in the United States, he wants to “shake” up the old elites. But he also has to overcome possible resistance from the French working class. Whether or not Macron is able to impose his attacks on the living and working conditions of the French proletariat may well decide whether or not the experiment of En Marche and the Macron presidency ends in success or failure.

Whenever Macron speaks of the French-German tandem, while he always mentions these economic and political dimensions, he insists that it should be first and foremost seen as a military (a “security”) question. In reality, the axis Macron, and Merkel, are speaking of, is not a stable imperialist alliance such as was still possible under the conditions of the Cold War. It is more like a deal based on a greater determination to defend a bigger common policy of certain countries of the EU – expressed by the reaction to the Brexit - and to loosen dependencies on the US in reaction to the "positions" of Trump. The association between Germany andFrance in a leading tandem of the EU is made possible by the complementarity between these two countries. France is the leading military power in Europe, on a par with Britain and really stronger than Germany, and not only because of its possession of the nuclear weapon. The co-leadership with France could benefit to Germany by conferring on it a higher political and diplomatic credibility. On the other hand, France could expect positive spinoffs from an alliance with the economic leader of Europe, mainly a countertrend to the economic / political decline it suffers. And more. The existence of such a co-leadership presents the advantage that it arouses less fear from other EU partners as a Germany assuming the leadership on its own.

The first French-German governmental consultations after the election of Macron decided, among other things: the development of a joint jet fighter to replace both Eurofighter and Rafale; enforcement of “Frontex” against refugees, and the establishment of a joint EU entrance and exit register; under German leadership, the development, along with Italy and Spain, of a European military drone; new investments in modern tanks, patrol boots and space technology. The EU “foreign minister” Mogherini joined Merkel and Macron to declare a European “Alliance for the Sahel Zone”. Germany declared its willingness “in principle” to increase its public and private investments in Europe, and to give financial support to the present French military missions in Africa. All of this under the slogan of “protecting Europe”.

Recent and ongoing: 

By way of a conclusion

The centre of the cyclone of decomposing capitalism is today the central country of the bourgeois system: the United States. The electoral triumph of a president who embodies the populist wave has already demonstrated how much this upsurge is antagonistic to the “rational” interests of the national capital and those factions of the bourgeoisie (security, military, diplomatic and political) who have the strongest sense of the “needs of state”.The tendency there at present is clearly one towards an intensification of  tensions and even an authentic impasse within the ruling class,. But precisely because the USA is so central to world capitalism, the pressure is daily increasing on the American bourgeoisie to try to resolve their present predicament. But how? Just at the moment it does not look as if the Trump Administration will be able to impose its politics – the resistance to this within the ruling class appears to be too strong. Another possibility is that the Trumpists give in and tacitly adopt the politics of their opponents (or at least show more readiness to compromise). Although there are signs in this direction, there are signals in the opposite direction too. The option most under discussion in public at present is that of the impeachment of the president. The drawback of this method of removing Trump from the Oval Office is that it threatens to become a protracted and complicated legal and political procedure. Other options, promising a more rapid resolution of the problem, are undoubtedly on the table too, even if they are not so freely discussed: one of them is to have president declared insane. It is also possible that Trump (or someone else) will try to break out of the existing deadlock through military adventures abroad. One of the advantages of the “war against terrorism” led by George W. Bush was that it enabled his government, at least temporarily, to unite the ruling class behind him, and to impose large parts of their “neo-conservative” programme. Today, countries such as North Korea or Iran offer tempting targets for such operations, since they are closely linked not only to Russia but also to China. If there is one thing the US bourgeoisie still agrees on, it is that Peking is its main challenger today.

Steinklopfer. First written 23.08.2017 but subsequently updated 

22nd ICC Congress: Resolution on the international class struggle

22nd ICC Congress: Resolution on the international class struggle

 

1. The election of Donald Trump as president of the USA, which closely followed the unexpected result of the EU referendum in the UK, has created a wave of unease, fear, but also questioning across the world. How could our rulers, those who are supposedly in charge of the present world order, allow such things to happen – turns of events that seem to go against the “rational” interests of the capitalist class? How did it come about that a chancer, a narcissist thug and hustler is now at the head of the world’s most powerful state? And more important: what does this tell us about where the entire world is headed.

Part I: A hundred years of class struggle

2. In our view, the real condition of human society can only be understood by looking it at from the point of view of the class struggle, of the exploited class of this society, the proletariat, which has no interest in hiding the truth and whose struggle oblige it to see through all the mystifications of capitalism in pursuit of the goal of overthrowing it.  Equally, it is only possible to understand current, immediate or localised events by locating them in a world-historic framework. This is the essence of the marxist method. It is for this reason, and not simply because 2017 marks the centenary of the revolution in Russia, that we begin by going back a century or more to understand the historic epoch within which the most recent developments in the world situation are taking place: that of the decline or decadence of the capitalist mode of production.

The revolution in Russia was the response of the working class in Russia to the horrors of the first imperialist world war. As affirmed by the Communist International in 1919, this war marked the beginning of the new epoch, the end of the ascendant period of capitalism, of the first great burst of capitalist “globalisation” as it hit the barriers posed by the division of the world into rival national states: the epoch of “wars and revolutions”  The capacity of the working class to overthrow the bourgeois state in an entire country and to endow itself with a political party capable of guiding the  class toward the dictatorship of the proletariat was indicative that the promise of replacing  capitalist barbarism was both an historic possibility and necessity.

Moreover the Bolshevik party which, in 1917, was in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement, recognised that the seizure of power by the workers’ soviets in Russia could only be sustained if it was the first blow of an incipient world revolution. Equally, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg understood that if the world proletariat did not respond to the challenge posed by the October insurrection, and put an end to the capitalist system, mankind would be plunged into an epoch of growing barbarism, a spiral of wars and destruction that would endanger human civilisation.

With the world revolution in mind, and with the need to create an alternative pole of reference for the proletariat to now counter revolutionary Social Democracy, the Bolshevik Party took the lead in the creation of the Communist International whose first congress took place in Moscow in 1919. The new Communist Parties particularly those in Germany, Italy were to spearhead the extension of the proletarian revolution to western Europe.

3. The revolution in Russia indeed sparked off a world-wide series of mass strikes and uprisings which compelled the bourgeoisie to put an end to the imperialist slaughter, but the international working class was not able to take power in other countries, aside from some short-lived attempts in Hungary and in some German cities. Faced with the greatest threat yet from its potential grave-digger, the ruling class was able to overcome its most bitter rivalries to unite against the proletarian revolution: isolating the soviet power in Russia by blockade, invasion and support for the armed counter-revolution; making use of the social democratic workers’ parties and the unions, which had already shown their loyalty to capital by participating in the imperialist war effort, to infiltrate or neutralise the workers’ councils in Germany and divert them towards an accommodation with the new “democratic” bourgeois regime. But the defeat not only showed the continuing capacity of a now reactionary ruling class to rule; it also derived from the immaturity of the working class which was forced to make a sudden transition from the struggle for reforms to the struggle for revolution, and still carried within itself many profound illusions in the possibility of improving the capitalist regime through the democratic vote, the nationalisation of key industries or the granting of social benefits to the poorest layers of society. In addition, the working class had been severely traumatised by the horrors of war, in which the fine flower of its youth had been decimated, emerging from it with deep divisions between workers of the “victorious” and “vanquished” nations.

In Russia, the Bolshevik party, faced with isolation, civil war and economic collapse, and more and entangled with the apparatus of the Soviet State, made a series of disastrous errors which more and more brought it into violent conflict with the working class, notably the policy of the “Red Terror” which involved the suppression of workers’ protests and political organisations, culminating in the crushing of the revolt at Kronstadt in 1921 when the latter demanded the restoration of the genuine soviet power which had existed in 1917.  On the international level, the Communist International, which was also increasingly tied to the needs of the Soviet State rather than the world revolution, began to resort to opportunist policies which undermined its original clarity, such as the United Front Tactic adopted in 1922.

This degeneration gave rise to an important left opposition notably in the German and Italian Parties. And it was from the latter that the Italian fraction was able, in the late twenties and thirties to uncover the lessons of the eventual defeat of the revolution.

4. The defeat of the world revolutionary wave thus verified the warnings of the revolutionaries in 1917-18 about the consequences of such a failure: a new descent into barbarism. The dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia not only degenerated but turned into a capitalist dictatorship against the proletariat, a process that was confirmed (though not begun) by the victory of the Stalinist apparatus with its doctrine of “socialism in one country”. The “peace” installed to end the threat of revolution soon gave way to new imperialist conflicts which were accelerated and intensified by the outbreak of the world crisis of overproduction in 1929, a further sign that the expansion of capital was coming up against its own inbuilt limits. The working class in the heartlands of the system, especially the US and Germany, was fully exposed to the blows of the economic depression, but having tried and failed to make the revolution a decade earlier, it was fundamentally a defeated class, despite some real expressions of class resistance, such as in the USA and Spain. It was thus unable to stand in the way of another march towards world war.

5. The pitch-fork of the counter-revolution had three main prongs: Stalinism, fascism, democracy, each one of which has left deep scars in the psyche of the working class.

The counter-revolution plumbed the lowest depths in the countries where the revolutionary flame had risen the highest: Russia and Germany. But everywhere, faced with the necessity to exorcise the proletarian spectre, to cope with the greatest economic crisis in its history, and to prepare for war, capitalism assumed an increasingly totalitarian form, penetrating every pore of social and economic life. The Stalinist regime set the tone: a complete war economy, the crushing of all dissent, monstrous rates of exploitation, a vast concentration camp. But the worst legacy of Stalinism – in life as well as in death decades later – was that it masqueraded as the true heir of the October revolution. The centralisation of capital in the hands of the state was sold to the world as socialism, imperialist expansion as proletarian internationalism. Although, in the years when the October revolution was still a living memory, many workers continued to believe in this myth of the Socialist Fatherland, many more have been turned away from all thought of revolution by successive revelations of the true nature of the Stalinist regime. The damage Stalinism has done to the perspective of communism, to the hope that working class revolution can inaugurate a higher form of social organisation, is incalculable, not least because Stalinism did not descend on the proletariat from the clouds, but was made possible by the international defeat of the class movement and above all the degeneration of its political party. After the traumatic defection of the social democratic parties in 1914, for the second time in the space of less than two decades the organisations that the working class had laboured mightily to create and defend had betrayed it and become its worst enemy. Could there be a greater blow to the proletariat’s self-confidence, its conviction in the possibility of leading humanity onto a higher level of social life?

Fascism, initially a movement of outcasts from the ruling and middle classes, and even renegades from the workers’ movement, could be taken up by the most powerful factions of German and Italian capital because it coincided with their needs: to complete the crushing of the proletariat and the mobilisation for war. It specialised in the use of modern techniques to unleash the dark forces of irrationality that lie under the surface of bourgeois society. Nazism in particular, the product of a much more devastating defeat of the working class in Germany, attained new depths of irrationality, statifying and industrialising the mediaeval pogrom, and leading demoralised masses in a mad march towards self-destruction. The working class, on the whole, did not succumb to any positive belief in fascism – on the contrary it was much more vulnerable to the lure of anti-fascism, which was the principal rallying cry for the coming war. But the unprecedented horror of the Nazi death camps was no less a blow against confidence in mankind’s future – and thus the perspective of communism - than the Stalinist Gulag.

Democracy, the dominant form of bourgeois rule in the advanced industrial countries, presented itself as the opponent of these totalitarian formations – which did not prevent it from supporting fascism when it was finishing off the revolutionary workers’ movement, or allying with the Stalinist regime in the war against Hitler Germany. But democracy has proved itself to be a far more intelligent and durable form of capitalist totalitarianism than either fascism, which collapsed in the rubble of war, or Stalinism, which (with the notable exception of China and the anomalous regime in North Korea) was to fall under the weight of the economic crisis and its inability to compete on the capitalist world market, whose laws it had it tried to circumvent by state decree.

The managers of democratic capitalism have also been obliged by the crisis of the system to use the state and the power of credit to bend the forces of the market, but they were not compelled to adopt the extreme form of top-down centralisation imposed by a situation of material and strategic weakness on the eastern bloc regimes. Democracy has outlived its rivals and has now become the only game in town in the old capitalist heartlands of the West. To this day, it is irreligious to call into the question the necessity to have supported democracy against fascism in World War Two; and those who argue that behind the façade of democracy stands the dictatorship of the ruling class are dismissed as conspiracy theorists.  Already during the 1920s and 30s, the development of the mass media in the democracies provided a model for the dissemination of official propaganda that was the envy of a Goebbels, while the penetration of commodity relations into the spheres of leisure and family life, as pioneered by American capitalism provided a more subtle channel for the totalitarian domination of capital than the mere reliance on informers and naked terror. 

6. Contrary to the hopes of the much-reduced revolutionary minority which held onto internationalist positions during the 30s and 40s, the end of the war did not bring about a new revolutionary upsurge. On the contrary it was the bourgeoisie, with Churchill in the vanguard, which learned the lessons of 1917 and nipped any possibility of proletarian revolt in the bud, through the carpet bombing of German cities and through the policy of “letting the Italians stew in their own juice” in the wake of the massive strikes in the north of Italy in 1943. The end of the war thus deepened the defeat of the working class. And again, contrary to the expectations of many revolutionaries, the war was not followed by a further economic depression and a new drive towards world war, even if the imperialist antagonisms between the victorious blocs remained as a constant threat hanging over humanity’s head. Instead the post-war period witnessed a phase of real expansion of capitalist relations under American leadership, even if one part of the world market (the Russian bloc and China) attempted to shut itself off from the penetration of western capital. The continuation of austerity and repression in the eastern bloc did provoke important workers’ revolts (East Germany 1953, Poland and Hungary 1956), but in the West, following some post-war expressions of discontent like the strikes in France in 1947, there was a gradual attenuation of the class struggle, to the point where sociologists could begin theorising about the “embourgeoisiement” of the working class as a result of the spread of consumerism and the development of the welfare state. And indeed both these aspects of capitalism after 1945 remain as important added weights on the possibility of the working class reconstituting itself as a revolutionary force.  Consumerism atomises the working class and peddles the illusion that everyone can attain the paradise of individual ownership.  Welfarism – which was often introduced by left parties and presented as a conquest of the working class, is an even more significant instrument of capitalist control. It undermines the self-confidence of the working class and makes it reliant on the benevolence of the state; and later on, in a phase of mass migration, its organisation by the nation state would mean that the issue of access to health, housing and other benefits became a potent factor in the scapegoating of immigrants and divisions within the working class. Meanwhile, along with the apparent disappearance of the class struggle in the 1950s and 60s, the revolutionary political movement was reduced to the most isolated state in its history.

7. Some of those revolutionaries who did maintain an activity during this dark period had begun to argue that capitalism had, thanks to bureaucratic state management, learned to control the economic contradictions analysed by Marx. But others, more prescient, like the Internacialismo group in Venezuela, recognised that the old problems – the limits of the market, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall – could not be conjured away, and that the financial difficulties experienced in the late 60s heralded a new phase of open economic crisis. They also hailed the capacity of a new generation of proletarians to respond to the crisis through the reassertion of the class struggle – a prediction amply confirmed by the formidable movement in France in May 1968 and the subsequent international wave of struggles, which demonstrated that decades of counter-revolution had come to an end, and that the proletarian struggle was the key obstacle in preventing the new crisis initiating a course towards world war.

8. The proletarian upsurge of the late sixties and early 70s had been preceded by a growing political agitation among wide layers of the population in the advanced capitalist countries, and particularly among the young. In the US, protests against the Vietnam war and racial segregation; movements among German students who manifested an interest in a more theoretical approach to the analysis of contemporary capitalism; in France, the agitation of students against the war in Vietnam and the repressive regime in the universities; in Italy, the “operaist” or autonomist tendency which reaffirmed the inevitability of the class struggle when those wise sociologists were proclaiming its obsolescence. Everywhere, a growing dissatisfaction with the dehumanised life advertised as the luscious fruit of post-war economic prosperity. A small minority, propelled by the upsurge of militant struggles in France and other industrial countries, could have participated in the foundation of a conscious, internationalist political vanguard, not least because part of this minority had begun to rediscover the contribution of the communist left.

9. As we are only too aware, the rendez-vous between this minority and the wider class movement only took place episodically during the movements of the late sixties and early 70s. This was partly the result of the fact that the politicised minority was heavily dominated by a discontented petty bourgeoisie: the student movement, in particular, lacked the strong proletarian core brought into being by changes in the organisation of capitalism over the next few decades. And despite powerful class movements across the world, despite serious confrontations between the workers and the forces of containment in their midst – unions and left parties – the majority of class struggles remained defensive, and only rarely posed directly political questions. Furthermore the working class faced important divisions within its ranks as a world-wide class: the “iron curtain” between East and West, and the division between the so-called “privileged” workers of the centres of capital and the impoverished masses in the former colonial areas. Meanwhile the maturation of a political vanguard was held back by a vision of immediate revolution and by activist practices, typical of petty bourgeois impatience, which failed to grasp the long-term character of revolutionary work and the gigantic scale of the theoretical tasks facing the politicised minority. The predominance of activism made large parts of the minority vulnerable to recuperation by leftism or, when the struggles died down, to demoralisation. Meanwhile, those who rejected leftism were often hampered by councilist notions which rejected the whole problem of organisational construction. However, a small minority was able to overcome these obstacles and to take up the tradition of the communist left, initiating a dynamic towards growth and regroupment which continued throughout the 1970s, but this too came to an end at the beginning of the 1980s, symbolised by the break-down of the International Conferences. The failure of the struggles of this period to reach a more advanced political level, to nourish the seeds that, in the streets and meetings of 1968, had posed the problem the replacement of capitalism East and West with a new society, was to have very significant consequences in the following decade.

Nevertheless, this huge outburst of proletarian energy did not simply run out of steam, but required a concerted effort by the ruling class to divert, derail and repress it. Fundamentally, this took place at the political level, making maximum use of the forces of the capitalist left and the unions, which still had a considerable influence within the working class. Whether through the promise of electing governments of the left, or through the later strategy of the “left in opposition” coupled with the development of radical trade unionism, throughout the two decades that followed 1968 the instrumentalisation of organs which the workers still to some extent saw as their own was indispensable to the containment of the struggles of the class.

At the same time, the bourgeoisie took all the advantages it could of the structural changes imposed on it by the world crisis: on the one hand, the introduction of technological changes which replaced both skilled and unskilled labour in industries like the docks, automobile and print; on the other hand, the movement towards the “globalisation” of the production process, which decimated whole industrial networks in the old centres of capital and shifted production to the peripheries where labour power was incomparably cheaper and profits far greater. These alterations in the composition of the working class in the heartlands, often affecting sectors which had been at the centre of the struggle in the 70s and early 80s, became additional factors in the atomisation of the class and the undermining of its class identity.

10. Despite certain pauses, the dynamic of struggle unleashed in 1968 continued through the 70s. The high point in the maturation of the proletariat’s capacity for self-organisation and extension was attained in the Polish mass strike in 1980. However, this zenith also marked the beginning of a decline. Although the strikes in Poland revealed the classic interplay between economic and political demands, at no point did the workers in Poland pose the problem of a new society. In this aspect, the strikes were “below” the level of the movement in 68 where self-organisation was somewhat embryonic, but which provided a context for a much more radical debate about the need for social revolution. The movement in Poland, with a few very limited exceptions, looked to the “Free West” as the alternative society they wanted, to ideals of democratic government, “independent trade unions” and all the rest. In the West itself, there were some expressions of solidarity with the strikes in Poland, and from 1983, in the face of a rapidly deepening economic crisis, we saw a wave of struggles which were increasingly simultaneous and global in their scope; in a number of cases they showed a growing conflict between the workers and the trade unions. But the juxtaposition of struggles across the world did not automatically mean that there was an awareness of the need for the conscious internationalisation of the struggle; neither did clashing with the unions, which are of course part of the state, entail a politicisation of the movement in the sense of a realisation that the state must be overthrown, or of a growing capacity to put forward a perspective for humanity. Even more than in the 70s, the struggles of the 80s in the advanced countries remained on the terrain of sectional demands and in this sense also remained vulnerable to sabotage by radicalised forms of trade unionism.  The aggravation of imperialist tensions between the two blocs in this period certainly gave rise to a growing preoccupation with the threat of war, but this was largely diverted towards pacifist movements which effectively prevented the development of a conscious connection between economic resistance and the war danger. As for the small groups of revolutionaries who maintained organised activity during this period, though they were able to intervene more directly in certain initiatives by the workers, on a deeper level they were coming up against the prevailing suspicion of ‘politics’ within the working class as a whole – and this growing gulf between the class and its political minority was itself a further factor in the inability of the class to develop its own perspective.

Part II: The impact of decomposition

11. The struggle in Poland, and its defeat, would provide a summation of the global balance between the classes. The strikes made it clear that the workers of eastern Europe would not be prepared to fight a war on behalf of their Russian overlords, and yet they were not able to offer a revolutionary alternative to the deepening crisis of the system. Indeed, the physical crushing of the Polish workers had extremely negative political consequences for the working class in that entire region, who were absent as a class in the political upheavals that initiated the demise of the Stalinist regimes, and who were subsequently vulnerable to a sinister wave of nationalist propaganda which is today embodied in the authoritarian regimes reigning in Russia, Hungary and Poland. The Stalinist ruling class, unable to deal with the crisis and the class struggle without ruthless repression, showed that it lacked the political flexibility to adapt to changing historical circumstances. Thus in 1980-81 the scene was already set for the collapse of the eastern bloc as a whole, heralding a new phase in the historic decline of capitalism. But this new phase, which we define as that of the decomposition of capitalism, has its origins in a much wider stalemate between the classes. The class movements that erupted in the advanced countries after 1968 marked the end of the counter-revolution, and the continuing resistance of the working class constituted an obstacle to the bourgeoisie’s “solution” to the economic crisis: world war. It was possible to define this period as a “course towards massive class confrontations”, and to insist that a course towards war could not be opened up without a head-on defeat of an insurgent working class. In the new phase, the disintegration of both imperialist blocs took world war off the agenda independently of the level of class struggle. But this meant that the question of the historic course could no longer be posed in the same terms. The inability of capitalism to overcome its contradictions still means that it can only offer humanity a future of barbarism, whose contours can already be glimpsed in a hellish combination of local and regional wars, ecological devastation, pogromism and fratricidal social violence. But unlike world war, which requires a direct physical as well as ideological defeat of the working class, this “new” descent into barbarism operates in a slower, more insidious manner which can gradually engulf the working class and render it incapable of reconstituting itself as a class. The criterion for measuring the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes can no longer be that the proletariat holding back world war, and has in general become more difficult to gage.

12. In the initial phase of the rebirth of the communist movement after 1968, the thesis of the decadence of capitalism won numerous adherents and would provide the programmatic bedrock of a revived communist left. Today this is no longer the case: the majority of new elements who look to communism as an answer to the problems facing humanity find all kinds of reasons to resist the concept of decadence. And when it comes to the notion of decomposition, which we define as the final phase of capitalist decline, the ICC is more or less on its own. Other groups accept the existence of the main manifestations of the new  period  - the inter-imperialist free-for –all, the return of deeply reactionary ideologies such as religious fundamentalism and rampant nationalism, the crisis in man’s relationship with the natural world – but few if any draw the conclusion that this situation derives from an impasse in the balance of class forces, or agree that all these phenomena are the expressions of a qualitative shift in the decadence of capitalism, of a whole phase or period which cannot be reversed except by the proletarian revolution. This opposition to the concept of decomposition often takes the form of diatribes against the “apocalyptic” tendencies of the ICC, since we talk about it as the terminal phase of capitalism, or against our “idealism”, since although we see the long-drawn out economic crisis as a key factor behind decomposition, we do not see purely economic factors as the decisive element in the onset of the new phase. Behind these objections is a failure to understand that capitalism, as the last class society in history, is doomed to this kind of historical impasse by the fact that, unlike previous class societies when they entered into decline, capitalism cannot give rise from within itself to a new and more dynamic mode of production, while the only road to a higher form of social life must be built not on any automatic working out of economic laws, but on a conscious movement of the immense majority of humanity, which is by definition the hardest task ever undertaken in history.

13. Decomposition was the product of the stalemate in the battle between the two major classes. But has also revealed itself as an active factor in the increasing difficulties of the class since 1989. The very well-orchestrated campaigns about the death of communism which accompanied the fall of the Russian bloc – which showed the ability of the ruling class to use the manifestations of decomposition against the exploited – was a very important element in further undermining the self-confidence of the class and its capacity to renew its historic mission. Communism, marxism, even the class struggle itself, were declared over, no more than dead history. But the enormous and long lasting negative effects of the events of 1989 on the consciousness, combativeness and identity of the working class is not only the result of the gigantic scale of the anti-communist campaign.  The effectiveness of this campaign must itself be explained. It can only be understood in the context of the specific development of revolution and counter-revolution from 1917 onwards. With the failure of the military counter-revolution against the USSR itself and at the same time the defeat of the world revolution, a completely unexpected, unprecedented constellation arose: that of a counter-revolution from within the proletarian bastion, and of a capitalist economy in the Soviet Union without any historically developed capitalist class. What resulted from this was not the expression of any higher historical necessity, but an historical aberration: the running of a capitalist economy by a counter-revolutionary bourgeois state bureaucracy completely unqualified and not adapted for such a task. Although the Stalinist command economy proved effective in getting the USSR through the ordeal of World War II, it completely failed, in the long run, in generating competitive national capitals.

Although the Stalinist regimes were particularly reactionary forms of decadent bourgeois society, not a relapse into any kind of feudal or despotic regime, they were in no sense of the term “normal” capitalist economies. A capitalist economy in which inefficient companies cannot be punished through elimination, and where workers cannot be laid off, cannot be a bourgeois success. To an important degree, it was thanks to this understanding of the specificities of Stalinism as an unexpected product of the counter-revolution that the ICC was able to understand the events of 1989; for instance that Stalinism had not been brought down by workers’ struggles, but by an economic and political implosion, and that the collapse in the east was not the harbinger of a pending similar collapse in the west. At the level of the balance of class forces, we understood that the demise of what in many ways was the worst enemy of the proletariat, would, for a considerable length of time, not be to the benefit of the working class. With its collapse, it rendered a last great service to the ruling class. Above all, its campaign about the death of communism seemed to find a confirmation in reality itself. The deviations of Stalinism from a properly functioning capitalism were so grave and far reaching that it indeed appeared to people not to have been capitalist. Prior to this, and as long as it was able to maintain itself, it appeared to prove that alternatives to capitalism are possible. Even if this particular alternative was anything but attractive for most workers, its existence nonetheless left a potential breach in the ideological armoury of the ruling class. The resurgence of the class struggle in the 1960s was able to profit from this breach to develop the vision of a revolution which would be at once anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist and based, not on a state bureaucracy or a party state, but on workers’ councils. During the 1960s and 70s, if, to many, the world revolution was seen as an unrealisable utopia, as “pie in the sky”, it was because of the immense power of the ruling class, or what was seen as the inherent egoistic and destructive streak in our species. Such feelings of hopelessness however could and sometimes did find a counter-weight in the massive struggles and solidarity of the proletariat.  After 1989, with the collapse of the “socialist” regimes, a qualitatively new factor emerged: the impression of the impossibility of a modern society not based on capitalist principles. Under these circumstances, it is more difficult for the proletariat to develop, not only its class consciousness and class identity, but even its defensive economic struggles, since the logic of the needs of the capitalist economy weigh much heavier if they appear to be without any alternative.

In this sense, although it is certainly not necessary that the working class as a whole become marxist, or develop a clear vision about communism, in order to make a proletarian revolution, the immediate situation of the class struggle is altered considerably, and is dependent on whether or not wide sectors of the class see capitalism as something which can be put in question.

14. But working in a more underhand manner, the advance of decomposition in general and “by itself” gnawed away at the working class, its class identity and its class consciousness.  This was particularly evident among the long-term unemployed or partially employed layers “left behind” by the structural changes introduced by the 1980s: whereas in the past, the unemployed had been in the vanguard of the workers’ struggle, in this period they were far more vulnerable to lumpenisation, gangsterism, and the spread of nihilistic ideologies like jihadism or neo-fascism. As the ICC predicted in the immediate aftermath of the events of 89, the class was about to enter into a long period of retreat. But the length and depth of this retreat have proved even greater than we ourselves expected. Important movements of a new generation of the working class in 2006 (the anti-CPE movement in France) and between 2009 and 2013 in numerous countries across the world (Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, USA, Spain…), together with a certain re-emergence of a milieu interested in communist ideas, made it feasible to think that the class struggle was once again taking centre stage and that a new phase in the development of the revolutionary movement was about to open up. But a number of developments over the last decade have shown just how profound are the difficulties facing the world proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard.

15. The struggles around 2011 were explicitly linked to the effects of the deepening economic crisis, their protagonists frequently referring, for example, to the precariousness of employment and the lack of opportunities for young people even after several years of university education. But there is no automatic link between the aggravation of the economic crisis and the qualitative development of the class struggle – a key lesson of the 1930s when the Great Depression tended to further demoralise an already defeated working class. And given the long years of retreat and disorientation that had preceded it, the financial earthquake of 2007-8 was to have a largely negative impact on the consciousness of the proletariat.

An important element in this was the proliferation of the very credit system that had been at the heart of the economic expansion of the 90s and 2000s but whose inbuilt contradictions now precipitated the crash. This process of “financialisation” now operated not only at the level of great financial institutions, but also in the lives of millions of workers. At this level, the situation is very different from that of the 1920's and 1930's, when for the most part the so-called middle classes (small property owners, the liberal professions etc.) but not the workers had savings to lose; and where the state insurances were barely enough to prevent the workers from starving. If, on the one hand therefore, the immediate material situation of many workers in such countries is still less dramatic than it was eight or nine decades ago, on the other hand millions of workers precisely in such countries find themselves in a predicament which hardly existed in the 1930s: they have become debtors, often on an important scale. During the 19th century, and still to a large extent before 1945, the only creditors workers had were the local pub or café and the grocery store. They had to rely on their own class solidarity in times of particular hardship. The crediting of proletarians began on a large scale with housing and building credits, but then exploded in recent decades with the development of mass-scale consumer credits. The ever more refined, cunning and treacherous development of this credit economy for a large part of the working class has extremely negative consequences for proletarian class consciousness. The expropriation of working class income by the bourgeoisie is hidden and appears incomprehensible when it takes the form of devaluation of savings, the bankruptcy of banks or of insurance schemes, or the forfeiting of house ownership on the market. The increasing precariousness of “welfare state” insurances and their financing makes it easier to divide the workers between those who pay for these public systems, and those who are maintained by them without paying in equivalently.  And the fact that of millions of workers have fallen into debt is a new, additional and powerful means of the disciplining of the proletariat.

Even though the net result of the crash has been austerity for the many and an ever more shameless transfer of wealth to a small minority, the overall result of the crash has not been to sharpen or extend an understanding of the workings of the capitalist system: resentment against growing inequality has been to a great extent directed against the “corrupt urban elite”, a theme that has become a major selling point of right wing populism. And even when the reaction to the crisis and its attendant injustices gave rise to more proletarian forms of struggle, such as in the Occupy movement in the USA, the latter were also to a considerable extent weighed down by a tendency to put the blame on the greedy bankers or even on secret societies who had deliberately engineered the crash to strengthen their control over society.

16. The revolutionary wave of 1917-23, like previous insurrectionary movements of the class (1871, 1905), was sparked off by imperialist war, leading revolutionaries to consider that war provided the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution. In reality, the defeat of the revolutionary wave showed that war could create profound divisions in the class, in particular between those of the ‘victor’ and ‘vanquished’ nations. Furthermore, as the events at the end of World War Two demonstrated, the bourgeoisie has drawn the necessary lessons from what happened in 1917, and has shown its capacity to limit the possibilities of proletarian reactions to imperialist war, not least by developing strategies and forms of military technology that make fraternisation between opposing armies increasingly difficult.

Contrary to the promises of the western ruling class after the fall of the Russian imperialist bloc, the new historic phase it opened up was by no means one of peace and stability, but of spreading military chaos, of increasingly intractable wars that have ravaged whole swathes of Africa and the Middle East and even shook the gates of Europe. But while the barbarity displayed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and now Yemen and Syria has certainly aroused horror and indignation among sizeable sectors of the world proletariat – including those in the capitalist centres whose own bourgeoisies have been directly implicated in these wars – the wars of decomposition have only very rarely given rise to proletarian forms of opposition. In the countries most directly affected, the working class has been too weak to organise itself against the local military gangsters and their imperialist sponsors. This is most evident in the current war in Syria, which has seen not only the merciless decimation of the population by aerial and other forms of bombardment, above all by the official forces of the state, but also the derailing of an initial social discontent by the creation of military fronts and the enrolment of opponents of the regime into a myriad of armed gangs, each one more brutal than the next. In the capitalist centres, such appalling scenarios have mainly produced feelings of despair and helplessness – not least because it can seem as though any attempt to rebel against the present system can only end in an even worse situation. The grim fate of the “Arab spring” can easily be used as a new argument against the possibility of revolution. But the savage dismemberment of entire countries on the peripheries of Europe has over the past few years begun to have a boomerang effect on the working class in the centres of the system. This can be summarised by two questions: on the one hand, the world-wide and increasingly chaotic development of a refugee crisis which is truly planetary in its scope; and on the other, by the development of terrorism.

17. The trigger moment of the refugee is crisis in Europe was the opening of the borders of Germany (and Austria) to refugees from the “Balkan route” in summer 2015. The motives for this decision of chancellor Merkel were twofold. Firstly the economic and demographic situation of Germany (a thriving industry faced with the prospect of a shortage of qualified and “motivated” labour power). Secondly the danger of the collapse of law and order in south-east Europe through the concentration of hundreds of thousands of refugees in countries unable to manage them. The German bourgeoisie however had miscalculated the consequences of its unilateral decision on the rest of the world, in particular Europe. In the Middle East and in Africa, millions of refugees and other victims of capitalist misery started to make plans to set off for Europe, in particular Germany. In Europe, EU regulations such as “Schengen” or the “Dublin Refugee Pact” made Germany's problem that of Europe as a whole. One of the first results of this situation, therefore, was a crisis of the European Union – perhaps the most serious in its history to date.

The arrival of so many refugees to Europe was met initially with a spontaneous wave of sympathy within broad sectors of the population – an impulse which still is strong in countries like Italy or Germany. But this impulse was soon smothered by the rise of xenophobia in Europe. It was led not only by the populists, but also by the security forces and the professional defenders of bourgeois law and order, who were alarmed by the sudden and uncontrolled influx of often not identified persons. The fear of an influx of terrorist agents went hand in hand with the fear that the arrival of so many Muslims would enforce the development of immigrant sub-communities within Europe not identifying with the nation state of the country they live in. These fears were reinforced by the increase of terrorist attacks in France, Belgium and Germany. In Germany itself, there was a sharp increase of right wing terror attacks against refugees. In parts of the former GDR, a veritable pogrom atmosphere developed. In western Europe as a whole, after the economic crisis, the “refugee crisis” became the second major factor (augmented by fundamentalist terror) fanning the flames of right wing populism. Just as the economic crisis after 2008 opened up serious divisions within the bourgeoisie about how best to manage the world economy, summer 2015 marked the beginning of the end of its consensus on immigration. The basis of this policy, until now has been the principle of the semi-permeable border. The Wall against Mexico which Donald Trump wants to build, already exists, as does the one around Europe (also in the form of military patrol boats or airport prisons). But the purpose of the present walls is to slow down and regulate immigration, not prevent it. Making immigrants enter illegally criminalises them, thus obliging them to work for a pittance under abominable conditions without any social benefit rights. Moreover, by obliging people to risk their lives to gain admission, the frontier regime becomes a kind of barbaric selection mechanism, where only the most daring, determined and dynamic get in

Summer 2015 was in fact the beginning of the collapse of the existing immigration system. The disequilibrium between the ever-growing number seeking access on the one hand, and the shrinking demand for wage labourers in the country they are entering on the other (Germany is something of an exception) has become untenable. And as usual, the populists have an easy solution to hand: the semi-permeable border must be made impermeable, whatever the levels of violence required. Here again, what they propose seems very plausible from the bourgeois point of view. It amounts to nothing more or less than the application of the logic of “gated communities” at the scale of entire countries..

Here again, the effects of this situation for the consciousness of the working class are, for the moment, very negative. The collapse of the eastern bloc was presented as proof of the ultimate triumph of western democratic capitalism. In face of this, there was hope, from the point of view of the proletariat, that the development of the crisis of capitalist society, at all levels, would eventually help to undermine this image of capitalism as the best possible system. But today – and in spite of the development of the crisis – the fact that many millions of people (not only refugees) are ready to risk their lives to gain access to the old capitalist centres which are Europe and North America, can only enforce the impression that these zones (at least in comparison) are, if not a paradise, at least islands of relative prosperity and stability.

Unlike during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the breakdown of the world economy was centred on the USA and Germany, today, thanks to a global state capitalist management, the central capitalist countries seem likely to break down last. In this context, a situation resembling that of a besieged fortress has arisen in particular (but not only) in Europe and the United States. The danger is real that the working class in these zones, even if it is not actively mobilised behind the ideology of the ruling class, seeks protection from its “own” exploiters (“identification with the aggressor”, to use a psychological term) against what is perceived as being a common danger coming from outside.

18. The “blow-back” of terrorist attacks from the wars in the Middle East began well before the current refugee crisis. The attacks by Al Qaida on the Twin Towers in 2001, followed by further atrocities on the transport systems of Madrid and London, already showed that main capitalist states would reap the whirlwind they had sown in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the more recent spate of murders attributed to Islamic State in Germany, France, Belgium, Turkey, the USA  and elsewhere, despite often having an apparently more amateurish and even random character, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish a trained terrorist “soldier” from an isolated and disturbed individual, and occurring in conjunction with the refugee crisis, has further intensified feelings of suspicion and paranoia among the populations, leading them to turn to the state for protection from an amorphous and unpredictable “enemy within”. At the same time, the nihilistic ideology of Islamic State and its emulators offers a brief moment of glory to disaffected immigrant youths seeing no future for themselves in the semi-ghettoes of the big western cities. Terrorism, which in the phase of decomposition has more and more become a means of warfare between states and proto-states, also makes the expression of internationalism much more difficult.

19. The current populist upsurge has thus been fed by all these factors – the 2008 economic crash, the impact of war, terrorism and the refugee crisis – and appears as a concentrated expression of the decomposition of the system, of the inability of either of the two major classes in society to offer humanity a perspective for the future. From the point of view of the ruling class, it signifies the exhaustion of the “neo-liberal” consensus which has enabled capitalism to maintain and even extend accumulation since the onset of the open economic crisis in the 70s, and in particular the exhaustion of the Keynesian policies which had presided over the post-war boom. In the wake of the 2008 crash, which widened the already immense wealth gap between the very rich few and the vast majority, deregulation and globalisation, the “free movement” of capital and labour in a framework devised by the world’s most powerful states, has been called into question by a growing section of the bourgeoisie, typified by the populist right, even though it can simultaneously put forward neo-liberalism and neo-Keynesianism in the same campaign speech. The essence of populist politics is the political, administrative and judicial formalisation of the inequality of bourgeois society. What the 2008 crisis in particular helped to make clear, is that this formal equality is the real basis of an ever more glaring social inequality. In a situation in which the proletariat is unable to put forward its revolutionary solution – the establishment of a society without classes – the populist reaction is to want to replace the existing hypocritical pseudo-equality by an open and “honest” system of legal discrimination. This is the kernel of the “conservative revolution” advocated by president Trump’s adviser, Steve Bannon.

 A first indication of what is meant by slogans such as “America First” is given by the “France d'abord” electoral programme of the Front National. It proposes to privilege French citizens, at the levels of employment, taxation and social benefits, in relation to people from other European Union countries, who in turn would have priority over other foreigners. There is something of a similar debate in Britain about whether or not, after Brexit, EU citizens should be given an intermediate status between natives and other foreigners. In the UK, the main argument put forward in favour of Brexit was not objections to the EU trade policies, or any British protectionist impulses towards continental Europe, but the political will to “regain national sovereignty” regarding immigration and the national labour market. The logic of this argumentation is that, in the absence of a longer-term perspective of growth for the national economy, the living conditions of the natives can only be more or less stabilised by discriminating against everybody else.

20. Instead of being an antidote to the long and deep reflux of class consciousness, class identity and combativeness after 1989, the so-called finance and euro crisis had the opposite effect. In particular, the pernicious effects of the loss of solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat were increased significantly. In particular, we are seeing the rise of the phenomenon of scapegoating, of ways of thinking which blame persons – onto whom all of the evil of the world is projected – for whatever goes wrong in society. Such ideas open the door to the pogrom. Today populism is the most striking, but far from being the only manifestation of this problem, which tends to permeate all social relations. At work and in the everyday life of the working class, it increasingly weakens cooperation, and favours atomisation and the development of mutual suspicion and of mobbing.

The marxist workers’ movement has long defended the theoretical insights which help to counter-weigh this tendency. The two most essential insights were a) that under capitalism exploitation has become non-personal, since it functions according to the “laws” of the market (law of value). The capitalists themselves are obliged to obey these laws; b) despite this machine- like character, capitalism is a social relation between classes, since this “system” is based and maintained by an act of will of the bourgeois state (the creation and enforcement of capitalist private property). The class struggle, therefore, is not personal but political. Instead of combating persons, it is directed against a system - and the class which embodies it - in order to transform social relations. These insights never immunised even the more class conscious layers of the proletariat against scapegoating. But it made it more resilient. They partly explain why, even in the midst of the counter-revolution, and even in Germany, the proletariat resisted the upsurge of anti-semitism more and for longer than other parts of society. These proletarian traditions continued to have positive effects, even where the workers no longer in any conscious manner identified with socialism. The working class remains the only real barrier to the spread of this kind of poison, even if certain parts of the class have been seriously affected by it.

21. All of this has led to a changing political disposition of bourgeois society as a whole; one however which, for the moment, is not at all in favour of the proletariat. In countries like the United States or Poland, where populists are now in government, large scale protests on the streets have above all been in defence the existing capitalist democracy and its “liberal” regulations. Another issue mobilising masses is the struggle against corruption Brazil, South Korea, Romania or Russia. The Five Star movement in Italy is mainly animated by the same issue. Corruption, endemic in capitalism, assumes epidemic proportions in its terminal phase. To the extent that this hampers productivity and competitiveness, those who struggle against it are among the best defenders of the interests of the national capital. The masses of national flags on display at such protests are thus no coincidence. There is also a renewal of interest in the bourgeois electoral process. Some parts of the working class fall prey to voting for the populists, under the influence of the retreat of solidarity, or as a kind of protest against the established political class. One of the barriers to the development of the cause of emancipation today is the impression these workers have that they can shock and pressurise the ruling class more through a populist vote than by proletarian struggle. The perhaps biggest danger however is that the most modern and globalised sectors of the class, at the heart of the production process, might out of indignation against vile populist exclusionism, and out of a more or less clear understanding that this political current puts in danger the stability of the existing order, fall for the trap of defending the reigning democratic capitalist regime.

22. The rise of populism, and of anti-populism, has certain similarities with the 1930s, when the working class was caught between the vice of fascism and antifascism. But despite these similarities, the present historic situation in not the same as in the 1930's. At that time, the proletariat in the Soviet Union and in Germany had suffered not only a political reverse but also a physical defeat. As opposed to this, the situation today is not one of counter-revolution. For this reason, the likelihood that the ruling class would even try to impose a physical defeat on the proletariat is, at the present time, remote.

There is another difference with the 1930: the ideological adherence of proletarians to populism or anti-populism is not at all definitive. Many workers who today vote for populist candidates can from one day to the next find themselves struggling alongside their class brothers and sisters, and the same goes for workers caught up in anti-populist demonstrations.

The working class today, above all in the old centres of capitalism, is not ready to sacrifice its life for the interests of the nation, despite the increased influence of nationalism on certain sectors of the class; nor has it lost the possibility of fighting for its own interests, and this potential continues to come to the surface, even in a much more dispersed and ephemeral manner than in the 68-89 period and the struggles between 2006 and 2013. At the same time, a process of reflection and maturation among a minority of proletarians continues despite difficulties and set-backs, and this in turn reflects a more subterranean process taking place among wider layers of the proletariat.

In these conditions, the attempt to terrorise the class would be politically dangerous and most probably counter-productive. It would strongly dent the existing illusions of the workers in democratic capitalism, which constitutes one of the most important ideological advantages of the exploiters.

For all of these reasons, it is much more in the objective interest of the capitalist class to use the negative effects of decomposing, dead-end capitalism to weaken the working class.

Part III: 1917, 2017 and the perspective of communism

23. One of the main lines of attack by the “liberal” bourgeoisie against the October revolution of 1917 has been, and will continue to be, the alleged contrast between the democratic hopes of the February uprising and the October “coup d’Etat” by the Bolsheviks, which plunged Russia into disaster and tyranny. But the key to understanding the October revolution is that it was based on the necessity to break the imperialist war front, which was maintained by all factions of the bourgeoisie not least its “democratic” wing, and thus strike the first blow for the world revolution. It was the first clear answer of the world proletariat to capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decline, and it is at this level above all that October 1917, far from being a ruin from a lost age, is the signpost to humanity’s future.

Today, after the all the counter-blows it has received from the world bourgeoisie, the working class may seem very far away from recapturing its revolutionary project. And yet “In a sense the question of communism is at the very heart of the predicament of humanity today. It presently dominates the world situation in the form of the void it has created through its absence” (Report on the World Situation, 22nd ICC Congress).  The multiple barbarisms of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Hiroshima and Auschwitz to Fukushima and Aleppo are the heavy price humanity has paid for the failure of the communist revolution all those decades ago; and if, at this late hour in the decadence of bourgeois civilisation, the hopes of revolutionary transformation are definitively dashed, the consequences for the survival of human society will be even more grave. And yet we are convinced that these hopes are still alive, still founded on real possibilities.

On the one hand, they are based on the objective possibility and necessity for communism, which is contained in the sharpening clash between the forces of production and relations of production. This clash has grown more acute precisely because capitalism in decadence decomposition, in contrast to previous class societies which endured whole epochs of stagnation, has not stopped expanding globally and penetrating every pore of social life.  This can be seen at several levels:

  • In the contradiction between the potential contained in modern technology and its actual use under capitalism: the development of information technology and artificial intelligence, which could be used to help free mankind from drudgery and greatly shorten the working day, has led to the decimation of employment on the one hand, and the prolonging of the working day on the other
  • In the contradiction between the world-wide, associated character of capitalist production, and its private ownership, which on the one hand highlights the participation of millions of proletarians in producing social wealth and its appropriation by a tiny minority whose arrogance and wastefulness becomes an affront to the stagnating living conditions or outright impoverishment facing the vast majority. The objectively global character of labour association has increased in a spectacular manner in recent decades, in particular with the industrialisation of China and other Asian countries.  These new proletarian battalions, which have often showed themselves to be extremely militant, potentially constitute a vast new source of strength for the global class struggle, even if the proletariat of western Europe retains the key to the political maturation of the working class towards a revolutionary confrontation with capital.
  • In the contradiction between use value and exchange value, which expresses itself above all in the crisis of overproduction and all the means capitalism uses to overcome it, in particular the massive recourse to debt. Overproduction, that unique absurdity of capitalism, points simultaneously to the possibility of abundance and the impossibility of achieving it under capitalism. Again an example of technological development highlights this absurdity: the internet has made it possible to distribute all kinds of goods free of charge (music, books, films etc) and yet capitalism, because of the need to maintain the profit system, has to create a huge bureaucracy to ensure that any such free distribution is curtailed or operates mainly as a forum for advertising commodities. Moreover, the crisis of overproduction results in continuous attacks on the living standards of the working class and the impoverishment of the mass of humanity.
  • In the contradiction between capital’s global extension and the impossibility of going beyond the nation state. The particular phase of globalisation that began in the 1980s has brought us ever closer to the point predicted by Marx in the Grundrisse: “the universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own overcoming[1]. This contradiction, of course, could already be perceived by revolutionaries at the time of the First World War, since the war itself was the first clear expression that while the nation state has outlived itself, capital cannot really go beyond it. And today we know that the overcoming – in fact, the downfall - of capital will not take a purely economic form: the closer it gets to an economic dead-end, the greater will be the drive towards “survival” at the expense of others through military means. The openly nationalist belligerence of the Trumps, Putins et al signifies that capitalist globalisation, far from unifying mankind, is pushing us ever closer to self-destruction, even if this descent into the abyss may not necessarily take the form of a world war
  • In the contradiction between capitalist production and nature, which was considered a “free gift” from the onset of capitalism (Adam Smith), and has reached unprecedented levels in the phase of decomposition. This is most obviously expressed in the open vandalism of the climate change deniers in control of the US, and in the rise of their arch-enemy, China, where the feverish hunt for growth at any cost has given birth to cities where the air cannot be breathed, greatly added to the danger of run-away global warming, and  - in a bizarre combination of ancient superstition and modern gangster capitalism – accelerated the destruction of entire species in Africa and elsewhere, prized for the magical healing properties of their horns or skin.  Capitalism cannot exist without this mania for growth but it is incompatible with the health of the natural environment in which mankind lives and breathes. Thus the very perpetuation of capitalism threatens the existence of the human species not only at the military level, but also on the level of its interchange with nature.

The unbearable sharpening of the contradictions cited above all point to one solution: associated world production for use not profit, an association not only between human beings but also between human beings and nature. Perhaps the main expression of the potential for this transformation is that, within the central and most modern sectors of the world proletariat, the young generation, although increasingly aware of the seriousness of the historical situation, no longer shares the “no future” hopelessness of the previous decades. This confidence is based on the awareness of one's own associated productiveness: on the potential represented by scientific and technological progress, on the “accumulation” of knowledge and of the means of access to it, and on the growth of a more profound and critical understanding of the inter-action between humankind and the rest of nature. At the same time, this part of the proletariat – as we saw in the movements in Western Europe in 2011, which at their height raised the slogan of “world revolution” – is much more aware of the international character of labour association today, and thus better able to grasp the possibilities of the international unification of struggles. 

But the global unification of the proletariat is a solution which capital must avoid at all costs, even when it must adopt means which show the inherent limits of production for exchange. The development of state capitalism in the decadent epoch is in a sense a kind of a desperate search for a way of trying to hold a society together by totalitarian means, an attempt by the ruling class to exert control over economic life in a period in which the unfolding of the “natural laws” of the system push towards its own collapse.

24. While capitalism cannot conjure away the necessity for communism, we know that this new mode of production cannot arise automatically, but requires the conscious intervention of the revolutionary class, the proletariat. Despite the extreme difficulties facing the working class today, its apparent inability to renew its “ownership” of the communist project, we have already outlined our reasons for insisting that this renewal, this reconstitution of the proletariat as the class for communism, is still possible today. Because just as it cannot conjure away the objective need for communism, neither can it ever entirely suppress the subjective longing for a new society, or the search to understand how to achieve it, among the class of association, the proletariat.

The memory of what Red October really meant, and indeed the memory that the German revolution and the world-wide revolutionary wave set in motion by October ever happened at all, cannot entirely disappear. It has been, so to speak, repressed, but all repressed memories are fated to reappear when the conditions are ripe. And there is always, within the working class, a minority who have sustained and elaborated the real story and its lessons on a conscious level, ready to fertilise the reflection of the class when it recovers the need to make sense of its own history.

The class cannot reach this level of inquiry on a mass scale without going through the hard school of practical struggles. These struggles in response to the growing attacks of capital are the granite basis for the development of the self-confidence and unrestricted solidarity which are generated by the reality of associated labour.

But the impasse reached in the proletariat’s purely defensive, economic battles since 1968 also necessitates, on the one hand, a theoretical struggle, a quest to understand its “deep” past and its possible future, a quest which can only point to the need for the class movement to pass from the local and national to the universal, from the economic to the political, from the defensive to the offensive. While the immediate struggle of the class is more or less a fact of life in capitalism, there is no guarantee that this next vital step will be taken. But it is indicated, in no matter how limited and confused a manner, by the struggles of the present generation of proletarians, above all in movements like that of the Indignados in Spain which was indeed an expression of a genuine indignation against the entire system – an “obsolete” system as demonstrators proclaimed on their banners, of a desire to understand how this system works, and what might replace it; and, at the same time, to discover the organisational means which may be used to break out of the institutions of the existing order. And lo and behold, these means were not essentially new: the generalisation of the mass assemblies, the election of mandated delegates, was a clear echo from the days of the soviets in 1917. This was a clear demonstration of the workings of the “Old Mole” deep in the underground of social life.

It also gave a first glimpse of a potential for the development of what we can call the political-moral dimension of the proletarian struggle: the emerging of a deep seated rejection of the existing way of life and behaviour on the part of wider sectors of the class. The evolution of this moment is a very important factor of the preparation and maturation both of massive struggles on a class terrain, and of a revolutionary perspective.

At the same time, the failure of the Indignados movement to restore a real class identity points to the necessity to link this incipient politicisation on the streets and the squares to the economic struggle, to the movement in the workplaces where the working class still has its most distinct existence. The revolutionary future lies not in a “negation” of the economic struggle as the modernists proclaim, but in a true synthesis of the economic and the political dimensions of the class movement, as observed and advocated in Luxemburg’s Mass Strike.

25. In developing this capacity to see the link between the economic and political dimensions of their movement, communist political organisations have an indispensable role to play, and this is why the bourgeoisie will do all it can to discredit the role of the Bolshevik party in 1917, presenting it as a conspiracy of fanatics and intellectuals interested only in winning power for themselves. The task of the communist minority is not to provoke struggles, or organise them in advance, but to intervene within them in order to elucidate the methods and goals of the movement.

The defence of Red October also of course demands the demonstration that Stalinism, far from representing any continuity with it, was the bourgeois counter-revolution against it. This task is all the more important today in face of the weight of ideas that the collapse of Stalinism proved the economic unfeasibility of communism. The negative effects of this on politically searching minorities – the unstable milieu between the communist left and the left of capital – are considerable. Whereas before 1989 confused but recognisably anti-capitalist ideas, for instance of a councilist or autonomist variety, were relatively influential in such circles, since then there has been an important advance of conceptions based on forming networks of mutual exchange at the local level, on preserving and extending areas of subsistence economy or the still existing “commons”. The advance of such ideas indicates that even the more politicised layers of the proletariat today are often unable to even imagine a society beyond capitalism. Under these circumstances, one of the necessary factors preparing the emergence of a future generation of revolutionaries is that the existing revolutionary minorities today expound in the most profound and convincing manner possible (without falling into utopianism) why communism today is not only a necessity, but a very real and practicable possibility.

Given the extremely reduced and dispersed nature of today’s communist left, and of the enormous difficulties faced by a wider milieu of elements searching for political clarity, it is evident that a huge distance has to be travelled between today’s small revolutionary movement and any future capacity to act as an authentic vanguard in massive class movements. The revolutionaries and the politicised minorities are not purely passive products of this situation, since their own confusions serve to further aggravate their disunity and disorientation. But fundamentally, the weakness of the revolutionary minority is an expression of the weakness of the class as a whole, and no organisational recipes or activist slogans will be able to overcome this.

Time is no longer on the side of the working class, but it cannot leap beyond its shadow. Indeed, it is compelled today to retrieve much of what it has lost not only since 1917, but also from the struggles of 1968-89. For revolutionaries, this demands a long-term, patient work of analysing the real movement of the class and the perspectives revealed by the crisis of the capitalist mode of production; and on the basis of this theoretical effort, providing answers to the questions posed by those elements edging towards communist positions. And the most important aspect of this work is that must be seen as part of the political and organisational preparation of the future party, when the objective and subjective conditions once again pose the problem of the revolution. In other words, the tasks of the revolutionary organisation today are similar to those of a communist fraction, as elaborated most lucidly by the Italian Fraction of the Communist left in the 1930s.

 

ICC, April 2017



[1]              Notebook IV, the Chapter on Capital.

 

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Congress Resolution

2018 - International Review

International Review 160 - Spring 2018

A belated answer to a revolutionary anarchist: Emma Goldman and the Russian Revolution

We are publishing here a response to the analysis drafted by Emma Goldman (1869-1940) in the first years after the October 1917 revolution. After her expulsion from the United States in January 1920 she spent two years in Russia, then published three books:[1] “I consider then, and still consider, that the Russian problem is entirely too complex to speak lightly of it”, she wrote in the introduction to her first book. We are responding to Emma Goldman because she was a central figure of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the United States at the time of the First World War. Because of her determination to defend a clearly internationalist position against the war she was nicknamed “Emma the Red - America's Most Dangerous Woman” by the American ruling class. But there are two other reasons to examine Goldman's positions in more detail. On the one hand, her important influence in the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist milieu up until today – “the Rosa Luxemburg of the anarchists”; and on the other because her early analysis of the Russian Revolution and the problems it faced shows great honesty and responsibility. Today, although we do not share at all some of her positions, Goldman's efforts are a valuable contribution to the understanding of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

 

Goldman, an anarchist of Russian origin, was inspired by the theories of the influential anarchist Peter Kropotkin, but defended an anarcho-syndicalist position in her activity. She clearly rejected marxism as a political and theoretical orientation. What distinguished Goldman from Kropotkin was her determination, along with Malatesta, Berkman, and others, in February 1915, to take a firm stand against the “Manifesto of the Sixteen”, whereby Kropotkin and other anarchists debased themselves by their shameful approval of the First World War. Goldman defended a clear internationalist position condemning any participation, support or tolerance of the war, thereby providing an internationalist point of reference in the United States.

Our aim in this article is to examine Goldman’s political assumptions regarding the Russian Revolution, her experiences and conclusions. To anticipate: Goldman's observations, underpinned by a deep proletarian instinct, and her significant advances, must in our view be distinguished from some of her central political conclusions. In order to allow sufficient insight into Goldman's position, it is necessary to include long quotations. Since it is not possible to address all aspects of her analysis, we are forced to make a selection and so urge a direct reading of her writings on the Russian Revolution and her autobiography.

Goldman was constantly preoccupied with two questions: the fusion of the Bolsheviks with the state apparatus and its consequences; and her own self-laceration over the moment that would allow or even force her to expose her criticism of the Bolsheviks – which she eventually did after months of painful hesitation. We cannot address here Goldman’s other political concerns, like the “red terror”, the Cheka, Brest-Litovsk, Makhno’s movement in the Ukraine, the Razvyorstka (the relentless requisition of food from the peasants, which therefore includes the relationship between the working class and the peasantry), the catastrophic situation of children[2] or her position regarding the workers' councils. However, her experiences and analyses of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921 are important because they signified Goldman's break with the Bolsheviks.

"The truth about the Bolsheviki"

The outbreak of the October Revolution filled her with great enthusiasm: “From November, 1917, until February, 1918, while out on bail for my attitude against the war, I toured America in defence of the Bolsheviki. I published a pamphlet in elucidation of the Russian Revolution and in justification of the Bolsheviki. I defended them as embodying in practice the spirit of the revolution, in spite of their theoretic Marxism.”[3]

In 1918, in the anarchist magazine Mother Earth, she published an article entitled “The Truth about the Bolsheviki”:

The Russian Revolution can mean nothing to him unless it sets the land free and joins to the dethroned Tsar his partner, the dethroned land-owner, the capitalist. That explains the historic background of the Bolsheviki, their social and economic justification. They are powerful only because they represent the people. The moment they cease to do that, they will go, as the Provisional Government and Kerensky had to go. For never will the Russian people be content, or Bolshevism cease, until the land and the means of life become the heritage of the children of Russia. They have for the first time in centuries determined that they shall be heard, and that their voices shall reach the heart of, not of the governing classes they know these have no heart but the heats of the peoples of the world, including the people of the United States. Therein lies the deep import and significance of the Russian Revolution as symbolised by the Bolsheviki (…) The Bolsheviki have come to challenge the world. It can nevermore rest in its old sordid indolence. It must accept the challenge. It has already accepted it in Germany, in Austria and Romania, in France and Italy, aye, even in America. Like sudden sunlight Bolshevism is spreading over the entire world, illuminating the great vision and warming it into being - the new life of human brotherhood and social well-being.”[4]

So Goldman's view of the Bolsheviks in 1918 was anything but negative. On the contrary, her defence of the Russian Revolution and of the Bolsheviks was a highly responsible reaction to the American bourgeoisie's campaign of lies and its role in the brutal, internationally coordinated campaign against revolutionary Russia. Her radical criticism after two years in Russia was always motivated by the intention of defending the October Revolution against its external enemies, as well as against internal degeneration; this was the main concern of her activities and writings.

Enthusiasm and disappointment

Two brief quotes impressively illustrate the change in Goldman's assessment of the evolution of the Russian situation. She describes her arrival in Petrograd in January 1920 in exuberant terms: “Soviet Russia! Sacred ground, magic people! You have come to symbolise humanity’s hope, you alone are destined to redeem mankind. I have come to serve you, beloved Matushka. Take me to your bosom, let me pour myself into you, mingle my blood with yours, find my place in your heroic struggle, and give to the uttermost to your needs!”[5]

But then, two years later, as a final description of her stay in Russia, we find the following: “In the train, December 1, 1921! My dreams crushed, my faith broken, my heart like a stone. Matushka Rossiya [Mother Russia] bleeding from a thousand wounds, her soil strewn with the dead. I clutch the bar at the frozen window-pane and grit my teeth to suppress my sobs.”[6]

It was just one year and eleven months since I had set foot in what I believed to be the promised land. My heart was heavy with the tragedy of Russia. One thought stood out in bold relief: I must raise my voice against the crimes committed in the name of the Revolution. I would be heard regardless of friend or foe.[7]

What happened between her arrival in 1920 and her departure two years later? And was her disappointment exclusively the result of a naive expectation overtaken by reality? We will return to this second question at the end of the article.

The encirclement of the Russian Revolution

Goldman rightly attaches great importance to the question of the encirclement of the Russian Revolution, which, according to her, was a real cause of the difficulties of the first years of soviet rule. But, as we will show later, she speaks little of its political isolation as due to the fact that the world proletariat had not been able to take power in other countries, which was the essential question, and which did not allow the important errors of Bolshevik power to be corrected.

In her book The Crushing of the Russian Revolution written in 1922, Goldman stresses from the outset how the encirclement of Russia stifled the revolution and that the situation of a world war created the worst conditions for the revolution.

The march on Russia began. The interventionists murdered millions of Russians, the blockade starved and froze women and children by the hundred thousands. And Russia turned into a vast wilderness of agony and despair. The Russian Revolution was crushed and the Bolshevik regime immeasurably strengthened. That is the net result of the four years conspiracy of the imperialists against Russia.”[8]

The internationally coordinated war against Russia resulted in a brutal strangulation. It would be very erroneous not to take this tragic situation into account in the analysis of the degeneration and failure of the Russian Revolution. Goldman constantly evokes it in her personal experiences; for example she describes the terrible situation resulting from the ruthless starvation of Russia and its consequences for millions of children in 1920-21, a situation further aggravated by the scheming of many state bureaucrats to enrich themselves. On this issue, despite all her harsh criticisms, Goldman defended the Bolsheviks' efforts to improve the situation of the children:

It is true that the Bolsheviki have attempted their utmost in regard to the child and education. It is also true that if they have failed to minister to the needs of the children of Russia, the fault is much more that of the enemies of the Russian Revolution than theirs. Intervention and the blockade have fallen heaviest upon the frail shoulders of innocent children and the sick. But even under more favourable conditions the bureaucratic Frankenstein monster of the Bolshevik state could not but frustrate the best intentions and paralyse the supreme effort made by the communists on behalf of the child and education (...) More and more I came to see that the Bolsheviki were trying to do all they could for the child, but that their efforts were being defeated by the parasitic bureaucracy their state had created[9]

So, concretely, she describes what were called the “Dead Souls”[10]: names of children who had already died and were registered on the lists of those entitled to food rations by the lower bureaucracy, who then diverted these fraudulent rations for their own consumption or to sell for themselves; all this to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of starving children, the most vulnerable victims of the asphyxiation caused by the international blockade!

Goldman cannot be reproached for having analysed the decline of the Russian Revolution without taking into account the decisive and deadly situation of its isolation in Russia. She also attempted, as is shown by the quotes from her texts, to distinguish between the Bolsheviks and the state bureaucracy, to which we will return later.

Her weakness lies rather in the absence of a clear analysis of the fact that the war and the blockade against Russia were only possible because the working class, specifically in western Europe, was progressively defeated, particularly in Germany. The working class in western Europe, and also in the United States, was confronted with a much more experienced bourgeoisie and a more sophisticated state apparatus than in Russia. But it is not only the defeat of the international revolutionary wave that produced the desperate situation of Russia; it is also the backwardness of the international working class compared to Russia.

In Germany, the attempted revolution only began more than a year after October 1917, which left a long time free for the strategy of Russia's isolation, as shown in the months following the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The seizure of power by the proletariat in the central states of western Europe was the only way to break the strangling of the Russian Revolution and put a stop to armed intervention. It is only possible to understand the roots of the defeat of the Russian Revolution by examining precisely the international balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; this aspect appears only occasionally in the writings of Goldman, barely developed, and which leaves the impression that the fate of the revolution was sealed mainly on Russian soil.

The isolation and strangulation of Russia after October 1917 in no way explains every aspect of its internal degeneration, which was ultimately the most traumatic experience for the working class, nor should it serve as justification for this internal degeneration. With regard to the problem of the Bolsheviks’ catastrophic errors, in particular their policy of identification with the state apparatus, it is crucial to see that this could only have been corrected under the influence of a victorious revolutionary working class in other countries, which was tragically not to be the case.[11]

On closer inspection, there is a contradiction in Goldman's central theses about the relationship between the international situation and the causes of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. On the one hand she writes: “All my observations and studies over two years gave me the clarity that the Russian people, if not continuously threatened from without, would have soon realised the danger from within and would have known how to meet that danger (…)”.On the other hand, however: “If there was ever a doubt as to what constitutes the greatest danger to a revolution - outside attacks or the paralysed interest of the people within - the Russian experience should dispel that doubt completely. The counter-revolutionists, backed by Allied money, men and munitions, failed utterly (...)”[12]

As we have already said, Russia’s isolation must in no way serve as an excuse for its errors. But Goldman draws a curious conclusion in which she contradicts all her “observations and studies” quoted above: the salvation of the revolution depended essentially on the forces and politics of the working class in Russia, the international situation becoming for her a much more secondary factor. Goldman develops a logic here that reminds us of Voline, without however going so far;[13] she presents the defeat of the Allied counter-revolutionary forces as proof that the counter-revolution had been a perfectly surmountable obstacle for the revolution, which is shockingly simplistic when you consider the huge damage caused by the this bloody confrontation,[14] including the deaths of tens of thousands of determined revolutionaries, which Goldman herself had well described. Those conscious revolutionaries who had voluntarily put themselves in the front line in their thousands and fallen in battle could probably have opposed in some way the internal counter-revolution.

These two factors; isolation and strangulation on the one hand, and the errors of the Bolsheviks on the other, were mutually reinforcing. The main difference between them was that the war against Russia was obvious to all, while the internal degeneration began in a much more hidden way, eventually becoming the trauma of the century for the international working class. Goldman's conclusions are, in essence, a common way of taking into account both the question of the external counter-revolution and that of the internal counter-revolutionary degeneration; a problem with which all the revolutionaries of the 1920s were confronted.

War does not create the best conditions for revolution

One of Goldman's notable contributions to understanding the defeat of the Russian Revolution – even though we do not share her conclusion – is her reflection on the conditions for a revolution during and after a war: “Perhaps the Russian Revolution was doomed at its birth. Coming as it did upon the heels of four years of war, which had drained Russia of her best manhood, sapped their blood, and devastated her land, the revolution may not have had the strength to withstand the mad onslaught of the rest of the world.[15]

Here she rightly points out the direct result of the war and responds to the false and schematic ideas whereby the crisis automatically aggravates the war and war automatically strengthens the consciousness of the working class, thus leading to the break out of revolution. Goldman emphasises that fundamentally the revolution suffered from exhaustion in Russia resulting from the war itself. But the idea that the fate of the revolution could somehow be “doomed at its birth” shows a fatalistic approach.

An important potential factor must be considered that was not realised. The First World War ended in November 1918, one year after October 1917. As we have already pointed out, the only hope for October was for the revolution to break as quickly as possible in other countries and, above all, for a rapid revolutionary surge in western Europe. This was a historically possible perspective, and the working class had no choice but to engage the struggle in that direction.

The war ended with victorious and defeated countries. If the defeat shook the defeated governments and could, therefore, facilitate their weakening and the revolutionary dynamic, this was not the case for the victorious governments which, on the contrary, were strengthened. In the victorious states where the working class had been painfully dragged to slaughter by the bourgeoisie for four years, it was the aspiration for peace and stability that prevailed and significantly undermined the possibilities for a revolutionary assault by the proletariat in France, Britain, Belgium, Holland and Italy. It was not only the balance of power between the imperialist states that was different after the war, but also the state of mind of the masses who were thus divided according to whether they were in a victorious or vanquished country. Goldman raises the problem of the war which creates poor conditions for the revolution, but she reduces it mainly to the case of Russia itself

What possibilities for change after a revolution?

What possibilities for change existed in Russia at a time of total encirclement and famine? In the anarchist camp, there were very different opinions on this subject but what was significant was the great expectation of immediate improvements in living conditions, especially in terms of economic measures and the fundamental reorganisation of production. So what were Goldman's expectations at that time, just two years after October 1917? Was she expecting on her arrival in Russia in January 1920 to find a society that already met human needs? At her first meeting with Maxim Gorky, on a train to Moscow, she told him: “I also hope you will believe me when I say that, though an anarchist, I had not been naive enough to think that anarchism could rise overnight, as it were, from the debris of old Russia.”[16]

She describes conversations with Alexander Berkman, her closest political and personal companion for decades, as follows: “He dismissed the charges [against the Bolsheviki] as the irresponsible prattle of ineffective and disgruntled men. The Petrograd anarchists were like so many in our ranks in America who used to do least and criticise most, he said. Perhaps they had been naive enough to expect anarchism to emerge overnight from the ruins of autocracy, from the war and blunders of the Provisional Government.[17] Goldman did not judge the Russian Revolution by a naive measure based exclusively on the immediate improvement of living conditions and the economy.[18]

On the question of the immediate possibilities of a social upheaval in the interest of the working class and other oppressed layers, like the millions of peasants in Russia, Goldman puts her point of view again in a framework that does not ignore the international situation. Nor did she hesitate to defend the efforts of the Bolsheviks (as we have seen with regard to the situation of children which demanded immediate and drastic action) and to severely criticise the positions of other anarchists. Goldman did not submit to the law of silence and the rejection of any mutual criticism within the anarchist camp. We do not know what arguments she used against impatient anarchists who expected the immediate upheaval of society. But these controversies between anarchists show that there was no homogeneous anarchism in Russia during the revolution.

The question of possible immediate measures to rapidly relieve suffering was of crucial importance for the working class and for the peasantry as a whole, and was not only a theme of the most impatient parties of anarchism, among whom this question often uniquely decided their attitude towards the Bolsheviks. For the working class, revolution is not an abstract historical logic. After decades of brutal exploitation, and having endured the sufferings of the butchery of 1914-1918, the great hopes of a sunrise on the horizon of life were more than understandable and fitting. They constituted an important driving force of the revolutionary conviction and combativity that enabled October. Given the immediate reality of the strangulation of revolutionary Russia, of hunger and the war against the white armies, the expected sun had not risen on the horizon. Hunger and demoralisation weighed heavily on the working class. In this almost desperate situation, Goldman adopted a responsible attitude of patience and perseverance which, with the progressive defeat of the world revolutionary wave after the war and for all revolutionaries could only be maintained with enormous political will and clarity.

The Bolsheviks and the state apparatus: the shipwreck of marxism?

In her analysis of the dynamic of the state apparatus in full growth after October, Goldman was totally faithful to her own idea according to which the Russian problem was much too complicated to be explained away by a few superficial phrases. She gave a great deal of attention to this question and distinguished herself by precise observations and reflections. Nevertheless, we absolutely do not share a good number of these conclusions! Her writings contain contradictions on the question of the relations between the Bolsheviks and the developing state apparatus.

In 1922 she was not yet ready to make a profound analysis; this was only possible at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s when the Italian Communist Left took up the task. There was no doubt that certain anarchist principles on the question of the state strongly dominated her analyses and the conclusions that flowed from it.

First of all it's indispensable to broadly present Goldman’s vision on the issue:

The first seven months of my stay in Russia had almost crushed me. I had come with so much enthusiasm, with a passionate desire to throw myself into the work, into the holy defence of the revolution. What I found completely overwhelmed me. I was unable to do anything. The chariot wheel of the Socialist State rolled over me paralysing my energy. The wretchedness and distress of the people, the callous disregard of their needs, the persecutions and the repression tore at my mind and heart and made life unbearable. Was it the revolution which had turned idealists into wild beasts? If so the Bolsheviks were mere pawns in the hands of the inevitable. Or was it the cold, impersonal nature of the state which by foul means had harnessed the revolution to its heart and was now whipping it into channels indispensable to the state? I could not answer these questions. Not in July 1920, at any rate.”[19]

Yet neither in the conservative not even in the revolutionary sense do the trade unions in Russia represent the need of the workers. What they really are is the coerced and militarised adjunct of the Bolshevik state. They are “‘the school of communism’ as Lenin insisted in his thesis on the functions of the trade unions. But they are not even that. A school presupposes the free expression and initiative of the pupils, whereas the trade unions in Russia are military barracks for the mobilised labour army, forced into membership by the whip of the state driver.”[20]

I am certain that neither Lunacharsky nor Gorky knew about it [the imprisonment of children by the Cheka]. But therein lies the curse of the vicious circle; it makes it impossible for those at the head to know what the host of their subordinates are doing (...) Does Lunacharsky know of such cases? Do the leading communists know? Some no doubt do. But they are too busy with ‘important state affairs’. And they have become callous to all such ‘trifles’. Then, too, they themselves, are caught in the vicious circle, in the machinery of Bolshevik officialdom. They know that adherence to the party covers a multitude of sins.” [21]

And concerning relations between the state apparatus and its bureaucrats:

In the village where he [Kropotkin] lived in little Dimitrov, there were more Bolshevik officials than ever existed there during the reign of the Romanov's. All those people were living off the masses. They were parasites on the social body, and Dimitrov was only a small example of what was going on throughout Russia. It was not the fault of any particular individual, rather it was the state that they had created, which discredits every revolutionary ideal, stifles all initiative and sets a premium on incompetence and waste.”[22].

Goldman's observations on the concrete reality of the state very precisely describe how it developed more and more and began inexorably to consume everything. It's to her great credit that she gives a detailed perception of the “daily life” of the bureaucratic apparatus and its profound contradiction with the interests of the working class and other exploited classes. In 1922, her descriptions were highly pertinent faced with all the glorifications circulating in the international workers' movement on the situation in Russia and faced with a blindness towards the problems it confronted. There's no doubt that Goldman’s efforts to warn against the dangers of the state as it was developing in Russia were precious at this time, even if her analysis was based on what she saw and only provisional.

But what conclusions did she draw from it?

It would be an error to assume that the failure of the revolution was due entirely to the character of the Bolsheviki. Fundamentally it was the result of the principles and methods of Bolshevism. It was the authoritarian spirit and principles of the state which stifled the libertarian and liberating aspirations. Were any other political party in control of the government in Russia the result would have been essentially the same. It is not so much the Bolsheviks who killed the Russian Revolution as the Bolshevik idea. It was marxism, however modified; in short, fanatical governmentalism (...) I have further shown that it is not only Bolshevism that failed, but Marxism itself. That is to say, the STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolise all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevails. (...) The main cause of the defeat of the Russian Revolution lies much deeper. It is to be found in the whole Socialist conception of revolution itself.”[23]

And while the workers and peasants of Russia were laying down their lives so heroically, this inner enemy rose to ever greater power. Slowly but surely the Bolsheviki were building up a centralised state, which destroyed the Soviets and crushed the revolution, a state that can now easily compare, in regard to bureaucracy and despotism, with any of the great powers of the world.”[24]

The marxist policies of the Bolsheviki, the tactics first extolled as indispensable to the life of the revolution only to be discarded as harmful after they had wrought misery, distrust and antagonism, were the factors that slowly undermined the faith of the people in the revolution.”[25]

Goldman’s thesis is the following: marxism, because of the policy of the Bolsheviks towards the state following the revolution, has turned out to be useless. Contrary to the viscerally anti-organisation sections of anarchism, Goldman never defended the position that the problems of the Bolsheviks fundamentally resulted from the organisational strength of their political party. She rejected rather their concrete policy. And she had good reason to on two counts when she said that the state is by nature "institutional and static". Manifestly, she refers here to the experience concerning the bourgeois state and its nature before the revolution. Goldman’s position is not exclusively emotional, as some anarchists constantly reproached her for at the time, but is based on historic experience. The state in feudalism and capitalism is by its nature completely static and, above all, unconditionally defends the interests and power of the dominant class; it is openly reactionary. Secondly, we share the point of view according to which the problem is not that of individual personalities in the ranks of the Bolsheviks, but the enormous confusion within the party concerning the state after the revolution, which in fact reflected the immaturity of the workers' movement at that time on the question of the state.

Even after a world proletarian revolution (which was never the case at the time of the Russian Revolution, being largely limited to that country), the "semi-state" – necessary but limited to minimal functions and subordinate to the workers' councils – remains in its essence always conservative and static, and in no way constitutes a driving force for the establishment of a communist society; nor is it an organ of the working class. The Italian Communist Left described it thus: “... the state, even with the adjective ‘proletarian’ attached to it, remains an organ of coercion, and in sharp and permanent opposition to the realisation of the communist programme. In this sense it is an expression of the capitalist danger throughout the development of the transition period ....”[26]

Consequently, it is absolutely false to speak of a "proletarian state" as an organ of the revolution, as the Trotskyists claim with regard to Russia, but also the Bordigist current concerning the theoretical analysis of the transition period. Such an idea is completely incapable of grasping the danger of identifying the workers' councils and the political party with the state apparatus – as tragically happened in Russia.

To avoid any false debate, a remark is necessary: Goldman often speaks of a "centralised state" built by the Bolsheviks. But this was not because she was a partisan of the federalist concept, like Rudolf Rocker who advocated the principle of an extremely federalist class struggle. [27]  The term "centralist" used by Goldman was rather a characterisation of the impenetrable, unresponsive, corrupt and hierarchical state apparatus in Russia, which sabotaged the implementation of even the smallest measures for the working class and other oppressed layers of society, like the peasantry.

But does the test of revolution signify the collapse of marxism as Goldman claims? And was anarchism, on the contrary, confirmed by the Russian Revolution? If one wants to understand the events around the Russian Revolution, standing as an arbiter of two historical political currents on the "field of the revolution" to give a winner and a loser is hardly useful.

We cannot deal with all aspects of the tragic degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the Russian Revolution in this response, but we have already dealt with these in numerous ICC texts. But we must respond to Goldman on the alleged shipwreck of marxism as a whole. The Bolshevik party degenerated, which was clearly expressed by its fusion with the state apparatus; that’s a fact – but marxism has not failed.

With her method, how does Goldman explain the fact that faced with the question of war, it was precisely within the marxist workers' movement, and on the basis of its historical legacy, that the clearest, most determined internationalist positions emerged, such as those embodied in the Kienthal Conference of 1916? And all this led by a marxist organisation, the Bolsheviks, a spearhead against the reformism which was gaining ground faced with the question of war.

With her method, how does Goldman explain the fact, mentioned at the beginning of this article and correctly denounced by herself, that within anarchism and even around the central figure of anarchism at the time, Kropotkin, a tendency appeared which abandoned internationalist principles and openly proclaimed so in a manifesto – a deviation that gave rise to great uncertainty, tensions and resistance within the anarchist ranks? According to Goldman's own method anarchism hit the rocks here since internationalism had just been thrown overboard by its most influential representatives. As in the marxist workers' movement this produced a lively confrontation faced with the test of war and a determined part of anarchism, which also included Goldman, fought against any support for either of the two imperialist camps involved.

It would be absolutely false to say that anarchism as a whole became bankrupt in 1914. On the contrary, it's precisely because such a drastic decantation took place within the anarchist and marxist workers' movement that it was possible in the struggle against war and in October ‘17, revolutionary, internationalist anarchists fought side-by-side with revolutionary marxists. If the necessary positioning between war and the revolution indeed produced such a result, it was just as much among marxists as among anarchists, producing a determined and intransigent defence of internationalism and the interests of the working class.

And that's not all. With her approach and the thesis of the bankruptcy of marxism, how does Goldman explain the fact that the Bolsheviks, an organisation of the marxist tradition, were able in 1917, with the April Theses formulated by its most determined representatives, to bring clarity against the democratic confusions still existing in the Russian working class?

It's a fact that the majority of the Bolsheviks gradually moved away the spirit of the October revolution, turning their backs on it. By identifying with the state apparatus and taking repressive measures against those who criticised, they became locked into the absurd belief that they could save the revolution and thus became the incarnation of the counter-revolution from within. But it wasn't the totality of the Bolsheviks who embarked on this path, because there were different organised reactions within the party in the face of these signs of degeneration.

Goldman describes her great sympathy for and closeness to one of these oppositional groups within the party; the "Workers' Opposition" around Kollontai and Shliapnikov. Clearly, marxism was capable of producing a militant revolutionary opposition, which Goldman expressly welcomed. On the other hand, she (and more so still her political comrade Alexander Berkman) described the organised tendencies within anarchism in Russia, the so-called "soviet anarchists", who openly supported the policies of the Bolsheviks; and this even in 1920 when the terror of the Cheka[28] was already set up. She also honestly describes what followed: " Unfortunately, as was unavoidable under the circumstances, some evil spirits had found entry into the Anarchist ranks debris washed ashore by the Revolutionary tide. (…) Power is corrupting and anarchists are no exception".[29] So, if we follow Goldman’s method, has anarchism in its entirety failed because of such facts? Such a conclusion would be wrong from our point of view. Her approach and conclusion does not take into account all the post-October 1917 debates within a so-called "bankrupt marxism".

The question of the state after the revolution wasn't resolved within the workers' movement of the time and this is equally valid for the anarchists. An essential reason was the absence of any concrete historical experience for what happened in Russia after 1917. Up to then the workers' movement had always started from the perspective of a rapidly extending revolution. The insurmountable isolation of the Russian Revolution and the obligation to defend its territory brutally and rapidly reinforced it suffocation and its degeneration; the state and the Bolshevik Party "fused" to become an active factor in this dynamic.

Even Goldman's political reference point, “Father Kropotkin” as his political entourage called him, was also unable to answer the questions of the role and function of the state after a revolution in his book The State: its Historic Role. The radical rejection of the state by the great majority of anarchists on the basis of an instinctive distrust, came from the experience of a brutal confrontation with the state under feudalism and the capitalist state apparatus; it rightly demanded the destruction of the bourgeois state by the proletarian revolution as was advocated by Lenin in his book The State and Revolution.

Even though this merit of the anarchist movement must be recognised, a false conception nevertheless prevailed in its ranks: the reorganisation of society, immediately after the revolution, by the workers' councils, the unions and cooperatives. Such a scenario hopelessly pushes the organs of the defence and political interests of the working class, the workers' councils, which constitute the dynamic element of the society, to fuse with the organism charged with the management of society (what we call a reduced and controlled transitional state.[30] If this happens, the workers' councils can only lose their autonomy in relation to the state (which would mean the working class losing its autonomy as a class), and themselves becoming a cog in the bureaucratic machine. Goldman also shares this position, even if only in an implicit and undeveloped form.

Let's return to the question of the so-called shipwreck of marxism. The majority of anarchists criticised the tragic developments in Russia. But anarchism wasn’t confirmed in its totality in the Russian Revolution, just as marxism did not fail as a whole. There were without any doubt two false ideas among the Bolsheviks on the subject of the relations between workers' councils, party and state. At the time of the Russian Revolution the idea of unity between party and state apparatus dominated, and of a party which, alongside the workers' councils, had to be involved in the exercise of power. The dominant conception was that a minority within the class, its party, because of the confidence placed in it, would be called to take power in the name of the working class. This point of view clearly expressed the immaturity that existed on the question of the state after the revolution.

Through their conceptions of the post-revolutionary state and their relationship with it, the Bolsheviks became caught in a destructive spiral which, in the situation of complete isolation of the revolution, saw a false idea turn into a tragedy. Although the Bolsheviks never openly rejected the principle of the seizure of power by the workers 'councils, one of the first signs of degeneration was the gradual denial of the powers of the workers' councils, a process in which the Bolsheviks played a decisive role.

It’s not fatalistic sarcasm but a historical fact to say it was the tragic experience of the Russian Revolution that clarified all these questions. Salvation could only come from the international extension of the revolution on the basis of the vitality of the soviets. This would also have denied any retrospective determinism according to which the fate of the Russian Revolution was already sealed at its birth. But wanting to save the revolution with "the strong arm of the state", as the Bolsheviks initially attempted, was a pure and simple impossibility.

Goldman draws a static conclusion from the reality of the growing domination of the state apparatus after October and of the process of degeneration. The weakness in her method is not to take into account the struggle in the marxist ranks against the dynamic of state domination: nor does it take into account the enormous difficulties that this situation generated among the anarchists, even if this figures in the detail of her observations. Added to this weakness is her idea that the Bolsheviks – as a party of marxism and for that very same reason – were doomed to failure from the very start because of their supreme goal, that of seizing power, just as all the detractors of the Bolshevik Party claimed. It seems that, according to Goldman, it is the elementary existence of marxist positions which decided the fate of the revolution. In her conclusion on the question of the state she also expressly denies the fact that it was a process of degeneration resulting from the world context rather than a question "settled" from the start. With her proclamation of "the failure of marxism" in the experience of the Russian revolution, she gives too much away too easily, finally leading to another thesis.

"The end justifies the means" and Kronstadt: a break with the Bolsheviks

One of Goldman's theses where she goes furthest in her criticism is:

The Bolsheviks are the Jesuit order in the Marxist church. Not that they are insincere as men or that their intentions are evil. It is their Marxism that has determined her policies and methods. The very means they have employed have destroyed the realisation of their end. Communism, Socialism, equality, freedom – everything for which the Russian masses have endured so much martyrdom – have become discredited and besmirched by her tactics, by their Jesuit motto that the end justifies the means.” (…) “But Lenin is a shrewd and subtle Jesuit; he joined in the popular cry: ‘All power to the Soviets!’. When he and his follow-Jesuits were firmly in the saddle, the breaking up of the Soviets begun. Today they are like everything else in Russia – a shadow with the substances utterly crushed.” (…)  “To be sure, Lenin often repents. At every All-Russian Communist conclave he comes forth with his mea culpa. ‘I have sinned’. A young Communist once said to me: ‘It would not surprise me if Lenin should some day declare that the October Revolution was a mistake.’”[31]

Yes, the objectives of the Bolsheviks, communism, socialism, equality and freedom, which Goldman did not deny to be the true goals of the Bolsheviks, could not be realised. In other places in her writings on Russia, she describes how she was confronted with a question that was full of hope and asked many times by many Bolshevik leaders: "Will we soon see the revolution in Germany and the United States?" This too from Lenin in a meeting with Goldman. The Bolsheviks she spoke to were eager to receive a positive reply from her, she being closely in touch with the situation in the United States. It was clear from her descriptions that the Bolsheviks lived in constant fear of isolation and desperately awaited the least sign of revolutionary developments in other countries. This itself proves that in the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, which was anything but homogeneous, the hope of a world revolution had continued to live despite the increasingly clear degeneration. And so it was not just about a greed for power in Russia, as she runs the risk of claiming with the idea of the "Jesuitism" of the Bolsheviks.

 

Goldman's concerns revolved around the contradiction between the initial objectives of the Bolsheviks and their specific policies and methods. This led to a definitive break after the bloody repression of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921 under the banner of saving the revolution, and where there was use of brutal violence within the working class, which was in stark contradiction with communist principles. Her experience with the Cheka also played a decisive role in her break with the Bolsheviks.

The method according to which the end justifies the means must be vehemently fought against by the working class. Goldman is honest in not to hiding her own hesitations about it. But her descriptions clearly refute the thesis that the Bolsheviks' thinking was that of the "Jesuits of Marxism", who would stop at nothing in the pursuit of their goals, and that here there would be a fundamental difference between the Bolsheviks and the anarchism.

How was this question posed among anarchists? She described her discussions with Berkman on the question of the legitimate means for defending the revolution:

"It was absurd to denounce the Bolsheviki for the drastic measures they were using, Sasha urged. How else were they to free Russia from the stranglehold of counter-revolution and sabotage? So far as he was concerned, he did not think any methods too harsh to deal with this. Revolutionary necessity justified all measures, however we might dislike them. As long as the Revolution was in jeopardy, those seeking to undermine it must pay the penalty. Single-hearted and clear-eyed as ever was my old pal. I agreed with him; still, the ugly reports of my comrades kept disturbing me."[32]

This debate with Berkman went on in the sharpest way:

For hours he would argue against my ‘impatience’ and deficient judgement of far-reaching issues, my kid-glove approach to the Revolution. I had always depreciated the economic factor as the main cause of capitalist evils, he declared. Could I fail to see now that economic necessity was the very reason which was forcing the hand of the men at the Soviet helm? The continued danger from the outside, the natural indolence of the Russian worker and his failure to increase production, the peasants’ lack of the most necessary implements, and their resultant refusal to feed the cities had compelled the Bolsheviki to pass those desperate measures. Of course he regarded such methods as counter-revolutionary and bound to defeat their purpose. Still, it was preposterous to suspect men like Lenin or Trotsky of deliberate treachery to the Revolution. Why, they had dedicated their lives to that cause, they had suffered persecution, calumny, prison, and exile for their ideals! They could not go back on them to such an extent![33]

For the working class, the means used must not be in contradiction with its fundamental objectives.[34] However, we reject the assertion that marxism alone, and the Bolsheviks in particular, would be vulnerable to the penetration of the dominant class ideology by adopting means that conflict with the goal of communism. The discussions described by Goldman are characteristic of the fact that anarchism has always had enormous difficulties in this regard. An example of the use by many anarchists of means that contradict the goal is the attack on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan on August 30th, 1918, justified by allegations of Lenin's so-called betrayal of the revolution. Given the long tradition of assassinations of representatives of the hated tsarist regime, which exposed the anarchists to a brutal repression, part of Russian anarchism resorted to what is called "propaganda by deed" by having recourse to "the ends justifies the means". This included targeting working class fighters, as the attack on Lenin shows!

It is not a matter of mourning the hated figures of Tsarism targeted by the methods of one part of Russian anarchism, which expressed a reductive understanding of feudalism, identifying it with some individuals. But, as Berkman defended it correctly against Goldman, this system was not based on the malevolence of individuals, but on social and economic bases in contradiction with the needs of the exploited classes. The "propaganda by deed", the individual violence against the hated representatives of feudalism, conceived as "triggering reflection" also expressed a false conception of the development of class consciousness, since these methods in no way demonstrate the necessity for a united struggle of the whole class against the foundations of exploitation.

It is understandable that Goldman showed allegiance to Kaplan as a prisoner, since she was tortured by the Cheka. She did not herself call for the same methods as Kaplan. But why in this situation did she not dare go a step further and criticise the "Jesuit" methods in the ranks of anarchism, rather than circumscribing it to the Bolsheviks?

Goldman suffered greatly in September 1921 with the Cheka's execution of friends, of anarchists such as Fanya Baron, with the approval of Lenin. Although Lenin was one of the most determined and clearest personalities of the October Revolution, such measures are unacceptable. Goldman developed a growing antipathy, especially towards Trotsky and Lenin, describing them as clever and cunning Jesuits.[35]

The Cheka had become uncontrollable and used hostage-taking and torture to extract information and carried out executions to spread fear. It was often used against political opposition groups coming from the very ranks of the Bolsheviks and anarchists, but also against workers who participated in strikes. Goldman's criticism of prisoners – defenceless individuals – being condemned to death, whether members of bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations, criminals, or those taken prisoner from the white armies, is absolutely justified because such measures were not only meaningless acts of violence, but were also an expression of the view that people cannot change their opinions, their behaviour and political positions and they must, in a word, be liquidated.[36] Within the Bolsheviks, the fight against the suppression of opposition voices inside the party and the working class began in 1918. Although Goldman herself witnessed debates and the existence of different positions among the Bolsheviks, she draws too simplistic a picture in order to condemn the latter as "Jesuits of Marxism", as if they were forged from a single block, which never corresponded to reality. The central problem was the sliding into a militarist approach to political problems rather than turning to working class consciousness, to which most of the Bolsheviks succumbed in the false belief that they were saving the besieged revolution. But this does not correspond to a thirst for power allegedly rooted inside the Bolshevik Party.

Marxism has never defended the principle according to which the end justifies the means; this was never a principle or practice of the Bolsheviks before and during the October Revolution. Kronstadt's suppression, however, the tragic culmination of a growing repression, showed how much the degeneration had already progressed, the forms it would take and the logic behind it. Its political justification was derived from its underlying goal (the "iron cohesion" of Russia against the international attacks) justifying the means (bloody repression).

Goldman's personal and utterly demoralising experiences of Kronstadt led to a break with the Bolsheviks and marked a turning point. In the last days before the crushing of the sailors, soldiers and workers of Kronstadt, she was part of a delegation (including in addition to her, Perkus, Pertrowski, Berkman) who tried to negotiate with the Red Army. "Kronstadt broke the last thread that held me to the Bolsheviki. The wanton slaughter they had instigated spoke more eloquently against them then aught else. Whatever their pretences in the past, the Bolsheviki now proved themselves the most pernicious enemies of the revolution. I could have nothing further to do with them."[37]

Kronstadt was a terrible tragedy, a tragic mistake much more than a simple "error".

The crushing of Kronstadt with several thousand dead proletarians (on both sides!) was based on an absolutely false assessment of the character of this uprising by Bolshevik leaders that could have had several causes: the fact that the international bourgeoisie had perfidiously seized this opportunity to hypocritically declare its "solidarity" with the insurgents; also the growing fear that Kronstadt had passed into the camp of the counter-revolution or was even already an expression of the counter-revolution. Goldman responded correctly to both of these aspects. In her autobiography dating back to 1931, however, she was unable to draw the most important lesson from the Kronstadt tragedy, as was the case for the entire Marxist Left during the repression, which mostly supported it. Neither, even with the passage of time, would she be able to understand, contrary to certain currents of the Communist Left, that violence within the working class must be firmly rejected and that this must be a principle.[38]

As with the question of the state, Goldman falls far too easily into the question of the so-called "continued Jesuitism of the Bolsheviks". She calls the Bolsheviks Jesuit, which is in total contradiction with their history. The dynamism of the majority of the Bolsheviks, who did not hesitate to use violence in Kronstadt in 1921 as an alleged means of class struggle, was by no means "their tradition" but rather, as we have seen, an expression of the process of their progressive degeneration.

Instead of looking fundamentally at the question that all revolutionaries without exception faced, namely what means can be used in the class struggle and in the revolution, the "Jesuit" label that Goldman loosely attributed to the Bolsheviks was rather an obstacle to understanding the degeneration of the revolution as a process.

Silence or criticism?

One question is found in Goldman's writings on Russia like a red thread: when was it justified to formulate an open criticism of the Bolsheviks? She described an encounter with anarchists in Petrograd with great indignation:

"These charges and denunciations beat upon me like hammers and left me stunned. I listened tense in every nerve, hardly able clearly to understand what I heard, and failing to grasp its full meaning. It couldn’t be true — this monster indictment! (…) The men in that dismal hall must be mad, I thought, to tell such impossible and preposterous stories, wicked to condemn the Communists for the crimes they must know were due to the counterrevolutionary gang, to the blockade and the White generals attacking the Revolution. I proclaimed my conviction to the gathering, but my voice was drowned in the laughter of derision and jeers.”[39]

As regards the question of the changes to come immediately after the revolution, Goldman's despondency with the positions of the other anarchists shows that anarchism was anything but homogeneous, especially with regard to the attitude towards the Bolsheviks. Anarchism in Russia had again divided into different camps.[40] The following passages from Goldman's writings once again testify to her responsible attitude in not ignoring her own uncertainties, but they also show the evolution of her attitude towards the Bolsheviks.

"Well could I understand the attitude of my Ukrainian friends. They had suffered much during the last year: they had seen the high hopes of the Revolution crushed and Russia breaking down beneath the heel of the Bolshevik state. Yet I could not comply with their wishes. I still had faith in the Bolsheviki, in their revolutionary sincerity and integrity. Moreover, I felt that as long as Russia was being attacked from outside I could not speak in criticism. I would not add fuel on the fires of counterrevolution. I therefore had to keep silent, and stand by the Bolsheviki as the organised defenders of the Revolution. But my Russian friends scorned this view. I was confounding the Communist Party with the revolution, they said; they are not the same, on the contrary they were opposed, even antagonistic.[41]

 “At the first news of war with Poland I had set aside my critical attitude and offered my services as a nurse at the front (…) But he (Zorin) never did. That of course could have no bearing on my determination to help the country, in whatever capacity possible. Nothing seemed so important just then.” (…) “I was not denying Makhno’s services to the Revolution in the struggle against the White forces, nor the fact that his povstantsy army was a spontaneous mass movement of the toilers. I did not think, however, that anarchism had anything to gain from military activity or that our propaganda should depend on military or political spoils. But that was beside the point. I was not in a position to join their work, nor was it a question of the Bolsheviki any more. I was ready to admit frankly that I had erred grievously when I had defended Lenin and his party as the true champions of the Revolution. But I would not engage in active opposition to them so long as Russia was still being attacked by outside enemies.”[42]

I was oppressively conscious of the great debt I owed to the workers of Europe and America: I should tell them the truth about Russia. But how could I speak out when the country was still besieged on several fronts? It would mean working into the hands of Poland and Wrangel. For the first time in my life I refrained from exposing grave social evils. I felt as if I were betraying the trust of the masses, particularly of the American workers, whose faith I dearly cherished.”[43]

"I found it necessary to observe silence so long as the combined imperialist forces were at the throat of Russia. (…) Now, however, the time for silence has passed. I therefore mean to tell my story. I am not unmindful of the difficulties confronting me. I know I shall be misappropriated by the reactionaries, the enemies of the Russian Revolution, as well as excommunicated by its so-called friends; who persist in confusing the governing party of Russia with the Revolution. It is, therefore, necessary that I state my position clearly towards both.”[44]

At that time other revolutionaries, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were quick to make criticisms of the Bolsheviks, even when they expressed total solidarity with them and defended the decisive role they had played in the Russian Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg wrote her pamphlet The Russian Revolution in 1918 at the same time as Goldman published the article "The Truth about the Bolsheviks" in Mother Earth with boundless enthusiasm. The example of Rosa Luxemburg shows how difficult it was to make the decision to publish her own criticism at the right time, and always with the concern not to strike a blow to the revolution. In her text written in the Moabit Prison, Luxemburg expressed a criticism of the Bolsheviks, where her concern was, by clarifying the problems posed in Russia, to show her support and solidarity:

"Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favour of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favour of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favour of dictatorship on the bourgeois model.” (…) “But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people. Doubtless the Bolsheviks would have proceeded in this very way were it not that they suffered under the frightful compulsion of the world war, the German occupation and all the abnormal difficulties connected therewith, things which were inevitably bound to distort any socialist policy, however imbued it might be with the best intentions and the finest principles. (...) The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics.[45]

Luxemburg did not refrain from criticism. Why did Goldman not follow the example of Rosa Luxemburg when, in her writings, she repeatedly expressed her sadness following the assassination in January 1919 of Luxemburg, whose positions she knew? Why in her pamphlet The Crushing of the Russian Revolution did she never make reference to Luxemburg’s criticisms written three years previously?

The reason is simple: she did not know of it. Indeed, Luxemburg's text became the victim of a gross fear of "stabbing the revolution in the back" and of playing the bourgeoisie's game in raising criticisms. The publication of Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks, which she wanted to make known immediately after drafting it, was deliberately withheld by her closest political friends and did not appear until four years later, in 1922.[46]

Unfortunately, Goldman did not have the opportunity to draw inspiration from Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks. Her excitement on arrival in Russia is understandable given the horrors in which the World War had plunged humanity. Goldman's “Soviet Russia! Sacred ground” and her subsequent utter disillusionment is also an example that euphoria is most of the time condemned to suffer great disappointment. It is not surprising that 13 years later she rejected as "naive" her initial defence of the Bolsheviks.

Luxemburg was never inclined to political excitement and formulated her criticism on the basis of the first experiences of the months following October 1917, concluding with the famous words that the future belongs to Bolshevism. Goldman wrote her criticism three years later, based on her own experience of a later phase of the revolution in Russia, after the workers' councils were dispossessed of their power at the time of the unleashing of the Cheka and the inescapable identification of the Bolshevik Party with the state apparatus. Nevertheless, it harboured great hopes: "Lenin and his retinue are sensing the danger. Their attack upon and the persecution of the Labour Opposition and the Anarcho-Syndicalists are continuing with even greater intensity. Is it that the Anarcho-Syndicalist star is rising in the east? Who knows- Russia is the land of miracles.”[47] What would have been Luxemburg's analysis at the end of 1921, after the onset of a clear degeneration and after Kronstadt? Sadly, we will never know.

Goldman oscillated between silence and her "I have to raise my voice against the crimes committed in the name of the Revolution”. But how should that happen? During her stay in Russia, the bourgeois newspaper World in New York repeatedly asked her to publish articles on Russia. Goldman at first refused, after hard discussions with Berkman, who was strictly against such an approach, with the argument that everything published in the bourgeois press could only be used in the service of the counter-revolution and proposed she produce her own leaflets for distribution to the workers. A few weeks later, as Goldman had left Russia at the end of 1921, she allowed World to publish her texts.

"I wrote her that I preferred to have my say in the liberal and labour press in the United States, and that I should be willing to have them publish my articles without any pay rather than have them appear in the New York World or similar publications. (…) Now that I knew the truth, was I to be forced to slay it and keep silent? No, I must protest. I must cry out against the gigantic deception posing as truth and justice.[48]

Goldman had waited a few months in Russia to make public her criticism because she did not want to "stab the revolution in the back". And because of this unthinking decision, she was pilloried from various directions:

My Communist accusers were not the only ones to cry ‘Crucify!’ There were also some anarchist voices in the chorus. They were the very people who had fought me on Ellis Island, on the Buford and the first year in Russia because I had refused to condemn the Bolsheviki before I had a chance to test their scheme. Daily the news from Russia about the continued political persecution strengthened every fact I had described in my articles and in my book. It was understandable that Communists should close their eyes to the reality, but it was reprehensible on the part of people who called themselves anarchists to do so, especially after the treatment Mollie Steimer had received in Russia after having valiantly fought in America for the Soviet régime.“[49]

The charge of treason by some parts of the American workers' movement had largely deprived her analysis and reflections of the attention and recognition they deserved. But in a world where two classes confront each other in an absolutely antagonistic way, it was a desperate act to criticise herself and to explain it from the fact that she had no other choice. Indeed it was extremely dangerous to want to use an instrument of the bourgeoisie, whatever it may be, even briefly, as a means of expressing a working class position. What a pity that such a strong militant had fallen into this trap!

What Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg have in common is undoubtedly the enormous desire to understand the problems of the Russian Revolution, to defend the revolutionary character of October 1917 and to not succumb to the dramatic situation without criticising. Goldman never accepted the tactical method of simply considering the Bolsheviks as a "lesser evil" and to support them only for the duration of the war against the white armies, a position openly defended in Russia by the anarchist Machajski in the journal The workers’ revolution.

Expressing open criticism of the policies of the Bolsheviks was from the outset less risky outside Russia than in Russia itself. But Goldman's doubts did not stem from fear or repressive measures against her. Owing to her status as a well-known American revolutionary, she enjoyed much greater protection than other revolutionary immigrants. Although she did not hide her sympathy for the Workers' Opposition and allied herself with the imprisoned anarchists (for example when she spoke at Kropotkin's funeral), she was only placed under "soft" surveillance by the Cheka, to intimidate her.

Would her criticisms have destroyed the shining example of the October revolution within the international working class? Certainly not. The alternative was posed not in the terms of "either being silent or denouncing the Bolsheviks". On the contrary, a mature political critique of Bolshevik policies at that time provided support for the entire international revolutionary wave. The working class is the class of consciousness, not of thoughtless action. Therefore, criticism of its own actions and mistakes is a legacy of the workers' movement which had to be maintained even in such tragic times. It is not part of the nature of the working class to conceal its problems, unlike the bourgeoisie. As Luxemburg’s text shows, criticism of the Bolsheviks must not be limited to indignation but should also be mature enough to support the struggle against the degeneration of the revolution. Later it was a criterion for the Italian Communist Left to refrain from expressing hasty analyses and criticisms that did not permit lessons to be drawn.

Goldman's analysis of the Russian Revolution went beyond mere indignation. But in different places, with its characterisation of Lenin and Trotsky as "cunning Jesuits", she slipped into a method of criticism which fixated on charismatic individuals, which cannot be justified by the great influence that these individuals had on the policy of the Bolsheviks. Lenin does not personify the disarming of the councils and their fusion with the state, any more than Trotsky personifies the crushing of Kronstadt.

Later on, Goldman developed the position vis-à-vis Trotsky that his actions – especially Kronstadt – were sufficient to make him a pioneer of Stalinism.[50] The use of violence that he had directed as commander of the Red Army at Kronstadt did not reflect his personal inclinations but was the implementation of a decision of the whole Bolshevik power and, let us again recall, was supported at the time by the entire marxist left. The tragic error of Kronstadt was an illustration of both the immaturity of the workers' movement on the question of violence (no violence within the working class) and the degenerate course of the revolution in Russia, which would much later end up in to the openly counter-revolutionary politics of socialism in one country and the emergence of Stalin as leader of the world counter-revolution. Whatever the inadequacies of Trotsky's political denunciation of Stalinism and its organised apparatus of repression aimed at the complete physical and ideological crushing of the working class, it nonetheless expressed a proletarian reaction against them.

The value of Goldman's analysis lies in her raising the central questions confronting the Russian Revolution. The contradictions in her analysis and the conclusions, that we absolutely do not share, are not a reason to reject or ignore her efforts altogether. On the contrary, they are the expression of the enormous difficulty of producing a complete analysis of the Russian problem since 1922. She was not alone in this matter. She has the merit of having rejected the fusion of the party with the state apparatus, the seizure of power by the party and the repression of Kronstadt.

In this sense, she made an important contribution to the working class, which must be welcomed but also criticised. Goldman never claimed that October 1917 ultimately gave birth to Stalinism, as the ruling class still does today, in its deceitful campaigns, but stubbornly defended the October Revolution.

Mario 07/01/2018

 

 

[1]. The Crushing of the Russian Revolution (1922), her first and most comprehensive analysis; My Disillusionment in Russia (1923/24); Living My Life (1931), Chapter 52.

[2]. This was a subject of great concern to her, which is understandable because the situation of children was catastrophic. In conditions of widespread misery, having lost one or both parents, often in war, they were the most vulnerable, especially when faced with the petty, unscrupulous and morally dehumanised bureaucrats. Perhaps she was more sensitive to this situation because she herself was a nurse and had had the opportunity to visit "model" institutions for children.

[3]. My Disillusionment in Russia, Preface to the first American edition.

[4]. “The Truth about the Bolsheviki”, Mother Earth, 1918.

[5]. Living My Life, Chapter 52.

[6]. Living My Life, loc. cit.

[7]. My Disillusionment in Russia, Chapter 32.

[8].  Introduction to The Crushing of the Russian Revolution.

[9]. Op. Cit., Chapter  “The Care of the Children“.

[10]. Title of the famous book by Nicolas Gogol in 1842. The methods and the parasitism of the state bureaucracy were an exact copy of certain techniques of personal enrichment under feudalism.

[11]. See our article “The degeneration of the Russian Revolution”, https://en.internationalism.org/node/2514

[12]. The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, Chapter “The Forces that Crushed the Revolution”.

[13]. Voline (W.M. Eichenbaum), The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, Chapter “Counter-Revolution”. Voline goes so far as to claim that the international intervention against Russia was largely exaggerated and transformed into a legend spread by Bolsheviks around the world.

[14]. See on this subject our article "The world bourgeoisie against the October revolution", https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201805/15143/world-...

[15]. The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, Loc. Cit.

[16]. Living My Life, Chapter 52.

[17]. Ibid.

[18]. The period of transition covers the entire period after the workers' councils take power until the state becomes extinct. During this period, a series of measures will have to be taken to eliminate wages and the money form, to socialise consumption and to meet needs (transport, leisure, rest, etc.). Read our article on “Problems of the Transition Period” in International Review nº 1. Although the measures to be taken right after the revolution are necessarily limited, certain measures however must be implemented immediately and with determination: for example, free transportation, immediate housing of homeless people in unneeded public buildings, homes of the rich, etc., but also the prohibition of child labour and any form of forced labour or prostitution.

 

[19]. The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, Chapter “A Visit to Peter Kropotkin”.

[20]. The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, Chapter “The Trade Unions”.

[21]. Op. Cit., Chapter “Dead Souls”.

[22]. My Disillusionment in Russia, Chapter 17.

[23]. Afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia.

[24]. Introduction to The Crushing of the Russian Revolution.

[25]. Op. Cit., Chapter “The forces that Crushed the Revolution”.

[26]. "The question of the state", Octobre nº 2, March 1938, quoted in “Some Answers from the ICC”, International Review nº 12, 1978, https://en.internationalism.org/node/2636

[27]. Rudolf Rocker, Uber das Wesen des Federalismus im Gegensatz zum Zentralismus,1922.

[28]. Goldman describes the Cheka very well with the following words: "Originally the Cheka was controlled by the Commissariat of the Interior, the Soviets and the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Gradually it became the most powerful organisation in Russia. It was not merely a state within the state; it was a state over a state. The whole of Russia is covered to the remotest village with a net of Chekas". (The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, Chapter “The Cheka”).

[29]. My Disillusionment in Russia, Chapter 28.

[30]. See our pamphlet, The Period of Transition, https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/transition.

[31]. The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, Chapters “The forces that Crushed the Revolution” and “The Soviets”. The Jesuit order is generally used as a symbol of a politics obsessed with power and ruthlessness according to the slogan “the end justifies the means”.

[32]. Living My Life, Chapter 52.

[33]. Ibid.

[34]. See our article, “Resolution on Terror, terrorism and class violence”, International Review, nº 15, https://en.internationalism.org/node/2649..

[35]. Voline went so far as to describe Lenin and Trotsky as brutal reformists who had never been revolutionaries and who used bourgeois methods (see The Unknown Revolution, Chapters “The Nature of the Bolshevik State” and “Counter-Revolution”).

[36]. This question is dealt with in detail in the book Moral Face of the Revolution (1923) by the People's Commissar for Justice until March 1918, Isaac Steinberg.

[37]. My Disillusionment in Russia, Chapter “Kronstadt”.

[38]. See International Review nº104, “1921: Understanding Kronstadt”, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/104_kronstadt.html.

[39]. Living My Life, Chapter 52.

[40]. In the spring of 1918 the question of relations with the Bolsheviks strongly polarised the anarchist milieu (already historically divided into pan-anarchists, individualist anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists, where the demarcations are equally difficult to define). The question of violence or the analysis of the nature of the October Revolution played a secondary role. From open support to the Bolsheviks (from the "anarchists of soviets") to the idea of the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution who must be fought, one finds all kind of intermediary positions.  See Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (1967), Chapter on “The Anarchists and the Bolshevik regime”.

[41]. My Disillusionment in Russia, Chapter “In Kharkov”.

[42]. Living My Life, Chapter 52.

[43]. My Disillusionment in Russia, Chapter “Back in Petrograd”.

[44]. Introduction to The Crushing of the Russian Revolution.

[45]. The Russian Revolution.

[46]. Paul Frölich, one of her political allies, describes this legendary sequence of events in his biography Rosa Luxemburg. Her Life and Work (1939). Paul Levi published Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution in the course of 1922 (hence after Goldman's pamphlet) after having broken with the KPD. Levi claimed that Leo Jogiches (who was opposed to publication, arguing that Luxemburg had subsequently changed her mind) had destroyed the manuscript. J.P. Nettl credibly asserts that it was Levi himself who put strong pressure on Luxemburg not to publish the text, arguing that the bourgeoisie would misuse it against the Bolsheviks. It is clear that Luxemburg's text was not accidentally passed over in the disarray of the revolution in Germany, but, quite the contrary, it was avoided in the storm of contusion over the need for open criticism!

[47]. The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, Chapter “The Trade Unions”.

[48]. Living My Life, Chapter 53.

[49]. Living My Life, Chapter 54.

[50]. Trotsky Protests Too Much, July 1938.

Rubric: 

History of the Workers' Movement

Fifty years ago, May 68

The events of spring 1968 in France, in their roots and in their results, had an international significance. Underlying them were the consequences for the working class of the first symptoms of the world economic crisis, which was reappearing after well over a decade of capitalist prosperity.

After decades of defeat, disorientation and submission, in May 1968 the working class returned to the scene of history. While the student agitation which had been developing in France since the beginning of spring, and the radical workers’ struggles which had broken out the previous year, had already changed the social atmosphere, the entry en masse of the class struggle (10 million on strike) overturned the whole social landscape.

Very soon other national sectors of the working class would enter the struggle. After the huge strike of May 1968 in France, the struggles in Argentina (the Cordobazo), the “Hot Autumn” in Italy and many other movements across the world provided proof that the world proletariat had left behind the period of counter-revolution. In contrast to the crisis of 1929, the one now emerging would not lead to world war but to the development of class battles that would prevent the ruling class from imposing its barbaric solution to the convulsions of its economy.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this major event, we are publishing on our website a dossier made up of some the main articles the ICC has written about it, in particular:

We also begin the publication of a series of three articles aimed at drawing a balance sheet of the period since 1968, motivated by the concern to examine the extent to which the conclusions we have drawn about the meaning of May 1968 have been verified by history. The first article looks at the course followed by the aggravation of the economic crisis, and the following two will deal with the dynamic of the class struggle and the development of the revolutionary milieu.

                                          ******

Sinking into the economic crisis

The advances and retreats in the class struggle since 1968

Geographical: 

Deepen: 

History of the workers' movement: 

Rubric: 

Long live the revolution!

Sinking into the economic crisis

In issue number two of Révolution Internationale, published in 1969, there is an article called ‘Understanding May’ written by Marc Chirik, who had returned from over a decade of exile in Venezuela to take an active part in the ‘Events’ of May 68 in France[1].

This article was a polemical response to the pamphlet ‘Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement’ published by the Situationist International[2]. While recognising that the SI had indeed played an active part in the movement of May-June, it punctured their almost unlimited pretentiousness and self-regard, which led them to the frankly subsitutionist conclusion that "the agitation unleashed in January 1968 by the four or five revolutionaries who were to constitute the enrages group was to lead, in five months, to the virtual liquidation of the state". And that "never has an agitation undertaken by so small a number led in so short a time to such consequences"

The material bases of the proletarian revolution

But the principal focus RI’s polemic was the underlying conceptions which provided the soil for this exaltation of ‘exemplary’ minorities – their rejection of the material bases of the proletarian revolution. Indeed, Marc’s article concludes that the voluntarism and substitutionism of the SI was a logical consequence of repudiating the marxist method which holds that massive and spontaneous actions by the working class are intimately connected to the objective situation of the capitalist economy.

Thus, against the SI’s notion that the “revolutionary events” of May-June had broken out against a capitalism that was “functioning well”, and that there had been “no tendency towards economic crisis” in the period leading up to the explosion,   Marc demonstrated that the movement had been preceded by a growing threat of unemployment and by falling wages – signs that the “glorious” prosperity of the post-war period was coming to an end. And these signs were not limited to France but expressed themselves in various forms across the ‘developed’ world, notably in the devaluation of the pound sterling and the dollar crisis in the USA. He stressed that these were indeed only signs and symptoms, that “this is not yet an open economic crisis, first because we are only at the beginning, and second because in today's capitalism the state possesses a whole arsenal of means to slow down, and temporarily to attenuate the crisis' most striking expressions”.

At the same time, while repudiating the anarchist (and Situationist) idea that revolution is possible at any time, the article also affirms that the economic crisis is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the revolution, that profound changes in the subjective consciousness of the masses are not automatically produced by the decline of the economy, contrary to the affirmation of the Stalinists in 1929, who declared the opening of a “Third Period” of imminent revolution in the wake of the 1929 crash, ,when in reality the working class was experiencing the most profound defeat in its history (of which Stalinism was, of course, both a product and active factor). 

May 68 was thus not yet the revolution, but it did signify that the counter-revolutionary period that followed the defeat of the first world wide revolutionary wave had come to an end. “The full significance of May 68 is that it was one of the most important reactions by the mass of workers to a deteriorating world economic situation”. The article does not go any further in examining the actual events of 68; that is not its purpose. But it does give some indications about the consequences of the end of the counter-revolution (a period which Marc had lived through from beginning to end) for the future unfolding of the class struggle. It meant that the new generation of the working class was freeing itself from many of the mystifications which had imprisoned it during the previous period, above all Stalinism and anti-fascism; and although the re-emerging crisis would push capitalism towards another world war, today, unlike in the 1930s, “Capitalism disposes of fewer and fewer themes of mystification capable of mobilizing the masses and sending them to the slaughter. The Russian myth is collapsing; the false choice between bourgeois democracy and totalitarianism is wearing very thin. In these conditions, the crisis can be seen immediately for what it is. Its first symptoms will provoke increasingly violent reactions from the masses in every country”.

Furthermore, as a series of articles written in 2008,May 68 and the revolutionary perspective’[3], insisted, May 68 was more than a purely defensive reaction to a deteriorating economic situation. It also gave rise to an intense political ferment, to innumerable debates about the possibility of a new society, to serious attempts by young politicised elements - workers as well as students - to discover the revolutionary traditions of the past. This dimension of the movement was above all what the revived the perspective of revolution, not as an immediate or short-term possibility, but as the historic product of a whole period of resurgent class struggle. The more immediate fruit of this new-found interest in revolutionary politics was the constitution of a new proletarian political milieu, including the groups that would form the ICC in the mid-70s.

The question we want to raise here, however, is whether, fifty years later, the predictions contained in Marc’s article have been proved correct or found wanting. 

50 years of the economic crisis

The majority of marxist currents in the first decades of the 20th century considered that the First World War marked the definitive shift from the era in which capitalist relations of production had been “forms of development” for the productive forces to becoming fetters on their further development. This was concretised, at the economic level, by the transformation of the cyclical crises of overproduction which had marked the 19th century to a chronic state of economic crisis accompanied by a permanent  militarisation of the economy and a spiral of barbaric wars. This did not mean, as some of the marxists in the revolutionary period that followed the 1914-18 war thought, that capitalism had entered into a “death crisis” from which any kind of recovery would be impossible. Within an overall epoch of decline, there would still be recoveries, expansion into new zones previously outside the capitalist system, and real advances in the sophistication of the productive forces. But the underlying tendency would be one in which economic crisis was no longer a passing storm, but a permanent, chronic illness, which would at certain moments enter into an acute phase. This was already becoming clear with the crisis of the 30s: the idea that ‘leaving well alone’, relying on the hidden hand of the market, would naturally allow the economy to recover -  the initial response of the more traditional bourgeois sectors - had to give way to a more openly interventionist policy by the state- typified by the New Deal in the US, and the Nazi war economy in Germany. And it was above all the latter which revealed, in a period of defeat for the working class, the real secret of the mechanismswhich served to alleviate the acute crisis of the 1930s: preparation for a second imperialist war. 

The return of the open crisis which our article proclaimed in 1969 was confirmed within the next few years, with the shock of the so-called ‘oil crisis’ of 1973-4 and the growing difficulties of the post-war Keynesian consensus, which expressed itself in mounting inflation and attacks on workers’ living standards, particular the wage levels which had risen steadily during the period of post-war prosperity. But, as we showed in our article ’30 years of the open economic crisis’ written in 1999[4], the tendency towards the open crisis becoming a permanent feature of decadent capitalism has become more evident in the entire period since 1968: today we are due an article on ’50 years of the open economic crisis’. Our 1999 article traces course of the crisis through the explosion of unemployment which followed the application of ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganomics in the early 80s; the financial crash of 1987; the recession of the early 90s; the convulsions in the Far Eastern ‘Dragons and Tigers’, Russia and Brazil in 1997-8. An updated version would include further recession at the turn of millennium and of course the so-called financial crash or credit crunch of 2007.  The 1999 article underlines the principal features of the crisis-ridden economy in these decades: the untrammelled growth of speculation, as investment in productive activities become increasingly unprofitable; the de-industrialisation of whole areas of the old capitalist centres as capital was drawn to the sources of cheaper labour power in the ‘developing’ countries; and, underlying a large part both of the growth and the financial shocks of this whole period, capital’s incurable addiction to debt. And it shows that the crisis of capitalism is not only measured in unemployment figures or rates of growth, but in its social, political and military ramifications. Thus it was the world economic crisis of capitalism which was a decisive factor in the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989-91, in the sharpening of imperialist tensions and the exacerbation of war and chaos, above all in the weakest zones of the global system. In our putative update we would also seek to show the link between the increased competition demanded by the crisis and the accelerating plunder of the natural environment, the consequences of which (pollution, climate change etc) are already having a direct impact on human populations throughout the world.  In brief: the prolonged character of capitalism’s open crisis in the last five decades, with the two major classes caught in a social stalemate, neither able to their respective solutions to the crisis – world war or world revolution – underlies the emergence of a new and terminal phase in the decadence of capitalism, the phase of generalised decomposition.

Of course, the trajectory of this period has not shown one long decline or even a permanent state of stagnation, and the ruling class has always made maximum propaganda use out of the various recoveries and mini-booms that have taken place in the advanced countries in the 80s, 90s and 2000s, while for many of its mouthpieces the impressive rise of the Chinese economy in particular is proof positive that capitalism is far from being a senile system. But the fragile, limited and temporary bases of these recoveries in the established centres of the system was cast under a very bright light by the enormous financial crash of 2007, which exposed the degree to which capitalist growth was founded on the shifting sands of unlimited debt. This phenomenon is also an element in the rise of China, even if the latter’s growth has a more substantial basis than the ‘vampire recoveries’, the ‘recoveries without jobs’ and the ‘recoveries without wage rises’ which we have seen in the western economies. But in the final analysis China cannot escape the contradictions of the global system and indeed the dizzying scale of its expansion has the potential to make future world crises of overproduction even more destructive. Looking back over the past five decades, it becomes evident that we are not talking about a cycle of boom and bust as in the 19th century, when capitalism really was a system in its prime, but a single, protracted, world-wide economic crisis, itself the expression of an underlying obsolescence of the mode of production. The 1969 article, armed with this understanding of the historic nature of the capitalist crisis, was thus able to diagnose the real significance of the small signs of economic ill-health that were so easily dismissed by the Situationist doctors.

The development of state capitalism

Looking back in this way we can also appreciate the correctness of the article’s assertion that “today's capitalism the state possesses a whole arsenal of means to slow down, and temporarily to attenuate the crisis' most striking expressions”.

The main reason why this crisis has dragged on for so long, and has so often been so difficult to perceive, is precisely the capacity of the ruling class to use the state to hold off and postpone the effects of the system’s contradictions. The ruling class from the 60s onwards did not make the same mistake as in the apologists for ‘laisser-faire’ in the 1930s. Instead, an older and wiser bourgeoisie maintained and strengthened the state capitalist interference in the economy which had enabled it to respond to the crisis in the 30s and which helped to sustain the post-war boom. This was evident with the first Keynesian responses to the reawakened crisis, which often took the form of nationalisations and direct financial manipulations by the state, but, ideological fog notwithstanding, it has continued, albeit in an altered form, throughout the epoch of ‘Reaganomics’ and ‘neo-liberalism’, in which the state has tended to delegate many of its functions to private sectors with the aim of increasing productivity and the competitive edge.

The 1999 article explains how this revised relationship between state and economy operated:

The mechanism of ‘financial engineering’ was as follows. On the one hand, the state issued bonds and securities in order to finance its enormous and ever-growing deficits which were subscribed to by the financial markets (banks, business and individuals). On the other hand, it pushed the banks to search for loans in the financial markets, and at the same time to issue bonds and securities and to carry out successive expansions of capital (issuing of shares). It was a question of a highly speculative mechanism which tried to exploit the development of a growing mass of fictitious capital (idle surplus value incapable of being invested in new capital). In this way, the weight of private funds became more important than public funds in the financing of debt (public and private).

This does not mean that there was a lessening of the weight of the state (as the ‘liberals’ proclaim), but rather there was a reply to the increasing needs of financing (and particularly immediate liquidity) which meant a massive mobilisation of all the available disposable capital”.

The credit crunch of 2007 is perhaps the clearest demonstration that the most ubiquitous cure adopted by the capitalist system in the last few decades - the resort to debt – has also poisoned the patient, postponing the immediate impact of the crisis only to raise future convulsions to an even higher level. But it also shows that, in the final analysis, this cure has been the systematic policy of the capitalist state. The credit bonanza which fuelled the housing boom prior to 2007, so often blamed on the greedy bankers, was in reality a policy decided and supported at the highest echelons of government, just as it was government which had to step in to shore up the banks and the whole tottering financial edifice in the wake of the crash.  The fact that they have done this by getting even further into debt, and even by unashamedly printing money (“quantitative easing”) is further evidence that capitalism can only react to its contradictions by making them worse.

********************************************************************************

It is one thing to show that we were right to predict the reappearance of the open economic crisis in 1969, and to offer a framework to explain why this crisis would be long drawn out affair. It is a more difficult task to show that our prediction of a resurgence of the international class struggle has also been vindicated. We will therefore devote a second part of this article to this problem, while a third part will look at what has become of the new revolutionary movement which was born out of the events of May-June 1968.

Amos, March 2018


[1] See also our short biography of Marc to get a better idea of one aspect of this “active participation” in the movement. “He had the opportunity on this occasion to show one of the traits of his character, which had nothing to do with those of an armchair theoretician. Present wherever the movement was going on, in the discussions but also in the demonstrations, he spent a whole night behind a barricade with a group of young elements, having decided to hold out until morning against the police...” https://en.internationalism.org/ir/066/marc-02

[3] World Revolution 313-316

[4] International Review 96 and 97

 

Deepen: 

Report on imperialist tensions (November 2017)

The report we publish below was presented and discussed at an international meeting of the ICC in November 2017, with the aim of drawing out the main tendencies in the evolution of imperialist tensions. In order to do this, it based itself on the organisation’s previous texts and reports which had made an in-depth analyses of these tendencies, i.e. the orientation text ‘Militarism and Decomposition’ in 1991 (published in International Review 64) and the report to the 20th International Congress (published in IR 152, 2013).

Since the latter report was written, there has been a series of major events in the aggravation of imperialist tensions in the Middle East: first, the direct military incursion by Turkey in Syria on 20 January, to confront the Kurdish troops based in the region of Afrin in the north of Syria. This intervention, which had at least the tacit agreement of Russia, is heavy with future military confrontations, in particular with the USA, which in this region is allied with the Kurdish forces of the YPG, and expresses important divisions within NATO, of which both Turkey and the USA are members. Then there was the US military strike in Syria (supported by Britain and France), aimed at the presumed sites for the construction of chemical weapons, and marking a clear increase in the growth of tensions between the USA and Russia. Still more recently we had Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, which has led to a sharpening of tensions between Israel and Iran but also to a more global destabilisation, since the American decision has been condemned by the majority of countries. All this highlights the risk of an uncontrolled escalation of conflicts in the Middle East (see our article), and shows that capitalism is a growing threat to humanity.

Over the last four years, imperialist relations have gone though some major developments: the war in Syria and the fight against IS, the Russian intervention in the Ukraine, the refugee crisis and the terrorist attacks in Europe, Brexit and the pressure of populism, the election of Trump in the USA and the accusations about Russia’s involvement in his election campaign (“Russiagate”), the tensions between the US and China over the provocations by North Korea, the opposition between Saudi Arabia and Iran (including the tensions over Qatar), the failed coup d’Etat against Erdogan and the subsequent repression in Turkey, the conflict over Kurdish autonomy, the upsurge of nationalism in Catalonia, and so on. It is thus important that the IB evaluates the extent to which these events are consistent with our general analyses of the period, but also what new orientations do they reveal?

To do this, it’s crucial, as the 1991 orientation text “Militarism and decomposition” puts it right from the start, to use a method that is adequate for understanding a situation which has no precedent:

“Contrary to the Bordigist current, the ICC has never considered marxism as an "invariant doctrine", but as living thought enriched by each important historical event. Such events make it possible either to confirm a framework and analyses developed previously, and so to support them, or to highlight the fact that some have become out of date, and that an effort of reflection is required in order to widen the ap­plication of schemas which had previously been valid but which have been overtaken by events, or to work out new ones which are capable of encompassing the new reality.

Revolutionary organizations and militants have the specific and fundamental responsibility of carrying out this effort of reflection, always moving forward, as did our predecessors such as Lenin, Rosa, Bilan, the French Communist Left, etc, with both caution and boldness:

  • basing ourselves always and firmly on the basic acquisitions of marxism,
  • examining reality without blinkers, and de­veloping our thought "without ostracism of any kind" (Bilan).

In particular, faced with such historic events, it is important that revolutionaries should be capable of distinguishing between those analyses which have been overtaken by events and those which still remain valid, in order to avoid a double trap: either succumbing to sclerosis, or "throwing the baby out with the bath water"

Applying this approach, which is imposed by current reality, has been the basis of our ability to analyse the fundamental evolution of imperialist relations for the past 26 years.

In this perspective, the present report proposes that we should try to grasp recent events at three levels, in order to locate their importance within our framework of analysis:

  1. To what extent are they in accord with the framework of analysis developed after the implosion of the eastern bloc? Here we will remind ourselves of the main analytical axes of the orientation text on militarism and decomposition (IR 64, first quarter of 1991)
  2. To what extent do they follow the major trends of imperialist tensions on a world scale, described in the report of the 20th international congress (IR 152, second quarter of 2013)?
  3. What are the most significant developments in imperialist tensions today?

The orientations of the 1991 OT

This text puts forward the analytical framework for understanding the question of imperialism and militarism in the period of decomposition. It advances two fundamental orientations for characterising imperialism in the current period:

The disappearance of the blocs does not call into question the reality of imperialism and militarism

On the contrary, they become more barbaric and chaotic: “The constitution of imperialist blocs is not the origin of militarism and imperialism. The oppo­site is true: the formation of these blocs is only the extreme consequence (which at certain mo­ments can aggravate the causes), an expression (and not the only one), of decadent capitalism's plunge into militarism and war…the end of the blocs only opens the door to a still more barbaric, aberrant, and chaotic form of imperialism”.

This is expressed in particular by the outbreak of extreme imperialist appetites and the multiplication of tensions and conflicts: “The difference with the period that has just ended is that these conflicts and antagonisms, which before were contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs; will now come to the forefront, because with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the presence of the blocs, these conflicts risk becoming more violent and more numerous, in particular, of course, in zones where the proletariat is weakest”

Similarly we are seeing the development of “every man for himself” and their corollary, the attempts to contain the chaos, both of which are factors aggravating military barbarism: “the chaos which is threatening the major developed countries and their inter-relations.….. faced with the tendency towards generalized chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc's collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold together its different compo­nents, than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense, the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging”.

The OT thus centrally underlines the fact that there is a historic tendency towards every man for himself, towards the weakening of US control over the world, particularly over its former allies. And at the same time, there is an attempt on its part to use military force, where it has an enormous superiority, to maintain its status and impose its control over these same ex-allies.

The reconstitution of blocs is not on the agenda

The increasingly barbaric and chaotic character of imperialism in the period of decomposition is a major obstacle to the reconstitution of new blocs: “the exacerbation of the latter (militarism and imperialism) in the present phase of capitalism's life paradoxically constitutes a major barrier to the re-formation of a new system of blocs tak­ing the place of the one which has just disappeared….  the very fact that military force has become - as the Gulf conflict confirms - a pre­ponderant factor in any attempt by the ad­vanced countries to limit world chaos is a con­siderable barrier to this tendency…the reconstitution of a new pair of imperialist blocs is not only impossible for a number of years to come, but may very well never take place again”.

The USA is the only power that can play the role of world cop. The only other possible candidates for the leadership of a bloc are Germany and Japan: “the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the mo­ment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a mini­mum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force”.

At the same time, the USSR will never be able to regain a role as challenger: “It is, for example, out of the question that the head of the bloc which has just collapsed - ­the USSR - could ever reconquer this position”.

Here again the analysis remains essentially accurate: after 25 years in the period of decomposition, there is still no perspective for the reconstitution of blocs.

In conclusion, the framework and the two main axes presented in the OT have broadly been confirmed and remain profoundly valid.

However, further reflection is needed about certain elements of the analysis

The role of the USA as sole gendarme of the world has evolved a great deal over the past 25 years: it’s one of the key questions to deepen in this report. However, the OT puts forward an orientation which has become even more concrete than the predictions we made in 1991: the fact that the actions of the USA would create further chaos. This has been strikingly illustrated by the development of terrorism today, which is to a large extent the result of the US policy in Iraq, and secondarily of the French-British intervention in Libya.

We can also say today that the analysis overestimated the potential role attributed to Japan and even Germany. Japan has been able to build up its weaponry and has gained more autonomy in certain sectors, but this is not at all comparable to the tendency towards the formation of blocs since Japan has had to submit to US protection faced with the threat from North Kore and above all from China. The potential still exists for Germany without having been seriously strengthened over the last 25 years. Germany has gained more weight, it plays a preponderant and even leading role in Europe, but on the military level it remains a dwarf, even if (unlike Japan) it has had its troops participating in as many UN “mandates” as possible, By contrast, the period has seen the emergence of China as a new rising power, a role we considerably underestimated in the past.

Finally for Russia, the analysis remains basically correct, in the sense that its position as a bloc leader in 1945 was already an “accident” of history. But the prediction that “despite its enormous arse­nals, the USSR will never again be able to play a major role on the international stage” and that it. is “condemned to return to a third-rate posi­tion” have not really been confirmed: Russia has certainly not become a world-wide challenger to the USA but it plays a far from negligible role as a “troublemaker”, which is typical of decomposition, which through its alliances and military interventions is exacerbating chaos all over the world (and it has had a certain success in Ukraine and Syria, has strengthened its position vis-a-vis Turkey and Iran and has developed a cooperation with China). We undoubtedly underestimated the resources of an imperialism with its back to the wall, ready to defend its interests tooth and nail.

The analyses of the report to the 20th ICC Congress (2013)

Locating itself in the framework of an increasingly barbaric and chaotic imperialism and of the growing impasse facing US policy, which could only further exacerbate military barbarism (axes of the report to the 19th congress[1]), the report puts forward four orientations in the development of imperialist confrontations which concretise the axes of the 91 OT:

 - The growth of every man for himself, expressed in particular by a multiplication of imperialist ambitions. This was expressed concretely by:

  • (a) the danger of military confrontations and the growing instability of the states of the Middle East: unlike the first Gulf war of 91, which was stirred up by the US and waged by an international coalition under its leadership, this highlights the terrifying extension of chaos;
  • b) the rise of China and the exacerbation of tensions in the Far East. The report’s analysis partially corrects the underestimation of the role of China in our previous analyses. However, despite an impressive economic expansion, growing military power and a more and more marked presence in imperialist confrontations, the report asserts that China does not have the industrial and technological capacities to impose itself as the head of a bloc and constitute itself as a global challenger to the USA.

 - The growing impasse of the policies of the USA as a global cop, in particular in Afghanistan and Iraq, has led to a further plunge into military barbarism “The striking failure of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan has weakened the world leadership of the USA. Even if the American bourgeoisie under Obama has chosen a policy of controlled withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been able to reduce the impact of the catastrophic policies of Bush, it has not been able to reverse the tendency and this has lead to a further plunge into military barbarism. The execution of Bin-Laden was an attempt by the US to react to this retreat in its leadership and underline its absolute military and technological superiority. However, this reaction has not called into question the underlying trend towards retreat”.

 - The tendency towards the explosive extension of zones of permanent instability and chaos:in whole swathes of the planet, from Afghanistan to Africa, to the point where certain bourgeois analysts, such as Jacques Attali in France, talks openly about the ‘Somalisation’ of the world”

 - The crisis of the eurozone (the PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) is accentuating tensions between European states and centrifugal tendencies in the EU “On the other hand, the crisis and the drastic measures being imposed are pushing towards the break-up of the EU and a rejection of the idea of submitting to the control of a particular country, i.e. are pushing towards every man for himself. The UK radically oppose the proposed measures of centralisation and in the countries of Southern Europe there is a growing anti-German nationalism. The centrifugal forces can also lead to a tendency towards the fragmentation of states, through the autonomisation of regions like Catalonia, Northern Italy, Flanders or Scotland….Thus the pressure of the crisis, through the complex inter-action of centripetal and centrifugal forces, is accentuating the process towards the break-up of the EU and exacerbating tensions between states”.

The four major orientations developed in the report also remain valid. They show clearly that the tension between on the one hand the push towards every man for himself and the efforts to control chaos, underlined by the 91 OT, are leading to an increasingly chaotic and explosive situation.

 The general development of instability in imperialist relations

Since the 2013 report, events confirm the slide towards increasingly chaotic inert-imperialist relations. But above all, the situation is marked by its highly irrational and unpredictable character, linked to the impact of populist pressures, in particular the fact that the world’s number one power is today led by a populist president whose reactions are extremely unpredictable. An increasingly short-term approach by the bourgeoisie and the strong unpredictability that results from it are above all features of the policy of the US gendarme, but can also be seen in the policies of other imperialist powers, the developments of conflicts in the world, and the growth of tensions in Europe.

The decline of the US superpower and the political crisis in the American bourgeoisie

The arrival in power of Donald Trump, surfing on the populist wave, has had three main consequences:

The first concerns the unpredictability of decisions and incoherence of US foreign policy. The actions of this populist president and his administration, such as the denunciation of transpacific and transatlantic treaties, of the climate agreement, the putting into question of NATO and the nuclear treaty with Iran, unconditional support for Saudi Arabia, the bellicose set-to with North Korea or the tensions with China, are sapping the bases of international policies and agreements which had been defended by different US administrations. His unpredictable decisions, threats and poker moves have had the effect of undermining the reliability of the US as an ally: the detours, bluffs and sudden changes of position by Trump not only make the US look ridiculous but are leading to less and less countries having any confidence in the US.

At the same time,: even if the American bourgeoisie under Obama, by opting for a policy of controlled retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, was able to reduce the impact of Bush’s disastrous policies, it hasn’t been able to reverse the basic tendency towards the decline of the sole superpower, and the impasse of US policy has been sharply accentuated by the actions of the Trump administration. At the G20 the isolation of the USA on climate change and the trade war was obvious. What’s more, Russia’s involvement in Syria to save Assad made the US step back and led to a strengthening of Russia’s influence in the Middle East, particularly in Turkey and Iran, whereas the US has not been able to contain China’s advance from outsider status in the 90s to that of a serious challenger which presents itself as a champion of globalisation.

The risk of destabilising the world situation and augmenting imperialist tensions has never been so strong, as we have seen with North Korea or Iran: the policy of the US is more than ever a direct factor in the aggravation of chaos on a global level.

The second consequence of Trump coming to power has been the opening of a major political crisis within the US bourgeoisie. The constant need to try to contain the unpredictable decisions of the  president but above all the suspicions that Trump’s electoral success was largely due to support from Russia (“Russiagate”), a prospect which is totally unacceptable for the US bourgeoisie, points to a particularly delicate political situation within the US bourgeoisie and a difficulty in controlling the political game.

The incessant battle to “contain” the president plays out at several levels: the pressure exerted by the Republican party (the failed votes on getting rid of Obamacare), opposition to Trump’s plans by his own ministers (the minister of Justice Jeff Sessions refusing to resign or the ministers of foreign affairs and defence who “nuance” Trump’s proposals), the struggle for control over the White House staff by the “generals” (McMaster, Mattis). And yet these efforts don’t always stop things getting out of hand, such as in September when Trump made a deal with the Democrats to stymie Republican opposition to raising the debt ceiling.

Whatever the approach towards Russia (about which there can be divergences within the US bourgeoisie, as we shall see)), the accusations that Russia was mixed up in the presidential election campaign and that Trump has ties to the Russian mafia are extremely serious, since this would mean that for the first time ever a US president has been elected with the support of the Russians, which is unacceptable for the interests of the US bourgeoisie. If the inquiries confirm the accusations, they can only lead to impeachment proceedings for Trump.

The final consequence of Trump coming to power is the development of tensions over the options for US imperialism. The question of links with Russia is also a focus for clan confrontations within the US bourgeoisie. Since the main challenger today is China, would a rapprochement with the former head of the rival bloc and an important military power be acceptable for the US bourgeoisie in order to contain chaos, terrorism and the push from China? Could America contribute to the re-emergence of its Cold War rival and accept negotiating with it in certain areas? Would this make it possible to contain Chinese ambitions and also strike a blow against Germany? Within the Trump administration, there are numerous partisans of such a rapprochement, like Tillerson in foreign affairs and Ross in trade, as well as the president’s son-in-law Kushner. However, a considerable part of the US bourgeoisie (particularly within the army, the secret services and the Democratic Party) don’t seem prepared to make concessions at this level. In this context, the investigations into Russiagate, which imply the possibility of a US president being manipulated and blackmailed by an external enemy, are being widely exploited by these factions to make any rapprochement with Russia totally unacceptable.

The crisis of the US gendarme further exacerbates the push towards every man for himself among the other imperialist powers and the unpredictability of relations between them

Trump’s protectionist orientations and the USA’s exit from various international agreements is leading various powers, especially those in Europe and Asia, to strengthen their ties – without for the moment completely excluding the US – and to express their wish to become more independent from the USA and defend their own interests. This appeared clearly through the collaboration between Germany and China during the last G20 in Hamburg, and this collaboration between European and Asian countries could also be seen at the Bonn climate conference which aimed to concretise the objectives drawn up at the Paris conference.

The USA’s withdrawal is exacerbating the every man for himself tendency among the other big powers: we have already pointed to the aggressive imperialist stance of Russia which has enabled it to regain footholds on the global imperialist battleground (Ukraine, Syria). As regards China, in the previous report we still underestimated (a) the rapidity of its economic modernisation and (b) the internal political stability of China, which seems to have been strongly reinforced under Xi. China presents itself today as the defender of globalisation in the face of US protectionism and as a pole of planetary stability in contrast to the instability of US policies, while at the same time developing a military strategy aimed at increasing its military presence outside of China (the South China Sea).

This development of every man for himself can go hand in hand with the establishment of circumstantial alliances (China and Germany to orient the G20, the Franco-German tandem to reinforce military cooperation in Europe, China and Russia in relation to Iran), but these remain fluctuating and can’t be seen as bases for the emergence of real blocs. Let’s consider at this level the example of the alliance between China and Russia. The two powers share common interests, for example in relation to the USA in Syria and Iran, or in the Far East (North Korea) in relation to the US and Japan. They have also held joint military manoeuvres in both regions. Russia has become a major supplier of energy to China, thus reducing its dependency on the West, while China has massive investments in Siberia and supplies Russia with considerable amounts of consumer goods. However, Russia does not want to be subordinated to a powerful neighbor which it is already dependent upon to an unprecedented degree. What’s more, the two countries are also rivals in central Asia, South East Asia and the Indian peninsula: the project of the “New Silk Road” goes directly against Russian interests, while Russia is renewing its links with India, the main adversary of China in Asia (along with Japan). Finally, the rapprochement between China and the EU and with Germany in particular represents a deadly threat to Russia which could find itself squeezed between China and Germany.

The extension of zones of war, instability and chaos

Faced with the explosion of every man for himself, the efforts to “hold together the different parts of a body that is tending to break up” seem to be more and more futile, while the instability of imperialist relations makes for an unpredictable extension of areas of conflict.

The defeat of Islamic State will not reduce instability and chaos: the confrontations between Kurdish militia and the Turkish army in Syria, between Kurdish units and the Iraqi army and pro-Iranian Shia militias in Kirkuk in Iraq herald new bloody battles in the region. The stance taken by Turkey, which plays a key role in the region, is both central to the evolution of tensions and full of danger for the stability of the country itself. Turkey has important imperialist ambitions in the region, not only in Syria and Iraq, but in all the Muslim countries, from Bosnia to Qatar and Turkmenistan to Egypt, and is playing its own imperialist cards to the full: on the one hand, its status as a member of NATO is very unstable, given its taut relations with the USA and the majority of countries in Western Europe who are members of NATO, and also the tensions over the refugees and its difficult relations with Greece; on the other hand, it is now heading towards a rapprochement with Russia and even Iran, which is a direct imperialist competitor in the Middle East, while at the same time opposing itself to Saudi Arabia (refusal to withdraw troops from Qatar). At the same time, the struggle for power inside the country has sharpened, with the increasingly dictatorial practices of Erdogan and the revival of Kurdish guerilla activity. At this level, the USA’s refusal to extradite Gülen but also its support, arming and training of Kurdish militias in Iraq by the USA, are heavy with menace for the development of chaos inside Turkey itself.

The unpredictability of certain foci of tension is especially evident in the case of the North Korea. But while the root of this conflict is the increasingly overt confrontation between China and the USA, a certain number of elements make the outcome of this situation highly uncertain:

  • The ideology of the besieged fortress in North Korea, the advocacy of atomic weapons to respond to an inevitable attack by the Americans and the Japanese as an absolute priority, implies a high level of distrust towards its Chinese or Russian “friends” (and this in turn is based in certain experiences of the Korean partisans during the Second World War) and means that China’s control over North Korea is limited;
  • Trump’s poker moves, threatening North Korea with total destruction, raises the question of his credibility. This is leading on the one hand to an accelerated rearmament of Japan (already announced by prime minister Abe); but on the other hand, the unbalance in atomic weapons between the USA and North Korea (a different situation from the “balance of terror” between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War) and the sophistication of “limited” atomic weapons, does not rule out the threat of their unilateral use by the USA, which would be a qualitative step in the descent into barbarism.

In short, the zone of war, decomposition of states and of chaos is tending to widen more and more, stretching from Ukraine to South Sudan, from Nigeria to the Middle East, from Yemen to Afghanistan, from Syria to Burma and Thailand. Here we also have to point to the extension of zones of chaos in Latin America: the growing political and economic destabilisation in Venezuela, the political and economic chaos in Brazil, the destabilisation in Mexico which will get worse if Trump’s protectionist policies towards the country are carried through. To all this must be added the extension of terrorism, its presence in the day-to-day reality of Europe, the USA, etc. The chaos spreading across the planet means that there is less and less possibility for reconstruction (whereas this could still be envisaged for Bosnia or Kosovo), as shown by the failure of the policy of the reconstruction and re-establishment of state structures in Afghanistan.

The development of tensions in Europe

This factor, already seen as potentially present in the report to the 20th Congress, has accentuated in a spectacular manner in the last few years. With Brexit, the EU has entered a zone of considerable turbulence, while under the cover of protecting citizens against terrorism police and army budgets have risen noticeably in Western Europe and still more in Eastern Europe.

Under the pressure of economic measures, the refugee crisis, terrorist attacks and above all the electoral victories of populist movements, fractures within Europe are multiplying and antagonisms sharpening: economic pressure by the EU on Greece and Italy, the result of the Brexit referendum, the pressure of populism on European policies (Holland, Germany) and victories in the countries of Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary and recently the Czech Republic), internal tensions in Spain with the “Catalan crisis”. A gradual dismemberment of the EU, for example via a “several speed Europe”, as currently advocated by the Franco-German duo, would produce a marked intensification of imperialist tensions in Europe.

The relationship between populism (against the “elites” and their globalist, cosmopolitan ideas, and for protectionism) and nationalism was highlighted by Trump’s speech to the UN in September: “nationalism serves an international interest: if every country thinks of itself first, things will arrange themselves for the world”. This exacerbated glorification of every man for himself (Trump’s “America First”) weighs heavily on the Catalan conflict. Against the background of the euro crisis and the drastic austerity which came in its wake, we are seeing a dramatic interaction between populism and nationalism: one the one hand a part of the middle and petty Catalan bourgeoisie which “no longer wants to pay for Spain”, or the provocations of Puigdemont’s Catalanist coalition dominated by the left and faced with a loss of credibility in power; on the “Espagnolist” side, the nationalist reaction of the Spanish prime minister Rajoy who has to deal with a crisis in the Partido Popular, which is deeply mired in corruption.

“Militarism and war have been a fundamental given of capitalism's life since its entry into decadence…  if militarism, imperialism, and war are identified to such an extent with the period of decadence, it is because the latter corre­sponds to the fact that capitalist relations of production have become a barrier to the devel­opment of the productive forces: the perfectly irrational nature, on the global economic level, of military spending and war only expresses the aberration of these production relations' contin­ued existence”. (“Militarism and decomposition”). The level of imperialist chaos and military barbarism today, far worse than we could have imagined 25 years ago, expresses very clearly the obsolescence of the system and the need for its overthrow.



[1] This report was not published in our press. However, the reader can refer to the section on imperialist tensions from the resolution on the international situation adopted by the Congress.


 

 

 

Rubric: 

Imperialist Tensions

The world bourgeoisie against the October revolution

As we expected, the megaphones of the bourgeoisie have not remained quiet on the centenary of the 1917 October revolution. As in every decade, lies and contempt have animated newspaper articles, documentaries and televised speeches which have followed one after the other for several weeks. Without any great originality, intellectuals have rehashed the story of a coup d'état made by a handful of men in the service of a neurotic boss greedy for power and motivated by personal vengeance[i]. Thus, in this view, the struggle for a society without social classes and without the exploitation of man by man is just a fig-leaf for an expressly totalitarian undertaking which has its origins in the thoughts of Marx himself[ii].

It would be useless to look for any semblance of honesty among these guard dogs of democracy and the capitalist mode of production. But if this event is so well classified in the archives of history, why the desperation to deform it every ten years with so much arrogance? Why does the bourgeoisie denigrate one of the most precious episodes in the history of the struggle of the proletariat? Contrary to the words that it spreads through its media, the bourgeoisie knows very well that the class that failed to overturn its world a hundred years ago still exists today. It is also aware that its world is still more ailing than it was in 1917. And its survival depends on its capacity to intelligently and unfailingly use the weapons at its disposal so as to avoid a new October which could, this time, see a result for the historic aim of the working class. Very quickly the bourgeoisie understood the weight that the revolution in Russia could have on the world's social order. Thus, after tearing themselves apart for four years, the principal powers of the time made common cause in order to stem the proletarian wave which threatened to submerge a society which had nothing more to offer, except war.

Against official history, according to which the October 17 revolution contained in embryo the traces of its degeneration, this article aims to show that the isolation of the Russian proletariat is first of all due to the coordination of bourgeois governments ready to take up this class war whose outcome would turn out to be decisive for the course of history. It will also show that from 1917 to today, different factions of the dominant class have used all the weapons at their disposal to block and repress the revolution, then mislead and denigrate its memory and its lessons.

The provocation of the July days

In June 1917, faced with continuing war and the imperialist programme of the Provisional Government, the proletariat reacted with animation. During the enormous demonstrations of June 18 in Petrograd the internationalist slogans of the Bolsheviks became the majority for the first time. At the same time, the Russian military offensive ended in a fiasco when the German army pierced the front in several places. The news of the setback for the offensive arrived in the capital and stoked the revolutionary flames. In order to confront this very tense situation, the idea appeared of provoking a premature revolt in Petrograd: crush the workers and the Bolsheviks by putting the responsibility for the military offensive's setback on the proletariat of the capital who had "stabbed in the back" those at the front. For this the bourgeoisie came up with several machinations aimed at pushing the workers in the capital into a revolt. The resignation of four members of the Cadet Party from the government and pressure from the Entente on the Provisional Government led the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries to rally to the bourgeois government[iii]; which only re-launched the clamour for the immediate taking of power by the soviets. Further, the threat of sending the regiments of the capital to the front only increased the soldier's discontent, which then moved in the direction of an armed uprising against the Provisional Government. The July 3 demonstration would have turned out to be catastrophic for the continuation of the revolution if the Bolshevik Party hadn't succeeded in calming the ardour of the masses and preventing them from a premature confrontation with troops under the command of the government. In these crucial days the party remained faithful to the proletariat by turning it away from the trap laid by the bourgeoisie. But these provocations were small-scale compared to the repression and the campaigns of lies that confronted the Bolsheviks in the days following. As today, the Bolsheviks were charged with the worst accusations: German agents paid by the Kaiser, snipers who fired isolated shots at the troops entering Petrograd. All means were used in order to discredit the party in the eyes of the workers in the capital. It was the deployment of enormous energy and thanks to a great political discernment that the Bolsheviks were able to defend their honour. If the July Days revealed the indispensable role of the party, they also revealed the real nature of the Mensheviks and S-Rs. In fact their support for the bourgeois government in these crucial days [iv] was the cause of their discrediting among the masses. Thus, as Lenin wrote: “A new period is coming in. The victory of the counter revolutionaries is making the people disappointed with the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties and is paving the way for the masses to adopt a policy of support for the revolutionary proletariat. "[v].

The bourgeoisie tries to prevent the proletarian revolution

In an interview given to the journalist and militant socialist John Reed some time before the taking of the Winter Palace, Rodzianko, the Russian "Rockefeller" stated: "the revolution is a sickness. Sooner or later, the foreign powers will have to intervene, as one must care for a sick child and teach him how to walk".[vi]

This intervention wasn't long in coming. Very quickly, diplomats of the big powers were in agreement with the Russian bourgeoisie in order to settle this question with some urgency. For the chief of British intelligence in Russia, Sir Samuel Hoare, the best solution was the installation of a military dictatorship. The Officer's Union of the army and the fleet proposed the same solution. This was also expressed by the Culture Minister, Kartachev, a member of the Cadet Party: "whoever is not afraid of being cruel and brutal will take the power in their hands".[vii]

The attempted Kornilov[viii] coup d'état in August 1917 was supported by London and Paris and the setback for this first counter-revolutionary attempt was far from discouraging for the world bourgeoisie. Henceforth for the Allies, it was a question of stopping the growing influence of the Bolsheviks among the ranks of the proletariat of Russia. On November 3, a secret conference took place of military allies in Russia in the office of the chief of the Red Cross, Colonel Thompson. Faced with the "Bolshevik peril", the American, General Knox quite simply proposed picking up the Bolsheviks and shooting them[ix]. But on November 7, the Military Revolutionary Committee took the Winter Palace and power was in the hands of the Petrograd Soviet. For the world bourgeoisie, military intervention now remained the sole option; much more so as the echo of the revolution was being felt throughout Europe.

Straightaway, the 2nd Congress of Soviets adopted the decree on peace which proposed to the belligerents an immediate peace without annexations. But this appeal found no response among the allied powers who wanted to draw the conflict out while waiting for American help. For the Central Powers, the liberation of the Eastern front allowed them to reorganise before the United States entered the war. A truce of three weeks was thus signed at Brest-Litovsk November 22, with the General Staff of Austria and Germany. Negotiations opened on December 9 between the two parties, but the same day, the battle of Rostov-on-Don between the Red Guards and the White armies, heralded the opening of the civil war.[x] After seizing power, the hardest test now stood in front of the proletariat of Russia. While waiting for an extension of the revolution to the rest of Europe, it was necessary to prepare for a confrontation with the counter-revolutionary forces of the interior that were well supported by the major powers.

Beginning of the civil war and of the encirclement

The counter-revolution was really organised in the days following the elections to the Constituent Assembly which was marked by a majority hostile to the Soviet government. At the end of November, generals Alexiev, Kornilov and Denikin, and the Cossak Kaledin, set up the army of volunteers in the south of Russia. At the beginning it was composed of about 300 officers. This army was the first military reaction of the Russian bourgeoisie. Its financing was provided by: "the plutocracy of Rostov-on-the-Don which raised six-and-a-half million roubles, that of Novocherkassk about two million". Made up of officers favourable to a restoration of the monarchy, it held, "the embryo of a class character" according to the Russian general Denikin[xi].

The Soviet government couldn't allow this army to be set up without reacting and the revolution had to strengthen itself on the military level. On January 28, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars adopted a decree aimed at transforming the Red Guard into a workers’ and peasants’ Red Army made up "of the most conscious and best organised elements of the labouring classes"[xii]. But the organisation of this army remained a difficult task. In fact, due to the lack of competent communist leaders, Trotsky recruited from the officer corps of the Tsarist army. By the beginning of 1918, the balance of force was hardly in favour of the Russia of the Soviets. Germany and Austro-Hungary profited from the breakdown of the army and then from its demobilisation on January 30 in order to put an end to the armistice signed some weeks before. In a radio programme reported in Pravda, the Council of People's Commissars protested: "regarding the offensive launched by the German government against the Soviet Republic of Russia which proclaimed the end of the state of war and begun to demobilise the army on all fronts. The workers and peasants government of Russia could expect a less similar attitude; the armistice had not been denounced by any of the contracting parties neither directly nor indirectly, neither February 10, nor any other moment as both parties were bound by the agreement of December 2,[xiii] 1917."

In fact Germany used the pretext of the independence of Ukraine to go onto the offensive with the consent of the Rada, the bourgeois government of Ukraine. A rout of the Red Guard followed, recalled by the Bolshevik Primakov:

"The retreat of the Red Guard resembles a great exodus. More than a hundred thousand, accompanied by their families, fled Ukraine. Tens of thousands of others dispersed into the villages, the hamlets, the forests and the ravines of Ukraine (...) The heavy burden of war, the violence of the occupying troops, the arrogance of the German lieutenants, the impudence of the haidamaks (Cossack paramilitaries), the bloody vengeance of the big owners, the betrayal of the Rada central, the open pillage of the country only inflamed popular hatred. The government of the central Rada was known as the Government of Betrayal."[xiv]

It is in this very difficult situation that the first mass levies of the Red Army took place while the question of peace was more and more pressing for the survival of the revolution.

The peace of Brest-Litovsk and the military offensive of the bourgeoisie

If, in order to gain time in the first place, the Republic of Soviets adopted a strategy of "neither war, nor peace", the delayed European revolution made the signing of the peace inevitable despite the shameful conditions imposed by the Central Empire which amputated a huge part of Russian territory. We know that afterwards the question of the peace gave rise to debates within the Bolshevik Party and the left S-R's. It's not the place here to dwell on these. But with this setback the position defended by Lenin, accepted by the Seventh Party Congress, turned out to be the best adapted to the situation.[xv]

In the weeks and months that followed, the Republic of Soviets was encircled on all fronts and the White Armies were set up in several parts of the country. In Samara, the Czechoslovakian legion was set up by the Entente powers[xvi] sowing terror along the Trans-Siberian railway line in important conurbations, thus facilitating the uprisings. Subsequently, the Anglo-Americans landed at Murmansk, the Whites occupied the south of western Russia, the Germans and Austrians came into the Don region and Japanese troops landed at Vladivostok...

At the beginning of summer 1918, the situation of the Republic of Soviets was becoming very alarming. On July 29 Lenin wrote: "Murmansk to the north, the Czechoslovak front in the east, Turkestan, Baku and Astrakhan in the south-east, we are seeing that all the chains forged by imperialism are in place." We can see that the engagement of the powers of the Entente was decisive for the organisation of the counter-revolution - a detail that our good democrats prefer to avoid. At the beginning of 1919, about 25,000 British, French, Italian, American and Serb soldiers were mobilised between Archangel and Murmansk[xvii] in a fight to the death against "the Bolshevik peril", which would continue to spread "if it wasn't stopped", according to Clemenceau.

The testimony of a member of the Expeditionary Force, Ralph Albertson, bears eloquent witness to the determination and barbarity used by this anti-communist coalition: "We used all the exploding gas shells possible against the Bolsheviks... We laid all the booby-traps possible when we evacuated the villages. Once we shot more than twenty prisoners... And when we took the commissar at Borok, a sergeant told me that his body had been left in the street, wounded by more than sixteen bayonet cuts. We took Borok by surprise and the commissar, a civilian, had no time to take up arms... I heard an officer tell his men that they weren't to take prisoners, that they had to kill them even if they were unarmed... I saw unarmed Bolshevik prisoners, causing no trouble, slaughtered in cold blood... Every night a battalion of incendiaries caused masses of victims."[xviii]

The peace of Brest-Litovsk only stirred up the hatred of the different counter-revolutionary factions but also of the left S-R's against the Bolsheviks. From this time on, the Russia of the Soviets appeared like a besieged fortress where hunger "is at the door of many towns, villages, factories and mills", as Trotsky related. The alliance of the Whites and the western powers plunged the revolution into a situation of a permanent struggle for survival. Moreover, from March 15, 1918, the different governments of the Entente decided to reject the peace of Brest-Litovsk and organised an armed intervention. But while the Entente powers were intervening directly in Russia, they also counted on the betrayal of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in order to advance the counter-revolution. In June 1918, the ex-assistant of Kerensky, the S-R Boris Savinkov, forecast the assassination of Lenin and Trotsky and started up an insurrection in Rybinsk and Yaroslav so as to facilitate landings by the Allies. In other words, in view of the extreme weakness of the Red Army, a great offensive was put into action in order to finish with the revolution once and for all.

As Savinkov relates, the Whites hoped to "encircle the capital with uprisings in the towns and, using the support of the Allies and Czechoslovaks to the north, who had just taken Samara on the Volga, putting the Bolsheviks in a difficult situation". We now know, thanks to the memoires published by several foreign secret agents and to investigations appearing in Pravda some years later, as well as diplomatic sources, that Britain and France were at the heart of this plot. The plans for insurrections in the towns around Moscow, the foreign landings, the Czechoslovak offensive were part of one and the same scheme orchestrated by the foreign military and diplomats and executed by leading S-R's who were ferociously opposed to peace with Germany and to the extension of the revolution.[xix]

The Czechoslovak regiments, guided by the Allies, took Samara on June 8 and then laid siege to Omsk. A month later they took Zlatoust in the Urals then, a few days later, they approached Yekaterinburg where the Imperial family was interned. The liberation of this family would have allowed the unification of the counter-revolutionary forces that were having a difficult time settling their own arguments and divergences. The Bolsheviks didn't want to run this risk and decided to execute the whole family. This decision was motivated by the necessity to intimidate the enemy and to show it, as Trotsky wrote some years later, "that there was no retreat possible, that the issue was total victory or total defeat". Despite everything, this decision was turned back against the Bolsheviks. The execution of the Tsar's children was utilised by the international bourgeoisie in its propaganda campaigns so as to present the Bolsheviks as barbarians thirsty for blood.

In July and August the offensive continued with the French and British landing in Murmansk in the north where they installed an “autonomous” government. The Turks and the British occupied Azerbaijan. The Germans went into Georgia with the consent of the Mensheviks while the Czech legions continued their advance towards the west. These weeks turned out to be decisive for the defence of the revolution, whose survival was hanging by a thread. At Sviajsk, close to Kazan, after several days of fighting, the extremely weakened high-command of the 5th Army could have all been captured with its main military chiefs beginning with Trotsky. A lack of information and strategic errors by the White generals allowed Trotsky and his men to escape. Given the extreme weakness of the Soviet power, the capture of its main leaders would have dealt a fatal blow to the morale and determination of the troops.

In the north, the British took command of all the armies of the region. Outside of four or five British battalions, the force was composed of four or five American battalions, one French, one Polish and one Italian plus some mixed formations[xx]. A Russian army was also organised but remained under the command and supervision of the British. At the beginning of August, this northern army took Archangel, overthrew the soviet and set up a provisional government composed of S-R cadets and controlled by British general Pool.

At the same time, the Commune of Baku fell in mid-August faced with an offensive by the Turkish army, some moussavatists (Azerbaijan nationalists) and some British regiments. Twenty-six people's commissars were gunned down on September 18 by the British[xxi].

Different factions of the Russian bourgeoisie profited from this difficult context in order to destabilise the power of the Soviets by fomenting plots which could have turned out to be disastrous for the revolution.

The time of plots

 A counter-revolutionary bloc was formed from May and June 1918, going from monarchists to some Mensheviks and S-R's. All these rallied around a "National Centre" that was originally created by the Cadets. The main leaders of the movement worked to collect political and military information which they transmitted to different White armies and maintained close relations with British, French and American secret agents. Moreover, a special conference was held in October 1918, composed of representatives of the Entente countries and the National Centre. The Cheka reacted rapidly, taking account of the existence of this single centre of the counter-revolution.

But that didn't prevent attempts aiming to destabilise the Soviet Republic. August 30, the chief of the Cheka, Ouritsky, was assassinated by an S-R. Some hours later an attempt was made on the life of Lenin when he came out of the Michaelson factory. But these two attempts were part of a much wider enterprise aimed at liquidating all of the leading Bolsheviks: "On August 15, Bruce Lockhart (a British secret agent) received a visit from an officer who presented himself as Colonel Berzine, the commander of the Latvian Guard of the Kremlin. He handed over a letter of recommendation written by Cromey, the British naval attaché to Petrograd. Berzine declared that, although they had initially supported the Bolsheviks, the Latvians didn't want to fight against the British who had landed at Archangel. After discussing with Groener, the French General Counsel, Lockhart put Berzine in touch with Railey. At the end of August, Groener presided over a secret meeting of certain Allied representatives. It was held at the General Consulate of the United States. Railey and another spy, George Hill, as well as Moscow's Figaro correspondent, René Marchand, were in attendance. Raily recounts in his memoires that he made it known that he had bought Berzine for two million roubles. It was a question of a single blow seizing the leading Bolsheviks who were due at a meeting of their Central Committee. The British were in touch with General Yudenitch and were preparing to supply him with arms and material. (...) After the assassination of Ouritski, the Cheka, who were on the plotters’ scent, had penetrated the British embassy in Petrograd. Cromey fired on the police, killing a commissar and several agents. He was shot and so was the naval attaché who was about to burn some compromising papers. But there was still enough left to enlighten the investigators; Raily managed to escape. After several months he got back to London where he accused Marchand of having betrayed him... As to Berzine, the Soviet press subsequently revealed that he had indicated to his chiefs that Bruce Lockhart and Raily had offered him two million roubles to participate in the assassination of the leading Bolsheviks."[xxii]  

The arrest of Bruce Lockhart concluded an enquiry that fully demonstrated the foreign participation in the plot and the scheming of the Whites[xxiii].

This failed plot was nonetheless one of the culminating points of the counter-revolution. At this stage the fall of the Soviet Republic seemed imminent. Faced with such a situation, the Red Terror was decreed on September 6. But if this measure was a major error[xxiv] we must admit that it was imposed by the force of events, that's to say by the terrorist practices of the foreign powers and the White armies.

"Without the help of the Allies, it is impossible to liberate Russia"

Officially, the bourgeois governments intervened in Russia in defence of democracy and against the "Bolshevik Peril". But in reality, the installation of a democracy was the last thing on the minds of the powers of the Entente who, before everything, were determined to avoid the extension of the revolutionary wave which was gaining ground in Germany by the end of 1918. The French, British and American bourgeoisies were prepared to do anything in order to defend their interests. Thus, from the beginning of the civil war, the invading armies acted like bloody hordes, supporting or installing military dictatorships in the territories re-taken from the Red Army. This is what happened for example at the beginning of January 1919, when General Miller landed at Archangel and proclaimed himself Governor General of the town and Minister of War. Leading an army of 20,000 men, made up of peasants and monarchist fishermen who hated the communists, he unleashed a reign of terror on the region. The old prosecutor of the province, Dobrovolsky, recalls that "the partisans of Pinet were so ferocious that the commander of the 8th regiment, a Colonel B., decided to produce a pamphlet on the human attitude to have towards prisoners".[xxv]

Moreover, the Allies didn't hesitate in directly supporting the armies of the main White army chiefs, partisans of a very authoritarian power such as Denikin and Kolchak. The offensive of the latter, undertaken from Siberia to the outskirts of Moscow at the end of 1918, was in great part made with a military arsenal supplied by the foreign powers: "The United States delivered 600,000 rifles and hundreds of cannons, many thousands of machine-guns, munitions, tools, uniforms, Britain 200,000 tools, 2000 machine-guns, 500 million bullets. France 30 planes and more than 200 automobiles. Japan 70,000 rifles, 30 cannons, 100 machine-guns, the necessary munitions and 120,000 tools. In order to pay for these deliveries which allowed him to furnish an army of more than 400,000 men, Kolchak sent from Hong-Kong 184 tonnes of gold, treasure which had been given to him"[xxvi].

It was this military division of labour between the Allies and the White Armies which the proletariat in Russia had to face up to throughout the year 1919. Lenin was well aware of the extreme fragility of the Soviet power and this is why he saw the need to denounce the role of the Tsarist generals in collaborating with the foreign armies:

“Kolchak and Denikin are the chief, and the only serious, enemies of the Soviet Republic. If it were not for the help they are getting from the Entente (Britain, France, America) they would have collapsed long ago. It is only the help of the Entente which makes them strong. Nevertheless, they are still forced to deceive the people, to pretend from time to time that they support ‘democracy’, a ‘constituent assembly’, ‘government by the people’, etc. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries are only too willing to be duped.

The truth about Kolchak (and his double, Denikin) has now been revealed in full. The shooting of tens of thousands of workers. The shooting even of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The flogging of peasants of entire districts. The public flogging of women. The absolutely unbridled power of the officers, the sons of landowners. Endless looting. Such is the truth about Kolchak and Denikin”.[xxvii]

This great counter-revolutionary alliance was even more vital when the revolution broke out in Germany in 1918. As the American historians, M. Sayers and A. Khan relate in The Great Conspiracy against Russia:

"The reason why the Allies didn't march on Berlin, and definitively disarm German militarism, resides in their fear of Bolshevism. The Allied Commander-in-Chief, Marshall Foch, revealed in his memoirs that, from the opening of peace negotiations, the German spokesmen constantly evoked the threat of the ‘Bolshevik invasion of Germany'... General Wilson of the British High Command recalled in his 'War Diary' that, November 9, 1918, two days before the signature on the Armistice, 'the cabinet met this night, from 6:30 to 8 o'clock, Lloyd George read two telegrams from 'Tiger' (Clemenceau) in which he told of an interview of Foch with the Germans: Tiger dreads the fall of Germany and the victory of Bolshevism in this country: 'Lloyd George asked me if I wanted that to happen or if I preferred an armistice. I replied without hesitation 'Armistice'. The whole cabinet agreed with me. For us, the real danger from now on wasn't the Germans, but Bolshevism'".

The fear of the extension of the revolution to the whole of Europe sharpened the determination of the bourgeois powers to definitively break the power of the Soviets. At the Peace Conference, Clemenceau was the most ferocious defender of this policy: "The Bolshevik danger is very great at this present hour; it is spreading. It has won over the Baltic Provinces and Poland; and, this morning, we have received very bad news, because it has spread to Budapest and Vienna. Italy is also in danger. The danger is probably greater there than in France. If Bolshevism, after spreading to Germany, crossed Austria and Hungary, taking in Italy, Europe would have to face a very great danger. That is why it is necessary to do something against Bolshevism."

Affirming loud and clear at this conference, "the right of peoples to self-determination", the bourgeoisie would not leave the world proletariat to make up its own mind at the risk of putting bourgeois society in peril. For both camps, the key to victory resided in the extension or isolation of the revolution. Also the fear of the bourgeoisie can be measured against the degree of violence and the atrocities which they carried out in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy. Because behind the veil of "the rights of man" hides the interests of a ruling class which always uses the worst measures when it's a question of its own survival.

Economic strangulation

The striking speeches of Clemenceau (above) allow us to understand his insistence on decreeing a total blockade of Russia and working for the neighbouring states to remain hostile to the Soviet Republic[xxviii].

And also arising from this, his determination to combat the revolutionary wave. The delay in making the revolution by the European and world proletariat plunged the Russian bastion into complete isolation. The Soviet Republic henceforth became a "besieged fortress" trying to resist immense difficulties. In 1919-1920, the effects of rationing and the subjugation of production to the needs of war applied during the course of the war, was making itself felt still more in this country. To this could be added the devastation of the civil war and the economic blockade imposed by the democratic powers between March 1918 and the beginning of 1920. All imports were blocked, including solidarity parcels sent by the proletariat of other countries. The White armies and those of the Entente had the coal of the Ukraine and the oil of Baku and the Caucasus in their grip, engendering a shortage of combustible material. The combustibles which reached the towns were down to 10% of that consumed before World War I. Famine in the towns was terrible where everything was in short supply. Heavy industry workers received first category rations which didn't go beyond 900 calories.

Evidently, this situation also had repercussions on the state of the soldiers of the Red Army who were prey to hunger, cold and sickness. In October 1919, the White troops of Yudenitch threatened Petrograd and the brigade commander, Kotovsky from the Ukraine, appealed for reinforcements. On November 4 Kotovsky sent an edifying report: "A generalised epidemic of typhus, scabies, eczema and sickness due to the cold following a lack of laundry, uniforms and baths. All this puts out of action 75 to 85% of our old fighting force who are, on the way to, or remaining in clinics and hospitals". Faced with the protests of some regiments, the brigade was rested. It could have been worse: "we were confronted with other difficulties, wrote a soldier. A typhoid epidemic has broken out and sicknesses due to the frost have ravaged the brigade. Soldiers and officers live in unheated barracks and receive starvation rations: 200 grams of 'soukhari' (a sort of grilled bread) and 300 grams of cabbage. It makes my heart ache to see our horses dying for lack of forage"[xxix]. Trotsky depicted in sombre terms the appearance of these same troops who were supposed to defend the main bastion of the Russian proletariat: "The workers of Petrograd do not look good: pasty-faced because of their hunger and lack of food, ragged clothed, boots with holes in, mismatched clothes."

After 1921, shortages continued and rationing became yet more drastic: "the ration of black bread was still on 800 grams for the workers of refineries and 600 grams for the model workers. The ration was decreased to 200 grams for holder of a ‘B card’ (unemployed). Herring stocks, which in other circumstances had saved the day, were completely lacking. Potatoes arrived frozen in the towns because of the lamentable state of the railways (running at hardly 20% of their pre-war potential). At the beginning of spring, 1921, an atrocious famine ravaged the western provinces of the Volga region. According to statistics recognised by the Congress of Soviets, between 2 and 2.7 millions suffered from hunger, cold, typhoid, diphtheria, influenza, etc."[xxx]

In the factories, the super-exploitation of workers didn't prevent the fall in production. The lack of food and the chaos of the economy pushed some to migrate to the countryside and others to leave the big firms for small workshops making barter easier. In these conditions, it was decided to enact the New Economic Policy (NEP) which put a brake on the statification of production.

The civil war left behind it a country bled white. Close to 980,000 deaths in the ranks of the Red Army and 3 million in the civil population. The already existing famine was amplified in the summer of 1921 with a terrible drought spreading throughout the Volga basin.

Even if, faced with the development of mutinies and the revolutionary "danger" on their own territory, the foreign powers withdrew their own troops during 1920, and if the counter-revolutionary armies had never really been up to re-taking power, gangrened as they were by internal quarrels, the lack of discipline and the absence of coordination, the world bourgeoisie nevertheless succeeded in stopping the revolutionary wave which had burst out after four years of imperialist war. The total isolation of Soviet Russia signalled the kiss of death for the revolution and plunged it into degeneration[xxxi].

As we will see in the second part of this article, it is in this context that Social Democracy and then Stalinism delivered the coup de grace to the October revolution and to its heritage.

Narek, April 8 2018.

 

[i]  These are more or less the terms that Stephane Courtois used in a radio programme to describe the personality and motivations of Lenin.

[ii]  A view expressed by Thierry Wolton at the start of the programme 28 minutes on the Arte channel of October 17, 2017.

[iii]  The article by Lenin, "What can the Cadets have counted on when they withdrew from the cabinet”, written July 3, shows the clarity of the Bolsheviks on this issue.

[iv]  Particularly in the repression of the demonstration of July 3rd.

[vi]  Quoted in Pierre Durant, Les sans-culottes du bout du monde. 1917 - 1921, Editions du Progres, 1977.

[vii]  Jean-Jaques Marie, La guerre civile russe. 1917 - 1922. Armees paysannes rouges, blanches et vertes. Editions autrement, 2005.

[viii]  For complementary information on the coup d'état of Kornilov, see the ICC's Manifesto on the October Revolution 1917.

[ix]  Pierre Durant Op. cit.

[x]  Jean-Jaques Marie, Op. cit.

[xi]  Quoted by Jean-Jaques Marie, Op. cit.

[xii] While we think that in such circumstances the formation of a Red Army was indeed necessary, we consider that the dissolution of the Red Guard, the specific organ of the arming of the workers, was a mistake that amounted to the disarming of the revolutionary class.

[xiii]  "Planned radio programme to the government of the German Reich" drawn up by Trotsky in Lenin, Oeuvres choises, Editions du Progres, Moscow, 1968.

[xiv]  Quoted by Jean-Jaques Marie, Op. cit.

[xv]  For more detail on this question see: "Brest-Litovsk: gaining time for the world revolution", Revolution Internationale, no. 48 (Brest-Litovsk : gagner du temps pour la Révolution mondiale).

[xvi]  See Jean-Jaques Marie, La Guerre des Russes Blancs, 1917 - 1920, Tallandier, 2017.

[xvii]  Pierre Durant, Op. cit. p. 191.

[xviii]  Quoted by Pierre Durant, Op. cit. p. 190.

[xix]  Pierre Durant, Op. cit. p. 89.

[xx]  Jean-Jaques Marie, Op. cit, p. 79.

[xxi]  Ibid, p. 81.

[xxii]  Ibid, pages 116-117.

[xxiii]  Pierre Durand, Op. cit.

[xxiv]  Along with Rosa Luxemburg, the ICC rejects the idea of Red Terror: "Even if it was necessary to respond firmly to the counter-revolutionary plots of the old dominant class and create a special organ with the aim of repressing them, the Cheka, this organ rapidly escaped the control of the Soviets and had the tendency to become infected with the moral and material corruption of the old social order". Manifesto on the October revolution

[xxv]  Quoted in Jean-Jaques Marie, La guerre civile russe, Op. cit. P. 94.

[xxvi]  Quoted in Jean-Jaques Marie, Op. cit., p. 99.

[xxvii]All out for the fight against Denikin. Letter of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to party organizations”

[xxviii]  Jean-Jaques Marie, La guerre des Russes blancs, Op, cit., p. 436.

[xxix]  Quoted in Jean-Jaques Marie, La guerre civile, op. cit., p. 164.

[xxx]  ICC pamphlet, Octobre 17, debut de la revolution mondiale. L'isolement c'est la mort de la révolution

[xxxi]  "The degeneration of the Russian revolution", International Review no. 3.

Rubric: 

Russian Revolution

International Review 161 - Autumn 2018

100 years ago, revolution in Germany

A hundred years ago we were at height of the world revolutionary wave – more precisely, the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, a year after the proletariat took power in Russia, in October 1917.

As in Russia, the working class in Germany gave rise to workers’ councils, organs for unifying all workers and for the eventual taking of political power. Because it took place in the most industrialised country in the capitalist world, with the most numerous working class, the revolution in Germany had the potential to break the isolation of the proletarian power in Russia and to extend the revolution across Europe. The bourgeoisie was aware of this and it brought the imperialist war to an end, signing the armistice of 11 November 1918 because continuing the war would have further radicalised the masses and discredited all factions of the bourgeoisie, especially its most ‘left factions, which is what had happened n Russia in the months following the February 1917 revolution. Furthermore, although most of the right wing factions of the state apparatus were in total disarray because of the military disaster, the German bourgeoisie was able to rely on the social democratic traitors to weaken and then crush the working class and its revolution in Germany. This is a fundamental lesson for the revolution of the future, since it will again run up against all the left and extreme left factions of capital working overtime to undo the class struggle.

We are publishing a new article entitled

‘Revolution in Germany: 100 years ago, the proletariat made the bourgeoisie tremble’.

We also recommend some older articles to our readers:

‘90 years ago, the German revolution’. A series of five articles, the first of which was published in international Review 133 and the last in IR 137:

Germany 1918-19 (i): Faced with the war, the revolutionary proletariat renews its internationalist principles; (ii): From war to revolution; (iii): Formation of the party, absence of the International; (iv) Civil War; (v): From Noske to Hitler.

‘The German revolution’: a series of 13 articles, the first of which was published in IR 81 and the last in IR 99: (i) Revolutionaries in Germany during World War 1; (ii): The Start of the Revolution; (iii) The Premature Insurrection; (iv) Fraction or New Party?; (v): From the work of a fraction to the foundation of the KPD;  (vi):  The Failure to Build the Organisation; (vii): The Foundation of the KAPD; (viii): The Kapp Putsch; (ix): The March Action of 1921: the danger of petty-bourgeois impatience; (x): The reflux of the revolutionary wave and the degeneration of the International; (xi): The communist left and the growing conflict between the Russian state and the interests of the world revolution; (xii): Germany 1923: The bourgeoisie inflicts a decisive defeat on the working class; (xiii):  1923, Part 2 A defeat that marked the end of the world revolutionary wave

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History of the workers' movement: 

Rubric: 

Revolution in Germany

100 years ago, the proletariat made the ruling class tremble

“100 Years ago, the proletariat made the ruling class tremble”. This title may sound odd today because this immense historical event has more or less been consigned to oblivion. The bourgeoisie has succeeded in erasing it from the memory of the working class. And yet in 1918, all eyes were on Germany – a source of hope for the proletariat, and of fear for the bourgeoisie.

The working class had just taken power in Russia. 1917. The Bolsheviks. The soviets. The insurrection. Or as Lenin put it: “The Russian revolution is only one of the contingents of the international socialist army, on the action of which the success and triumph of our revolution depends. This is a fact which none of us lose sight of. We likewise bear in mind that the vanguard role of the Russian proletariat in the working-class movement is not due to the economic development of the country. On the contrary, it is the backwardness of Russia, the inability of what is called our native bourgeoisie to cope with the enormous problems connected with the war and its cessation that have led the proletariat to seize political power and establish its own class dictatorship” (Speech to the conference of factory committees in the Moscow province, July 23 1918)

Germany was the bolt on the door between East and West. A victorious revolution here would open the way to the revolutionary class struggle throughout the old continent of Europe. None of the bourgeoisies wanted to see this door unbolted. This is why the bourgeoisie was to direct all its hatred, and all its most sophisticated manoeuvres, against it. The revolution in Germany would determine the success or failure of the world revolution which had begun in Russia.

The power of the working class

1914: The world war breaks out. It brought 4 years in which the working class was subjected to the worst butchery in the history of humanity. The trenches. Poison gas. Famine. Millions of dead. Four years in which the trade unions and the social democratic parties took advantage of their glorious proletarian past – which they betrayed in 1914 by supporting the bourgeoisie’s war effort - and the confidence they were accorded by the workers to impose all kinds of sacrifices and to justify the war. But during these four years the working class, little by little, began to fight back. Strikes in a succession of cities. Unrest in the army. And of course, faced with this, the bourgeoisie did not remain inert. It reacted ferociously. “Ringleaders” in the factories, fingered by the unions, were arrested. Soldiers were shot for indiscipline or desertion.

1916. On the First of May Karl Liebknecht[1] raised the cry: “Down with the war! Down with the government!”  Rosa Luxemburg was jailed, alongside other revolutionary socialists - Meyer, Eberlein, Mehring (who was then 70 years old)[2]. Karl Liebknecht was sent to the front. But the repression wasn’t enough to silence the discontent. On the contrary: it gave rise to growing agitation in the factories.

1917: the unions came under more and more criticism. The “Obleute” appeared in the factories – the “Men of Confidence”, essentially rank and file union delegates who had broken with the union leadership. Above all, the workers of Germany were inspired by the courage of their class brothers and sisters in the East. The echo of the October revolution was being heard far and wide.

1918. The German bourgeoisie was becoming aware of the danger and it realised that it needed to extricate itself from the war. But the most backward part of the ruling class, linked to the old aristocracy, and especially the military aristocracy, didn’t understand what was at stake and rejected any idea of peace or any talk of defeat. Concretely, in November, the naval command based in Kiel insisted on one final battle to save its “honour” – using the rank and file sailors as cannon fodder of course. But on several ships the sailors mutinied and raised the red flag. The order was given to the ships that hadn’t been “infected” to fire on them. The mutineers surrendered, refusing to fire on their own class comrades.  As a result, they faced the death penalty. But in solidarity with those who had been condemned, a wave of strikes broke out among the workers of Kiel. Inspired by the October revolution, the working class took charge of its struggle and created the first workers’ and soldiers’ councils. The bourgeoisie then called in one of its most loyal guard-dogs: social democracy. The SPD leader Gustav Noske, the specialist in military matters and in “maintaining troop morale” was dispatched to the spot to stifle the danger. But he arrived too late. The workers’ and soldiers’ councils were already spreading to other ports and the great working class centres of the Ruhr and Bavaria. Faced with this geographic extension of the movement, Noske could not attack it head on. On 7 November the Kiel workers’ council called for revolution, proclaiming “power is in our hands”. On 8 November, practically the whole of north-west Germany was under the control of the councils. In Bavaria, Saxony, local princes abdicated. Workers’ councils spread to all the cities of the Empire, from Metz to Berlin.

It was precisely the generalisation of this mode of political organisation that made the bourgeoisie tremble. The unification of the class in workers’ councils, with delegates elected by assemblies and revocable at any moment, is an extremely dynamic form of organisation. The councils are a real expression of the revolutionary process, the place where the working class comes together, debates the goals of its struggle, takes control of social life. After the experience of 1917, the bourgeoisie understood this very well. This is why it focused on undermining the councils from within, taking advantage of the considerable illusions the working class still had in its old party, the SPD. Thus Noske was elected to the head of the workers’ council in Kiel. This weakness of our class would have tragic consequences in the weeks that followed. We will come back to this. But for now, on the morning of 9 November, the struggle was still developing. In Berlin, the workers demonstrated outside the barracks to rally the soldiers to their cause and freed their class comrades from prison. The bourgeoisie then understood that the war had to end right away and that the Kaiser had to go. It was drawing the lessons from the mistakes made by the Russian bourgeoisie. On 9 November 1918 Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated. On 11 November, the armistice was signed.

The struggle of the workers of Germany had hastened the end of the war, but it was the bourgeoisie which signed the peace treaty and was to use this event to act against the revolution.

The Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie

A brief summary of the balance of forces at the beginning of the civil war in November 1918:

  • On the one hand, an extremely combative working class. It had spread the workers’ councils across the whole country and with great rapidity. But it held on to major illusions in its former party, the SPD. It allowed these traitors to assume the highest responsibilities within the councils, as in the case of Noske in Kiel. The revolutionary organisations, the Spartacists and other groups of the left were engaged in a political battle, carrying out the role of providing an orientation for the struggle. They put forward the necessity to create a bridge to the working class in Russia; they unmasked the manoeuvres and sabotage of the bourgeoisie, they understood the fundamental role of the workers’ councils.
  • On the other hand, the German bourgeoisie, an extremely experienced and organised ruling class, conscious of the efficacy of its major anti-working class weapon, the SPD. Heeding the warning of the events in Russia, it clearly identified the danger of continuing the war and the threat posed by the workers’ councils. The whole work of sabotage carried out by the SPD was aimed at diverting the revolutionary process towards the cage of bourgeois democracy. To achieve this, the bourgeoisie was to attack on all fronts: from the most slanderous propaganda to the most savage repression, via a whole series of provocations.

The SPD thus took up one of the slogans of the revolution “end the war” while at the same time speaking up for “party unity” and wiping out the memory of its key role in the march to war. By signing the peace treaty, the SPD removed what was most unbearable from the workers, while at the same time injecting it with democratic poison. And to justify all this it found a useful scapegoat for the war and the famine: the monarchy and the military aristocracy.

Recuperating the councils

But the greatest danger for the bourgeoisie remained then councils and the slogan “all power to the soviets” which had come from Russia. The revocability of the delegates posed a real problem for the bourgeoisie, since it made it possible for the councils to constantly renew and radicalise themselves. This is why the councils were assailed by faithful representatives of the SPD, whether or not they were well-known figures like Noske in Kiel or Ebert in Berlin. The councils were gangrened from the inside, emptied of their substance. The whole aim of this manoeuvre was to convince the councils to renounce their own power in favour of the newly formed constituent assembly. The national congress of councils held in Berlin on 16 December 1918 was the clearest example of this.

  • The soldiers’ delegates were over-represented in relation to workers’ delegates (I for every 100,000 soldiers, 1 for every 200,000 workers), since the workers tended to be well to the left of the soldiers.
  • Access to the congress was forbidden to the Russian delegation. Exit internationalism!
  • Access to the congress was forbidden to non-workers, i.e. every member appeared on the basis of their job. Thus members of the Spartacist League including Luxemburg and Liebknecht were denied entry. Exit the revolutionary left! Even under the pressure of 250,000 demonstrators outside the doors, the congress did not budge
  • In the same logic, the SPD got the Congress to vote the call for the election of a constituent assembly for the 19th January 1919.

The system of councils is an affront to capitalism and its democratic apparatus. The bourgeoisie was well aware of this. But it also knew that time was not on its side and that the image of the SPD as a workers’ party was getting very thin. It thus had to precipitate events, while the proletariat needed time to mature, to grow politically.

Parallel to these ideological manoeuvres, from 9 November on, Ebert and the SPD were making secret agreements with the army to crush the revolution. They multiplied provocations, lies and slanders to pave the way to a military confrontation. Their calumnies were directed against the Spartakusbund in particular, accusing it of “assassinations, pillage, calling on the workers to shed their blood again”. They called for a pogrom against Liebknecht and Luxemburg. They created a “White Army” – the Freikorps, composed of soldiers traumatised by the war and motivated by blind hatred.

Beginning 6 December, a huge counter-revolutionary offensive was launched:

  • Attack on the headquarter of the Spartacist paper, Die Rote Fahne
  • Attempts to arrest members of the executive organ of the workers’ councils
  • An attempted assassination of Liebknecht
  • Systematic skirmishes during workers’ demonstrations
  • A media campaign and military offensive against the People’s Naval Division, composed of armed sailors who had played an important role in spreading the revolution and acting in its defence

But far from scaring off the proletariat, such actions only increased its anger. Demonstrations were armed to defend themselves against provocations. This class solidarity culminated in the biggest demonstration since 9 November being held on December 25. Five days later, the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, was founded in Berlin.

Again the bourgeoisie learned quickly and acted fast. By the end of December 1918 it had realised that frontally attacking the great figures of the revolution only strengthened class solidarity. It then decided to accentuate the rumours and the calumnies, while avoiding direct armed confrontations and manoeuvre around less well-known personalities. So it targeted Eichhorn, who had been elected to the head of a soldiers’ committee in Berlin and had been put in charge of the local police forces. He was removed from his post and the provocation worked very well. This was immediately perceived by the Berlin workers as an act of aggression. The Berlin workers responded massively: on 5 January 1919, 150,000 were in the street, which surprised even the bourgeoisie. But this would not prevent the working class from falling into the trap of a premature insurrection. Even though the movement had not been followed elsewhere in Germany where Eichhorn was not so well-known, revolutionary leaders like Pieck and Liebknecht, pulled along by the excitement of the moment, decided that evening to launch the armed insurrection. This went against the decisions of the KPD Congress, and the consequences of this improvisation were dramatic: having come out onto the streets, the workers remained there without any precise objective and in the greatest confusion. Worse still, the soldiers refused to take part in the insurrection, which ensured its defeat. Facing this error in analysis and the dangerous situation that resulted from it, Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches defended the only possible position that could avoid a blood-bath:  continue the mobilisation by arming the workers and calling on them to encircle the barracks until the soldiers came out in favour of the revolution. This position was argued by the correct analysis that while the political balance of forces was not in the proletariat’s favour at the beginning of January 1919, the military balance of forces was, at least in Berlin.

But instead of trying to arm the workers, the “Revolutionary Committee” began to negotiate with the government which it had just declared overthrown. From now on time was no longer on the side of the proletariat, but of the counter-revolution.

On 10 January 1919 the KPD called for the resignation of Liebknecht and Pieck from the Revolutionary Committee. But the damage had been done. There followed the bloody week, the so-called “Spartacist Week”. The “Communist putsch” was put down by the “heroes of freedom and democracy”. The White Terror was unleashed. The Freikorps hunted down revolutionaries all over the town and summary executions became systematic. On the evening of 15 January, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were kidnapped and then assassinated. In March 1919 it would be the turn of Leo Jogiches and hundreds of other militants of the revolutionary left.

The democratic illusions of the working class and the weaknesses of the KPD.

What was the cause of this dramatic failure? The events of January 1919 contained all the elements which had led to the defeat of the revolution: on the one hand an intelligent bourgeoisie, manoeuvring very skilfully, and on the other hand a working class still weighed down by illusions in social democracy and a communist party that was insufficiently organised, lacking a solid programmatic base upon which it could develop a clear analysis of the situation. The KPD was somewhat disorientated, it was young and inexperienced (it was made up of many young comrades, since a lot of the older ones had died in the war or the repression). It lacked unity and was unable to give a clear orientation to the working class.

Unlike the Bolsheviks who had maintained an organisational continuity since 1903, and had been through the experience of the 1905 revolution and the soviets, the revolutionary left in Germany, after the betrayal of the SPD in August 1914, had to reconstruct itself hastily, in the heat of the events. The KPD was founded on 30 December 1918 with the fusion of the Spartakusbund and the International Communists of Germany, the IKD. During this conference, the majority of delegates took a clear position against participation in bourgeois elections and rejected the trade unions. But the organisational question was largely underestimated and pushed to the bottom of the list. The question of the party was not grasped at the level demanded by what was at stake.

This underestimation of programmatic questions would result in the decision by Liebknecht and others  to call for the insurrection without waiting for a new analysis by the party, without a lucid method for assessing the balance of forces between the classes. The centralisation of decisions was not seen as a priority. It was these weaknesses of the party that would have such dramatic results. At one moment time was on the side of the proletariat. In a few hours the balance had changed and now the bourgeoisie was able to unleash the white terror.

All the same, strikes continued. From January to March 1919, the mass strike emerged in a spectacular manner. But the bourgeoisie also continued its work: executions, slanders, rumours….little by little the terror overwhelmed the proletariat. In February, while massive strikes were breaking out all over Germany, the Berlin proletariat, the heart of the revolution, was no longer able to take part, having been crushed by the January defeat. When it finally returned to the struggle, it was too late. The struggles in Berlin and the rest of Germany didn’t manage to unite. At the same time, the KPD had been “decapitated” and had been forced into illegality. In the wave of strikes between February and April, it was not able to play a decisive role. Its voice had been more or less smothered by capital. If the KPD had been able to unmask the provocation of the bourgeoisie and prevent the workers from falling into the trap, the movement would surely have had a different outcome. The working class thus paid the price for the organisational weaknesses of the party, which now became the target for the most brutal repression. Everywhere communists were being hunted down. The lines of communication between what was left of the central organs and the local or regional delegates were continually being broken. At the national conference of 29 March 1919, it was pointed out that “the local organisations are stuffed with agents provocateurs”.

In conclusion

The German revolution was above all the mass strike movement of the working class, extending geographically, countering capitalist barbarism with class solidarity, re-appropriating the lessons of October 1917 through the formation of workers’ councils. The German revolution was also the lesson about the necessity for an internationally centralised party, built on clear organisational and programmatic foundations. Without such an organ the working class will not be able to expose the Machiavellian tricks of the bourgeoisie. But the German revolution was also the capacity of the bourgeoisie to unite against the proletariat, to use manoeuvres, lies and manipulations of all kinds. It was the noxious stench of a dying order which refuses to give up. It was the deadly trap of illusions in democracy and the destruction of the workers’ councils from within.

 Even though the events of 1919 proved decisive, the flames of the revolution in Germany were not extinguished for several years. But on the scale of history, the consequences of this defeat would be very grave for humanity as a whole: the rise of Nazism in Germany, of Stalinism in Russia, the march towards the second world war under the banners of anti-fascism – these nightmarish events can all be traced to the failure of the revolutionary wave which, between 1917 and 1923, shook the bourgeois order without being able to topple it once and for all.

And yet the revolution in Germany in 1918 remains a source of inspiration and lessons for the future struggles of the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote on the eve of her murder by troops dispatched by social democracy:

“What does the entire history of socialism and of all modern revolutions show us? The first spark of class struggle in Europe, the revolt of the silk weavers in Lyon in 1831, ended with a heavy defeat; the Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats… Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today…we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we can’t do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding...

To date, revolutions have given us nothing but defeats. Yet these unavoidable defeats pile up guarantee upon guarantee of the future final victory.

There is but one condition. The question of why each defeat occurred must be answered…

“Order prevails in Berlin!” You foolish lackeys! Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again, clashing its weapons,” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing:

I was, I am, I shall be!”[3]

ICC, 1 November 2018

 

 

[1] Along with Rosa Luxemburg, one of the two best known and most persecuted leaders of the Spartacist League.

[2] All three were part of the minority of the SPD which refused to vote for war credits and joined the Spartacist League

[3] Rote Fahne, 14 January 1919

Rubric: 

Revolution in Germany

Analysis of the recent evolution of imperialist tensions (June 2018)

We are publishing below a report on the imperialist situation adopted by the ICC’s central organ at a meeting in June 2018. Since the report was written, events around Trump’s visit to Europe have very clearly confirmed the main ideas developed in the report, in particular the notion that the USA has now become the main propagator of the tendency of “every man for himself” on a global level, even to the point of trashing the instruments of its own “world order”. See our article on "Trump in Europe".

Report on imperialist tensions (June 2018)

We publish here a report on the imperialist situation adopted by the central organ of the ICC at a meeting in June 2018. Since then, events around Trump’s visit to Europe have very clearly confirmed the main ideas of this report, in particular the idea that the USA has become the main propagator of the tendency towards “each for themselves” on a world scale, to the point where it is destroying the instruments of its own “world order” (see our article “Trump in Europe”).

The main orientations of the November 2017 report on imperialist tensions provide us with the essential framework to understand current developments:

  • the end of the two Cold War blocs did not mean the disappearance of imperialism and militarism. Although the compositions of new blocs and the outbreak of a new Cold War is not on the agenda, conflicts broke out all over the world. The development of decomposition has led to a bloody and chaotic unchaining of imperialism and militarism;
  • the explosion of the tendency of each for himself has led to the rise of the imperialist ambitions of second and third level powers, as well as to the growing weakening of the USA’s dominant position in  the world;
  • The current situation is characterised by imperialist tensions all over the place and by a chaos that is less and less controllable; but above all, by its highly irrational and unpredictable character, linked to the impact of populist pressures, in particular to the fact that the  world’s strongest power is led today by a populist president with temperamental reactions.

In the recent period, the weight of populism is becoming more and more tangible, exacerbating the tendency of “each for himself” and the growing unpredictability of imperialist conflicts;

  • The questioning of international agreements, of supra-national structures (in particular the EU), of any global approach, makes  imperialist relations more chaotic and accentuates the danger of military confrontations between the imperialist sharks (Iran and Middle East, North Korea and Far East).
  • The rejection of the traditional globalised political elites in a lot of countries goes together with the reinforcement of an aggressive nationalist rhetoric all over the world (not only in the US with Trump’s “America First” slogan and in Europe but also in Turkey or Russia for instance).

These general characteristics of the period find their concretisation today in a series of particularly significant tendencies.

1) US imperialist policy: from world cop to main propagator of each for himself

The evolution of US imperialist policy over the last thirty years is one of the most significant phenomena of the period of decomposition: after promising a new age of peace and prosperity (Bush Senior) in the aftermath of the implosion of the Soviet bloc, after then struggling against the tendency towards each for himself, it has today become the main propagator of this tendency in the world. The former bloc leader and only remaining major imperialist superpower after the implosion of the Eastern bloc, which for around 25 years has been acting as the world cop, fighting against the spreading of each for himself on the imperialist level, is now rejecting international negotiations and global agreements in favour of a policy of "bilateralism".

A shared principle, aimed at overcoming chaos in international relations, is summarised in the following Latin sentence: "pacta sunt servanda" - treaties, agreements, must be honoured. If someone signs a global agreement - or a multilateral one - he is supposed to respect it, at least ostensibly. But the US under Trump abolished this conception: “I sign a treaty, but I can scrap it tomorrow”. This has already happened with the Trans-Pacific Pact (TPP), the Paris agreement on climate change, the nuclear treaty with Iran, the final agreement on the G7 meeting in Québec. The US today rejects international agreements in favour of a negotiation between states, in which the US bourgeoisie will bluntly impose its interests through economic, political and military blackmail (as we can see today for instance with Canada before and after the G7 with regard to NAFTA or with the threat of retaliation against European companies investing in Iran). This will have tremendous and unpredictable consequences for the development of imperialist tensions and conflicts (but also for the economic situation of the world) in the coming period. We will illustrate this with three “hot spots” in the imperialist confrontations today:

  • (1) The Middle East: in denouncing the nuclear deal with Iran, the US is opposing not only China and Russia but also the EU and even Britain. Its seemingly paradoxical alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia leads to a new configuration of forces in the Middle East (with a growing rapprochement between Turkey, Iran and Russia) and increases the danger of a general destabilisation of the region, of more confrontations between the main sharks, and more extensive bloody wars.
  • (2) The relations with Russia: what is the USA’s position towards Putin? For historical reasons (the impact of the Cold War” period and the Russiagate affair that began with the last presidential elections), there are strong forces in the US bourgeoisie pushing for stronger confrontations with Russia, but the Trump administration, despite the imperialist confrontation in the Middle East, still does not seem to rule out an improvement of the cooperation with Russia: for example at the last G7, Trump suggested reintegrating Russia into the Forum of Industrial Countries.
  • (3) The Far East: the unpredictability of agreements weighs particularly heavily on the negotiations with North Korea: (a) what are the implications of an agreement between Trump and Kim, if China, Russia, Japan and South Korea are not directly involved in negotiating this agreement? This has already come to the surface when Trump revealed in Singapore to the dismay of his Asian “allies” that he had promised to stop joint military exercises  in South Korea (b) if any deal can be put into question at any moment by the US, how far can Kim trust it? (c) will North and South Korea in this context totally rely on their “natural ally” [M1] and are they considering an alternative strategy?

Although this policy implies a tremendous growth of chaos and of each for himself, and also ultimately a further decline of the global positions of the world’s leading power, there is no tangible alternative approach in the US. After one and a half year of Mueller‘s investigation and other kinds of pressures against Trump, it does not look likely that Trump will be pushed out of office, amongst other reasons because there is no alternative force in sight. The quagmire within the US bourgeoisie continues.

2) China: a policy of avoiding too much direct confrontation

The contradiction could not be more striking. At the same time that Trump's US denounces globalisation and falls back on "bilateral" agreements, China announces a huge global project, the “New Silk Road”, that involves around 65 countries over three continents, representing 60% of the world population and about a third of world GDP, with investments over a period of the next 30 years (2050!) of up to 1.2 trillion dollars.

Since the beginning of its re-emergence, which was planned in the most systematic, long-term way, China has been modernising its army, building a “string of pearls”» –beginning with the occupation of Coral Reefs in the South China Sea and the establishment of a chain of military bases in the Indian Ocean. For now however, China is not looking for direct confrontation with the US; on the contrary, it plans to become the most powerful economy in the world by 2050 and aims at developing its links with the rest of the world while trying to avoid direct clashes. China’s policy is a long-term one, contrary to the short-term deals favoured by Trump. It seeks to expand its industrial, technological and, above all, military expertise and power. On this last level, the US still has a considerable lead over China.

At the same moment of the failed G7 summit in Canada (9-10.6.18), China organised, in Quingdao a conference of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with the assistance of the presidents of Russia (Putin), India (Modi), Iran (Rohani), and the leaders of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kirgizia (20% of  world trade, 40% of the world population). China’s current focus is clearly the Silk Road project -the goal is to spread its influence. It is a long-term project and a direct confrontation with the US would counter-act these plans.

In this perspective, China will use its influence to push for a deal leading to the neutralisation of all nuclear weapons in the Korean region (US weapons included), which -provided the US were to accept this –would  push back US forces to Japan and reduce the immediate threat to Northern China.

However, China’s ambitions will inevitably lead to a confrontation with the imperialist aims not only of the US but also of other powers, like India or Russia:

  • a growing confrontation with India, the other big power in Asia, is inevitable. Both powers have begun a  massive strengthening of their armies and are preparing for a sharpening of tensions  in the medium term;
  • in this perspective Russia is in a difficult situation: both countries are cooperating but in the long run China’s policy can only lead to a confrontation with Russia. Russia has regained power in recent years at the military and imperialist level, but its economic backwardness has not been overcome, on the contrary: in 2017, the Russian GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was only 10% higher than the GDP of the Benelux!
  • Finally, it is likely that Trump's economic sanctions and political and military provocations will force China to confront the US more directly in the short term.

3) The rise of strong leaders and bellicose rhetoric

The exacerbation of the tendency of each for himself on the imperialist level and the growing competition between the imperialist sharks give rise to another significant phenomenon of this phase of decomposition: the coming to power of "strong leaders" with a radical language, and an aggressive, nationalist rhetoric.

The coming to power of a "strong leader" and a radical rhetoric about the defence of national identity (often combined with social programmes in favour of families, children, pensioners) is typical of populist regimes (Trump, of course, but also Salvini in Italy, Orbán in Hungary, Kaczynski in Poland, Babiš in the Czech Republic, …) but it is also a more general tendency all over the world, not only in the strongest powers (Putin in Russia) but also in secondary imperialist countries like Turkey (Erdogan), Iran, Saudi-Arabia (with the “soft coup” of crown prince Mohammed Ben Salman). In China, the limitation of the presidency of the state to two five-year periods has been removed from the constitution, so that Xi Jinping is imposing himself as a “leader for life", the new Chinese emperor (being president, head of the party and of the central military commission, which has never happened since Deng Xiaoping). "Democratic" slogans or keeping up democratic appearances (human rights) are no longer the dominant discourse (as the talks between the Donald and Kim have shown), unlike at the time of the fall of the Soviet bloc and at the beginning of the 21st century. They have given way to a combination of very aggressive speeches and pragmatic imperialist deals.

The strongest example is the Korean crisis. Trump and Kim first used both strong military pressure (with even the threat of a nuclear confrontation) and very aggressive language before meeting in Singapore to haggle. Trump offered gigantic economic and political advantages (the Burmese model) with the aim of eventually pulling  Kim into the US camp. This is not totally inconceivable as the North Koreans have an ambiguous relationship with and even distrust towards China. However, the reference to Libya by US officials (National Security Adviser John Bolton) – North Korea might have the same fate as Libya, when Gaddafi was urged to abandon his weapons, and then forcefully deposed and killed– makes the North Koreans particularly suspicious of American proposals.

This political strategy is a more general tendency in the current imperialist confrontations, as shown by Trump’s aggressive tweets against Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau, “ a false and weak leader” because he refused to accept higher import taxes brought in by the US.  There was also the brutal ultimatum of Saudi Arabia against Qatar, accused of “centrism” towards Iran, or Erdogan’s bellicose statements against the West and NATO about the Kurds. Finally,, we will mention Putin’s very aggressive “State of the Union” speech, which was a presentation of Russia’s most sophisticated weapons systems with the message: “You’d better take us seriously”!

These tendencies strengthen the general characteristics of the period, such as the intensification of militarisation (despite the strong economic burden linked to this) amongst the three biggest imperialist sharks, but also as a global trend and in a context of a changing imperialist landscape in the world and in Europe. In this context of aggressive policies, the danger of limited nuclear strikes is very real, as there are a lot of unpredictable elements in the conflicts around North Korea and Iran.

4) The tendency towards the fragmentation of the EU.

All the trends in Europe during the past period – Brexit, the rise of an important populist party in Germany (AfD), the coming to power of populists in Eastern Europe, where most of the countries are run by populist governments, are being accentuated by two major events:

  • the formation of a 100% populist government in Italy (composed of the 5 Stars movement and the Lega), which will lead to a direct confrontation between the “bureaucrats from Brussels” (the EU), the “champions” of globalisation (backed by the Eurogroup) and the financial markets on one side, and on the other side the people’s “populist front”;
  • the fall of Rajoy  and the PartidoPopular in Spain and the coming to power of a Socialist Party  minority government backed by the Catalan and Basque nationalists and Podemos, which will accentuate the centrifugal tensions inside Spain and in Europe.

This will have huge consequences for the cohesion of the EU, the stability of the Euro, and the weight of the European countries on the imperialist scene.

  • (a) The EU is unprepared for and largely powerless to oppose Trump's policy of  a US embargo on Iran: European multinationals are already complying with US dictates (Total, Lafarge). This is especially true since various European states support Trump's populist approach and his policy in the Middle East (Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania were represented at the inauguration of the US Embassy in Jerusalem, against the official policy of the EU). Concerning the raising of import taxes, it is far from sure that there will be an agreement within the EU to respond systematically to the higher import tariffs imposed by Trump.
  • (b) The project of a European military pole remains largely hypothetical in the sense that more and more countries, under the impetus of populist forces in power or putting pressure on the government, do not want to submit to the Franco-German axis. On the other hand, while the EU's political leadership is made up of the Franco-German axis, France has traditionally developed its military technological cooperation with Britain, which is about to leave the EU.
  • (c) Tensions around the reception of refugees not only pits the coalition of populist governments in the East against those of Western Europe, but increasingly Western countries against each other, as shown by the strong tensions that have developed between Macron's France and the Italian populist government, while Germany is increasingly divided on the subject (pressure from the CSU).
  • (d) the economic and political weight of Italy (the third economy of the EU) is considerable, in no way comparable with the weight of Greece. The Italian populist government intends, among other things,  to reduce taxes and to introduce a basic income, which will cost more than one hundred billion euros. At the same time the government’s programme includes asking the European Central Bank to skip 250 billion euros of the Italian debt!
  • (e) On the economic but also imperialist level, Greece had already advanced the idea of appealing to China to support its ailing economy. Again, Italy plans to call China or Russia for help to support and finance an economic recovery. Such an orientation could have a major impact at the imperialist level. Italy already opposes the continuation of EU embargo measures against Russia following the annexation of Crimea.

All these orientations strongly accentuate the crisis within the EU and the tendencies towards fragmentation. It will ultimately affect the policy of Germany as the most influential country in the EU, as it is internally divided (weight of AfD and CSU), confronted with political opposition by the populist leaders of Eastern Europe, economic opposition by Mediterranean countries (Italy, Greece, ...), and quarells with Turkey, while at the same time being directly targeted by Trump’s import tariffs. The growing fragmentation of Europe under the blows of populism and the “America First” policy will also present a huge problem for the policy of France, because these trends are in total opposition to Macron’s programme, which is essentially based on the strengthening of Europe and on the full assimilation of globalisation.

ICC, June 2018


 [M1]Who is he ?

 

Life of the ICC: 

Trump in Europe: an expression of capitalism in turmoil

Events around Trump’s visit to Europe have very clearly confirmed the main ideas developed in the report on imperialist tensions (June 2018), in particular the notion that the USA has now become the main propagator of the tendency of “every man for himself” on a global level, even to the point of trashing the instruments of its own “world order”.  

The July NATO summit in Brussels was marked by the noisy and threatening demands of US President Trump that European NATO members should increase as quickly and massively as possible their military budgets -first to 2% and even to 4%, an amount the US claims to have been spending for some time.

Trump’s complaint that the gigantic level of American military spending constitutes a terrible burden on the US economy and its competitiveness is certainly not fake news. The decade- long financing of a military machine present on all continents of the world, and the economic price of the USA’s fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq, are suffocating the American economy. This is the inevitable product of the cancer of militarism. And yet the running US budget has allocated again a much bigger share to armaments spending than during the previous years – and this orientation was pushed both by the Democratic Party and the Republicans[1]. So despite the warning that the spiralling costs of militarism are undermining the overall performance of the US economy, sooner or later the militarist drive compels all governments in the world to sacrifice ever more resources and expenditure to this insatiable Moloch. The fact that the armaments companies make gorgeous profits out of this doesn’t prevent the weakening of the economy as a whole. The example of Russia in the 70s and 80s serves as a warning: the crippling weight of its military sector, the unwinnable arms race with the US, was a key factor in the collapse of the entire Stalinist regime.

At the same time, Trump‘s threats that if the European ‘allies’ do not increase their military budgets according to US demands, the US might go it alone, might even leave NATO, brings him into a direct conflict with those who up to now have defended the global imperialist interests of US capital.

There is certainly a logic in Trump’s antipathy to NATO, which in many ways is a vestige of the period of the blocs and whose role in today’s multipolar world has become increasingly uncertain. At the time of the Cold War, NATO was the central instrument of a military bloc with the US at its head, allowing it to impose its own decisions and a bloc-wide discipline. And even after the Russian bloc collapsed in 1989-91, NATO has still served as a US-dominated power structure, a means for preserving American global hegemony and opposing the centrifugal tendencies among its former allies. In particular, NATO was used to install more troops in Central and Eastern Europe, pushing forward the US offensive against Russia. NATO still serves as a shield against Russia in the eyes of several Eastern European countries.

Of course, underneath all this, the advancing tendencies of “every man for himself”, of increasing tensions between nation states, has acted to steadily and irreversibly weaken US domination of NATO and its former allies. But Trump’s threats to withdraw  from NATO are still in direct conflict with the interests of the US military wing, which does not want to abandon what remains of the  leading position of the US within NATO, still less to drop NATO altogether. This faction of the ruling class understands that maintaining US hegemony is more than a problem of economics.  The NATO summit and Trump’s rambling threats reveal the reality of the effects of the cancer of militarism, but also the fact that the US ruling class is profoundly divided over its military orientations.

At the same time the results of the NATO summit could only reinforce the determination of the European member countries to increase their military spending and gain more room for manoeuvre outside of the zone of control by the US.  Trump‘s ultimatums were a welcome pretext for them to speed up this process, strengthening European ambitions to develop new military structures within the EU or outside, in particular between France and Germany, but also with the UK (irrespective of Brexit). So we see that the global weight of militarism does not wither away: when the previous military power structures erode, this only creates new tensions and new military alliances, however short-lived. As with any gang, when the top boss is weakened or toppled, the second-rate gangsters generally form new alliances before they start to get at each other…..

Immediately following the NATO summit, Trump paid a brief visit to the UK, whose politics, he observed, are in “somewhat turmoil”. He then proceeded to increase the turmoil by appearing to undermine Theresa May’s efforts to cobble together a Brexit agreement, declaring that she hadn’t done what he had told her to do and that the deal with the EU she was proposing would rule out a trade deal with the US – having previously praised cabinet rebel Boris Johnson by saying he would make a “great prime minister”. The damage caused by all this was done, despite furious back-peddling at the press conference at Chequers where Trump stood side by side with May. And after defining the EU as a “foe” just before his summit with Putin, the attitude of this “disrupter” president towards the EU – which had been set up as part of the western bloc and which the US continued to support in the post-89 world order – clearly parallels his approach to NATO.

Then came the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki. This demonstrated  above all that the ruling class in the US have a president at their head who is acting more and more on his own or who only insists on very specific interests, in particular short term economic calculations. Instead of being a centralising force directing the military and security forces, he acts not only  without consultation with them, but he even expressed a bigger faith in the words of Putin than in those of his security apparatus as regards Russian meddling in the US elections.  It is obvious that Trump has become more unpredictable than ever, and the ridiculous corrections of his most outlandish statements cannot hide the real quagmire the US ruling class finds itself in.

In the same way as his attitude at the NATO summit showed the divisions within the ruling class, the fiasco of the Putin meeting highlights growing conflicts within and between the military/ security apparatus and the White House, within and between certain branches of industry and important wings of the state. Opposition to Russian imperialist ambitions has been deeply entrenched in US imperialist policy since 1945 and has only been reinforced by Putin’s aggressive foreign policy. The idea that Trump, and with him certain factions of the ruling class, might be willing to do all kinds of deals with Putin, or are even acting as his stooges, is a source of considerable anxiety in the most established factions of the US ruling class, who are not convinced by the argument that the US could usefully ally with Russia against the bigger threat posed by China and as a counter-weight to the EU.

When Trump arrived in the UK, he was “welcomed” by tens, even hundreds of thousands of protestors, angered by his racist statements on immigration, his open admission of sexual abuse, his praise for the “fine people” of the fascist right. But these demonstrations were very clearly on a bourgeois terrain, not least because they were openly encouraged by ruling class mouthpieces like The Guardian and the Evening Standard. Their focus was above all on Trump the man: his orange skin, his comb-over, his small hands and penis, the enlightening fact that one meaning of “trump” is “fart”. The problem with all this is that it hides what’s really at stake in the situation. Just as 10 years ago the bankers were held responsible for an economic crisis which is rooted in the impersonal contradictions of capital, so today Trump is blamed for the growing political, economic, and military chaos, when in the end he is only the product of this chaos, which derives from the underlying reality that we are living through the disintegration and decomposition of an entire social system. As one of the placards at the London demo put it: “can we please let the smart people run things now?”. But replacing Trump with a smarter and more responsible politician will not halt capitalism’s slide into the abyss of barbarism. Only a determined struggle against world capital, a struggle aimed at its overthrow, can offer humanity that hope.

DA, 24.7.18


[1]On March 16, 2017 President Trump submitted his request to Congress for $639 billion in military spending—$54 billion—which represents a 10 percent increase—for FY 2018 as well as $30 billion for FY2017 which ends in September. ... The Congress increased the budget to total 696 billion dollar.  That $61 billion increase matches or even surpasses Russia's entire military budget each year. It's more than the Trump administration originally requested. It rivals two big spending surges during President George W. Bush's administration, in 2003 and 2008, which went to fund the Iraq War. "Today, we receive the largest military budget in history, reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding," Defense Secretary Jim Mattis (https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/26/596129462/how-the-pent...)

 

 

General and theoretical questions: 

Communism is on the agenda of history: Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism

In September 1945 Marc Chirik wrote a letter from Paris to the writer Jean Malaquais and his wife Gally. Malaquais had worked with Marc in the French fraction of the communist left in Marseille during the war, a period which inspired his great novel Planet without Visa, one of whose principal protagonists is a communist revolutionary, an internationalist opposed to the “anti-fascist” war, named “Marc Laverne”.

The letter begins: “first, the disappeared. Michel, our poor Mitchell, no news of him, he must have ended his life in frightful conditions… Jean was the best element of the Belgian Fraction… the most talented, full of promise (did you know him?). He and his son were deported and died in a concentration camp in Germany”.

There follows a list of comrades and contacts from the political milieu in Vichy Marseille, as well as members of his own family: those who died, those who came back after suffering appalling tortures, those who managed to avoid the Nazi terror by adopting false names, or by flight. A terror continued by the Stalinist Resistance, as Marc recounts further on:

The most critical moment for me, when I could see death in front of me, was a few weeks afterwards when the Stalinists arrested me along with Clara1 and took all my writings. They were ready to show me what they were made of. It was just by a miracle of luck that Clara had met, among the leading chiefs, a woman with whom she had worked for a while in the UGIF (to help Jewish children) and we were able to save our skins from the hatred of the Stalinists”.

Such was the situation facing internationalists during and immediately after the second imperialist world war. Mitchell, who was one of them, had written a series of articles on the ‘Problems of the Period of Transition’ in the pages of Bilan. We have published them as part of this series2 because they offer an authentic marxist framework for discussing some of the most fundamental questions of the communist transformation: the historical and international context of the proletarian revolution; the dangers emanating from the transitional state; the economic content of the transformation, and so on. These articles must have had a powerful influence on Marc and the French fraction, later the Gauche Communiste de France, as can be seen from their efforts to take Mitchell’s critique of the transitional state to its logical conclusion: the rejection of any identity between the proletariat and this necessary evil in the transformation of social relations.3

Stirrings in the proletarian milieu

The letter to Malaquais asks for news about the political milieu in the western hemisphere – the Paul Mattick group in Chicago, which he linked to the Dutch left, the Oehler group in the same city, the group of the Italian left in New York, the Eiffels group in Mexico. Marc also answers Malaquais’ questions about Victor Serge, who had been with them in the milieu in Marseille but had become a democrat, supporting the allied imperialisms during the war4. Following a review of the counter-revolutionary role being played by the former workers’ parties in the post-war settlement, Marc talks about the proletarian milieu, such as it was , in France, mentioning in passing the French fraction and the divergences around the formation of the party in Italy, but also the groups who had come out of Trotskyism “L’Union Communiste is dead, but in its place has arisen a group, the Communistes Revolutionnaires, coming from a split with the Trotskyists, and although confused, it is sincerely revolutionary”. The CR was aligned with the Austrian/German group Revolutionären Kommunisten Deutschlands, which had also broken from Trotskyism over the crucial issues of the defence of the USSR and support for the war. The French fraction had discussed and worked with the RKD during the war, jointly signing an internationalist manifesto at the time of the “liberation” of France5.

Thus the French fraction, and subsequently the GCF, were keenly interested in discussion with all the internationalist proletarian groups which had survived the war and which were undergoing a certain revival in its wake6. Despite their characterisation of official Trotskyism as an appendage to Stalinism, they were open to the possibility that groups emerging from Trotskyism – provided they made a total break with its counter-revolutionary positions and practices – could evolve in a positive direction. This had evidently been the case with the RKD/CR tendency, and also with the Stinas group, the International Communist Union, in Greece, although we don’t know much about the existence of any contacts between Stinas and the Italian communist left during or after the war7

In France itself, the GCF entered into contact with the group around Grandizo Munis and, from 1949, with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group animated by Cornelius Castoriadis/Chaulieu (who had been a member of the Stinas group in Greece), Claude Lefort/Montal and others. In the case of the Munis group, then called Union Ouvrière Internationaliste, the GCF held a series of meetings with them on the present situation of capitalism. The seminal text ‘The evolution of capitalism and the new perspective’ was based on the exposé given by Marc Chirik at one of these meetings. Similar initiatives were taken with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

In a subsequent article, we are going to examine the ideas of Munis and Castoriadis in more detail, not least because both of them devoted a great deal of energy to defining the meaning of proletarian revolution and of socialist society in a period of continuing reaction in which the hideous deformations of Stalinism, of “really existing socialism” in Russia and its bloc, were more or less dominant in the working class. This ideological domination was not at all challenged by official Trotskyism, whose “contribution” to understanding the transition from capitalism to socialism was limited to an apology for the Stalinist regimes, defined as deformed workers’ states, and an advocacy of “nationalisation under workers’ control” (i.e. a form of state capitalism) in the countries outside the Russian bloc. It is thus of particular interest to study the work of elements who were breaking with Trotskyism not only because of its abandonment of internationalism, but also because its vision of social transformation remained firmly within the horizon of capitalism.

As a kind of preface to this study, we think it would be useful to republish the text ‘Welcome to Socialisme ou Barbarie’ in Internationalisme 43, because it is a good example of the method employed by the GCF in its relationship with the refugees from the shipwreck of Trotskyism in the wake of World War Two

The title of the article immediately sets the tone: a fraternal welcome to a new group which the GCF recognises as clearly belonging to the revolutionary camp, despite the many differences in the method and outlook of the two groups. The new group was the result of a split by the Chaulieu/Montal tendency within the French Trotskyist Party, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (in which Munis had also briefly sojourned). This led the GCF to qualify a previous statement it had made about this tendency:

The overall judgment we made of this tendency in recent issues of Internationalisme, however severe it might have been, was absolutely well-founded. We must however make a correction concerning its definitive character. The Chaulieu tendency was not liquidated, as we presented it, but found the strength, albeit after a very long delay, to break with the Trotskyist organisation and form itself into an autonomous group. Despite the heavy weight of this heritage on the group, this fact represents a new element that opens the possibility of its later evolution. The future alone will tell us to what extent it constitutes a gain in the formation of a new revolutionary movement. But right now we must say to them that they won’t be able to carry out this task unless they rid themselves completely and as quickly as possible of the scars they have inherited from Trotskyism and which can still be felt in the first issue of their review”.

And indeed, the “heavy weight of this heritage” was to prove an extremely difficult one to throw off. This burden can also be seen in the subsequent work of Munis, but it was to prove much more destructive in the case of Socialisme ou Barbarie, not least because, as the GCF article notes, the Chaulieu group immediately proclaimed that it had gone beyond all the existing revolutionary currents and would be able to provide definitive answers to the enormous problems confronting the working class. This arrogant assumption was to have very negative consequences for the future evolution of the group. We will seek to demonstrate this in a subsequent article.


Internationalisme 43, June/July 1949

Welcome to Socialisme ou Barbarie

The first issue of a new revolutionary review called Socialisme ou Barbarie has just appeared in France.

In the sombre situation in which the workers’ movement in France and the rest of the world finds itself today, a situation marked by a course towards war, in which the rare revolutionary groups – expressions of the life and state of consciousness of the proletarian class – who still survive thanks to a determined desire to act and a constant ideological effort , are becoming a little weaker each day; in a situation where the revolutionary press is reduced to a few small duplicated bulletins, the appearance of a new printed review, an “organ of criticism and revolutionary orientation” is an important event which every militant can only welcome and encourage.

Whatever the breadth of our disagreements with the positions of Socialisme ou Barbarie, and whatever the future evolution of this review, on the basis of the fundamental positions and general orientation expressed in this first issue, we must consider this group as undeniably proletarian and revolutionary. That is to say, we welcome its existence, and will follow with sympathy and interest its future activity and efforts. Since revolutionary sympathy is above all based on paying attention to political positions, we intend to examine the ideas put forward by Socialisme ou Barbarie without prejudice and with the greatest of care, to analyse them as they evolve, criticising what seems erroneous in them and in such cases countering them with our own views. We see this not with the aim of carrying out a vain polemic based on denigration - something which has become only too common among groups and which deeply repels us – but, however lively the discussion might be, as being exclusively geared towards the confrontation and clarification of positions.

Socialisme ou Barbarie is the organ of a tendency which has just broken with the Trotskyist party, the Chaulieu-Montal tendency. It is a political tendency known among the milieu of militants in France and we have spoken about it on several occasions, and again quite recently8, not in exactly tender terms. This perhaps demands a supplementary explanation on our part.

Examining the Trotskyist movement in France and noting that it once again, for the umpteenth time, finds itself in a state of crisis, we posed the question whether this crisis had a positive significance from the point of view of revolutionary formation. We replied with a categorical No, and for the following reason. Trotskyism, which was one of the proletarian reactions within the Communist International during the first years of its degeneration, never went beyond this position of being an opposition, despite its formal constitution into an organically separate party. By remaining attached to the Communist Parties – which it still sees as workers’ parties –even after the triumph of Stalinism, Trotskyism itself functions as an appendage to Stalinism. It is linked ideologically to Stalinism and follows it around like a shadow. All the activity of Trotskyism over the last 15 years proves this. From 1932-33 where it supported the possibility of the victory of the proletarian revolution in Germany under Stalinist leadership, to its participation in the 1939-45 war, in the Resistance and the Liberation, via the Popular Front, anti-fascism and participation in the war in Spain, Trotskyism has merely walked in the footsteps of Stalinism. In the wake of the latter, Trotskyism has also contributed powerfully to introducing into the workers’ movement habits and methods of organisation and forms of activity (bluff, intrigue, burrowing from within, insults and manoeuvres of all kinds) which are so many active factors in the corruption and destruction of any revolutionary activity. This doesn’t mean that revolutionary workers who only have a little political education have not been drawn into its ranks. On the contrary, as an organisation, as a political milieu, Trotskyism, far from favouring the development of revolutionary thought and of the organisms (fractions and tendencies) which express it, is an organised milieu for undermining it. This is a general rule valid for any political organisation alien to the proletariat, and experience has demonstrated that it applies to Stalinism and Trotskyism. We have known Trotskyism over 15 years of perpetual crisis, through splits and unifications, followed by further splits and crises, but we don’t know examples which have given rise to real, viable revolutionary tendencies. Trotskyism does not secrete within itself a revolutionary ferment. On the contrary, it annihilates it. The condition for the existence and development of a revolutionary ferment is to be outside the organisational and ideological framework of Trotskyism.

The constitution of the Chaulieu-Montal tendency within the Trotskyist organisation, and precisely after the latter had sunk itself up to its neck in the second imperialist war, the Resistance and national liberation, did not, with good reason, inspire much confidence towards it on our part. This tendency was formed on the basis of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism in the USSR and consequently rejected any defence of the latter. But what value could this position of non-defence of the USSR have when your practice is to co-habit in an organisation whose activity clearly and concretely resides in the defence of Russian state capitalism and participation in imperialist war? Not only did the Chaulieu-Montal tendency find its cohabitation in the organisation possible, it participated actively, and at all levels, in the activism typical of Trotskyism, based on bluff and mystification, in all its electoral, trade union and other campaigns. Furthermore, we could hardly avoid being unfavourably impressed by the behaviour of this tendency, made up of manoeuvres, combinations, dubious compromises, aimed more at seizing control of the leadership of the party than at developing the consciousness of its militants. The prolonged hesitations of the members of the tendency to leave the organisation – at the last congress, in summer 1948, they were still accepting being elected to the central committee – denotes both their political incoherence, their illusion in the possibility of re-dressing the Trotskyist organisation, and finally their total incomprehension of the political and organisational conditions indispensable to the elaboration of revolutionary thought and orientation

The overall judgment we made of this tendency in recent issues of Internationalisme, however severe it might have been, was absolutely well-founded. We must however make a correction concerning its definitive character. The Chaulieu tendency was not liquidated, as we presented it, but found the strength, albeit after a very long delay, to break with the Trotskyist organisation and form itself into an autonomous group. Despite the heavy weight of this heritage on the group, this fact represents a new element that opens the possibility of its later evolution. The future alone will tell us to what extent it constitutes a gain in the formation of a new revolutionary movement. But right now we must say to them that they won’t be able to carry out this task unless they rid themselves completely and as quickly as possible of the scars they have inherited from Trotskyism and which can still be felt in the first issue of their review.

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It’s not our intention here to make a deep and detailed analysis of the positions of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. We will come back to this another time. Today we will limit ourselves to observing that, after reading their first issue, this is a group in evolution, and that its positions are anything but fixed. This should not be seen as a reproach, far from it. This group rather seems to be moving away from its fixed position about a third class, the bureaucracy, and from the idea of a dual historical antithesis to capitalism; either socialism or bureaucratic collectivism. This position, which was previously the only reason for its existence as a tendency, was a dead-end both at the level of theoretical research and of practical revolutionary activity. It’s because it seems today to be abandoning, if only partially, this conception of a historical opposition between statism and capitalism, in favour of seeing statification as a tendency inherent in capitalism in the present period, that this group is managing to get a more correct appreciation of the present trade union movement and its necessary integration into the state apparatus.

We want to draw attention to a very interesting study by A. Carrier on the cartel of autonomous unions, in which through his pen the group Socialisme ou Barbarie for the first time expresses "our position on the historically obsolete nature of trade unionism as a proletarian weapon against exploitation".

However, we are a bit surprised to learn, after such a clear declaration on the historically obsolete character of trade unionism, that this position does not lead Socialisme ou Barbarie to refuse to take part in any trade union life. The reason for this practical attitude, which is in contradiction with the whole analysis made of the trade union movement, is formulated thus: “we go where the workers are, not just because they are there, so to speak, physically, but because that’s where they struggle, with more or less effectiveness, against all forms of exploitation. What’s more, participation in the unions is justified by saying: “We are not uninterested in the question of demands. We are convinced that in all circumstances there are correct demand slogans which, without resolving the problem of exploitation, assure the defence of the elementary material interests of the class, a defence which has to be organised on a daily basis faced with the daily attacks of capitalism”. And this after having, with the support of figures, demonstrated that “capitalism has reached the point where it can no longer give anything, where it can only take back what it has given. Not only is any reform impossible, but even the present level of poverty can’t be maintained”. From this point, the significance of the immediate programme has changed.

This whole study on “The cartel of united trade union action” is extremely interesting, but while it provides a valid analysis of trade unionism in the present period, it is also a very striking manifestation of the contradictory state of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. The objective analysis of the evolution of modern capitalism towards statification, both of the economy and of the economic organisations of the workers (an analysis which is that of the groups of the ultra-left, to which we belong) is in competition with the old traditional subjective attitude of participation and activity in the trade union organisation, an attitude inherited from Trotskyism from which they have not fully disengaged.

A good part of this number of Socialisme ou Barbarie is devoted to polemics with the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste. This is very understandable. Leaving a political organisation, where you have a whole past of militancy and conviction, doesn’t take place without a kind of emotional crisis, and often involves personal recriminations, which is quite natural. But here we are dealing with a polemic and a polemical tone which is well out of proportion.

We are thinking of the article by Chaulieu “Useless Mouths”, which is aimed at clearing a member of the group, Lefort, of the accusations made against him by La Vérité. We can well understand the strong indignation that can be provoked by this kind of accusation, full of hypocritical insinuations and malicious allusions. But Chaulieu doesn’t manage to keep things at a certain level, and in his reply he indulges in a regrettable grossness and vulgarity. Wordplay around the name of Pierre Frank is really worthy of a naughty schoolboy and doesn’t really have a place in a revolutionary publication. Once again we are in the presence of the decomposition which has been infecting the workers’ movement for years. The precondition for the reconstitution of a new revolutionary movement is to free itself of this venomous tradition imported by Stalinism, and maintained, among others, by Trotskyism. We can never insist too much on this “moral” aspect , which is one of the foundation-stones of revolutionary work in the immediate and in the future. This is why we were so disagreeably impressed to find this malodorous polemic in the columns of the first issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie. We should also point out that, caught up in the fires of polemic, Chaulieu and his friends have forgotten to reply to one of the key questions which gave rise to this polemic, i.e. whether or not it’s possible to carry out research into problems of the revolutionary movement through any publication that offers you its columns.

In Internationalisme we have already looked at this question, and the conclusion we arrived at is in the negative. Today there is an anguishing problem of a lack of means of expression for revolutionary thought. Every thinking revolutionary militant has had this feeling of being stifled and feels the need to break out of the silence which has been imposed on them. But beyond the subjective aspect of the problem there is a political problem linked to the present situation. We can’t find relief by depositing our thoughts anywhere: we have to make our thought an effective weapon of the proletarian class struggle. Have Lefort, Chaulieu and their friends asked themselves what is the result of collaborating with a literary and philosophical review like Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes?

This kind of collaboration will not only produce little more than ‘revolutionary’ verbiage, but it will also give credibility among militants to a review, an ideological current towards which the greatest political and ideological reserve is necessary. In this way, instead of clarifying things by distinguishing between different currents, you only end up increasing confusion. It shows a real lack of understanding of the conditions for revolutionary research to turn Sartre and his review - for whom the political application of his philosophy means support for the RDR9 - into a place, a milieu, for discussion about the role played by Trotsky and Trotskyism in the degeneration of the Communist International. Revolutionary theoretical research can never be the topic of conversation in a salon, or provide a theory for left-leaning literary types. However pitiful the means of expression available to the revolutionary proletariat, it’s only in this framework that you can work towards the elaboration of the theory of the class. Working on, improving, developing these means of expression is the only way for militants to make their thought and action effective. Trying to use means of expression that don’t belong to the organisms of the class always denotes an intellectualist and petty bourgeois tendency. The fact that this problem is completely neglected in the polemic written by Socialisme ou Barbarie proves that it has not even grasped, let alone solved, the problem. We think that this too is very significant.

******************************************

Before engaging in a critical examination of the positions defended by the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, we think that it’s necessary to pause a moment at another point, which is also highly characteristic: the manner in which this group presents itself. It would be wrong to consider that this is something without any importance. The idea one has of oneself, and the appreciation one has of other groups, is intimately linked to the general conceptions one professes. It is often this aspect which is most revealing about the nature of a group. In every case it is an indispensable element which makes it immediately possible to grasp the underlying conceptions of a group.

Here are two extracts from the leading article of the first issue of the review, an article which is in some ways the credo or political platform of the group.

Talking about the present-day workers’ movement, and having noted the complete alienation of the masses in anti-working class ideologies, the review writes:

The only ones that seem to be keeping afloat in this universal deluge are weak organisations like the ‘4th International’, the anarchist federations, and a few so-called ‘ultra-left’ groups (Bordigists, Spartacists, council communists). Organisations which are weak, not because of their meagre numbers – which in itself means nothing, and is not a criterion – but above all because of their lack of ideological and political content. Linked much more to the past than to the anticipation of the future, these organisations already find themselves absolutely incapable of understanding the social development of the 20th century, and even less of orienting themselves positively in response to it

And, having enumerated the weaknesses of Trotskyism and anarchism, the article continues a few lines later:

Finally, the ‘ultra-left’ grouplets either passionately cultivate their sectarian deformations, like the Bordigists, sometimes going so far as to making the proletariat responsible for their own incapacity, or, like the council communists, content themselves with drawing up, on the basis of past experience, recipes for the ‘socialist’ kitchens of the future….Despite their delirious pretensions, both the ‘4th International’ and the anarchists and the ultra-lefts are in truth nothing but historical memories, tiny scabs on the wounds of the class, doomed to disappear with the rise of the new skin being prepared in the underlying tissues” (p 9).

So much for the other existing tendencies and groups. It thus becomes understandable that, after such a severe judgment, a condemnation without appeal of the others, you present yourself in these terms:

By presenting ourselves today, through the means of this review, to the vanguard of manual and intellectual workers, we are the only ones responding in a systematic way to the fundamental problems of the contemporary revolutionary movement; we think that we are the only ones taking up and continuing the marxist analysis of the modern economy, posing on a scientific basis the problem of the historical development of the workers’ movement and its meaning, defining Stalinism and the ‘workers’’ bureaucracy in general, and finally, posing the revolutionary perspective by taking into account the original elements created by our epoch…We think that we represent the living continuation of marxism in the framework of contemporary society. In this sense we have no fear of being confused with all the editors of ‘marxist’ publications seeking ‘clarification’, all the men of good will, all the chatterers and gossips. If we pose problems, it’s because we think that we can resolve them (our underlining).

This is a language in which pretension and limitless self-flattery is only equalled by the ignorance shown about the revolutionary movement, its groups and tendencies, its work and its theoretical struggles over the last 30 years. Ignorance explains a lot, but it is not a justification and still less does it entitle you to claim a glorious medal for yourself. What medal authorises the Socialisme ou Barbarie group to speak so dismissively of the recent past of the revolutionary movement, its internal struggles, and its groups, whose only fault is to have posed some ten or twenty years in advance the problems which SouB in its ignorance claims to have discovered today?

The fact of having come into political life very recently during the course of the war, and even more the fact that it has come from the politically corrupted organisation of Trotskyism, in whose swamp it was floundering up till 1949, should not be invoked as a certificate of honour, as a guarantee of political maturity. The arrogant tone here bears witness to the evident ignorance of this group, which has not yet sufficiently freed itself from ways of thinking and discussing that derive from Trotskyism. If it looked at things in a different way, it would be seen quite easily that the ideas it announces today, and which it considers to be its original work, are for the most part a more or less happy reproduction of the ideas put forward by the left currents of the Third International (the Russian Workers’ Opposition, the Spartacists in Germany, the Council Communists in Holland, the Communist Left of Italy) over the course of the past 25 years.

If, instead of contenting itself with a few bits of knowledge and even of hearsay, the Socialisme ou Barbarie group had taken the trouble to make a deeper study of the many, though hard-to-find, documents of these left currents, it might perhaps have lost its pretensions to originality, but it would assuredly have gained in depth.


1 Marc’s wife and member of the GCF and later the ICC. See ‘Homage to our comrade Clara’ which also recounts this incident.

2 In IR 128, 129, 130, 131, 134. See International Review 2000's : 100 - 139

3 We have also republished the GCF’s ‘Theses on the nature of the state and the proletarian revolution’ from 1946, with a critical introduction.

4 This divergence had already appeared in Marseille, judging from the version provided by Malaquais in Planet without Visa, which has the fictional Marc arguing against the pro-allied position of the character Stepanoff, a thinly disguised version of Serge.

5 This joint intervention with the RKD was falsely described as “collaborating with Trotskyism” by the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, and served as a pretext for the expulsion of the GCF from the International Communist Left. But the RKD had clearly broken with Trotskyism on the key question of internationalism, opposition to the war, and denunciation of the USSR.

6 See for example our article on the internationalist conference in Holland in 1947.

7 For Stinas, see our introduction to extracts from his memoirs in International Review 72 (Memoirs of a revolutionary (A. Stinas, Greece): Nationalism and antifascism). See also ‘Greek Resistance in WW2: patriotism or internationalism’. The memoirs of Stinas have been published in Greek and French Agis Stinas, Mémoires: un révolutionnaire dans la Grèce du XXe siècle, preface by Michel Pablo, translated by Olivier Houdart, La Brèche, Paris, 1990, pp369. A partial English translation can be found on libcom: Revolutionary defeatists in Greece in World War II - Aghis Stinas. Stinas was unwavering in his opposition to the imperialist war and to the patriotic Resistance. In his case, given the lack of real centralisation in the self-proclaimed Fourth International, he had assumed for some years that this was the ‘normal’ position of the Trotskyist party. It was only later that he discovered the full extent of official Trotskyism’s capitulation to anti-fascism….

8 Internationalisme 41, January 1949, in the article ‘Where are we?’.

9 ICC note: Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire: a short-lived party formed by Sartre in 1947 along with various left social democrats and Trotskyists.

 

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Communism is on the agenda of history

Did May 68 really mark the end of almost 50 years of counter-revolution?

The ICC held public meetings in a number of cities across several countries to coincide with the 50th anniversary of May 1968. Generally speaking, those present broadly supported the way in which we characterised the movement:

  •  the historical significance of these events was expressed by the renewal of the class struggle, with the most massive workers' strike that ever existed until then – 10 million workers on strike –  a movement that owed nothing to the actions of the trade unions but was a spontaneous outbreak of struggle arising  purely from the initiative of the workers themselves;
  • this working class movement, while in no way inspired by the major student unrest of the time, was  partly catalysed by the brutal police attacks on the students that caused real outrage inside the working class;
  • this historical episode gave rise to an unprecedented atmosphere such as exists only during major working class movements: in the streets, in universities and in some occupied factories people spoke openly and there were intense political discussions;
  • this huge movement was the product of the return of the open economic crisis and its effect on the working class, and it freed the younger generation from the crushing weight of the of counter-revolutionary period;
  • this movement was therefore able to bring an end to an important blockage to the class struggle and to the overwhelming grip of Stalinism through its union transmission belts.

The idea that May 68 had signalled the development of a wave of struggles internationally was generally of no surprise to those present. But paradoxically, it was still not considered the case that May 68 marked the end of the long period of counter-revolution that resulted from the defeat of the first world revolutionary wave and which, at the same time, opened a new course towards class confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In particular, a number of characteristics of the current period, like the development of fundamentalism, the spread of wars across the planet, etc., tended to be seen as indicating that we are still in a counter-revolutionary period. For us, this is a mistake which has its source in a twofold problem.

On the one hand, there is insufficient knowledge of what the period opening up the world counter-revolution was like following the defeat of the first revolutionary wave, and thus a difficulty to really grasp what such a period meant for the working class and its struggle, but also for humanity insofar as the barbarism inherent in capitalism in crisis was no longer bound by any limits. This is why in this article we have chosen to go back to examine this period in detail. On the other hand, with the period that opened with May 68, although it may seem more familiar to the generations who – directly or indirectly – know about May 68, grasping its underlying dynamic is not something that comes spontaneously. In particular, it may be obscured by events and situations which, although important, do not constitute the decisive factors. This is why we will also return to this period by highlighting its fundamental differences with the period of counter-revolution.

The history of class struggle comprises advances and retreats

 

Everyone was in agreement that, at an immediate level, after a struggle, a workers' mobilisation tends to fall back and often with it the will to fight, and this also exists at a deeper level throughout history. In fact, this gives validity to what Marx had pointed out on this subject in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that the proletarian struggle alternates between advances, often very dynamic and dazzling (1848-49, 1864-71, 1917-23) and retreats (in 1850, 1872, and 1923) which, moreover, have each time led to the disappearance or degeneration of the political organisations that the class had given itself during the period of rising struggles (Communist League: established in 1847, dissolved in 1852; International Workers’ Association: founded in 1864, dissolved in 1876; Communist International: founded in 1919, degenerated and died in the mid 1920s; the life of the Socialist International 1889-1914, having followed a broadly similar course but with less clarity[1]).

The defeat of the first international revolutionary wave of 1917-23 would open the longest, deepest and most terrible period of counter-revolution suffered by the proletariat, with the working class as a whole losing its bearings, with the few remaining organisations loyal to the revolution being reduced to tiny minorities. But it also opened the door to an unleashing of barbarism that would surpass the horrors of the First World War. On the other hand, since 1968 the opposite dynamic has developed and there is no reason to say that it has now been exhausted, despite the major difficulties experienced by the proletariat since the early 1990s and with the extension and deepening of barbarism across the planet.

The period 1924 - 1967: the deepest ever counter-revolution suffered by the working class

The expression “It is midnight in the century”, from the title of a book by Victor Serge,[2] applies perfectly to the reality of this nightmare that lasted nearly half a century.

The terrible blows struck early on against the world revolutionary wave that had opened with the Russian revolution in 1917 already constituted the antechamber to the long series of bourgeois offensives against the working class that would plunge the workers' movement into the depths of the counter-revolution. For the bourgeoisie, it would not only be a question of defeating the revolution but also of delivering blows against the working class that it would not be able to recover from. Faced with a world revolutionary wave that had threatened the global capitalist order, and this was indeed its conscious and stated objective,[3] the bourgeoisie could not simply be content with driving the proletariat back; it had to do everything in its power to ensure that this experience would leave such an image to the future world proletariat that it would never want to do it again. Above all, it had to try to discredit forever the idea of communist revolution and the possibility of establishing a society without war, without classes and without exploitation. For this reason, it was able to benefit from political circumstances that were considerably favourable to it: the loss of the revolutionary stronghold in Russia was not the result of its defeat in the military confrontation with the white armies that tried to invade Russia, but came from its own internal degeneration (to which, of course, the considerable war effort contributed greatly). So much so that it would be easy for the bourgeoisie to make the monstrosity that emerged from the political defeat of the revolution, the “Socialist” USSR, look like communism. At the same time, the latter had to be perceived as the inevitable destiny of any struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation. All fractions of the world bourgeoisie, in all countries, from the far right to the Trotskyist far left, would participate in this lie.[4]

When the World War was ended by the main bourgeoisies involved in it in November 1918, it was with the obvious aim of preventing new centres of revolutionary activity from swelling the tide of the revolution that had been victorious in Russia and was threatening in Germany, where the bourgeoisie had been weakened by the military defeat. This sought to prevent the revolutionary fever, incited by the barbarism of the battlefields and by the unbearable exploitation and misery behind the front lines, from also seizing hold in other countries such as France and Great Britain. And this goal was generally achieved: in the victorious countries, the proletariat, while it had fervently acclaimed the Russian revolution, did not show a massive commitment to the flag of revolution for the overthrow of capitalism in order to put an end forever to the horrors of war. Exhausted by four years of suffering in the trenches or in the arms factories, it sought instead to seek rest, “taking advantage” of the peace that the imperialist bandits had just delivered. And since, in the final analysis, in all wars the defeated parties get the blame, the Entente countries (France, United Kingdom, Russia) removed all the responsibility from capitalism as a whole, and laid all the blame onto the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Hungary). Even worse, the bourgeoisie in France promised workers a new era of prosperity on the basis of the reparations that would be imposed on Germany. In this way, the proletariat in Germany and in Russia would be all the more isolated.

But what would really happen, in both victorious and defeated countries, was the future that Rosa Luxemburg had outlined in her Junius Pamphlet: if the world proletariat did not succeed through its revolutionary struggle in building a new society on the smoking ruins of capitalism, then inevitably the latter would inflict even worse disasters on humanity.

The story of this new descent into hell, which culminated in the horrors of the Second World War, is tied up in many ways with that of the counter-revolution that reached its peak at the end of this conflict.

The white armies' offensive against Soviet Russia and the failure of revolutionary attempts in Germany and Hungary

Very soon after October 1917, Soviet power was confronted with the military offensives of German imperialism, which was not going to listen to any talk about peace.[5] The white armies, with economic support from abroad, were being formed in several parts of the country. And then, new white armies, directly set up abroad, were unleashed against the revolution until 1920. The country was surrounded, hemmed in by the white armies, and was being suffocated economically. The civil war would leave the country totally devastated. Nearly 980,000 Red Army soldiers died and around 3 million from among the civilian population.[6]

In Germany, the axis of the counter-revolution was constituted by the alliance between two major forces: the traitorous SPD (Social Democratic Party) and the army. They contributed in setting up a new force, the Freikorps, the mercenaries of the counter-revolution, the nucleus of which would become the Nazi movement. The bourgeoisie would inflict a terrible blow on the Berlin proletariat by drawing it into a premature insurrection in Berlin, which was brutally suppressed in January 1919. Thousands of Berlin workers and communists – the majority of whom were also workers – were slaughtered (1200 workers were executed by firing squad), tortured and thrown into prison. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and then Leo Jogisches were murdered. The working class was losing a part of its vanguard and its most perceptive leader in the person of Rosa Luxemburg who would have been a valuable compass in the face of the looming turmoil.

In addition to the inability of the workers' movement in Germany to thwart this manoeuvre, it would also suffer from a glaring lack of coordination between the various centres of the movement: after the Berlin uprising, defensive struggles broke out in the Ruhr involving millions of miners, steel workers, textile workers from the industrial regions of the Lower Rhine and Westphalia (1st quarter of 1919), followed (at the end of March) by struggles in central Germany and again in Berlin. The Executive Council of the Republic of the councils of Bavaria was proclaimed in Munich and then overthrown, opening the door to brutal repression. Berlin, the Ruhr, Berlin again, Hamburg, Bremen, Central Germany, Bavaria, everywhere the proletariat was crushed, everywhere sector by sector. All the ferocity, the barbarism, the cunning, the calls of denunciation and the military technology were put at the service of repression. For example, “to take back Alexanderplatz in Berlin, battlefield weapons were used for the first time in the history of revolutions: namely, light and heavy artillery, bombs weighing up to one hundredweight, aerial reconnaissance and aerial bombardment”.[7] Thousands of workers were shot or killed in the fighting; communists were hunted down and many were sentenced to death.

In March the workers in Hungary also engaged capital in revolutionary clashes. On March 21, 1919, the Republic of Councils was proclaimed but it was crushed during the summer by counter-revolutionary troops. For more information, read our articles in the International Review.[8]

Despite the subsequent heroic attempts of the proletariat in Germany, in 1920 (in the face of the Kapp putsch) and 1921 (the March Action),[9] which testify to the persistence of a strong fighting spirit, the momentum was no longer towards the political reinforcement of the German proletariat as a whole, but the opposite.

The degeneration of the revolution in Russia

 

The ravages of the war against the offensives of the international bourgeoisie, including the considerable losses suffered by the proletariat, its political weakening with the loss of political power by the workers' councils and the dissolution of the Red Guard, and the political isolation of the revolution – all this constituted a favourable ground for the development of opportunism within the Bolshevik party and the Communist International.[10] The repression of the Kronstadt insurrection in 1921, which took place in reaction to the loss of power by the Soviets, was ordained by the Bolshevik party. From being the vanguard of the revolution at the time of the seizure of power, it was to become the vanguard of counter-revolution at the end of an internal degeneration that could not be prevented by the fractions that emerged within this party to fight specifically against growing opportunism.[11]

The broad masses that in Russia, Germany and Hungary had stormed the heavens were no longer present. They were blooded, exhausted, defeated, and could not take anymore. Within the victorious countries of the war, the proletariat had been unable to strike an effective blow. All this would signal the political defeat of the proletariat everywhere in the world.

Stalinism becomes the spearhead of the world bourgeoisie against the revolution

The process of the degeneration of the Russian revolution accelerated when Stalin took control of the Bolshevik party. The adoption in 1925 of the thesis of “socialism in one country”, which became the doctrine of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International, constituted a breaking point with no return. This betrayal of proletarian internationalism, the basic principle of the proletarian struggle and the communist revolution, would now be adopted and defended by all the Communist Parties of the world,[12] which was totally opposed to the historic project of the working class. And just as it signals the abandonment of the whole proletarian project, the thesis of socialism in one country corresponded with Russia's growing integration into world capitalism.

From the mid-1920s, Stalin would pursue a policy of merciless liquidation of all Lenin's former companions by making maximum use of the repressive bodies that the Bolshevik Party had set up to resist the white armies (notably the political police, the Cheka).[13] The whole capitalist world had recognised in Stalin the right man for the job, the one who would eradicate the last vestiges of the October Revolution and to whom it was necessary to give all the necessary support to smash and exterminate the generation of proletarians and revolutionaries who, in the middle of the world war, had dared to engage in a struggle to the death against the capitalist order.[14]

Revolutionaries were hunted down and suppressed by Stalinism, wherever they were, and this with the help of the great democracies, the same people who had sent their white armies to starve and try to overthrow the power of the soviets.

From this point, Stalin's USSR is seen as socialism, while any consciousness of the real proletarian project starts to disappear

Stalin's Russia was presented by the Stalinist bourgeoisie, as well as by the world bourgeoisie, as the realisation of the ultimate goal of the proletariat, the establishment of socialism. In this endeavour, all the factions of the world bourgeoisie collaborated, both the democratic factions and the various national Communist Parties.

The vast majority of those who still believed in the revolution would identify its purpose as the establishment of a regime like the USSR in other countries. The more the light was shed on the reality of the situation of the working class in the USSR, the deeper would be the division in the world proletariat: those who would continue to defend its “progressive” character (despite all its shortcomings), with the idea that there was “no bourgeoisie” in the Soviet Union; those for whom, on the contrary, the situation in the USSR was seen as a monstrosity, but against which they felt powerless to pose the alternative. Only a smaller and smaller minority of revolutionaries supported the proletarian project and stayed loyal to it.

The proletariat confronted with the crisis of 1929 and the 1930s

The years following the 1929 crisis dramatically affected the living conditions of the world proletariat, especially in Europe and the United States. But generally speaking its reactions to this situation did not provide a sufficiently dynamic class response that could challenge the established order. Far from it. Worse still, notable reactions in France and Spain were diverted into the impasse of the antifascist struggle.

In France, the great wave of strikes that followed the arrival of the Popular Front government in 1936 clearly demonstrated the limitations imposed on the working class by the leaden yoke of the counter-revolution. The wave of strikes had begun with spontaneous occupations of factories and did show a certain combativity of the workers. But, from the very first days, the left would use this gigantic mass to manoeuvre and to impose the measures of state capitalism on the whole French bourgeoisie, measures needed for dealing with the economic crisis and preparing for war. While it was true that for the first time in France there were factory occupations, it was also the first time that we would see the workers singing both the International and the Marseillaise and marching behind both the red flag and the Tricolour.[15] The apparatus constituted by the Communist Party and the unions was in control of the situation, managing to lock up the workers, who had let themselves be lulled by the sound of the accordion inside the factories.

The Spanish proletariat had stayed somewhat isolated from the First World War and the revolutionary wave,[16] so its physical forces remained relatively intact in dealing with the attacks that rained on it throughout the 1930s. There were nevertheless more than a million deaths between 1931 and 1939, of which the most important part would be a consequence of the civil war between the Republican camp and that of General Franco, which had absolutely nothing to do with the class struggle of the proletariat but was on the contrary made possible through its weakening. The situation was precipitated in 1936 with the coup d'état by General Franco. There was an immediate response from the workers: on 19 July 1936, the workers took strike action and went en masse to the army barracks to disarm the coup, without worrying about the contrary directives of the Popular Front and the Republican government. Uniting the struggle for demands with the political struggle, the workers held back Franco's murderous hand, but not that of the bourgeois faction organised in the Popular Front. Barely a year later, in May 1937, the Barcelona proletariat rose up again, but out of desperation, and it was massacred by the Popular Front government, the Spanish Communist Party with its Catalan branch of the PSUC at the helm, while the Francoist troops willingly halted their advance to allow the Stalinist executioners to crush the workers.

This terrible working class tragedy, which is still misrepresented today as “a Spanish social revolution” or “a great revolutionary adventure”, is a mark, on the contrary, of the triumph of the counterrevolution, with the ideological and physical crushing of the last living forces of the European proletariat. This massacre would be a dress rehearsal that paved the royal way to the unleashing of the imperialist war.[17]

The 1930s: the bourgeoisie has its hands free once again to impose its solution to the crisis

The Weimar Republic in Germany had distinguished itself with the introduction of extreme measures to exploit the working class alongside others that gave workers some representation in the company they worked for, with the sole intent of mystifying them.

In Germany, there was no real opposition between the Weimar Republic (1923) and fascism (1933): the former had permitted the revolutionary threat to be crushed, dispersing the proletariat, and clouding its consciousness; the latter, Nazism, would finish the process off, uniting capitalist society by using the iron fist to smash any remaining proletarian threat.[18]

Parties appeared in all the European countries claiming to be either pro-Hitler or pro-Mussolini and they all supported a programme of strengthening and concentrating political and economic power in the hands of a single party state. Their influence grew alongside a widespread anti-working class offensive by the repressive state apparatus reinforced by the army, and by the fascist troops where needed. From Romania to Greece, we saw the development of fascist-type organisations charged with preventing any working class reaction and with the collusion of the national state. The capitalist dictatorship became overt, and most often took the form of the Mussolini or Hitler model.

However, in the industrialised countries least affected by the crisis, retaining the framework of democracy was still possible. Indeed, this was necessary to mystify the proletariat. Fascism, having given rise to “antifascism”, had strengthened the ability of the “democratic powers” to use this mystification. The ideology of the Popular Fronts[19] made it possible to keep the workers disoriented behind the programmes of national unity and preparation for imperialist war; and, in collusion with the Russian bourgeoisie, most of the Communist Parties subservient to the new imperialist order organised a vast campaign on the rise of the fascist peril.[20] The bourgeoisie would only be able to wage war by deceiving the proletariat and making it believe that it was its war too: “With the halt to the class struggle, or more precisely the destruction of the class power of the proletariat, the destruction of its consciousness and the diversion of its struggles, the bourgeoisie used its intermediaries inside the proletariat to empty the class struggles of their revolutionary content and to derail them onto the paths of reformism and nationalism, which was the ultimate and conclusive condition for the outbreak of the imperialist war.”[21]

The massacres of the Second World War

The majority of the soldiers enrolled by both camps did not set out with much enthusiasm, still mindful of the deaths of their fathers just 25 years earlier. And what they were confronted with would not do much to raise their mood: the “Blitzkrieg” caused 90,000 deaths and 120,000 wounded on the French side, 27,000 dead on the German side. The debacle in France would see ten million people die under appalling conditions. One and a half million prisoners were sent to Germany. The conditions for the survivors were totally inhuman: the massive exodus of the people in France and the Nazi state terror bearing down on the German population.

In France as in Italy, many workers joined the maquis at that time. The Stalinist party and the Trotskyists had sold them a fraudulently distorted view of the Paris Commune (shouldn't the workers take a stand against their own bourgeoisie led by Pétain – the new Thiers – when the Germans were occupying France?) With the outbreak of the war and the population terrified and powerless, many French and European workers were recruited into the resistance groups and would now be killed believing they were fighting for the “socialist liberation” of France, Italy... The Stalinist and Trotskyist resistance groups were directing their odious propaganda around the idea that the workers would be “at the forefront of the struggle for a people's independence”.

While the First World War killed 20 million people, the Second World War would kill 50 million, 20 million of whom were Russians killed on the European front. 10 million people died in the concentration camps, 6 million of them as a result of the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews. Although none of the macabre abuses of Nazism are now unknown to the general public, unlike the crimes committed by the great democracies, the Nazi crimes remain an irrefutable illustration of the boundless barbarism of decadent capitalism, and the heinous hypocrisy of the Allied camp. Indeed, during the liberation, the Allies pretended to have just discovered the concentration camps. This was a pure masquerade to conceal their own barbarity by exposing that of the defeated enemy. In fact, the bourgeoisie, both English and American, had known perfectly well of the existence of the camps and what was happening in them. And yet, strange as it may appear, it did not talk about it throughout most of the war and did not make it a central theme of its propaganda. In fact, the governments of Churchill and Roosevelt feared like the plague that the Nazis would empty the camps and massively expel the Jews. And so, they refused offers of an exchange of one million Jews; even in exchange for nothing.[22]

In the final year of the war, the bombardments were directly targeted on areas where the workers were concentrated, in order to weaken the working class as much as possible by decimating and terrorising it.

The world bourgeoisie takes steps to prevent the possibility of a proletarian recovery

The objective was to prevent the repeat of a proletarian uprising like the ones in 1917 and 1918 in response to the horrors of the war. This is why the Anglo-American bombings – mainly in Germany but also in France – were purposely barbaric. The toll of what was undoubtedly one of the greatest war crimes, in the course of the Second World War, was around 200,000 dead,[23] almost all civilians. For example, the bombing in 1945 of Dresden, a hospital town with no strategic interest had no other purpose than terrorising the civilian populations.[24] By comparison, Hiroshima, another heinous crime, killed 75,000 people and the horrific American bombings of Tokyo in March 1945 caused 85,000 deaths!

When Mussolini was overthrown in 1943 and replaced by Marshal Badoglio, who was sympathetic to the Allies, the Allies although they already controlled the south of the country, were in no rush to move northwards. It was a case of letting the fascists settle scores with the working masses who were renewing the struggle against their class oppressors in the industrial regions of northern Italy. When asked about his passivity, Churchill replied: “Let the Italians stew in their own juice”.

From the end of the war, the Allies favoured Russian occupation, especially in areas where workers’ revolts had occurred. The Red Army was the best equipped to restore order in these countries either by slaughtering the proletariat or by diverting it from its class terrain in the name of “socialism”.

A similar division of labour was established between the Red Army and the German army. When it had already reached the suburbs of Warsaw and Budapest, the “Red Army” didn't lift a finger. It let the German army crush the insurrections that were poised to drive them out. Thus Stalin entrusted Hitler with the task of slaughtering tens of thousands of armed workers who could have upset his plans.

Not content with offering Stalin territories where there was a risk of social movements, the “democratic” bourgeoisie of the victorious countries called on the Communist Parties to join the governments in most European countries (notably in France and Italy), allocating them high-ranking positions in various ministries (Thorez – secretary of the French Communist Party – was appointed vice-president of the Council in France in 1944).

Terror was inflicted on the German population immediately after the war

In continuity with the massacres designed to prevent any proletarian uprising in Germany at the end of the war, those that took place after the war were no less barbaric and expeditious.

Germany was transformed into a vast death camp by the occupying powers of Russia, Britain, France and the United States. Many more Germans died after the war than in the battles, bombings and war concentration camps. According to James Bacque, the author of Crimes et Mercies: Le sort des civils allemands sous occupation alliée, 1944-1950”,[25] more than 9 million died as a result of the policy of Allied imperialism between 1945 and 1950.

It was only when this deadly objective had been achieved and American imperialism began to see that the post-war exhaustion of Europe could lead to the domination of Russian imperialism over the whole continent, that the policy of Potsdam was changed. The reconstruction of Western Europe depended on resurrecting the German economy. The Berlin Airlift in 1948 was the symbol of this change of strategy.[26] Of course, just like the bombing of Dresden, considered “...the most beautiful terror raid [that] the victorious Allies carried out in the whole war”, the democratic bourgeoisie did everything possible to obscure the true reality of the barbarism that was broadly shared by the two sides in the World War.

The proletariat was not able to rise up directly against the war

Despite the fact that struggles broke out from time to time in various places, particularly those in Italy in 1943, the proletariat was not able to visibly hold back the barbarism of the Second World War, as it had done with the First. 

The First World War had won millions of workers to internationalism; the Second World War cast them into the depths of the most despicable chauvinism, in the hunting down of the “Boche”[27] and the “collabos”.[28]

The proletariat was at rock bottom. What was presented to it, and what it interpreted as its great “victory”, the triumph of democracy over fascism, was in fact its most complete historical defeat. It made possible the consolidation of the ideological pillars of the capitalist order: the proletariat was overwhelmed by the feeling of victory and euphoria, the belief in the “sacred virtues” of bourgeois democracy – the same democracy that had led it into the butchery of two imperialist wars and crushed its revolution in the early 1920s. Then during the period of reconstruction, and the post-war economic “boom” and with it the short-lived improvement in its living conditions in the West, it was prevented from seeing the extent of the real defeat It had suffered.[29]

In the Eastern European countries, who were not beneficiaries of the manna of the American Marshall Plan because the Stalinist parties refused it on Moscow's orders, the situation took considerably longer to improve. The workers were presented with the mystification of “constructing socialism”. This mystification had some degree of success, such as in Czechoslovakia, where the “Prague coup” of February 1948 – i.e. the Stalinist take-over of the government – met with the approval of many workers.

Once this illusion began to wear thin, workers’ uprisings like the one in Hungary in 1956 broke out, but they were severely repressed by Russian soldiers.

The involvement of Russian troops in the repression then became an additional stimulus for nationalism in the Eastern European countries. At the same time, it was used extensively in propaganda by the “democratic” and pro-American sectors of the bourgeoisie of the Western European countries, while the Stalinist parties of these countries used the same propaganda to present the Hungarian workers' insurrection as a chauvinist, even a “fascist” movement, in the pay of American imperialism.

Moreover, throughout the “Cold War”, and even when it gave way to “peaceful coexistence” after 1956, the division of the world into two blocs was a major instrument for the mystification of the working class.

In the 1950s the working class was still divided and disoriented by the same kind of politics as existed in the 1930s: one part of the working class no longer wanted to know anything about communism (which was identified with the USSR), while the other part continued to suffer under the ideological domination of the Stalinist parties and their unions. Hence, following on from the Korean War, the confrontation between East and West was used to sow divisions inside the working class and to mobilise millions of workers behind the Soviet camp in supporting “the struggle against imperialism”.  At the same time, the colonial wars provided an additional opportunity to deflect workers away from their class terrain, once more behind the “struggle against imperialism” (and not the struggle against capitalism) in which the USSR was presented as the champion of the “rights and the freedom of the people”. This kind of campaign continued in many countries throughout the 1950s and 1960s, particularly during the Vietnam War, where the United States began its large-scale intervention in 1961.[30]

Another consequence of this very long and profound retreat of the working class was the organic rupture with the communist fractions of the past;[31] with the consequence that the burden of responsibility was passed onto future generations of revolutionaries to critically reclaim the acquisitions of the workers' movement.

May 68, the end of the counter-revolution

 

The crisis of 1929 and the 1930s had, at best, provoked a proletarian combativity as in France and Spain, but, as we have seen previously, these movements were diverted from the class terrain into antifascism and the defence of democracy, thanks to the grip of the Stalinists, Trotskyists and trade unions. This only contributed in a further reinforcing of the counter-revolution.

1968 was only the start of the return of the global economic crisis and yet, the effects in France (rising unemployment, wage freezes, the drive for increased productivity, attacks on social security) explain a large part of the rise in workers' combativity in that country from 1967 onwards. Far from being channelled by the Stalinists and trade unions, the renewal of workers' combativity was turning away from union-led strikes and “days of action”. As early as 1967, faced with the violent repression by the employers and police, there were some very fierce confrontations where the unions lost control on several occasions.

The purpose of this article is not to go back over all the important aspects of May 68 in France. For this reason, we refer the reader to the articles, “May 68 and the revolutionary perspective” written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of these events.[32] Nevertheless, recalling certain facts is important to illustrate the change in the dynamics of the class struggle that took place in May 1968.

In May, the social atmosphere changed radically. “On May 13, every town in the country saw the most important demonstrations since World War II. The working class was massively present alongside the students. (...) At the end of the demonstrations, practically all the universities were occupied, not only by the students but also by many young workers. Everywhere, anyone could speak. Discussions were not limited to questions about universities and repression. They began to confront all the social problems: conditions of work, exploitation, the future of society. (…) On May 14 discussions continued in many firms. After the huge demonstrations the day before, with the enthusiasm and feelings of strength that emanated from them, it was difficult to carry on as if nothing had happened. In Nantes, with the workers of Sud-Aviation carried along by the youngest workers, a spontaneous strike broke out and they decided to occupy the factory. The working class had begun to take up the reins.”[33]

The traditional method of corralling the struggle used by the bourgeoisie wasn't much use faced with the spontaneity with which the working class entered the struggle. Thus, in the three days following the demonstration on 13 May, the strike spread spontaneously to workplaces throughout France. The movement overflowed the unions and left them behind. No specific demands were raised, but a common pattern existed: all-out strike, occupations that were not time-limited, management taken captive, red flags raised. In the end, the CGT called for spreading the strike, aiming to “move things along”.[34]  But even before the CGT's instructions were known, there were already a million workers on strike.

The working class's growing consciousness of its own power stimulated discussion and especially political discussion. This was to some extent reminiscent of the political life that the working class experienced in the revolutionary ferment of 1917, recorded in the writings of Trotsky and John Reed.

The veil of lies woven for decades by the counter-revolution and its supporters, both Stalinist and democratic, was beginning to get very thin. Amateur videos shot in the occupied Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes showed a passionate discussion among a group of workers about the role of the strike committees under “dual power”. The duality of power in 1917 was the product of the struggle for real power between the bourgeois state and the workers’ councils. In many of the factories on strike in 1968, the workers had elected strike committees. It was very far from being in a pre-revolutionary situation, but what was happening was an attempt by the working class to reclaim its own experience, its revolutionary past. Another example bears this out: “Some workers asked those who defended the idea of the revolution to come and argue their point of view in their occupied factories. In Toulouse, the small nucleus that went on to form the ICC's section in France was invited to expound its ideas about workers' councils in the occupied JOB (paper and cardboard) factory. And the most significant thing was that this invitation came from the union militants of the CGT, and those of the French Communist Party. The latter had to negotiate for an hour with the permanent officials of the CGT and the PCF who had come from the big Sud-Aviation factory to ‘reinforce’ the JOB strike picket to get authorisation to allow the ‘leftists’ to enter the factory. For more than six hours, workers and revolutionaries, sitting on rolls of cardboard, discussed the revolution, the history of the workers' movement, the soviets and even the betrayals... of the PCF and the CGT.[35]

Such a reflection allowed thousands of workers to rediscover the historical role of workers' councils, as well as the accomplishments of the working class struggle, such as the revolutionary efforts in Germany in 1919. Similarly, there was a growing criticism of the role played by the French Communist Party (which then defined itself as a party of order) not only in relation to the events of 1968 itself, but also since the Russian revolution. This was the first time that Stalinism and the Communist Party as guardians of the established order had been called into question on such a scale. The criticism also affected the unions, which increased when they openly showed themselves to be sowing divisions inside the working class in order to get it to go back to work.[36]

It was the start of a new era, characterised by a re-awakening of class-consciousness across the working masses. This break with the counter-revolution did not mean that the latter would not continue to weigh negatively on the subsequent development of the class struggle, nor that workers' consciousness was free of very strong illusions, particularly concerning the obstacles to be overcome on the road to revolution, and indeed it was much further away at the time than the great majority imagined.

Such a characterisation of May 68 as an illustration of the end of the counter-revolutionary period was confirmed by the fact that, far from remaining an isolated phenomenon, these events would on the contrary constitute the starting point for the resumption of the class struggle on an international scale, spurred on by the deepening of the economic crisis, whose corollary was the development of a proletarian political milieu on an international scale.[37] The founding of “Révolution Internationale” in 1968 was an illustration of this, since this group would play a leading role in the process that would lead to the founding of the ICC in 1975, in which Révolution Internationale became its section in France. Unlike the dark period of the counter-revolution, the bourgeoisie was now confronted with a class that was not ready to accept the sacrifices demanded from the economic war between states. It also obstructed the slide towards world war in opposing the sacrifices demanded by imperialist war; this would become clearer later, at least as concerned the main bastions of the class in Europe and the United States.

The international recovery of class struggle from 1968

The ICC has just devoted an article to this question, “The advances and retreats in the class struggle since 1968”,[38] which we recommend to our readers and from which we draw elements necessary to highlight the differences between the counter-revolutionary period and the historical period opened with May 1968. Simply put, the fundamental difference between the period of counter-revolution, starting from a heavy defeat of the working class, and the one that opened with May 68, lies in the fact that since this emergence of the struggle and despite all the difficulties with which the proletariat has been confronted, it has not suffered a decisive defeat.

The deepening of the open economic crisis, which was only in its infancy at the end of the 1960s, has produced a significant development of proletarian combativity and consciousness.

There were three successive waves of struggle over the two decades after 1968.

The first, undoubtedly the most spectacular, gave us the Italian “hot autumn” in 1969, the violent uprising in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1969 and struggles in Poland in 1970, and important movements in Spain and Great Britain in 1972. There was also a “hot autumn” in Germany in 1969 with many wildcat strikes. In Spain in particular, workers began to organise themselves through mass assemblies, a process that culminated in Vitoria in 1976. The international dimension of the wave was demonstrated by echoes in Israel (1969) and Egypt (1972) and, later, by the uprisings in the townships of South Africa, which were led by struggle committees (the Civics).

After a short break in the mid-1970s, there was a second wave with strikes by Iranian oil workers, steel mill workers in France in 1978, the “winter of discontent” in Britain, the dockworkers' strike in Rotterdam, led by an independent strike committee, and steel strikes in Brazil in 1979 which also challenged union control. In Asia there was the Kwangju revolt  in South Korea. This wave of struggles culminated in Poland in 1980, certainly the most important episode of class struggle since 1968, and even since the 1920s.

Although the severe repression of the Polish workers brought this wave to a halt, it did not take long before a new movement took place with the struggles in Belgium in 1983 and1986, the general strike in Denmark in 1985, the miners' strike in Britain in 1984-85, the railway and health workers' struggles in France in 1986 and 1988, and the movement of education workers in Italy in 1987. The struggles in France and Italy, in particular – like the mass strike in Poland – showed a real capacity for self-organisation with general assemblies and strike committees.

This movement of struggles in waves was not going nowhere; it made real advances in class-consciousness expressed in the following characteristics:

  • a loss of illusions in the political forces of the left of capital and mainly the unions, with illusions giving way to mistrust and increasingly open hostility;
  • the increasing rejection of ineffective forms of mobilisation, dead-ends into which the unions have so often channelled workers' combativity: days of action, demonstrations reduced to tame parades; long and isolated strikes...

But the experience of these 20 years of struggle had not only brought out the “negative” lessons for the working class (of what not to do). It has also provided lessons about what to do:

  • seeking to extend the struggle (Belgium 1986 in particular);
  • seeking to take the struggle into our own hands, by organising into elected and revocable assemblies and strike committees (France at the end of 1986, Italy mainly in1987).

Similarly, the more sophisticated manoeuvres developed by the bourgeoisie to deal with the class struggle also showed that there has been some development during this period. Thus, to face up to the growing disenchantment with the official unions and the threat posed by self-organisation, it developed forms of unionism which could even appear to be “outside the unions” (the 'Coordinations' set up by the far left in France, for example).

The proletariat puts a brake on war

During the twenty years after May 1968, the bourgeoisie, unable to inflict a decisive historic defeat on the working class, was incapable of implementing a mobilisation for a new world war, contrary to the situation of the 1930's, as we showed above.

In fact it was out of the question that the bourgeoisie would launch a world war without being fully assured of the docility of the proletariat, an indispensable condition for it to accept the sacrifices required for a state of war in which the mobilisation of all the living forces of the nation, as much in production as on the fronts, is demanded. Such an objective was totally unrealistic as long as the proletariat wasn't ready to submit itself obediently to the measures of austerity that the bourgeoisie had to take in order to face up to the consequences of the economic crisis. That's why a third world war didn’t take place during this period, a time where tensions between the blocs were at their height and the alliances amongst them were already firmly established through the two blocs. Further, in none of the historic concentrations of the proletariat did the bourgeoisie try to mobilise the proletariat as cannon-fodder in the local wars relevant to the east-west rivalry which, during this time, had bloodied the world.

This is particularly true of the working class of the West but equally applies to those of the East, although the latter were weaker politically, in the USSR especially, given the damage done by the steamroller of Stalinism. The Stalinist bourgeoisie, mired in a rapidly deteriorating economic swamp, was manifestly incapable of mobilising its workers in a military solution to its economic bankruptcy, a fact particularly illustrated with the strikes in Poland in 1980.

That being said, even if the working class was an obstacle to world war up to the end of the 1980's, given that it had been capable of developing its combats of resistance against the attacks of capital in the two decades after 1968 without submitting to a decisive defeat that would have overturned a global dynamic of towards confrontation between the classes, that's not to say that it was strong enough to prevent wars across the planet. In fact they never stopped during this period. In the majority of cases they were the expression of imperialist rivalries between East and West, not a direct confrontation between them but through client countries. And in these countries on the periphery of capitalism, the proletariat didn't have the strength to paralyse the armed force of the bourgeoisie.

The proletariat faced with the decomposition of capitalism

Despite the advances made in the class struggle, notably through the development of class consciousness and also the inability of the bourgeoisie to dragoon the proletariat into a new world conflict, the working class was nevertheless incapable of developing its perspective of revolution, of posing its own alternative to the crisis of the system.

 Thus, neither of the two fundamental classes could impose their solution to the crisis of capitalism. Deprived of any end result but still sinking into its long-term economic crisis, capitalism began to rot on its feet and this degeneration affected capitalist society at every level. Here capitalism enters into a new phase in its decadence, that of social decomposition. We've often showed how this phase is synonymous with the growing difficulties for the class struggle.[39]

Looking over the three last decades, we can say that the setback in consciousness has been profound, causing a type of amnesia in relation to the advances of the period 1968-1989. This is fundamentally explained by two factors:

  • the enormous impact that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989-91 had, lyingly identified by the campaigns of the bourgeoisie as the collapse of communism;
  • the characteristics of decomposition itself inaugurated by this collapse, particularly “the constant increase in criminality, inse­curity, and urban violence…the development of nihilism, despair, and suicide amongst young people … and of hatred and xenophobia…the profusion of sects, the renewal of the religious spirit including in the advanced coun­tries, the rejection of rational, coherent thought the invasion of the same media by the spectacle of violence, horror, blood, massacres…the development of terrorism, or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare be­tween states…”[40]

Despite the enormous difficulties that the working has experienced since 1990, two elements should be taken into account in order to get the whole picture:

  • the growing difficulties and even its partial defeats are not yet tantamount to a historic defeat of the working class and the disappearance of the possibility of communism;
  • subterranean maturation continues because, despite decomposition, capitalism goes on and the two fundamental classes of society continue to face one another.

In fact, in the last decades, there have been a certain number of important movements which tend to support this analysis:

  • in 2006, the massive mobilisation of high school and university youth in France against the CPE.[41] Its protagonists rediscovered forms of struggle which appeared in May 68, in particular general assemblies where real discussion took place and where the young were ready to listen to the witnesses of older comrades who had taken part in the events of 68. This movement, which had overflowed containment by the unions, held the real risk of drawing in the workers in a similarly “uncontrolled” way as in 68 and that is why the French government withdrew the law;
  • again in May 2006, 23,000 metalworkers in Vigo, in the Galician province of Spain, went on strike against work reforms in the sector and instead of staying bottled up in the factory went out to look for solidarity from other workers notably in the naval shipyard and the Citroen factories, organising demonstrations in the town to rally the whole population and above all organising public and daily general assemblies open to all workers whether active, unemployed or retired;
  • in 2011, the wave of social revolts in the Middle East and Greece culminated in the movement of the “Indignados” in Spain. The proletarian element in these movements varied from one country to the other, but it was strongest in Spain where we saw the spread of general assemblies, a powerful internationalist élan which saluted the expressions of solidarity of the participants from all parts of the world and where the slogan “world revolution” was taken seriously, perhaps for the first time since the revolutionary wave of 1917; a recognition that “the system is obsolete” and a strong will to discuss the possibility of a new form of social organisation. In numerous animated discussions which took place in the assemblies and commissions on the questions of morals, science and culture, in the all-present calling into question of the dogmas according to which capitalist relations are eternal – here we see once again the real spirit of May 68 taking shape. Evidently, this movement showed plenty of weaknesses that we have analysed elsewhere,[42] not least among those who saw themselves as “citizens” rather than proletarians and thus really vulnerable to bourgeois ideology.

The threats that the survival of capitalism holds over humanity shows that revolution is more than ever a necessity for the human race: from the expansion of military chaos to the ecological catastrophe; from famine to the development of unprecedented diseases. The decadence of capitalism, and its decomposition, certainly increases the danger that the objective basis of a new society could be definitively destroyed if decomposition advances beyond a certain point. But even in its latest phase, capitalism still produces the forces which can be used to overthrow it - in the words of the Communist Manifesto of 1848: “What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers”.

Thus, with the entry of capitalism into its phase of decomposition, even if it brings with it greater difficulties for the proletariat, nothing indicates that the latter has suffered a defeat of irreversible consequences and, from this, has accepted all the sacrifices regarding its living and working conditions that would imply a mobilisation for imperialist war.

We don't know when or with what force the next manifestations of the potentialities of the proletariat will be produced. What we do know is that the determined and appropriate intervention of a revolutionary minority strengthens the future of the class struggle.

Silvio (July 2018)

 

 

 

[1]. See “The Historic Course”, International Review nº 18.

[2]              . Victor Serge is known chiefly for his famous narrative of the history of the Russian revolution, Year One of the Russian Revolution.

[3]              .  “A new era is born: the era of the disintegration of capitalism, of its internal collapse. The epoch of the proletarian communist revolution”. Letter of invitation to the First Congress of the Communist International. On this subject, read our article “Communism is not a nice idea, its on the historical agenda, iv: The Platform of the Communist International”. International Review nº 94.

[4]              . The Fourth International, by supporting imperialist Russia (after Trotsky's death), in turn betrayed proletarian internationalism. See our article  “Le trotskisme et la deuxième guerre mondiale” in our pamphlet Le Trotskysme contre la classe ouvrière.

[5]              .  This would lead to the need for the government in Russia to sign the Brest-Litovsk agreement in order to avoid the worst.

[6]              . Read our article “The world bourgeoisie against the October Revolution (Part I)”, in International Review nº 160.

[7]              .  Paul Frölich, Rudolf Lindau, Albert Schreiner, Jakob Walcher, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany 1918-1920, Marxist Science eds, 2013.

[8]              . Read our articles “German Revolution (iii): The premature insurrection” in International Review nº 83, and “Germany 1918-19: civil war” in International Review nº 136.

[9]              . Read our article “The March Action 1921, the danger of petty bourgeois impatience” in International Review nº 93.

[10]            . “Attempts to gain support of the masses in a phase of the declining activity of these masses led to opportunistic ‘solutions’ - the growing insistence on work in parliament and the trade unions, calls for the ‘Eastern Peoples’ to stand up against imperialism and, above all, the policy of the United Front with the socialist and social democratic parties that threw overboard all the hard-earned clarity about the capitalist nature of those who had become social patriots.”  “The Communist Left and the Continuity of Marxism” available on our website.

[11].           See our article “Communism is not just a nice idea, it's a material necessity, ix: 1922-23: The communist fractions against the rising counter-revolution” in International Review nº 101.

[12]            . Here again this was opposed by the left fractions. See the article “The Communist Left and the continuity of Marxism” on our website.

[13]            .  Read our article “How Stalin wiped out the militants of the October 1917 revolution”, in World Revolution nº 312.

[14]            . Thus, for example, from 1925 onwards Stalin received the full support of the world bourgeoisie for his struggle against the left-wing opposition within the Bolshevik party, which tried to maintain an internationalist position against the thesis of “building socialism in one country”. Read our article “Quand les démocraties soutenait Staline pour écraser le prolétariat” on our website.

[15]            . As our comrade Marc Chirik himself said: “To go through these years of terrible isolation, to see the French proletariat flying the Tricolour, the flag of the Versailles and singing the Marseillaise, all this in the name of communism, was, for all the generations that had remained revolutionary, a source of terrible sadness”. And it was precisely at the time of the war in Spain that this feeling of isolation reached one of its culminating points when many organisations that had managed to maintain class positions were dragged along by the “antifascist” wave. See our article “Marc: From the October 1917 revolution to the Second World War”, International Review nº 65

[16]            .  However, it should be noted that a large minority within the CNT had declared itself in favour of joining the Communist International when it was founded.

[17]            . See “The events of 19 July”, Bilan nº 36, October-November 1936, republished in International Review nº 6.

[18]            . On this subject see “The Crushing of the German Proletariat and the Rise of Fascism” in Bilan nº 16 (March 1935), republished in International Review nº 71.

[19]            .  For more information, see “1936: The Popular Fronts in France and Spain: How the bourgeoisie mobilised the working class for war”, International Review nº 126.

[20]            . On this subject see “The 1944 Commemorations: 50 Years of Imperialist Lies (Part I)” published in International Review nº 78.

[21]            . “Report on the international situation of the July 1945 conference of the Gauche Communiste de France”, republished in International Review nº 59.

[22]            . On this subject, see “Let us remember: the massacres and crimes of the ‘great democracies’” in International Review nº 66.

[23]            .  This is the figure put forward by American estimates made after the war.

[24]            . Read our article “Quand les démocraties soutenait Staline pour écraser le prolétariat.” Available in French on our website.

[25]            . This book is available in English under the title Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950. For the author, “More than 9 million Germans died as a result of an imposed famine of the Allies and the policies of expulsion after the Second World War - a quarter of the country was annexed and about 15 million people were expelled in the greatest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen. More than 2 million of them, including countless children, died on the road or in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere. Western governments continue to deny that these deaths occurred.”

[26]            . See our article “Berlin 1948: The Berlin Airlift hides the crimes of Allied imperialism” in International Review nº 95.

[27]            . Boche is a derogatory term for a German soldier or a person of German origin, whose use by the French Communist Party in particular was intended to stir up chauvinistic hatred against Germans.

[28]            . This refers to those who, during the Second World War, “betrayed” by collaborating with the German enemy.

[29]            . Read our article “At the dawn of the 21st century: Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism (I)”, International Review nº 103.

[30]            . Read our article “At the dawn of the 21st century: Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism (II)”, International Review nº 104.

[31]            . Those that emerged from the former workers’ parties that degenerated with the defeat of the world revolutionary wave in 1917-23 .

[32]            . These were two successive articles: “The student movement in the world in the 1960s” and “End of counter-revolution, historical revival of the world proletariat” published in International Reviews nº 133 and nº 134 respectively.

[33]            .  “May 68 and the revolutionary perspective (I): The student movement around the world in the 1960s”.

[34]            . This would allow them to be present in the negotiations and to play a leading role in dividing up the movement to get a resumption of work, and to lead a series of separate negotiations in the various branches.

[35]            . “May 68 and the revolutionary perspective (II): End of counter-revolution, historical revival of the world proletariat”.

[36]            .   The emphasis here on challenging the leadership of the Communist Party and the unions should not, however, suggest that they remained inactive. In many occupied factories, unions did their utmost to isolate workers from any outside contact that might have a “harmful” influence on them (from those they called the “leftists”). They kept the workers occupied in the factories playing ping-pong all day long.

[37]            . This question justifies dedicating an article to it alone. We will do this later in an article on the evolution of the proletarian political milieu since 1968.

[38]            . See International Review nº 161.

[39]. See: “Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism”. International Review nº 62.

[40]. Ibid.

[41].  The CPE was the French state's First Employment Contract whose aim was to make work more precarious for young workers. For an analysis of this movement, see “Theses on the spring 2006 student movement in France”, International Review nº 125.

[42].  See “The Indignados in Spain, Greece and Israel: from indignation to the preparation of class struggle”, International Review nº 147

Rubric: 

ICC Public Meetings on May '68

Fifty years ago, May 68: The advances and retreats in the class struggle since 1968

Without the events of May 1968, the ICC would not exist. Marc Chirik had already helped to form a group in Venezuela, Internacialismo, which from 1964 onwards had defended all the basic positions which were to be taken up a decade later by the ICC. But Marc was aware from the start that it was the revival of the class struggle in the centres of world capitalism that would be decisive in inaugurating a change in the course of history. It was this understanding that propelled him to return to France and to play an active role in the movement of May-June, and this included seeking out contacts among its politicised avant-garde. Two young members of the Venezuelan group had already moved to France to study at Toulouse University, and it was alongside these comrades and a handful of others that Marc became a founder member of Révolution Internationale in October 1968 – the group that would play a central part in the formation of the ICC seven years later.

Since that time the ICC has never wavered from its conviction concerning the historic significance of May 68, and we have returned to the subject again and again. Every ten years or so we have published retrospective articles in our theoretical organ, the International Review, as well as material in our territorial press. We have held public meetings to mark its 40th and 50th anniversaries and intervened at events organised by others[1]. In this article, we begin by looking back at one of these articles, written at an anniversary which now has a definite symbolic value: 1988

In the first part of this new series[2], we concluded that the initial assessment made by RI -‘Understanding May’, written in 1969, according to which May 68 represented the first major reaction of the world working class to the resurfacing of capitalism’s historic economic crisis – had been entirely validated: despite capital’s often astonishing capacity to adapt to its sharpening contradictions, the crisis which at the end of the 60s could only be detected from its first symptoms has become both increasingly evident and to all intents and purposes permanent.

But what of our insistence that May 68 signalled the end of the previous decades of counter-revolution and the opening up of a new period, in which an undefeated working class would move towards massive and decisive struggles; and that in turn the outcome of these struggles would resolve the historical dilemma posed by the irresolvable economic crisis: world war, in the event of a new defeat for the working class, or world revolution and the construction of a new, communist society?

The 1988 article, ’20 years after May 1968 - Class struggle: the maturation of the conditions for revolution[3] began by arguing against the dominant scepticism of the day – the idea, very widespread in the bourgeois media and among a whole layer of the intellectual strata,  that May 68 had at best been a beautiful utopian dream which harsh reality had caused to fade and die. Elsewhere in our press around the same time[4], we had also criticised the scepticism which affected large parts of the revolutionary milieu, and had done so since the events of 68 themselves – a tendency notably expressed by the refusal of the main heirs of the tradition of the Italian communist left to see in May 68 anything more than a wave of petty bourgeois agitation which had done nothing to lift the dead-weight of the counter-revolution.

Both the Bordigist and Damenist wings[5] of the post-war Italian left tradition responded in this manner. Both tend to see the party as something outside of history, since they consider that it is possible to maintain it whatever the balance of forces between the classes. They thus tend to see the struggle of the workers as essentially circular in nature, since it can only be transformed in a revolutionary sense by the intervention of the party, which begs the question of where the party itself comes from. The Bordigists in particular offered a caricature of this approach in 68, when they issued leaflets insisting that the movement would only go anywhere if it put itself behind the banners of The Party (i.e, their own small political group). Our current, on the other hand, has always countered that this is an essentially idealist approach which divorces the party from its material roots in the class struggle. We considered ourselves to be carrying on the real acquisitions of the Italian communist left, in its most fruitful period theoretically – the period of the Fraction in the 1930s and 40s, when it recognised that its own diminution from the preceding stage of the party was a product of the defeat of the working class, and that only a revival of the class struggle could provide the conditions for the transformation of the existing communist fractions into a real class party.

These conditions were indeed developing after 1968, not only at the level of politicised minorities, which went through an important phase of growth in the wake of the 68 events and subsequent upsurges of the working class, but also at a more general level. The class struggle that erupted in May 68 was not a flash in the pan but the starting signal of a powerful dynamic which would quickly come to the fore on a world wide scale.

The advances in the class struggle between 1968 and 1988

Consistent with the marxist view that has long noted the wave-like process of the class movement, the article analyses three different international waves of struggle in the two decades after 68: the first, undoubtedly the most spectacular, encompassed the Italian Hot Autumn of 69, the violent uprisings in Cordoba, Argentina, in 69 and in Poland in 1970, and important movements in Spain and Britain in 1972 In Spain in particular the workers began to organise through mass assemblies, a process which reached its high point in Vitoria in 1976. The international dimension of the wave was demonstrated by its echoes in Israel (1969) and Egypt (1972) and, later on, by the uprisings in the townships of South Africa which were led by committees of struggle (the Civics)

After a short-pause in the mid-70s, there was a second wave, which included the strikes of the Iranian oil workers and the steel-workers of France in 1978, the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in Britain, the Rotterdam dock strike, led by an independent strike committee,  and the steelworkers’ strikes in Brazil in 1979 which also  challenged the control of the trade unions. This global movement culminated in the mass strike in Poland in 1980, whose level of self-organisation and unification marked it as the most important single episode in the world class struggle since 1968, and even since the 1920s. And although the severe repression of the Polish workers brought this wave to a halt, it was not long before a new upswing which took in the struggles in Belgium in 1983 and 1986, the general strike in Denmark in 1985, the miners’ strike in Britain in 1984-5, the struggles of rail and then health workers in France in 1986 and 1988, and the movement of education workers in Italy in 1987. The struggles in France Italy in particular – like the mass strike in Poland – displayed a real capacity for self-organisation through general assemblies and strike committees.

This was not a simple list of strikes. The article also highlights the fact that this wave-like movement  was not going round in circles but was generating real advances in class consciousness:

  • “A simple comparison on the characteristics of the struggles of 20 years ago with those of today will allow us to see the extent of the evolution which has slowly taken place in the working class. Its own experience, added to the catastrophic evolution of the capitalist system, has enabled it to acquire a much more lucid view of the reality of its struggle. This has been expressed by;
  • a loss of illusions in the political forces if the left of capital and first and foremost in the unions, towards which illusions have given way to distrust and, increasingly, an open hostility;
  • the growing tendency to abandon ineffective forms of mobilisation, the dead-ends which the unions have used so many times to bury the combativity of the workers, such as days of action, token demonstrations, long and isolated strikes …

But the experience of these 20 years of struggle hasn’t only produced negative lessons for the working class (what should not be done). It has also produced lessons on what is to be done:

  • the attempt to extend the struggle (especially Belgium ’86);
  • the attempt by workers to take the struggle into their own hands, by organizing general assemblies and elected, revocable strike committees (France ’86, Italy ’87 in particular)”.

At the same time, the article did not neglect the bourgeoisie’s responses to the danger of the class struggle: although it had been surprised by the outbreak of the May 68 movement, resorting to crude forms of repression which acted as a catalyst for the extension of the struggle, it had subsequently learned or re-learned a great deal in how to manage the resistance of its class enemy. It did not renounce the use of repression, of course, but it found more subtle means to present and justify its use, such as the scarecrow of terrorism; meanwhile, it developed its arsenal of democratic mystifications to derail struggles – particularly in countries which were still ruled by overt dictatorships – towards bourgeois political goals. At the level of the struggles themselves, it countered workers’ growing disenchantment with the official unions and the threat of self-organisation by developing more radical forms of trade unionism, which could even include ‘extra-union’ forms (the ‘coordinations’ set up by the extreme left in France for example).

The article had begun by recognizing that much of the optimistic talk about revolution in 1968 had indeed been utopian. This was partly because the whole discussion about the possibility of revolution was distorted by leftist notions that what was happening in Vietnam or Cuba were indeed socialist revolutions to be actively supported by the working class in the central countries; but also, even when revolution was understood as something that really involved the transformation of social relations, because in 1968 the objective conditions, above all the economic crisis, had only just begun to provide the material basis for a revolutionary challenge to capital. Since then, things had become more difficult, but more profound:

  • “Perhaps it is less easy to talk about revolution in 1988 than in 1968. But when today the word is shouted out in a demonstration in Rome where workers are denouncing the bourgeois nature of the unions, or at an unemployed workers demonstration in Bilbao, it has a much more profound and more concrete meaning than when it was banded about in the feverish assemblies, so full of illusions, of 1968.
    1968 affirmed the return of the revolutionary objective. For 20 years the conditions for its realization haven’t stopped maturing. Capitalism’s descent into an impasse, the increasingly unbearable situation this creates for all the exploited and oppressed classes, the experience accumulated through the fighting spirit of the workers, all this is leading to that situation of which Marx spoke, ‘in which any retreat is impossible’.”

The turning point of 1989

There is much in this analysis that we can still stand by today. And yet, we cannot help but be struck by a phrase which sums up the article’s assessment of the third wave of struggles:

  • “Finally, the recent mobilisation of the workers of the Ruhr in Germany and the resurgence of strikes in Britain in 1988 (see editorial in this issue) confirmed that this third international wave of workers struggles, which has now lasted for more than four years, is far from over”.

In fact, the third wave, and indeed the entire period of struggles since 1968, was to come to a sudden halt with the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989-91 and the accompanying tide of campaigns about the death of communism. This historic change in the world situation marked the definitive onset of a new phase in the decline of capitalism – the phase of decomposition.

The ICC had noted the symptoms of decomposition earlier on in the 80s, and a discussion about its implications for the class struggle was already underway in the organisation. However, the article about May 68 in IR 53, as well as the editorial in the same issue, provide evidence that its deeper significance had not been grasped. The article on 68 has a sub-heading “20 years of decomposition” without providing an explanation for the term, while the editorial only applies it to its manifestations at the level of imperialist conflicts – the phenomenon which was then termed “Lebanonisation”, the tendency for entire nation states to disintegrate under the weight of increasingly irrational imperialist rivalries. It’s probable that these imprecisions reflected real differences which had appeared at the 8th Congress of the ICC towards the end of 1988.

The dominant mood at this Congress had been one of over-optimism and even a kind of euphoria. Partly this reflected the understandable enthusiasm created by integration of two new sections of the ICC at the Congress, in Mexico and India.  But it was expressed above all in certain analyses of the class struggle that were being put forward: the idea that new bourgeois mystifications were wearing out in a matter of months; exaggerated hopes in the struggles then taking place in Russia; the conception of a third wave that was marching ever onwards and upwards; and above all a reluctance to accept the idea that, in the face of growing social decomposition, the class struggle seemed to be “marking time” or stagnating (which, given the seriousness of the stakes involved, could only imply a tendency towards retreat or regression). This viewpoint was defended by Marc Chirik and a minority of comrades at the Congress. It was based on a clear awareness that the development of decomposition expressed a kind of historic stalemate between the classes. The bourgeoisie had not inflicted a decisive historic defeat on the working class and was not able to mobilise it for a new world war; but the working class, despite 20 years of struggle, which had held back the drive towards war, and which had indeed seen important developments in class consciousness, had been unable to develop the perspective of revolution, to raise its own political alternative to the crisis of the system. Deprived of any way forward, but still sunk in a very long-drawn out economic crisis, capitalism was beginning to rot on its feet, and this putrefaction was affecting capitalist society at every level[6].

This diagnosis was powerfully confirmed by the collapse of the eastern bloc. On the one hand, this momentous event was a product of decomposition. It highlighted the profound impasse of the Stalinist bourgeoisie, which was stuck in an economic mire but patently unable to mobilise its workers for a military solution to the bankruptcy of its economy (the struggles in Poland in 1980 had clearly demonstrated that to the Stalinist ruling class). At the same time, it exposed the severe political failings of this section of the world working class. The proletariat of the Russian bloc had certainly demonstrated its ability to fight on the defensive economic terrain, but faced with an enormous historical event which expressed itself largely at the political level, it was completely unable to offer its own alternative and as a class it was drowned in the democratic upsurge falsely described as a series of “people’s revolutions”

In turn, these events dramatically accelerated the process of decomposition on a world scale. This was most evident at the imperialist level, where the rapid break-up of the old bloc system allowed the tendency for “every man for himself” to increasingly dominate diplomatic and military rivalries. But this was also true in relation to the balance of class forces. In the wake of the debacle in the eastern bloc, the world bourgeoisie’s campaigns about the death of communism, about the impossibility of any working class alternative to capitalism, rained further blows on the ability of the international working class - notably in the central countries of the system - to generate a political perspective.

The ICC had not foreseen the events of 89-91, but we were able to respond to them with a coherent analysis based on previous theoretical work. This was true with regard both to understanding the economic factors involved in the downfall of Stalinism[7], and to predicting the growing chaos that, in the absence of blocs, would now be unleashed in the sphere of imperialist conflicts[8]. And on the level of the class struggle, we were able to see that the proletariat now faced a particularly difficult period:

  • “The identification which is systematically es­tablished between Stalinism and communism, the lie repeated a thousand times, and today being wielded more than ever, according to which the proletarian revolution can only end in disaster, will for a whole period gain an added impact within the ranks of the working class. We thus have to expect a momentary retreat in the con­sciousness of the proletariat; the signs of this can already be seen in the unions' return to strength. While the incessant and increasingly brutal attacks which capitalism can't help but mount on the proletariat will oblige the workers to enter the struggle, in an initial period, this won't result in a greater capacity in the class to develop its consciousness. In particular, re­formist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions.
    Given the historic importance of the events that are determining it, the present retreat of the proletariat - although it doesn't call into question the historic course, the general perspective of class confrontations - is going to be much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland. Having said this, we cannot foresee in advance its breadth or its length. In particular, the rhythm of the col­lapse of western capitalism - which at present we can see accelerating, with the perspective of a new and open recession - will constitute a de­cisive factor in establishing the moment when the proletariat will be able to resume its march towards revolutionary consciousness[9].

This passage is very clear about the profoundly negative impact of the collapse of Stalinism, but it still contains a certain underestimation of the depth of the retreat. The estimate that this would be “momentary” already weakens the ensuing statement that the reflux will be “much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland”, and this problem was to manifest itself in our analyses in the years that followed, notably in the idea that certain struggles in the 90s – in 92, and again in 98 – heralded the end of the retreat. In reality, looking back over the past three decades, we can say that the retreat in class consciousness has not only continued, but has got deeper, resulting in a kind of amnesia about the acquisitions and advances of the 1968-89 period.

What are the main indicators of this trajectory?

  • The impact of the economic crisis in the West has not been as straightforward as the above passage implies. The repeated convulsions of the economy have certainly weakened the boasts of the ruling class in the early 90s that, with the end of the eastern bloc, we would now enter a period of unmitigated prosperity. But the bourgeoisie has been able to develop new forms of state capitalism and economic manipulation (typified in the concept of “neo-liberalism”) that have maintained at least an illusion of growth, while the real development of the Chinese economy in particular has convinced many that capitalism is infinitely adaptable and can always find new ways of extricating itself from its crisis.  And when the underlying contradictions returned to the surface, as they did with the great financial crash of 2008, they may have stimulated certain proletarian reactions (in the period 2010-2013 for example); but at the same time, the very form this crisis took, a “credit crunch” involving a massive loss of savings for millions of workers, made it harder to respond to it on a class terrain, since the impact seemed to be more on individual householders than on an associated class[10];
  • Decomposition undermines this self-awareness of the proletariat as a distinct social force in a number of ways, all of which exacerbate the atomisation and individualism inherent in bourgeois society. We can see this, for example, in the tendency towards the formation of gangs in the urban centers, expressing both a lack of any economic prospects for a considerable part of the proletarian youth, and a desperate search for a replacement community which ends up creating murderous divisions between young people based on rivalries between different neighbourhoods and estates, on competition for control of the local drug economy, or on racial and religious differences. But the economic policies of the ruling class have also deliberately attacked any sense of class identity – both through breaking up old industrial centers of working class resistance and through introducing much more atomised forms of labour, as in the so-called “gig economy” where workers are routinely treated as self-employed “entrepreneurs”.
  • The mounting number of bloody and chaotic wars that characterize this period, while again flatly disproving the assertion that the end of Stalinism would gift humanity with a “peace dividend”, do not provide the basis for a general development of class consciousness as they did, for example, during World War One when the proletariat of the central countries was directly mobilised for the slaughter. The bourgeoisie has learned the lesson of past social conflicts provoked by war (including the resistance against the Vietnam war) and, in the key countries of the West, has done its best to avoid the use of conscript armies and to quarantine its wars in the peripheries of the system. This has not prevented these military confrontations from having a very real impact on the central countries, but this has mainly taken forms which tend to reinforce nationalism and reliance on the “protection” of the state: the enormous increase in the number of refugees fleeing the war zones, and the action of terrorist groups aiming to hit back at the populations of the most developed countries[11].
  • At the political level, in the absence of a clear proletarian perspective, we have seen different parts of the working class being influenced by the phony critiques of the system offered by populism on the one hand and jihadism on the other. And the growing influence of “identity politics” among more educated layers of the working class is a further expression of this dynamic: the lack of class identity is made worse by the move towards fragmentation into racial, sexual and other identities, reinforcing exclusion and division, when only the proletariat fighting for its own interests can be truly inclusive.

We have to face the reality of all these difficulties and to draw their political consequences for the struggle to change society. But in our view, while the proletariat cannot avoid the harsh school of defeat, growing difficulties and even partial defeats do not yet add up to a historic defeat for the class and to the obliteration of the possibility of communism.

In the last decade or so, there have been a number of important movements which provide support for this conclusion. In 2006, we saw the massive mobilization of educated youth in France against the CPE[12]. The ruling class media often describes struggles in France, even when they are tightly controlled by the unions as in the most recent case[13], as raising the spectre of a “new May 68”, the better to distort the real lessons of May. But the 2006 movement did, in a sense, revive the genuine spirit of 68: on the one hand, because its protagonists rediscovered forms of struggle that had appeared at that time, notably general assemblies where real discussions could take place and where the young participants were eager to hear the testimony of older comrades who had taken part in the events of 68. But at the same time, this student movement, which had outflanked the trade unions, contained the real risk of drawing in the employed workers in a similarly “uncontrolled” way, precisely as in May 1968, and this is why the government withdrew the CPE legislation which had provoked the revolt in the first place.

Also in May 2006, 23000 metal workers in Vigo, in the Galician province of Spain, came out on strike against new labour rules in this sector, and instead of remaining shut up in the factories went to look for solidarity from other enterprises, in particular the shipyards and Citroën factories, organising demonstrations in the town to rally the whole population, and above all creating daily public general assemblies completely open to other workers, employed, unemployed and pensioners. These proletarian assemblies were the lungs of an exemplary struggle for a week, until the movement was caught between violent repression on the one hand and the negotiating manoeuvres of the unions and bosses.

In 2011, we saw the wave of social revolts in the Middle East and Greece, culminating in the Indignados movement in Spain and “Occupy” in the USA. The proletarian element in these movements varied from country to country, but it was at its strongest in Spain, where we saw in the widespread adoption of the assembly form; a powerful internationalist impulse which welcomed expressions of solidarity by participants from all round the world and where the slogan of “world revolution” was taken seriously, perhaps for the first time since the 1917 revolutionary wave; a recognition that “the system is obsolete” and a strong will to discuss the possibility of a new form of social organisation. In the many animated discussions that took place in the assemblies and commissions about questions of morality, science and culture, in the ubiquitous questioning of the dogma that capitalist relations are eternal -  here again we saw the real spirit of May 68 taking shape.

Of course, most of these movements had many weaknesses, which we have analysed elsewhere[14] , not least a tendency for the participants to see themselves as “citizens” rather than proletarians, and thus a real vulnerability to democratic ideology, which would enable bourgeois parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain to present themselves as the true heirs of these revolts. And in some ways, as with any proletarian defeat, the higher you climb, the further you fall: the reflux of these movements further deepened the general retreat in class consciousness. In Egypt, where the movement of the squares inspired the movement in Spain and Greece, illusions in democracy have prepared the way to the restoration of the same kind of authoritarian rule which was the initial catalyst of the “Arab spring”; in Israel, where mass demonstrations once raised the internationalist slogan “Netanyahu, Mubarak, Assad, same enemy”, the brutal militarist policies of Netanyahu’s government have now regained the upper hand. And most serious of all, in Spain, many of the young people who took part in the Indignados movement have been dragged towards the absolute dead-ends of Catalan or Spanish nationalism.   

The appearance of this new proletarian generation in the movements of 2006 and 2011 also gave rise to a new search for communist politics among a minority, but the hopes that this would give rise to a whole new influx of revolutionary forces have not, for the present at least, been realised. The communist left remains largely isolated and disunited; among the anarchists, where some interesting new developments began to take place, the search for class positions is being undermined by the influence of identity politics and even nationalism. In a third article in this series, we will look in more detail at the evolution of the proletarian political camp and its environs since 1968.

But if May 1968 teaches us anything, it shows that the working class can arise again from the worst of defeats, return from the deepest of retreats. The moments of proletarian revolt which have taken place despite the advancing threat of capitalist decomposition reveal the possibility that new movements will arise which, by regaining the perspective of revolution, can forestall the multiple dangers that decomposition poses for the future of the species.

These dangers – the spread of military chaos, of ecological catastrophe, of starvation and disease on an unprecedented scale – prove that revolution is more than ever a necessity for the human race. Capitalism’s decline and decomposition certainly magnify the threat that the objective basis of a new society will be definitively destroyed if decomposition advances beyond a certain point. But even in its last phase, capitalism still produces the forces that can be used to overthrow it – in the words of the Communist manifesto of 1848, “what the bourgeoisie produces, above all, is its own gravediggers”. Capitalism, its means of production and communication are more global than ever – but then so is the proletariat more international, more capable of communicating with itself on a world wide scale. Capitalism has become increasingly advanced technologically – but then it must educate the proletariat in the use of its science and technology which can be taken in hand ina future society for human needs rather than for profit. This more educated, internationally minded layer of the class  made its appearance again and again in recent social movement, above all in the central countries of the system, and will certainly play a key role in any future resurgence of the class struggle, as will the new proletarian armies created by capitalism’s dizzying but diseased growth in Asia and other previously “underdeveloped” regions. We have not seen the last of the spirit of May 68.

Amos, June 2018

 

[3] International Review 53, second quarter 1988. The article is signed RV, one of the young ‘Venezuelans’ who helped to form RI in 1968. 

[5] See in particular "The 1950s and 60s: Damen, Bordiga, and the passion for communism", International Review 158.

[6] For a more developed balance sheet of the struggles of the last few decades, which takes into account tendencies in our analysis to overestimate the immediate potential of the class struggle, see ” Report on the Class struggle” from the 21st ICC Congress, IR 156, Winter 2016.

[8] See in particular “Orientation text: Militarism and decomposition”, IR 64, first quarter 1991.

[9] “Theses on the economic and political crisis in the eastern countries”

[11] See points 16 and 17 of the above resolution

[14] See “The Indignados in Spain, Greece and Israel: From indignation to the preparation of class struggles”, IR 147, first quarter 2011

 

History of the workers' movement: 

reserved articles

Rubric: 

Anarcho-syndicalism in Argentina:FORA(1)

Since its origins, the workers’ movement has seen itself as international and internationalist.”Workers have no country”; “workers of the world, unite!”. These are the two key ideas of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The proletariat is an international class whose historic task of overthrowing capitalism and establishing new relations of production can only be conceived on an international scale. Because of this, even if the different struggles against capitalist exploitation don’t immediately take on this dimension, they still need to be seen as part of an international, historical movement. In particular, it’s up to the proletariat of all countries, and especially its vanguard, the revolutionary organisations, to draw all the lessons from the previous experience of the workers’ movement and its organisations. It's by basing ourselves on this approach that we have analysed, in our press, the experiences of struggles of the class in different parts of the world, and we think that it's important to make known those which have taken place in Argentina. They have produced an organisation, the FORA, which makes up a reference point for anarcho-syndicalism. In this sense, this article, which will itself be made up of several chapters, is part of our series in the International Review dedicated to revolutionary syndicalism[i]. This article has a particular interest since the FORA today constitutes a reference for anarcho-syndicalists who are embarrassed by the participation of the CNT in the government of the bourgeois republic during the war in Spain and want to remain faithful to internationalism.

In this first part, we are examining the historic context for the development of the thought and mobilisations of the Argentine workers, and which allowed for the constitution of the FORA.

The proletariat is an international class

Whereas in Europe during the nineteenth century capitalism imposed and strengthened itself, most of the countries of Latin America saw their struggles for national independence in the first decades of that century. By the last third of the 1900s, capitalist relations of production became dominant on the continent. In the case of Argentina one of the decisive points of capitalism's advance lay in the consolidation of agriculture and capitalist stock-farming at the same time as the country integrated itself into the international market and the process of industrialisation. It's for that reason that the measures taken from the 1880's on would be decisive for the dynamic of the development of the South American economy and of the working class. More particularly, the period between 1880 and 1914 is a defining moment for Argentina and its territory, clarifying the marking out of its frontiers, but also for the subordination of the old forms of social and economic organisation. This project resulted in the "Conquest of the Desert".

The "Conquest of the Desert" is the name given to a military campaign undertaken between 1878 and 1885 by the Argentine government against the surviving Indian communities of the extreme south of the region (especially against the Mapuches and the Tehuelches). This campaign of destruction and pillage was part of the process of the construction of the Argentine nation state and the route through which capitalist expansion would take place. Hundreds of Indians were shot and more taken prisoner, subjected to deportation to isolated and wild zones of the country or taken into servitude by the privileged families of Buenos Aires. The notes of newspapers at the time exposed the "successes" of the progress of civilisation:

  • "The Indian prisoners arrive barefoot for the most part or on wagons. The despair, the cries are incessant. In the presence of their mothers, the children are lifted up and offered up as presents despite the cries, the howls and the pleas of the Indian women raising their arms to the sky"[ii].

This project was a continuation of the policy carried out by the liberal sectors of the bourgeoisie of the mid-19th century who coveted the arrival of the "modern capitalist". The lawyer, Juan Bautista Alberdi, promoter of the constitution, defined the project as starting from the principle that "to govern is to populate". The reality of this policy is more explicit in his book Elementos de derecho publico provincial argentino (Elements of Public Provincial Law in Argentina, 1853):

  • "even if a hundred years pass, the uprooted, the half-breeds or the herders will not transform themselves into European workers... instead of leaving these lands to the savage Indians who possess them today, why not populate them with Germans, English and Swiss? Would anyone amongst us dress himself up as a pure Indian? Who would marry his sister or daughter to a gentleman from Araucaria and not a thousand times with an English boot maker?..."

Thus the combination of great concentrations of agricultural land, the birth of agro-industry, the attraction of foreign investment and diversified production led to the depopulation and tragedy of the Indian communities and also the massive arrival of immigrant workers, mainly from Italy, Spain and in lesser numbers from France and Germany.

But these "foreigners" who had migrated to flee misery and hunger (and in certain cases, also repression) brought with them not only their physical and creative capacities which allowed them to sell their labour power, but also the experiences of their lives as exploited workers and the lessons of their past combats (along with political weaknesses), which they found again in the social milieu of these "new territories" into which they were integrated, thus allowing proletarian reflection to become an international process.

It's not surprising then that the migrant workers transmitted to Argentina considerable energy to the proletarian combat through the three last decades of the 19th century; for example, the German Ave Lallemant[iii] and Augustus Kuhn of German origins, formed the first small  socialist grouping, "Verein Vorwarts" (the Forward Association), linked to German social-democracy, which acquired an eminent importance in workers' struggles; similarly, for the Italians, Pietro Gori and Errico Malatesta and, later, the Spaniard Diego Abad de Santillan, would be the animators of anarchist workers’ organisations. The tradition of struggle among these immigrant workers is reflected in their publishing work. The diversity of the papers appearing and distributed hand to hand, in the context of the numerical growth of the working class, turned out to be important elements for reflection, for the development of ideas and the politicisation of the young working class of the country.

However, it should be pointed out that this phenomenon did not confirm the mystified vision of the Argentinean bourgeoisie, which presented the workers' struggles as events imported by "foreigners". There was undoubtedly an experience transmitted by the migrant workers, but this arose and coalesced in the heat of combats which were not the mere product of will or created artificially. It is the economic and social reality that capitalism engenders (that's to say misery, hunger, repression...) which the workers respond to and which makes it possible to go beyond the divisions of nationality. 

Different nationalities but a single class

In the three last decades of the 19th century, Argentina was presented as a country where anything was possible, but very quickly this promise showed its real face. The workers' publications of this period detail the living conditions of the workers, where unemployment is frequent, the working-day exhausting and the wages are miserable. For example, in the hat factories of Franchini and Dellacha of Buenos Aires:

  • "They paid the pressers one peso per hundred hats and they lowered it to forty centimes, the finishers four pesos to 2.80, the rollers of soft hats from 6 to 4 and of top hats 6 to 3 pesos per hundred. At this rate, a skilled worker could only earn two pesos in two hours of work. Children aged 8 to 12, who worked in the morning or evening in hot water, burning their hands and losing their health after six months of exhausting and unhealthy work, after earning 80 centimes per day saw the rate lowered to 50... "[iv]

These living conditions continually repeated themselves throughout manufacture and agricultural exploitation, but in addition, a great number of employers practiced the "Truck System" for payment of work. In this wages are paid as vouchers for goods often produced by the enterprise but sold at a high price by the boss; the worker is thus stuck in continual dependence on  the boss.

In the towns the masses of workers, talking different languages, came together in insalubrious quarters, made up of precarious lodgings known as "conventillos"[v], where poverty consumed the lives of their inhabitants whatever their national difference.  

To imagine that the history of Argentinean workers is only the product of "bad" migrants denies the fact that capitalism creates its own gravediggers and that it pushes workers to make their own response to it. Miserable conditions encourage and accelerate workers' organisation and mobilisation, and the migrant workers integrate themselves into this reality. The anarchist Abad de Santillan rejected, correctly, the conspiratorial explanation of the bourgeoisie: "The defence of victims was something so logical that, even without social inspiration of any type, these workers' associations would appear as a biological wall against the bosses’ greed"[vi].  In his analysis there is a very precise following of the development of conditions which drive workers' resistance; however, he loses sight of the work of agitation and propaganda in which the migrant workers actively participated. And from this fact the international character of the proletariat is also lost.

Explaining the story through the existence of a " scapegoat, guilty for all the evils of society, the government and bosses’ groups unleashed the persecution of foreigners. A particular illustration of these attacks is the 1902 proclamation of the "Law of Residence". This law, also called the "Cane Law", allowed deportations without previous convictions of foreigners accused of seditious activities, thus dressing up a campaign of persecution in a legal and respectable garb linked to the law and to democratic principles.  In 1910, this law was extended through the "Law of Social Defence" which allowed the admission of foreigners to be restricted if they were suspected of being a threat to public order. In order to understand the mobilisation of the workers in Argentina it is important to take into account that capitalism is a system which is underwritten by profound contradictions which engender its economic crises. In the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie had shown an ability to increase its power, even though this was not achieved without difficulties. But as the century came to an end the contradictions of the capitalist economy were manifesting themselves more sharply. Although its epicentre had been situated in Britain, the recession of 1890, known as the "Baring Crisis"[vii], spread to central Europe and the United States, but also to Argentina given that this country constituted an important destination for the export of British capital; moreover this period was marked by a significant level of trade between the two countries.

Faced with capitalism's tendency towards recession, the response of the bourgeoisie, concerned to defend its profits, consisted of strengthening the means of exploitation of the producers of social wealth the workers. It's in this context that strikes and demonstrations appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, along with the necessity for the workers to build their unitary organisations of struggle.

The discussions and the confusions

If the process of the development of capitalism stimulated the fighting spirit of workers and awoke their efforts at reflection, that doesn't at all mean that the exploited all shared the same vision of reality; neither did they have the same class consciousness and the same capacities for organisation. The proletariat, as a class, builds itself up in its combat and through the self-criticism of its actions. In Argentina at the end of the 19th century, it was still marked by political and ideological traits belonging to the decomposition of the artisanal and peasant economy. Even if the mass of migrant proletarians constituted a certain form of inspiration for it, they didn’t always transmit their experience through the clearest arguments. That's the reason why the discussion and practices of the Argentine workers, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, was illustrated by a range of confused visions. Despite all this, they synthesised the intellectual effort and militant spirit of the exploited.

With the diversification of manufacturing production in the towns and the creation of specialised corporations, the workers began to establish social relations among themselves at the level of the workplace. This coming together stimulated the creation of societies of resistance, that's to say corporate groups for the defence of the most immediate living conditions. From this, between 1880 and 1901, there appeared the organisation of workers by job: bakers, drivers, cigar makers... but also the emergence of minorities who wanted to form socialist and anarchist groups which would, in time, become a factor in the animation of unitary organisations of struggle.

While the foundation of French, Italian and Spanish sections of the First International in Argentina went back to 1872, it was during the last two decades of the 19th century that more workers’ organisations and papers were created. As an expression of this dynamic we can note the 1890 edition of the socialist paper The Worker animated by the German Ave Lallemant. While this tendency was being pushed forward by workers' mobilisations, other publications such as La Vanguardia (led by the doctor Juan B Justo) appeared in 1894; other groups then formed who took up an important place among the workers such as the Centro Socialista Obrero (The Socialist Workers' Centre) and Il Fascio dei Lavoratori (Workers' Sheaf, a group attached to the Socialist Party of Italy). These groups joined up with the Equals, an ephemeral group formed by workers of French origin, to publish in 1894 the programme of the Partido Socialista Obrero Internacional (International Socialist Workers' Party - PSOI). This proletarian expression in Argentina changed its name the following year, becoming the Partido Socialista Obrero Argentino (Argentine Socialist Workers' Party - PSOA) to then become in 1896 the Partido Socialista Argentino (Argentine Socialist Party - PS), with Juan B Justo remaining at its head.

The PS attached itself to the Second International and called itself internationalist. Despite the weight of reformism in this International, this nevertheless enabled workers to make advances in the process of reflection and struggle. Given that the PS was formed from diverse groups it was politically heterogeneous. In fact the group led by Juan B Justo was in the majority but it was also the most confused since it was he who gave the most importance to the positions of the liberal bourgeoisie, which contributed at decisive moments to a lack of clarity in the party’s intervention[viii] . This lack of clarity and the sliding towards positions foreign to the proletariat provoked reactions inside the party, as demonstrated for example by the creation, in 1918, of a "critical wing" which formed the Partido Socialista Internacional Argentino  (PSIA)[ix], and also by reactions within the union sections.  

The programme for labour reform and the support given to liberal projects (for example, separation of church and state) that the PS advocated at the end of the nineteenth century, was a backward step in relation to the reality of the world, since the moment was approaching where the task of the proletariat was the overthrow of capitalism and not support for a system which had been progressive in relation to the irrational layers of society such as the church. But the calls for self-organisation and struggle for better living conditions allowed the workers to become conscious of the force that they represented and to obtain some immediate even if non-durable reforms. But the strategy of conciliation advocated by the SP, similar to its rejection of the basics of Marxism which came close to the arguments of Bernstein, distanced the party further and further from the proletarian camp; and this would become  a political weapon cleverly used by the Argentinean state. For example, at the beginning of 19th century, the PS maintained a sort of proletarian life within itself but its unbridled support for parliamentarism helped to distance it from the workers' struggles. This led to compromises, such as when it avoided the mobilisation of workers in exchange for the promulgation of the National Labour Law (known as the "(Joaquim) Gonzalez Plan") in 1905.

In the last years of the 19th century, the libertarian milieu began to take on some importance. Some figures of anarchism fleeing from the repression of European governments arrived in Argentina: Malatesta  (in 1885) and Pietro Gori (in 1891), stimulating workers' organisations and publishing work. But the anarchist camp wasn't homogeneous. To sum up we can divide them into two groups: the anarchists favourable to organisation, and anarchists hostile to organisation.

The publications of the first group had a limited distribution such as L'Avenir, El Obrero Panadero (The Bakery Worker). A journal of the same political lines with a much larger distribution should be also noted: La Protesta Humana (Human Protest) with the main writer one Antionio Pellicer Paraire (Pellico). On the side of the "anti-organisationists", the main publications were El Rebelde (The Rebel) and Germinal[x]. This division was accentuated with the convocation of the International Anarchist Congress of September 1900 in Paris. This Congress was the occasion for an important discussion between the anarchist groups, and although it was closed by the police before the end, some secret meetings were held which recommended the creation of union federations. The "favourable to organisation" thesis was expressed more clearly still in an intervention of Malatesta to the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam of 1907: "It is necessary that anarchists enter into workers' unions. First of all in order to make anarchist propaganda; second because it is the only means for us to have at our disposal on the long-awaited day groups capable of taking in hand the direction of production"[xi]. This orientation was based upon the idea that "syndicalism is not and never will be only a legalistic and conservative movement without any other accessible aim than the amelioration of working conditions".[xii]

Since the discussions preparing for the Paris Congress in 1900, a clear separation was created in Argentina between those who considered workers’ organisations as vital and those who on the contrary judged them to be useless and pernicious. Thus, extracts from El Rebelde (August 14, 1899) reveal the idea that when there is self-organisation and centralisation, individuals lose the capacity for initiative, revolutionary forces are exhausted and the reaction triumphs. The majority camp in Argentina was the one that defined itself in favour of organisation, of increasing its work in the unions and to push for the creation of federations, converging in this position with the socialist groups.

The militant anarchist Diego Abad de Santillan considered that the debate between the "pro" and "anti" organisationists was settled by the arguments exposed in the twelve articles published in 1900 in "Human Protest" under the title "Workers' organisation" and signed Pellico. At the centre of his ideas was the necessity of organisation at two levels: economic and revolutionary. Pellico wrote of: "a branch of workers' organisation that one can qualify as revolutionary, which is made up of those who are fully convinced that they are working directly for the triumph of an ideal. And the other branch that one can qualify as economist, made up of worker masses who are struggling in order to better their conditions of life and counter the abuse of the bosses..."[xiii]. According to Diego Abad de Santillan, the passage quoted of Pellico is based on the strategy of "the International Brotherhood of Bakunin (placing itself) within and alongside the International Workers' Association..."

Antonio Pellicer himself explained that the federation is the type of organisation that the workers need, attributing to it the role of the "germ of the commune of the revolutionary future". He thus proposed "that local federations organise themselves in the sense of the revolutionary commune, of the permanent and active action of the working people in all domains which challenge their liberty and existence..."[xiv].

Following this description we can understand that the union federation is seen as the organ charged with the defence of the living conditions of the workers; and, at the same time, under the influence of conspiratorial groups which work "in parallel", it is oriented towards open combat against the system.

In fact the workers' movement as a whole is confronted with the need for a political organisation distinct from the organisations for the defence of its immediate interests, responsible for defending its programme and its political project of the emancipation of the proletariat and the establishment of a classless society[xv] . For marxism, this first of all took the form of mass political parties in the Second International, then after their betrayal, much more selective political parties around a political programme for the revolution. But this problematic wasn't foreign to anarchism, as certain terms of the debate between "pro" and "anti" organisationists revealed. The problem is that the well-identified necessity for a revolutionary organisation is completely derailed by Diego Abad de Santillan by identifying it with the conspiratorial action of a Bakunin (which included the conspiracy against the General Council of the IWA).

On reflection, we can note of course that while some "pro-organisation" anarchists opposed the vision of the "anti-organisationists", it wasn't through a profound critique given that, after having tried to criticise them, they went back to the roots of the Bakuninist schema of conspiracy, which is unfit for a real struggle against capitalism. Moreover they repeated the old idea of the separation of the economic and political combat by embellishing the idealist conception of the possibility of beginning to build the new society from the germs that existed in the very entrails of capitalism. Thus, although criticising the socialists for focussing on reforms as the means for creating an alternative to capitalism, they naively put their confidence in the effort to create "federated communes" as the prefiguration of the future society, and this without the system itself being destroyed.

The first union federations

In 1890, at the height of the struggle  between factions  of the bourgeoisie (marked by an economic crisis which provoked a coup d'état,  ending with the renunciation of the presidency by Juarez Celman), the group Vorwärts and the corporations of shoemakers and carpenters (in which the anarchist groups actively participated) set up la Federacion de Trabajadores de la República Argentina (Workers' Federation of the Argentine Republic, FTRA). The federation demanded the 8-hour day. Although its capacity for intervention was relatively limited and had existed for hardly two years, it favoured the unity of the workers and the definition of a programme of demands. The FTRA captured the attention of the workers but was rather confused. While the socialists of Vorwärts saw it as a permanent force to gain concessions and reforms, the anarchists saw in the unions the instrument par excellence of the anti-capitalist struggle. The two positions were expressed at the second congress (1892) in a very confused form where the socialist groups thought that the federation should be the spearhead of the struggle for the nationalisation of the industry. Faced with this the anarchists abandoned the FTRA. There followed a numerical weakening aggravated by the fact that the increase in unemployment provoked the departure of many from the country and the federation ended up by dissolving itself.

Even if this federation had a brief existence, it allowed the identification of difficulties which would emerge in the discussions in the following years. On one side, the socialists amplified the temporary economic gains obtained by the union struggle and gave a privileged place to dialogue with parliament. On the other side, the anarchists were convinced of the possibility of revolution at any time of history as a product of the will and expressed in "direct action".

In order to criticise the point of view of Argentine social democracy, we want to recall the analysis made by Rosa Luxemburg in 1899 in the introduction to Social Reform or Revolution:"Between social reform and revolution there exists, for social-democracy, an indissoluble link. The struggle for reforms is the means, whereas the social revolution is the aim". We can note that the confusion that was already present in German social democracy and criticised by Rosa Luxemburg is repeated in Argentina where the socialists let themselves get caught up in the "means" (which Rosa Luxemburg talked about) while underestimating the "aim", finally forgetting it altogether. As for anarchism, in general it turned out to be incapable of analysing the class struggle in a dynamic fashion, not seeing the different phases of the life of capitalism and thus incapable of taking into account the changes from one to the other concerning the tasks posed to the exploited class: that's to say no longer the struggle for now impossible reforms but the fight against the deterioration of its living conditions, with a view to overthrowing capitalism and the revolutionary transformation of society. Further, by denying the necessity for the party, anarchism overestimated the role of the unions.

In this state of confusion and with the aggravation of attacks against the living conditions of the working class, the idea grew of creating federated unions. The year 1899 was particularly marked by an increase in strikes and by a questioning of their role and that of the unions. These issues were at the centre of the problems discussed by the workers.

Juan B Justo posed the problem in the following terms: “What is the final outcome of the strike? The socialists consider it as a first step (and a primary step) for the formulation of immediate demands and their possible satisfaction, the anarchists as the method for the transformation of the social regime...”[xvi] The discussion cut across the unions and the socialist and anarchist groups without being deepened. However it did allow the “pro-organisation” anarchists to recognise the necessity for the working class to struggle for the amelioration of its living conditions and thus to ally with the Socialist Party for the creation of a union federation. Thus in May 1901, 27 unions of different corporations gave birth to the Federacion Obrera Argentina (Workers’ Federation of Argentina, FOA). It was composed of both socialist and anarchist delegates, although the latter had the stronger presence, including Pietro Gori from the Rosario rail workers.

The founding congress unfolded over eight sessions, the second being opened by a declaration of Torrens Ros of the anarchist tendency in which he petitioned the congress “not to make any sort of compromise with the Socialist Party, nor with the anarchists...”[xvii], declaring it independent and autonomous, which doesn’t mean to say that the opinions defended by the two camps were excluded from the debates. After the congress some of the problems raised there were posed anew. Outside of the divergences, the discussion allowed the establishment of a general schema of agreements and basic demands:

  • General contempt for traitors who have to be countered, a direct reference to strike-breakers and scabs
  • Fight against the “Truck System”
  • Mobilise for the lowering of rents
  • Reduction in the working day
  • Increase in wages
  • Equal wages for men and women
  • Rejection of under-15’s working
  • Creation of free schools.

But there were other issues that fed the conflicts after the congress. One of its decisions was the transformation of the paper La Organizacion (edited by a dozen unionists strongly influenced by the PS) into La Organizacion Obrera (considered as the organ of the FOA) but two months after the constitution of the FOA, the unionists who edited La Organizacion refused to stop its publication and rejected its transformation.

One of the thorniest discussions concerned the recourse to arbitration; that is, of a mediator to settle labour conflicts. The intervention of P. Gori in the founding congress was important because it deepened the polemic, considering that the FOA should work for “the integral conquest of the rights of the workers by the workers, (but) they reserve the right, in some cases, to resolve the economic conflicts between capital and labour by the means of juridical arbitration which could only be effective through persons presenting serious guarantees of the defence of workers’ interests”[xviii].

Complementing this position was a definition of the role of the general strike, regarding which he said: “it must be the supreme base of the economic struggle between capital and labour, it affirms the necessity of propagating among the workers the idea of a general work stoppage; that’s the challenge to the reigning bourgeoisie...”[xix]

It was above all the question of “arbitration” that was the cause of the conflict within the ranks of anarchism. The “anti-organisation” anarchist tendency, most particularly the paper The Rebel, generally criticised those anarchists who moved closer to the PS in order to found the FOA, but more precisely they accused Gori of legalism in “defending and supporting arbitration”. The disagreements which emerged on the basis of the problems described didn’t immediately mean the break-up of the federation, although they illustrated the difficulties which confronted the working class at that time.

The significance and use of the strike as envisaged by the congress provoked sharp tensions between anarchists and socialists in the upsurge of the strikes which paralysed the main towns in the two months following the foundation of the FOA.

“The 20th century, a feverish and confused bazaar”[xx]

In Argentina, the first year of the 20th century was marked by workers’ demonstrations. The formation of the FOA expressed the search for unity and solidarity among the workers, but the explosion of strikes and demonstrations also confirmed the atmosphere of combativity and the rejection of a life of misery imposed by capitalism. The long working days, the lowering of wages and despotic treatment by the bosses contributed to diverse industries being hit by the strikes. In August of 1901, the rail workers of Buenos Aires blocked economic activity. A significant number of workers pushed for the opening of negotiations, obtaining a temporary satisfaction of their demands. Negotiations with the bosses were led by P. Gori, which allowed him to show to his critics that he was not legalistic, at the same time as demonstrating the form through which arbitration could be used.

Based on similar demands, in October of the same year workers’ discontent arose in the sugar refining industry at Rosario. While the threats of unemployment from the bosses reduced the initial protests to silence, they only strengthened the courage and militancy of the workers, as shown in the growth of demonstrations in the streets, in which the socialist and anarchist militants of the FOA were foremost. The strength of the demonstrations affected the negotiations with the capitalists; the chief of police was presented as the mediator. In an assembly the workers elected a committee of struggle and a delegation for negotiations, which included the anarchist Romuldo Ovidi.

When the delegation came to the meeting, the police arrested Ovidi, which further aroused discontent. In responding to the initiative of the workers to free their comrades, the police attacked with sabres and then with bullets, killing the worker (of anarchist origins) Cosma Budeslavich. After this the workers of Rosario declared a one-day general strike.

1902 began the same way that 1901 ended, with strikes for the reduction of the working day, better wages and better working conditions. Although the stevedores and the port workers of Rosario and Buenos Aries were the most active during the course of the year, workers in other sectors also mobilised on a wide scale, as illustrated by the strikes of bakers in July and the workers of the central fruit market in  October, raising great expressions of solidarity and ferociously fought by the ruling class, first of all by using scabs and strike-breakers and then with hordes of police who confronted the workers in the streets, resulting in a number of them being wounded or arrested.

For the bourgeoisie, these social conflicts were fomented by a group of immigrants[xxi]. Thus the promulgation of the “Law of Residence” allowed it to justify the expulsion of migrants deemed to be ‘dangerous’. Faced with this measure the FOA called a general strike which paralysed the factories and the ports from November 22. The government of Julio Roca responded with a declaration of martial law on November 26 (up to the first of January). A wave of repression was then unleashed, putting an end to the mobilisations. The atmosphere of agitation between 1901 and 1902 pushed the socialists and anarchists to analyse in more detail the way in which the working class should struggle. From this, the anarchist papers (both those in favour of organisation and those against) considered the moment opportune to insist, in their appeals for the general strike, on the idea that this was the most important form of combat. For its part, the PS adopted a critical tone towards the radicalisation of the demonstrations on the streets and the strikes. This same tone was employed in the circular published in 1902 in the journal La Pensa which said that the PS “deplores recent events in Rosario (the confrontation of workers and police in the stevedores’ strike on January 13) and declined all responsibility for the movement”[xxii].

The second congress of the FOA (April 1903), was, in a certain way, the expression of these disagreements, since they created a schism which saw the departure of the unions under the influence of the PS.

In fact, the split was not the result of disagreements on the different conceptions because, in reality, there was no discussion on the subject. The motive for the separation was a disagreement which came up on the application of the statutes concerning the nomination of delegates to the congress.

From the beginning of the congress there was a problem regarding this subject. Alfredo J. Torcell (journalist and well-known PS militant) was not allowed to present himself as a delegate of the bakers’ corporation of La Plata because he didn’t do the job and was not involved with this local. This led to tension and the delegates of a socialist orientation quit the room. Some 48 union groups were affiliated to the FOA and nineteen withdrew, thus leaving an absolute majority to the anarchist unions. However, the demands on which the FOA was founded didn’t fundamentally alter.

The second congress adopted or deepened some general demands posed from the first congress (for example, the 8-hour day, provision of care services...). But it was in the changed attitude that the FOA adopted with regard to the PS that we find the basis of the disagreement at the second congress. This wasn’t identified and still less taken up through a political confrontation between the anarchist and socialist conceptions. The congress firmly rejected the invitation of the PS to conjointly participate in the First of May demonstration. There was also a rectification regarding arbitration. Abad de Santillan synthesised the argument: “The congress declares for a greater autonomy to the federated societies for recourse or not to arbitration as they judge opportune". This fracture allowed the anarchist groups who criticised the formation of the FOA for its rapprochement with the socialists, as was the case with The Rebel among others, to integrate into the federation. But, without doubt, what most clearly showed the distancing between the FOA (with its anarchist majority) and the PS, were the interventions they made in the strikes of 1902; and this  distance lengthened and deepened following the raising of the state of emergency.

After the state of emergency and during the year 1903, persecutions and arrests continued. Despite that demonstrations started again and there was an upsurge in polemics, as much among the socialists as the anarchists, around the form the struggle should take.

In its press and at its congress, the PS never ceased to criticise the way in which the strike was developing. In particular it criticised the fact that it didn’t have a resistance fund but, above all, it maintained that it was a disproportionate action which would block any eventual negotiations.

Based on this analysis, the PS participated in the creation of the Union General de Trabajadores (General Workers’ Union – UGT)[xxiii] and even if, at its founding congress (March, 1903), the UGT refused to establish an electoral alliance with the PS, it promised to undertake political actions in order to promote laws in the workers’ favour. At the same time it nuanced the PS’s conception of the general strike by recognising in the latter an efficient means when properly organised. But it underlined its rejection of the use of violence and insurrectional aims. This showed that although the UGT was directly promoted by the PS, the latter didn’t get absolute agreement from its members.

The anarchists affirmed their position around the general strike while accusing the socialists of being cowards and traitors, including in La Protesta Humana (January 31 1903), underlining that, since the raising of the state of emergency “... the workers confirming their affiliation to the circles of the Socialist Party, although they are leaders, although they have incited the strike or like us advised the corporatist organisations, are being set free after making an apology for their actions...”[xxiv]. In this sense, the FOA, with a majority of anarchists at the time of its third congress, came to a total disagreement concerning dialogue with the state and decided that the general strike was the ideal means of raising consciousness in the struggle.

Workers’ actions didn’t stop throughout 1903 and December signalled a massive protest of workers from different sectors, in particular the tram conductors’ strike. Their demands were very clear: the 8-hour day and an increase in wages. They also expressed solidarity with comrades dismissed for having handed out union leaflets, calling for them to be re-hired and the union recognised. The response of the bourgeoisie was to resort to strike-breakers and the police. In this context the FOA convoked a massive meeting on December 22 which ended in brutal repression by the police.

This scenario was repeated in 1904 and, on various occasions, the demands and the response of the state were very similar. The bourgeoisie took heed of the development of workers’ discontent and for that reason combined open repression with the opening of parliament to the PS. Thus, Alfedo Palacious assumed the responsibility of deputy. Further, he made use of nationalist ideology, privileging the hiring of Argentinean workers which favoured a hostile atmosphere towards “noxious migrants”. But the government also asked for a study to be made on the situation of the workers by the doctor Juan Bialet Masse. It’s probable that the doctor acted with honesty in trying to describe reality. On the other hand, it is certain that the ruling class used the results to its profit.

The report began by underlining a claim by the “Creole” (Argentine) workers, accentuating an anti-immigrant campaign. Echoing what Bialet had written, it said that “... the Creole worker, despised and treated as incapable, sees himself as a Pariah in his country, working harder and doing more work than anyone else, he cannot earn enough to make ends meet (...) despite his superior intelligence, his sobriety and adaption to his surroundings...”

Then, it criticised the conservative ideology of the bosses which generated social tensions: “The obsession of the bosses becomes obstinacy (...) a shoe manufacturer maintained the ten-and-a-half hour day because he saw it in a large German factory…he did not want it (the 8-hour day) and now it was necessary to bring it about by the force of a strike which is imposed on him, through a sterile and damaging struggle as much for the worker as for himself..”.[xxv]

The change from the FOA to the FORA

The recognition of the living conditions of workers by the state in the report of Bialet (presented in April, 1904) did not eliminate repression despite the decision to enact an employment law (approved August 31, 1905). The actions of the police on Mayday 1904, on the Piazza Mazzini in Buenos Aires showed this:

  • “The demonstration of the Workers’ Federation (...) was severely repressed with revolver shots by the police under any old pretext or no pretext at all. When the designated speakers were ready to speak to the united and enthusiastic crow, gunshots rang out, from where no-one knew, but it was the signal for a savage attack by the police. The dispersion of the demonstrators began while the ground was covered with wounded, almost a hundred of them. Some workers with arms repulsed the attack and their bullets equally hit some agents of the security squads...”[xxvi].

Searches, deportations, detentions, repression in general and the terrible conditions in the factories did not diminish workers’ fighting spirit. Unions and federations continued to adhere to the FOA which, as it developed, radicalised its speeches. This tendency was seen at the Fourth Congress which took place between July and August 1904 and distinguished itself with the change of name from FOA to Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina (Regional Workers’ Federation of Argentina – FORA).

The change of name corresponded to the structure adopted by the organisation: on the one hand, it set up professional associations; on the other, all the professional associations of the same territory formed a local federation, with all of the local federations in a province forming a region. The heart of this arrangement was the existence of a dual organisational structure in which each part had a different role; the professional associations had the task of obtaining reforms on the economic level while the local federations, having brought together different industries and linked the territories, displayed objectives which went beyond the economic and corporate level by envisaging the emancipation of the proletariat. For that reason this structure was based on a “Solidarity Pact” aiming at a level of unity that would allow professional and corporate interests to be overcome, along with territorial limitations. The process consisted first of all of strengthening the organisation at the national level in order to then create “the great confederation of all the Earth’s producers”.

But a part of the congress was also dedicated to the “law of residence” and naturally the proposed employment law.

The congress pronounced against the two laws by raising the necessity for a general strike in order to oppose the policy of deportation. On the employment law, the rejection came from a justified mistrust, since the Minister of the Interior, Joaquin V. Gonzalez, warned that the proposed law was “to avoid agitations of which the Republic has been the theatre for some years and most particularly since 1902...”[xxvii]. The congress saw in the plan an attempt to corral the workers behind the juridical orientations of the state.

The FORA rejected this plan: “it only favours the capitalists because they can evade their own responsibilities and the workers would have to faithfully assume them”; by contrast the PS was the motor of the employment law, above all since it had included (March 1904) a deputy, the lawyer Alfredo Lorenzo Palacios.

However, there were some sectors within the PS which, through the publication La Vanguardia, expressed their agreement with the criticisms made by the FORA on the labour law. The UGT itself drew an official line away from the PS and its deputy and promised a campaign to repudiate the law. The law finished up being withdrawn, not through the criticisms of the unions but because a regroupment of the bosses, the Industrial Union of Argentina (UIA), considered the law’s proposal to establish an 8-hour day, with a day off on Sunday, to be too extreme.

This didn’t stop the workers mobilising massively and again taking up the demand for the 8-hour day and increases in wages. At the same time, the government of Manuel Quintana prepared to oppose the protests against the designation of the chief of police as the arbitrator in labour conflicts.

Since September 1904, different sectors of workers had been mobilising to demand the eight-hour day but discontent took on a much greater breadth when a strike broke out among workers in enterprises in Rosario demanding a day of rest on Sunday. The police immediately responded with arrests of the union delegation. Faced with such attitudes the FORA and other unions not belonging to the Federation called a work stoppage for November 22 and 23. The demonstrations developed throughout the day, during which confrontations with the police continued, with workers injured and several murdered. Indignation increased and pushed towards unity between the FORA and the UGT and PS in the calling of a general strike in solidarity with the town of Rosario. On November 29, while order was being called into question in Rosario, and already in Buenos Aries, the meeting of the FORA prepared a general stoppage for December 1 and 2. The turmoil and concern of the state was such that it openly prepared the deployment of police and the military throughout the town and even installed cannons in the suburbs and anchored warships in the port. Despite this the strike continued and even spread to Cordoba, Mendoza and Santa Fe. The demonstrations which followed these days had fewer repercussions and some of them, like those of the rail workers, remained isolated. The situation became complicated and confusion grew from the failed revolt of February 4, 1905, led by the Radical Party and inspired by the ideas of Hipolito Yrigoyen, which tried to overthrow the government of Manuel Quintana.

Massive strikes and repression

The upheavals of February 4 1905 were called the “civil-military revolution”, although it was a fight between different sectors of the bourgeoisie over power, and it also had implications for the workers. Not only did the martial law imposed by the government of Manuel Quintana prevent any sort of massive demonstration by the workers, but it also made it possible to arbitrarily accuse the anarchist and socialist unions of participating in the uprising. In this framework of a confrontation between forces of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie, the government unleashed a new wave of persecutions which continued after martial law was ended. The deportation of union militants and anarchists from abroad continued but it was added to by the persecution of militants of Argentine nationality who were arrested and exiled to Uruguay. However, the increase in repression did not demobilise the workers.

In Argentina, as in a great part of Europe, the first decade of the 20th century was characterised by a great wave of struggles in which masses of workers participated. But this strengthening of workers’ militancy was also met by the repression of the ruling class.

The state of emergency that followed the Yrigoyen rebellion had hardly ended when, on March 24, the FORA called a demonstration in the centre of Buenos Aries which was repressed without any pretext. On another occasion, May 1909 at Rosario, the protests of the working masses were again put down, resulting in several deaths and dozens of wounded. There was not a single union local or workers’ publication that wasn’t attacked by the police.

But faced with the constant threat, demands for better conditions of work formulated by the transport workers of the town took on a greater importance given the militant atmosphere surrounding preparations for the demonstration of the First of May. The possibility of extending the struggle looked promising.

In trying to spread fear and contain the expansion of demonstrations, a Colonel Falcon ordered demonstrators to be fired on, resulting in a dozen deaths and many more wounded. In response, the mass strike again paralysed the town for eight hours, until some amelioration of conditions was accepted by the workers as well as the release of prisoners and the restitution of union locals taken over by the police. This event, in a certain way, favoured two other important developments although they are quite different:

  • The first was the demonstration of a high level of solidarity and coordinated action by the union structures (FORA and UGT) inciting the workers to look for unity, which, it must be said in passing, the UGT took advantage of in order to argue for its proposals about unification.  Thus, throughout September 1909, several corporations of the FORA and the UGT gave birth to the Workers’ Regional Confederation of Argentine (CORA).
  • The second came about as a consequence of the massacre of May; the reappearance of individualist anarchism. In revenge for the massacre of May, a young anarchist, Simón Radowitzky, decided to assassinate Colonel Falcon. In the following years, similar acts were repeated. The FORA never made a critique of these practices; on the contrary it considered them as expressions of the class.

In fact the two inter-related aspects had important political consequences:

1) The creation of the CORA led to a strengthening of a union tendency which promoted a move away from anarchist and socialist positions, affirming the principle of apoliticism (that's to say, non-electoralism). It defined itself as a current having the characteristics of revolutionary socialism, but these were rapidly lost. The CORA went on to increase its influence among the workers, gradually expanding and even advocating integration en masse into the FORA. It was through this tactic of infiltration that it could gain a political presence which it would use in 1915, during the 9th Congress of the Federation, in order to vote for the suppression of the reference to anarchism established at the Fifth Congress. 

This led to the existence of two federations having the same name. The one oriented by the Ninth Congress, the other formed by a minority which decided not to recognise this congress and laid claim to the principles of the Fifth Congress, recovering its image as an anarchist union; that's why it called itself the FORA of the Vth Congress.

The two federations declared themselves in favour of the struggle for immediate demands while also calling for the emancipation of the working class. What differentiated them at the beginning was the question of the reference to anarchism, and from this flowed changes in the kind of struggle advocated. The FORA 9 went on to reject the mass strike as an arm of combat; the principle of solidarity grew increasingly distant from its practice and it considered that each union federation should act "as it saw fit". And although its members continued to reject participation in parliament, they looked for a rapprochement with the structures of the state in order to hold negotiations around social gains. The government of Hipolito Yrigoyen profited from this arrangement since, while continuing to order the massacre of workers, it tried to forge legal links with the "Niners".

The FORA of the 9th Congress developed numerically and, along with this growth, came closer to the state. Thus, it dissolved itself in 1922 to form the Union Sindical Argentina, which would serve as a base in 1930 for the foundation of the Confederacion General del Trabajo (General Confederation of Labour - CGT) which from the beginning would be influenced by the Socialist Party and later evolve into an instrument of Peronism.

2) The act of Simon Radowitzky also had political consequences. The anarchist Cano Ruiz explained that the assassination of the policeman Falcon "provoked the anger of the reaction. The state declared martial law for two months, the union locals were closed (...) hundreds arrested and numerous undesirables (for the authorities) were expelled". He even recognised that an important period of reflux had opened up; analysing things a little further on: "Since the act of Radowitzky (September 14, 1909) up to 1916, oppression was so harsh that the anarchist movement and by consequence the workers' movement incarnated by the FORA gave no sign of life"[xxviii]. It's essential to affirm, in looking back at the effects that this event provoked and as summed up by Cano Ruiz, that terrorism is foreign to the combat of the working class. Even if it can arouse sympathy (because it's seen as an act of justice), it expresses a weakness and even expresses the infiltration of petty-bourgeois ideology and of classes which hold no perspective, who live in despair and lack confidence in the actions of the working masses. Consequently, it is an individualist practice which, by hiding behind the facade of heroism, expresses a strong impatience, scepticism and demoralisation. Thus, as we have said on other occasions: “Their actions are more aimed at spectacular suicide than at any particular goal"[xxix].

We thus see growing difficulties in the expression and organisation of workers' militancy. On the one hand, there was a rapprochement between the FORA 9 and the structure of the state and, just as significantly, a loss of proletarian life in the PS, with the growth of parliamentary illusions and nationalist positions (it advocated the entry of Argentina into the Great War). But what confirmed the abandonment of the proletarian camp would be its condemnation of the Russian revolution. On the other hand, the repression had a demoralising effect and would temporarily remove all hope for the workers, a situation aggravated by the confusion provoked by an anarchist individualism that focused on the accomplishment of terrorist acts.

During this period of confusion and continuing attacks against the workers, only events of great breadth like the Russian revolution could aim to break the reflux and general demoralisation. Abad de Santillan synthesised it in this way: "There were moments in the period of agitation between 1918 to 1921 that really knocked on our door and made us feel joy at the supreme hour of all our demands. An international wave of enthusiastic solidarity touched the modern slaves (...) there rose a Russia bright with promises of liberty from the debris of Tsarism[xxx].

FORA V criticised the Bolsheviks but it didn't cease to recognise the historic importance of the revolution for the exploited. After having broken the reflux, the masses of workers could mobilise again for the defence of their living conditions, as they would do in massive fashion between 1919 and 1921.

In the second part we will look at the experience of the struggles undertaken by FORA V.

Rojo, March 2015.



[i] International Review no 118, ‘What is revolutionary syndicalism’. This series contains articles on the CGT in France (IR 120), the CNT in Spain (IR 128,129, 130, 131, 132), the FAU in Germany (IR 137,141,147) and the IWW in the USA (IR 124 and 125)

[ii]  La Nacion (The Nation), 21 January 1879, quoted by Raul Ernesto Comba in "20/20: 4 decados en la historia de Banderalo. 1800-1920" (20/20: 4 decades of the history of Banderalo), Edition Dunken,  BA, 2012, p47. Translated by us.

[iii]  Although G. A. Lallemant had dedicated an important activity to the organisation and spread of socialism in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, this person and with him a part of social democracy were close to the bourgeois liberal party called the "Radical Civic Union".

[iv]  La Protesta Humana (Human Protest) 3 September 1899, quoted by Diego Abad de Santillan in La FORA: ideologia et trayectoria. Translated by us.

[v]  There are many tangos that have their origins in these precarious dwellings. They often became flooded so you would have to fix benches by roping them to a wall. Thus one could sleep sitting against the wall. This form of rest was called, in the argot of the time, "maroma" (roping).

[vi]  Abad de Santillan. Op. Cit.

[vii] From the name of the English bank which ran into severe difficulties after being exposed to heavy defaults of payments linked to the sovereign debt of Argentina and Uruguay.

[viii]  Regarding the process of degeneration of the PS, it's necessary to recall that in 1919 Juan B Justo held a conference where he condemned the Russian revolution and the actions of the Bolsheviks in particular. In his text of 1925, "Internationalism and country", he criticised the communists (in particular Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg) for not having defended free-exchange, on the pretext that, if the war is effectively caused by the struggle for markets, as they affirmed, then it was necessary to eliminate this factor "by opening up all the markets to the free exchange of international capital".

[ix] In 1918 the PSIA was formed declaring itself in agreement with the Zimmerwald Conference and supporting the revolution.

[x] The historian Zaragoza Ruvira found other "individual" publications but their activity was diluted in the latter years of the 19th century, among them: El Perseguido (The persecuted, 1890-97), La Miseria (Misery, 1890), La liberte (1893-94), Lavoriamo (We workers, 1893 in the Italian language).

[xi]  Quoted in our article of the International Review no 120: "Anarchism faced with a changing epoch: the CGT up to 1914".

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii]  Human Protest, November 17, 1900.

[xiv]  Quoted by Abad de Santillan.

[xv]  Regarding this, read our article in International Review no 118, "What is revolutionary syndicalism?"

[xvi] Cited by Dardo Cuneo, Las dos corrientes del movemiento obrero en el 90 (The two currents of the workers’ movement in the 1890’s) in Claves de la historia argentina (Keys to the history of Argentina) 1968.

[xvii]  Oved, Op. Cit., p165.

[xviii]  Op. Cit., p68.

[xix] Bilsky Edgardo J.  La FORA y el movimiento obrero, 1900-1910 (FORA and the workers’ movement, 1900-1910), Latin American Editions, Argentina, 1985, p. 194.

[xx] In the celebrated tango “Cambalache” (1934) you can find the following phrase which inspired the sub-title of the article: “Siglo XX Cambalache problematico y febril”, which we have translated as “The 20th century, a feverish and confused bazaar”.

[xxi]  This attempt of the Argentine bourgeoisie to divide the workers shouldn’t surprise us.

Thus in the United States, the bourgeoisie cynically tried to exploit the differences between those born in the country, the Anglophone workers (even if they themselves were second generation immigrants) and the newly-arrived immigrant workers, who only spoke and read a little or no English. On this subject see our article “The IWW (1905-1921): the failure of revolutionary syndicalism in the United States (I)” in International Review no 124.
Similarly in Brazil from the second half of the 19th century, a massive immigration of workers coming from Italy, Spain, Germany, etc., made up the necessary labour for a rising industry, notably modifying the make-up of the proletariat in this country. From 1905, revolutionary minorities among them, essentially composed of immigrants, began to get together. Police repression expelled the active militants. On this subject, see our article “1914-23, ten years which shook the world, the echoes of the 1917 Russian revolution in Latin America, Brazil 1918-21” in International Review no 151:

[xxii]  Op. Cit. p204.

[xxiii]  The UGT in Spain was founded in 1988, where it was presented, as in Argentina, in certain proximity to the Partido Socialista Obrero de Espana (PSOE – Workers’ Socialist Party of Spain). Although the two central unions had a similar origin and even the same name, outside of that there was no political or organic relationship between them.

[xxiv]  Cited by Abad de Santillan.

[xxv]  Juan Bialet Masse, Informe sobre el estado de las clases obreras argentinas (Report on the state of the Argentinean working class).

[xxvi]  Abad de Santillan, Op. Cit.

[xxvii]  Cited by S. Marotta, “El movimiento sindical argentinao” (The Argentinean Trade Union Movement) Argentine, 1960, p194.

[xxviii]  Cano Ruiz, Que es el anarquismo, (What is anarchism?). Editions Nuevo tiempo (New Times), Mexico, 1985, p272.

[xxix]  For a deeper understanding of this question we recommend reading: "Terror, terrorism and class violence", International Review no. 14, 1978: https://en.internationalism.org/node/2649

[xxx]  Abad de Santillan, "The book of the counter-revolution", in The Protest, 110, 1924.

 

Geographical: 

Rubric: 

Revolutionary Syndicalism

Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism Second part: On the content of the communist revolution

 

In the previous part of this series, we re-published the article ‘Welcome to Socialisme ou Barbarie’ written by the Gauche Communiste de France in 1948. The article took up a clear position on the nature of the Trotskyist movement, which had abandoned its proletarian credentials by participating in the second imperialist world war:

“Trotskyism, which was one of the proletarian reactions within the Communist International during the first years of its degeneration, never went beyond this position of being an opposition, despite its formal constitution into an organically separate party. By remaining attached to the Communist Parties – which it still sees as workers’ parties –even after the triumph of Stalinism, Trotskyism itself functions as an appendage to Stalinism. It is linked ideologically to Stalinism and follows it around like a shadow. All the activity of Trotskyism over the last 15 years proves this”.

And it goes on to say:

“This doesn’t mean that revolutionary workers who only have a little political education have not been drawn into its ranks. On the contrary, as an organisation, as a political milieu, Trotskyism, far from favouring the development of revolutionary thought and of the organisms (fractions and tendencies) which express it, is an organised milieu for undermining it. This is a general rule valid for any political organisation alien to the proletariat, and experience has demonstrated that it applies to Stalinism and Trotskyism. We have known Trotskyism over 15 years of perpetual crisis, through splits and unifications, followed by further splits and crises, but we don’t know examples which have given rise to real, viable revolutionary tendencies. Trotskyism does not secrete within itself a revolutionary ferment. On the contrary, it annihilates it. The condition for the existence and development of a revolutionary ferment is to be outside the organisational and ideological framework of Trotskyism”[1].

Having constituted itself as a tendency within the French Trotskyist party, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, the initial reaction of the GCF towards the ‘Chaulieu-Montal tendency’[2] was thus to express severe doubts about its potential for evolution. And yet, with the rupture from the PCI and the formation of the SouB group, the GCF recognized that a genuine break had taken place, and was thus to be welcomed. This did not however prevent the GCF from warning that the new group continued to be marked by vestiges of its Trotskyist past (for example on the union question, or its ambiguous relationship with the review Les Temps Modernes published by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre) as well as displaying an unwonted arrogance towards the revolutionary currents who had come to similar conclusions to those of SouB well in advance of its break from Trotskyism.

In this new article, we will seek to show how right the GCF were to be cautious in their welcome to SouB, and how difficult it is for those who have grown up in the corrupt milieu of Trotskyism to make a really profound break with its fundamental ideas and attitudes. We will examine the political trajectory and work of two militants - Castoriadis and Grandizo Munis - who formed parallel tendencies in the Trotskyist movement in the late 40s, and who broke with it at around the same time.  The choice of these two militants is apt not only because they illustrate the general problem of breaking with Trotskyism, but also because both of them wrote at length about the question on which this series is based: the content of the socialist revolution.

Breaking with the IVth International

There is no question that in the late 40s and early 50s, both Castoriadis and Munis were militants of the working class. Munis remained one all his life.

As a young man in occupied Greece Castoriadis quit the Communist Party because he opposed their policy of support for (and even leadership of) the nationalist Resistance. He found his way to the group around Aghis Stinas[3], which though officially part of the Fourth International maintained an intransigent opposition to both camps in the imperialist war, including the Resistance fronts. Ill-informed about the real betrayals of the Trotskyist movement, they assumed that this would be the “normal” position for any internationalist group since it was in continuity with Lenin’s position on the First World War.

In danger from both fascist and Stalinist agents, Castoriadis left Greece at the end of the war and settled in France, becoming a member of the main Trotskyist organisation in that country, the PCI. After forming an opposition tendency within the PCI (the Chaulieu-Montal tendency referred to by the GCF), they split from the Party in 1948 to found the SouB group. The tendency’s splitting document, ‘Open letter to the militants of the PCI and the IVth International….’[4], published in the first issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie, develops a far-reaching critique of the theoretical vacuity of the Trotskyist movement and its inability to function as anything more than an appendage to Stalinism, both in its view that the USSR was still playing a progressive world historical role in setting up new (though deformed) workers’ states in eastern Europe, or in its tail-ending of the Socialist Party/Communist Party coalition which had been made part of the reconstruction government in France and which was charged with overseeing a ferocious intensification of exploitation. It was particularly sharp in its critique of the Fourth International’s toadying to the dissident Stalinist Tito in Yugoslavia, which expressed a clear break with Trotsky’s view that Stalinism could not be reformed.

At the end of his life Trotsky had argued that if the USSR emerged from the war without being overthrown by a proletarian revolution his current would have to revise their view of it as a workers’ state, and might have to conclude that it was the product of a new age of barbarism. There are traces of this approach in the group’s initial characterization of the bureaucracy as a new exploiting class, echoing the ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ analyses of Rizzi and Shachtman, which defined Russia as neither capitalist nor socialist; although as the GCF recognizes, the group soon moved away from this notion towards the idea of a new bureaucratic capitalism. In a text from SouB 2, ‘The relations of production in Russia’, Castoriadis does not hesitate to criticize Trotsky’s own view of the USSR as a system with a capitalist mode of distribution but an essentially socialist mode of production. Such a separation between production and distribution was, it argued, contrary to the marxist critique of political economy.  In line with this effort to apply a marxist analysis to the world historic situation, the group considered this tendency towards bureaucratisation to be both global and an expression of the decadence of the capitalist system.  This position also explains why the new group’s review was entitled Socialism or Barbarism. In particular, in its open letter and in the first years of SouB, the group considered that in the absence of a proletarian revolution, a third world war between the western and eastern blocs was inevitable.

As for Munis, his courage as a proletarian militant was particularly remarkable.  Along with his comrades in the Bolshevik Leninist group, one of the two Trotskyist groups active in Spain during the civil war, and alongside the dissident anarchists of the Friends of Durruti, Munis fought on the barricades erected by the workers’ uprising against the Republican/Stalinist government in May 1937. Imprisoned by the Stalinists towards the end of the war, he narrowly escaped an execution squad and fled to Mexico, where he resumed his activity within the Trotskyist milieu, speaking at Trotsky’s funeral and becoming influential on the political evolution of Natalia Trotsky, who like Munis was becoming increasingly critical of the official Trotskyist stance on the imperialist war and the defence of the USSR.

One of his first major criticisms of the Fourth International’s position on the war was contained in his response to James Cannon’s defence, at his trial for ‘sedition’ in Minneapolis, of the policy of the Socialist Workers Party in the US – an application of the ‘proletarian military policy’ which essentially consisted of a call to place the USA’s war against fascism under ‘workers’ control’. For Munis this represented a complete capitulation to the war effort of an imperialist bourgeoisie. Although quite late in clearly rejecting the defence of the USSR[5], by 1947 Munis, also in an open letter to the PCI written with Natalia and the surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, was insisting that the rejecting the defence of the USSR was now an urgent necessity for revolutionaries[6]. Like the Chaulieu-Montal letter, the text denounced the Trotskyists’ support for the Stalinist regime in the east (though not yet putting forward a definite analysis of its social nature) and for CP/SP governments in the west. The letter is much more focused than that of Chaulieu-Montal on the question of the Second World War and the betrayal of internationalism by large parts of the Trotskyist movement through their support for antifascism and the Resistance alongside their defence of the USSR. It also clearly rejects the idea that nationalisations – the call and support for which was a central plank of Trotskyisms ‘programmatic demands’– could be viewed as anything but a reinforcement of capitalism. Although the letter still harbours hopes for a revived IVth International purged of opportunism, and to this end called for joint work between his group and the Chaulieu-Montal tendency within the International, in reality the current around Munis soon broke all links with this false International and formed an independent group (the Union Ouvrière Internationale) which, like SouB, entered into discussion with the groups of the communist left.

Castoriadis on ‘The content of socialism’: beyond Marx or back to Proudhon?

We will return later on to the subsequent political trajectory of Castoriadis and Munis. Our main aim is to examine how, in a period dominated by Stalinist and social democratic definitions of socialism, a period of retreat for the working class and of growing isolation of the revolutionary minority, both militants tried to elaborate a vision of an authentic path to the communist future. We begin with Castoriadis, whose three articles on ‘The Content of Socialism’(CS), published between 1955 and 1958 in Socialisme  ou Barbarie[7] are without doubt his most ambitious attempt to criticise the dominant falsities about the meaning of socialism and to put forward an alternative.  These texts, but above all the second, were to have an influence on a number of other groups and currents, not least the Situationist International, which took up Castoriadis’ notion of generalised self-management, and the UK libertarian socialist group Solidarity, which was to rework article two in their pamphlet Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-managed Society[8].

The dates of publication are significant; in between the first article and the second there were momentous events in the ‘eastern’ empire: Kruschev’s famous speech about Stalin’s excesses, the revolt in Poland and above all the proletarian uprising in Hungary, which saw the emergence of workers’ councils. These events evidently had a major impact on Castoriadis’ thought and on the rather detailed description of a projected socialist society in the second article. The problem is that these articles persist in the theoretical arrogance noted by the GCF in 1948 with their claim to having understood key elements of capitalism and its revolutionary negation which had not been grasped in the workers’ movement, including by Marx. But in reality, rather than going ‘beyond’ Marx, they tend to take us back to Proudhon, as we shall explain. 

That is not to say that there are no positive elements in these texts. They confirm Castoriadis’ rejection of the Trotskyist view of Stalinism as a misguided expression of the workers’ movement, insisting that it defends a class interest which is opposed to that of the proletariat. Although Castoriadis freely accepts that his conception of the post-revolutionary society is very close to the one put forward by Pannekoek in his pamphlet Workers’ Councils[9], he does not fall into some of the crucial errors of the ‘late’ Pannekoek: the rejection of the Russian revolution as bourgeois and of any role for a revolutionary political organisation. Instead the Russian revolution is still treated as an essentially proletarian experience whose degeneration must be understood and learned from. Neither do the texts fall explicitly into the anarchist position that rejects centralisation on principle: on the contrary, he strongly criticizes the classical anarchist view and argues that “To refuse to face up to the question of central power is tantamount to leaving the solution of these problems to some bureaucracy or other”[10].

Rejecting the Trotskyist view that a mere change in the forms of property can bring about an end to the mechanics of capitalist exploitation, Castoriadis rightly insist that socialism has no meaning unless it brings about a total transformation in humanity’s relationship with all aspects of social and economic life, a change from a  society in which mankind is dominated by the products of his own hands and brains to one in which human beings consciously control their own activity, and above all the process of production. For this reason, Castoriadis stresses the central importance of the workers’ councils as the forms through which this profound change in the way society operates can be brought about. The difficulty arises less with this general notion of socialism as the restoration of “human power as its own end”, but with the more concrete means Castoriadis advocates to achieve this goal, and with the theoretical method that lies behind the measures he advocates.

To begin with the idea of criticising the contributions of the past workers’ movement:  there is nothing wrong in this per se. In fact it is an essential element in the development of the communist project. We cannot disagree with Castoriadis’ idea that the workers’ movement is necessarily affected by the dominant ideology and that it can only throw off this influence through a process of constant reflection and struggle.  But Castoriadis’ criticisms are very often inaccurate and lead to conclusions that tend to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater ‘ –in short, they lead him towards a break with marxism that was to become explicit not long after these articles were published, and the premises of this break can already be seen in these texts. To give an example:  he already rejects the marxist theory of crisis as a product of the internal economic contradictions of the system. For him the crisis is not the result of overproduction or the falling rate of profit but a result of the growing rejection, by those ‘below’,  of the division of society into order givers and order takers, which he sees not as the inevitable product of capitalist exploitation, but its actual foundation:  “The abolition of exploitation is only possible when every separate stratum of directors ceases to exist, for in modern societies it is the division between directors and executants that is at the root of exploitation[11]. By the same token, in CSII he offers us an extremely reductionist (albeit very common) caricature of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of crisis as one that predicts a purely automatic collapse of capitalism.

Seizing on a quote from Marx about the persistence of a “realm of necessity” even in communism, Castoriadis thinks he has discovered a fatal flaw in Marx’s thinking: that for Marx, production would always be a sphere of denial and essentially of alienation, whereas he, Castoriadis, alone has discovered that alienation cannot be overcome unless the sphere of production is also one in which our humanity is expressed. The reference (in CS II) is to the passage in Capital volume 3 where Marx says that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production”[12]. This passage does imply that labour or material production can never be an area of human fulfillment, and for Castoriadis this represent a decline from the early Marx who looked forward to the transformation of labour into free activity (especially in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) . But presenting things in this way distorts the complexity of Marx’s thought. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875, Marx also insists that the aim of the proletarian revolution is a society in which “labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want”. We can find similar ideas in the Grundrisse, another ‘mature’ work[13].

The self-management of a market economy

A common criticism of ‘On the content of socialism’ is that it violates Marx’s admonition against “drawing up recipes for the cookbooks of the future”. In CSII Castoriadis anticipates this criticism by denying that he is trying to draw up statutes or a constitution for the new society.  It is interesting to see how much capitalist society has changed since CSII was written, posing problems which don’t quite fit into the schema – above all the tendency towards the elimination of large factory production at the centre of many of the central capitalist countries, the growth of precarious employment, and the practise of ‘outsourcing’ to areas of the globe where labour power is cheaper. We can’t blame Castoriadis for failing to predict such developments, but it does show the pitfalls of schematic anticipations of future society. However, we prefer to look at the ideas contained in the text and to show why so much of what Castoriadis puts forward would in any case not be part of a really evolving communist programme.

We have already mentioned Castoriadis’ rejection of Marx’s theory of crisis in favor of his own innovation: exploitation, and the fundamental contradiction of ‘modern’ capitalism, as being rooted in the division between order givers and order-takers.  And this bold ‘revisionism’, this shelving of the economic contradictions inherent in the wage relationship and the accumulation of capital, means that Castoriadis has no qualms about describing his socialist society of the future as one where all the essential categories of capital remain intact and present no danger of engendering a new form of exploitation and no obstacle to the transition to a fully communist society.

In 1972, when the UK Solidarity group produced their pamphlet Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-managed Society, their introduction was already rather defensive about the fact that the ‘socialist’ society described by Castoriadis still retained a number of the key features of capitalism: wages (although Castoriadis insists on the absolute equality of wages from day one), prices, labour value as the source of accounting, a consumer market, and “the criterion of profitability”. And indeed in a polemic written in 1972, Adam Buick of the Socialist Party of Great Britain showed the degree to which the Solidarity version had bowdlerised some of the most embarrassing passages in the original:

 “Nobody who has read the original article can deny that Cardan was an advocate of so-called 'market socialism'. Solidarity themselves clearly found this embarrassing because they have edited out its more crude manifestations. In their introduction they apologise:

"Some will see the text as a major contribution to the perpetuation of wage slavery - because it still talks of 'wages' and doesn't call for the immediate abolition of 'money' (although clearly defining the radically different meanings these terms will acquire in the early stages of a self-managed society)" (p.4)

and, again, in a footnote :

"All the preceding talk of ‘wages', 'prices' and 'the market' will, for instance, undoubtedly have startled a certain group of readers. We would ask them momentarily to curb their emotional responses and to try to think rationally with us on the matter" (p. 36).

But Cardan did not speak only of 'wages', 'prices' and 'the market'. He also spoke of 'profitability' (rentabilité) and 'rate of interest’ ('taux d'intérêt'). This was evidently too much even for Solidarity's curbed emotion since these words nowhere appear in the edited translation.

It is very revealing to give some examples of the way Solidarity has toned down the 'market socialism' aspects of Cardan's original articles:

Original: shops selling to consumers (magasins de vente aux consomateurs) .

Solidarity’s version : stores distributing to consumers (p. 24).

Original: The market for consumer goods (le marché des biens de consommation).

Solidarity’s version : consumer goods (heading p. 35).

Original: This implies the existence of a real market for consumer goods (ce qui implique 1'existence d'un marché réel pour les biens de consommation).

Solidarity’s version: This implies the existence of some mechanism whereby consumer demand can genuinely make itself felt (p.35)

Original: Money, prices, Wages and value

Solidarity’s version: 'money', 'wages', 'value' (heading p. 36)..

In fact Cardan envisaged a market economy in which everybody would be paid in circulating money an equal wage with which to buy goods which would be on sale at a price equal to their value (amount of socially necessary labour embodied in them). And he as the cheek to claim that Marx also held that under Socialism goods would exchange at their values…”[GD1] [14]

The real continuity here is not with Marx but with Proudhon, whose future ‘mutualist’ society is a society of independent commodity producers, exchanging their products at their value. ..

“Socialism” as a transitional society?

 Castoriadis does not claim that the society he describes is the final goal of the revolution.  In fact, his position is very similar to the definition that arose during the period of social democracy and was theorised by Lenin in particular: socialism is a stage on the road to communism[15]. And of course Stalinism took full advantage of this idea to argue that the fully stratified economy of the USSR was already “real socialism”. But the problem with this idea lies not only in the way it was used by Stalinism. A deeper difficulty is that it tends to freeze the transition period into a stable mode of production, when it can really only be understood in a dynamic and contradictory manner, as a period marked by a constant struggle between the communist measures unleashed by the political power of the working class, and all the remnants of the old world which tend to drag society back towards capitalism. Whether the political regime of this ‘socialist’ stage is envisaged despotically or democratically, the fundamental illusion remains: that you can arrive at communism through a process of accumulating capital.  One can even see Castoriadis’ attempt to develop a balanced economy, where production is harmonised with the consumer market, as a reflection of the Keynesian methods of the day, which aimed to do away with economic crises precisely by achieving such a planned equilibrium. And this in turn reveals the degree to which Castoriadis was bewitched by the appearance of capitalist economic stability in the period that followed the Second World War[16].

In an early section of CS II, Castoriadis rightly takes up Marx’s view that the future society of free producers must profoundly simplify the whole process of production and distribution – must make its operations “perfectly simple and intelligible”, to use the term used by Marx in one of the rare descriptions of communist society contained in Capital[17]. But by retaining the categories of value production, not only will any attempt to rationally plan production and distribution be fettered by the concerns of the market and of profitability, it will also lead sooner or later to the same old shit – to economic crisis and to hidden, then open, forms of exploitation. It also seems rather ironic that having developed, in the early part of CSII, the argument that capitalist technology cannot be seen as neutral but is profoundly connected to the goals of capitalist production, Castoriadis then appears to opt for something of a technical fix, in which the ‘Plan Factory’, using very big computers, is able to work out how the self-managed market will achieve a perfect economic balance.

Castoriadis’ inability to envisage a real overcoming of the wage relation is connected to his fixation on the notion of the socialist “enterprise” as a self-managed unit, albeit one that coordinates with other enterprises and branches of production at various levels. CSII ‘s description of relations in the future socialist society begins with a long section on how the factory of the future will be managed, and only later in the text does it discuss how society as a whole will be run at the political and economic level. CSIII is almost entirely devoted to analysing the reality of day to day resistance on the factory shop floor, seeing it as the soil in which a future revolutionary consciousness will develop. Castoriadis is not wrong to stress the importance of the workplace as a focus for the association of the workers, for their collective resistance, and in any revolutionary process the base assemblies at the workplace will certainly play a vital role as ‘cells’ of a wider network of councils. But Castoriadis goes further than this and suggests that in socialist society the factory/workplace will maintain itself as a kind of fixed community. On the contrary, as Bordiga for one always stressed, the emergence of communism necessarily involves the end of the individual enterprise, and the real overcoming of the division of labour will surely imply that producers are less and less tied to a single unit of production.

Perhaps more importantly, Castoriadis’ ‘factoryism’ leads to a profound underestimation of the primary function of workers’ councils, which is not the management of the factory but the unification of the working class at both the economic and political levels. For Castoriadis, a workers’ council is essentially a council elected by the workers’ assembly of a given unit of production, and towards the end of CSII he clearly distinguishes this from the Russian soviets which he sees as essentially based on territorial units[18]

“Although the Russian word ‘soviet’ means ‘council,’ one should not confuse the workers' councils we have been describing in this text with even the earliest Russian Soviets. The workers' councils are based on one's place of work. They can play both a political role and a role in the industrial management of production. In its essence, a workers' council is a universal organ. The 1905 Petrograd Soviet (Council) of Workers' Deputies, although the product of a general strike and, although exclusively proletarian in composition, remained a purely political organ. The Soviets of 1917 were as a rule geographically based. They too were purely political institutions, in which all social layers opposed to the old regime formed a united front”

Castoriadis does envisage a network of councils taking on the running of local and national political affairs, and Solidarity helpfully draws us a diagram, but it seems to involve a central assembly of factory delegates at national level without anything in between. But, fixated on the problem of managing the factory (an issue that in Russia was taken up by the factory committees),  Castoriadis underestimates the significance of the fact that the soviets emerged both in 1905 and 1917 to coordinate the workplaces engaged in a mass strike: they were a ‘council of war’ of delegates from all the enterprises in a given town or city, and from the very beginning took up the direction of a movement that was moving from the terrain of economic defence to one of political confrontation with the existing regime.

It’s true that alongside, and often in conjunction with, the soviets of workers’ deputies there were soviets of soldiers’ and sailors’ delegates, elected from the barracks and on the ships, and soviets of peasants’ deputies elected from the villages, as well as comparable forms elected on the basis of urban neighbourhoods, blocks of flats, etc.   In that sense there was a strongly territorial or residential basis to many of the soviets. But this raises a further question: the relationship between the workers’ councils and the councils of other non-exploiting strata. Castoriadis is aware of this problem as his ‘diagram’ envisages the central assembly of delegates containing delegates from peasant councils and councils of professionals and small traders. For us this is the central problem of the state in the period of transition: a period in which classes still exist, in which the working class has to exercise its dictatorship while at the same time integrating the other non-exploiting strata into political life and into the process of transforming social relations. Castoriadis envisages a similar process but he rejects the idea that this transitional organisation of society constitutes a state. In our view this approach is more rather than less likely to permit a situation where the state becomes an autonomous force opposing the organs of the working class, as happened rather rapidly in Russia given the isolation of the revolution after 1917. For us, the real independence of the working class and its councils is better served by calling the state what it is, by recognizing its inherent dangers, and ensuring that there is no subordination of the organs of the working class to the organs of ‘society as a whole’.

A final expression of Castoriadis’ failure to envisage a real break with the categories of capital: the limitation of his vision to the national level. Hints of this are given here and there in CSII where he talks about how things might work “in a country like France”, and how “the population of the entire country” might run their affairs through an assembly of council delegates which is depicted as existing on a national scale only. But the danger of seeing “socialism” in a national framework comes through much more explicitly in this passage:

“…the revolution can only begin in one country, or in one group of countries. As a result, it will have to endure pressures of extremely varying kinds and durations. On the other hand, however swiftly the revolution spreads internationally, a country's level of internal development will play an important role in how the principles of socialism will be concretely applied. For example, agriculture might create important problems in France—but not in the United States —or Great Britain (where, inversely, the main problem would be that of the country's extreme dependence on food imports). In the course of our analysis, we have considered several problems of this kind and hope to have shown that solutions tending in a socialist direction existed in each case.
We have not been able to consider the special problems that would arise if the revolution remained isolated in one country for a long time —and we can hardly do it here. But we hope to have shown that it is wrong to think that the problems arising from such isolation are insoluble, that an isolated workers' power must die heroically or degenerate, or that at the most it can ‘hold on’ while waiting. The only way to ‘hold on’ is to start building socialism; otherwise, degeneration has already
[GD2]  set in, and there is nothing to hold on for. For workers' power, the building of socialism from the very first day is not only possible, it is imperative. If it does not take place the power held has already ceased to be workers' power”[19]

The idea that a proletarian power can hold on in a single country by building socialism reverses the reality of the problem and takes us back, finally, to the errors of the Bolsheviks after 1921, and even to the counter-revolutionary positions of Stalin and Bukharin after 1924. When the working class takes power in one country it will, of course be compelled to take economic measures to guarantee the provision of basic needs, and as far as possible they should be compatible with communist principles and antithetical to the categories of capital. But it must always be recognised that any such measures (like  ‘war communism’ in Russia) will be deeply distorted by conditions of isolation and scarcity and will not necessarily have any direct continuity to the authentic communist reconstruction that will only begin once the working class has defeated the bourgeoisie on a global scale.  In the meantime, the essentially political task of extending the revolution will have to take precedence over the contingent and experimental social and economic measures that will take place in the first stages of a communist revolution.

We will return later to the political trajectory followed by Castoriadis, which would be significantly molded by this departure from marxism at the theoretical level

Munis:  ‘For a Second Communist Manifesto’

Munis returned to Spain in 1951 to intervene in a widespread outbreak of class struggle, seeing the possibility of a new revolutionary upsurge against the Franco regime[20]. He was arrested and spent the next seven years in jail. It can be argued that Munis failed to draw some key political lessons from this experience, particularly about the revolutionary possibilities of the post-war period, but it certainly did not dampen his commitment to the revolutionary cause. He took very precarious refuge in France – the French state soon expelled him - and he spent several years in Milan, where he entered into contact with the Bordigists and with Onorato Damen of Battaglia Comunista, with whom he developed a strong mutual respect. It was during this period, in 1961 that Munis, in company with Peret, founded the group Fomento Obrero Revolucionario. In this context, he produced two of his most important theoretical texts: Unions against revolution in 1960 and For a second Communist Manifesto (FSCM) in 1961[21].

At the beginning of this article we noted the similarities in the political trajectories of Castoriadis and Munis in their break with Trotskyism. But by the early 60s their paths had begun to diverge rather radically. In its early days, the title Socialisme ou Barbarie was consistent with the real choice facing humanity: Castoriadis considered himself to be a marxist and the alternative announced in the title expressed the group’s adherence to the notion that capitalism had entered its epoch of decline[22]. But in the introduction to the first volume of a collection of his writings, The Bureaucratic Society[23] , Castoriadis describes the period 1960-64 as the years of his break with marxism, considering not only that capitalism had essentially resolved its economic contradictions, thus disproving the basic premises of the marxist critique of political economy; but also that marxism, whatever its insights, could not be separated from the ideologies and regimes which laid claim to it. In other words, Castoriadis, like other former Trotskyists (such as the remnants of the German RKD) went from a wholesale rejection of “Leninism” to a rejection of marxism itself (and thus ended up in a “new look” kind of anarchism).

Even though, as we shall also examine, FSCM indicates the degree to which Munis had not entirely thrown off the weight of his Trotskyist past, it argues quite clearly that, despite all the contemporary propaganda about the affluent society and the integration of the working class, the real trajectory of capitalist society confirmed the fundamentals of marxism: that capitalism had, since the first world war, entered its epoch of decadence, in which the crying contradiction between the relations of production and the productive forces were threatening to drag humanity to ruin, above all because of the historic danger of war between the two imperialist blocs that dominated the globe. The affluent society was in essence a war economy.

Far from blaming marxism for in some sense giving birth to Stalinism, FSCM eloquently denounces the Stalinist regimes and parties as the purest expression of capitalist decadence, which, in different forms around the world, was engendering a drive towards totalitarian state capitalism. From the same theoretical starting point, the text argues that all national liberation struggles had become moments in the global imperialist confrontation. At a time which saw a widespread dissemination of the idea that national struggles in the Third World were the new force for revolutionary change, this was a striking example of revolutionary intransigence, and the arguments that accompanied it would be amply confirmed by the evolution of the ‘post-colonial’ regimes produced by the struggle for national independence. And it stood in contrast with the ambiguities of the SouB group on the war in Algeria and other basic class issues. The FSCM makes it clear that SouB has followed a path of compromise and workerism rather than of fighting for communist clarity, against the stream where necessary:

“For its part, the ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ tendency, which also came out of the IVth International , operates at the tail end of the decaying French ‘left’ on all problems and in all important movements: on Algeria and the colonial problem, 13 May 1958 and the Gaullist power, trade unions and contemporary workers’ struggles, attitude towards Stalinism and state direction in general. To the point where, although it sees the Russian economy as a form of state capitalism, it has only served to spread further confusion. By expressly renouncing the task of struggling against the current and by only saying to the working class ‘what it can understand’, it dooms itself to its own failure. Lacking in nerve this ‘tendency’ has given in to a kind of versatility which has the air of existentialist tight-rope walking. To them, as towards other currents in the US, it’s worth recalling Lenin’s words: ‘a few pitiful intellectuals who think that with the workers it’s enough to talk about the factory and blather on about what they have already known about for a long time’”.

Again, in contrast to the evolution of SouB, FSCM has no hesitation in defending the proletarian character of the October revolution and of the Bolshevik party. In a document written about 10 years later, and which takes up similar themes to FSCM, Party-state, Stalinism, Revolution[24], Munis argues against those currents from the German and Dutch left who had reneged on their initial support for October and decided that the Russian revolution and Bolshevism were essentially bourgeois in nature. At the same time, FSCM focuses on certain key errors which accelerated the degeneration of the revolution in Russia and the rise of the Stalinist counter-revolution: the confusion of nationalisations and state property with socialism, and the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the dictatorship of the party. In Party-State, Munis also has a definite insight into the idea that the transitional state cannot be seen as the agent of communist transformation, echoing the position of Bilan and the GCF:

“From the Paris Commune, revolutionaries drew a lesson of great importance, among others: the capitalist state could not be conquered or used; it had to be demolished. The Russian revolution deepened this same lesson in a decisive manner: the state, however workers’ or soviet it might be, cannot be the organiser of communism. As the proprietor of the instruments of labour, as the collector of necessary (or superfluous) social surplus labour, far from withering away, it acquires an unlimited smothering force and capacity. Philosophically the idea of an emancipating state is pure Hegelian idealism, unacceptable to historical materialism” (P-S, 43)

And where Castoriadis in ‘The content of socialism’ advocates a form of self-managed capitalism, Munis offers no room for doubt about the economic/social content of the communist programme – the abolition of wage labour and commodity production.  

“The aim of a really planned economy can only be to bring production into accord with consumption; only the full satisfaction of the latter – and not profit or privileges, nor the demands of ‘national defence’ or an industrialisation alien to the daily needs of the masses – can be considered as the spur of production. The first condition for such an approach can thus[GD3]  only be the disappearance of wage labour, the foundation stone of the law of value, universally present in capitalist societies, even if many of them claim today to be socialist or communist”.

At the same time, this strength of FSCM regarding the content of the communist transformation also has a weak side – a tendency to assume that wage labour and commodity production can be abolished from the first day, even in the context of a single country. It’s true, as the text says, that “from the first day, the society in transition born from this victory must aim towards this goal. It must not lose sight for an instant of the strict interdependence between production and consumption”. But as we have already remarked, the proletariat in a single country must also never lose sight of the fact that whatever measures it undertakes can only be temporary as long as the revolutionary victory has not been achieved on a world scale, and that they remain subject to the global operation of the laws of capitalism. The fact that Munis does not keep this in mind at all times is confirmed in particular in Party-state where he presents war communism as a kind of “non-capitalism” and sees the NEP as the restoration of capitalist relations. We have already criticised this approach in two articles in the International Review nos 25 and 52 [25]. It is also confirmed by what Munis always maintained about the events in Spain 36-37: for him the Spanish revolution went even deeper than the Russian revolution. This was partly because in May 1937 the workers for the first time showed, arms in hands, an understanding of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism. But he also considered that the Spanish industrial and agrarian collectives had established small islands of communism. In sum: communist relations are possible even without the destruction of the bourgeois state and the international extension of the revolution. In these conceptions we see, once again, a renewal of anarchist ideas and even an anticipation of the ‘communisation’ current which was to develop in the 1970s and which has a definite influence within the wider anarchist movement today.

And while an incomplete break with Trotskyism sometimes takes this anarchist direction, it can also manifest itself in more explicit hangovers from Trotskyism. Thus FSCM ends with a kind of updated version of the 1938 transitional programme. We quote at length from our article in International Review 52:

“In its 'For a Second Communist Manifesto' the FOR con­sidered it correct to put forward all kinds of transitional demands in the absence of revolut­ionary movements of the proletariat. These go from the 30 hours week, the suppression of piece work and of time and motion studies in the fact­ories to the ‘demand for work for all, unemployed and youth’ on the economic terrain. On the political level the FOR demands democratic 'rights' and 'freedoms' from the bourgeoisie: freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly; the right of workers to elect permanent workshop, factory or professional delegates ‘without any judicial or trade union formalities’.

This is all within the Trotskyist logic, according to which it is enough to pose the right demands to gradually arrive at the revolution. For the Trotskyists, the whole trick is to know how to be a pedagogue for the workers, who don't understand anything about their demands, to brandish in front of them the most appetising carrots in order to push the workers towards their 'party'. Is this what Munis wants, with his Transitional Program Mark 2?

The FOR still doesn't understand today:

  • that it is not a question of drawing up a catalogue of demands for future struggles: the workers are big enough to formulate their own precise demands spontaneously, in the course of the struggle;
  • that this or that precise demand -- like the 'right to work' for the unemployed -- can be taken up by bourgeois movements and used against the proletariat (labor camps, public works, etc.);
  • that it's only through the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie that the workers can really satisfy their demands…..

It's very characteristic that the FOR should put on the same level its reformist slogans about democratic 'rights and freedoms' for workers, and slogans which could only arise in a fully revolutionary period. We thus find mixed pell-mell such slogans as:

expropriation of industrial, finance, and agricultural capital;

workers' management of the production and distribution of goods;

destruction of all the instruments of war, atomic as well as classical, dissolution of armies and police, reconversion of war industries into consumer industries;

individual armament of those exploited by capitalism, territorially organized according to the schema of democratic committees of management and distribution;

suppression of frontiers and constitution of a single government and a single economy to the extent of the proletariat's victory in diverse in countries.’

.    …..All these slogans display enormous confusions. The FOR seems to have abandoned any marxist compass. There is no distinction made between a pre-revolutionary period in which capital still rules politically, a revolutionary period in  which a dual power is established, and the period of transition (after the seizure of power by the proletariat) which alone can put on the agenda (and then not immediately!) the ‘suppression of wage labor’ and the ‘suppression of frontiers.’[26]

The later trajectory of Munis and Castoriadis

Munis died in February 1989. The ICC published a tribute to him that began by saying that “the proletariat has lost a militant who devoted his whole life to the class struggle”[27]. After briefly tracing the political history of Munis through Spain in the 30s, his break with Trotskyism over the Second World War, his sojourn in Franco’s jails in the early 50s and the publication of For a Second Communist Manifesto, the article takes up the story in the late 60s:

In 1967, along with comrades from the Venezuelan group Internacialismo, he partici­pated in efforts to restore contacts with the revolutionary milieu in Italy. Thus, at the end of the ‘60s, with the resurgence of the working class onto the scene of history, he took his place alongside the weak revolutionary forces existing at that time, including those who were to form Révolution Internationale in France. But at the beginning of the ‘70s, he unfortunately remained outside the discussions and attempts at regroupment which resulted in particular in the constitution of the ICC in 1975. Even so, the Ferment Ouvrière Révolutionaire (FOR), the group he formed in Spain and France around the positions of the ‘Second Manifesto', at first agreed to participate in the series of confer­ences of groups of the communist left which be­gan in Milan in 1977. But this attitude altered during the course of the second conference; the FOR walked out of the conference, and this was the expression of a tendency towards sectarian isolation which up to now has prevailed in this organisation”.

Today the FOR no longer exists. It was always highly dependent on the personal charisma of Munis, who was not able to pass on a solid tradition of organisation to the new generation of militants who rallied round him, and which could have served as a basis for the continued functioning of the group after Munis’ death. And as the tribute notes, the group suffered from a tendency towards sectarianism which further weakened its capacity to survive.

The example of this attitude referred to in the tribute is the rather showy departure of Munis and his group from the second conference of the communist left, citing his disagreement with the other groups on the problem of the economic crisis. This is not the place to examine this problem in detail, but we can see the core of Munis’ position in the FSCM:

“The recovery of the fighting spirit and the resurgence of a revolutionary situation cannot be expected, as claimed by certain marxists who lean towards economic automatism, to be the result of one of these cyclical crises, wrongly called ‘crises of overproduction’. These are the tremours which regularise the chaotic development of the system, and are not the result of its exhaustion. Managed capitalism knows how to attenuate them and besides, even if one of them does arise, it could easily favour the tortuous designs of new reactionaries, who await their moment, five year plans in one pocket, and production norms in the other. The general crisis of capitalism is its exhaustion as a social system. It consists, summarily speaking, in the fact that the instruments of production as capital and the distribution of products, limited by wage labour, have become incompatible with human necessities, and even with the maximum possibilities that technique could offer to economic development. That crisis is insurmountable for capitalism, and in the West as well as in Russia it gets worse every day”

Munis’s position is thus not one of simply denying the crisis of overproduction, and indeed earlier on in the FSCM he attributes them to a fundamental contradiction in the system, that between use value and exchange value. Furthermore, in his rejection of “automatism”, any idea that an economic crash will mechanically lead to an upsurge in revolutionary consciousness, Munis is correct. He is also right to see that the emergence of a truly revolutionary consciousness involves the recognition that the very social relations underlying civilisation have become incompatible with the needs of humanity. These are points which could have been discussed with other groups of the communist left and certainly didn’t justify leaving the Paris conference without even explaining his real differences.

Again, in his pamphlet ‘Mistaken Trajectory of Révolution Internationale[28], where his views on the relationship between economic crisis and class consciousness are explained at greater length, Munis does sometimes hit the target, since, as we argued in our resolution on the international situation from the 21st international congress, the ICC has sometimes  drawn an immediatist and mechanical  link between crisis and revolution[29]. But reality was not really on the side of Munis, since whether we like it or not, the capitalist system has indeed been stuck in a very profound economic crisis ever since the 1970s; the idea that economic crises are simply part of the mechanism for “regularising” the system seems to reflect the pressures of the time the FSCM was written – the early 60s, the zenith of the post-war boom. But this peak was followed by a rapid descent into a global economic crisis that has proved fundamentally intractable, despite all the energies that a state-managed system has expended in slowing down and delaying its worst effects. And while it’s true that a genuinely revolutionary consciousness must grasp the incompatibility between capitalist social relations and the needs of humanity, the visible failure of an economic system which presents itself as no less than an incarnation of human nature will surely play a key part in enabling the exploited to throw off their illusions in capitalism and its immortality. 

Underlying this refusal to analyse the economic dimension of capitalism’s decadence there lies an unresolved voluntarism, the theoretical foundations of which can be traced back to the letter announcing his break from the Trotskyist organisation in France, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste,  where he steadfastly maintains Trotsky’s notion, presented in the opening lines of the Transitional Programme, that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership:

The crisis of humanity – we repeat this a thousand times along with L.D. Trotsky – is a crisis of revolutionary leadership. All the explanations which try to lay the responsibility for the failure of the revolution on the objective conditions, the ideological gap or the illusions of the masses, on the power of Stalinism or the illusory attraction of the ‘degenerated workers’ state’, are wrong and only serve to excuse those responsible, to distract attention from the real problem and obstruct its solution. An authentic revolutionary leadership, given the present level of the objective conditions for the taking of power, must overcome all obstacles, surmount all difficulties, triumph over all its adversaries”[30]

It was this ‘heroic’ attitude which led Munis to see the possibility of revolution just under the surface at all times during the decadent period: in the 1930s, when Munis sees the events in Spain not as proof of a triumphant counter-revolution but as the highest point of the revolutionary wave that began in 1917; at the end of the Second World War, when, as we have seen, Munis saw the movements in Spain 1951 as the precursor to a revolutionary onslaught; at the height of the ‘boom’ period of the 60s, since the FSCM already refers to “the accumulation of formidable revolutionary energies” taking place at the time it was written.  And just as he rejected the ICC’s efforts to examine the evolution of the economic crisis, he equally rejects our argument that even if decadence means that the proletarian revolution is on the agenda of history, there can be phases of profound defeat and disarray in the class during this period, phases which make revolution almost impossible and which confer different tasks on the revolutionary organisation.

 But however costly these errors might have been, they are understandable errors of a revolutionary who desires with his whole being to see the end of capitalism and the beginning of the communist revolution. This is why our tribute concludes:

It's thus clear that we have very important differences with the FOR, which has led us to polemicise with them a number of times in our press (see in particular the article in International Review 52). However, despite the serious errors he may have made, Munis re­mained to the end a militant who was deeply loyal to the combat of the working class. He was one of those very rare militants who stood up to the pressures of the most terrible counter­revolution the proletariat has ever known, when many deserted or even betrayed the militant fight; and he was once again there alongside the class with the historical resurgence of its struggles at the end of the ‘60s.

We pay our homage to this militant of the revolutionary struggle, to his loyalty and un­breakable commitment to the proletarian cause. To the comrades of the FOR, we send our fraternal greetings

Castoriadis deserts the workers’ movement

One of the best accounts of the life of Munis was written by August Guillamon in 1993. Its title – ‘G Munis, a little known revolutionary’[31] – summarises one of the main points of the article: that most of those militants who, through the trials and tribulations of the 20th century, remained loyal to the proletarian cause, were not rewarded by fame or fortune: alongside Munis he mentions Onorato Damen, Amadeo Bordiga, Paul Mattick, Karl Korsch, Ottorino Perrone, Bruno Maffi, Anton Pannekoek and Henk Canne-Meijer[32]. By contrast, our obituary for Castoriadis was entitled, ‘Death of Cornelius Castoriadis: bourgeoisie pays homage to one of its servants’[33]. We can let the article speak for itself, adding a few further comments.

“The bourgeois press, especially in France, has made a certain amount of noise about the death of Cornelius Castoriadis. Le Monde referred to it in two successive issues (28-29 December and 30 December 1997) and devoted a full page to it under a significant title: 'Death of Cornelius Castoriadis, anti-marxist revolutionary'. This title is typical of the ideological methods of the bourgeoisie. It contains two truths wrapped around the lie that they want us to swallow. The truths: Castoriadis is dead, and he was anti-marxist. The lie: he was a revolutionary. To shore up the idea, Le Monde recalls Castoriadis' own words, ‘repeated until the end of his life’: ‘. "Whatever happens, I will remain first and above all a revolutionary’.

And indeed, in his youth, he had been a revolutionary. At the end of the 1940s he broke with the Trotskyist ‘4th International’ in company with a number of other comrades and animated the review Socialisme ou Barbarie. At this time SouB represented an effort, albeit confused and limited by its Trotskyist origins, to develop a proletarian line of thought in the middle of the triumphant counter-revolution. But in the course of the 1950s, under the impulsion of Castoriadis (who signed his articles Pierre Chaulieu, then Paul Cardan), SouB more and more rejected the weak marxist foundations on which it had been built. In particular, Castoriadis developed the idea that the real antagonism in society was no longer between exploiters and exploited but between ‘order givers and order takers’. SouB finally disappeared at the beginning of 1966, hardly two years before the events of May 68, which marked the historic resurgence of the world-wide class struggle after a counter-revolution of nearly half a century. In fact, Castoriadis had ceased to be a revolutionary long before he died, even if he was able to maintain the illusory appearance of one.

Castoriadis was not the first to betray the revolutionary convictions of his youth. The history of the workers' movement is littered with such examples. What characterised him, however, is that he dressed his treason in the rags of ‘political radicalism’, in the claim that he was opposed to the whole existing social order. We can see this by looking at an article written in Le Monde Diplomatique in response to his final book, 'Done and to be done', 1997.

"Castoriadis gives us the tools to contest, to build the barricades, to envisage the socialism of the future, to think about changing the world, to desire to change life politically... What political heritage can come from the history of the workers’ movement, when it is now obvious that the proletariat cannot play the role of motor force that marxism attributed to it? Castoriadis replies with a superb programme that combines the highest demands of human polity with the best of the socialist ideal...Action and thought are in search of a new radicalism, now that the Leninist parenthesis is closed, now that the police-state marxism of history has fallen into dust..."

In reality, this ‘radicalism’ that makes highbrow journalists drool so much was a fig leaf covering the fact that Castoriadis' message was extremely useful to the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie. Thus, his declaration that marxism had been pulverised (The rise of Insignificance, 1996) gave its ‘radical’ backing to the whole campaign about the death of communism which developed after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of the eastern bloc in 1989”.

We have seen some of the early signs of a search for recognition in the decision of the Castoriadis group to write for Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, a practice strongly criticized by the GCF[34]. But it is when he finally abandons the idea of a working class revolution and begins to speculate about a kind of autonomous citizens’ utopia, when he dives into the more obscure pools of sociology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, that he becomes of interest to bourgeois academia and the more sophisticated branches of the media, who were quite willing to forgive him the follies of his youth and accept him into their very comfortable fold.

But our article accuses Castoriadis of a more serious betrayal than giving up the life of a militant and seeking above all his professional advancement.

“But the real test of Castoriadis' radicalism had already taken place in the early 80s, when under Reagan's leadership the western bourgeoisie launched a deafening campaign against the military threat of the ‘Evil Empire’ of the USSR in order to justify an armaments drive unprecedented since the second world war. And it was precisely during this period that Castoriadis published his book Facing War where he tried to demonstrate that there was a ‘massive imbalance’ in favour of Russia, ‘a situation that was practically impossible for the Americans to amend’. What's more this ‘analysis" was frequently cited by Marie-France Garaud, an ideologue of the ultra-militarist right and mouthpiece in France for the Reaganite campaigns.

At the end of the 80s, reality demonstrated that Russian military power was actually vastly inferior to that of the US, but this didn't puncture Castoradis' self-importance or silence the journalists' praise for him. Neither was this new. From 1953-4, even before he openly abandoned marxism, Castoriadis developed a whole theory that capitalism had now definitively overcome its economic crisis (see 'The dynamic of capitalism' in SouB 120). We know what happened after this: capitalism's crisis returned with a vengeance in the late 60s. So when a pocket collection (Editions 10/18) of the works of Castoriadis was published in 1973, it missed out certain not very glorious writings, which allowed his friend Edgar Morin to say at the time: ‘Who today can publish without shame, indeed with pride, the texts that marked his political road from 1948 to 1973, if not a rare spirit like Castoriadis?’ (Le Nouvel Observateur)”.

Did Castoriadis openly call for mobilizing workers in defence of ‘western democracy’ against what he called the “stratocracy” of the eastern bloc? In a thread on libcom in 2011, a poster who signs himself ‘Julien Chaulieu’ takes issue with the original post, an account of the life of Castoriadis written by the Anarchist Federation in the UK, which argues that "In his last period, Castoriadis directed himself towards philosophical investigations, to psychoanalysis. In this period, his lack of knowledge of current social events and movements led him towards a tentative defence of the West - because struggle still remained possible within it - against Stalinist imperialism".[35]

Julien Chaulieu replied:

“As somebody who has studied all of his works, alongside with Guy Debord and many anarchists-libertarian socialists, I can confirm that the above statement is utterly wrong.

Castoriadis never defended the west. This was a misunderstanding, based on a propaganda by the Greek Stalinist social-fascist party (Communist Party of Greece). In this interview-video (which is unfortunately only available in Greek) he claims that indeed USSR was oppressive and tyrannical but that doesn't mean we should defend the western capitalist powers which are similarly brutal towards the ‘Third World’. The fact he abandoned typical socialist ideas, moving towards autonomy caused massive reactions to the (CPG).

In this interview he stated the following:

‘The western Societies are not just capitalist societies. If somebody is a Marxist will say that the mode of production in the Western world is capitalist, therefore these societies are capitalist because the mode of production determines everything. But these societies are not only capitalist. They are self-called democracies, (I do not call them democratic because I have a different definition on democracy), I call them liberal oligarchies. But in these societies there is a democratic element which has not been created by capitalism. On the contrary, it has been created in contrast to capitalism. It has been created while Europe was exiting from the Middle Ages and a new social class was being created, the so called middle class (which has nothing to do with the capitalists) and they tried to gain some freedom over the feudals, the kings and the church. This movement is continuing after the Renaissance with the English Revolution in the 17th century, the French and the American Revolutions in the 18th century which resulted to the creation of the labour movement.’

In fact, he appears to be very critical against capitalism, he uncovers the myth of ‘capitalism is the only system that works, the less bad’, the dominant western approach. Nothing pro-capitalist here. On the contrary, he speaks out the truth that has been destroyed by stupid liberals”

But what we really find in this passage, with its hint that there remains a real democratic and extra-capitalist substrate in the western forms of capitalism, and even more so with his alarmist analysis of Russian military strengthis that the later Castoriadis creates a zone of ambiguity which can easily be exploited by the real hawks of capitalist society, even if Castoriadis himself avoids incriminating himself with any explicitly pro-war pronouncements.

Our article could also have added that there is another side to the ‘legacy’ of Castoriadis: he is, in a sense, one of the founding fathers of what we have called the ‘modernist’ current, which is made up of various groups and individuals  who claim that they have gone beyond marxism (which, let’s recall, was always to an important extent the version Castoriadis inherited from Trotskyism)  but who still consider themselves to be revolutionaries and even communists. Several members of the Situationist international, who tended in this direction, were even members of SouB, but the passing on of this flame is a more general tendency and not dependent on direct physical succession. The Situationists , for example, agreed with Castoriadis about putting forward the slogan of generalised self-management, concurred that the marxist analysis of the economic crisis was old hat, but did not follow him into abandoning the idea of the working class as the motor force of revolution. On the other hand, the main trend of later modernism – which today tends to label itself as the “movement for communisation” – has read its Marx and its Bordiga and is able to show that this notion of self-management is entirely compatible with value relations. But what they do inherit from Castoriadis above all is the abandonment of the working class as the subject of history. And just as Castoriadis’ ‘supercession’ of Marx took him back to Proudhon, so the communisers mighty act of ‘aufhebung’  takes them back to Bakunin, where all classes immolate themselves in the coming grand conflagration. But this is a polemic we will have to take up elsewhere.

C D Ward, December 2017


[2] Chaulieu being a nom de guerre for Cornelius Castoriadis – along with Paul Cardan and others; Montal for Claude Lefort

[9] Pannekoek’s pamphlet was written during the war but published in full in the years that followed. The reference to it by Castoriadis is in https://libcom.org/library/on-the-content-of-socialism-iii-socialisme-ou...

[10] CSII

[11] CSII

[12] chap XLVIII

[14] ‘Solidarity, the market and Marx’, available here: https://libcom.org/library/solidarity-market-marx-adam-buick. The text is also interesting in that it welcomes the appearance of new groups like Workers Voice in Liverpool, Internationalism in the US and the London group which, after splitting from solidarity, formed World Revolution, who are much clearer than Solidarity on the content of socialism/communism. What it doesn’t do is take issue with the essentially national conception of socialism contained in CSII – a weakness also that inevitably afflicts the SPGB with their vision of a parliamentary road to socialism. See below.

[15] For ourselves – and we think we are closer to Marx here, even if he much preferred the term ‘communism’ –  we take socialism and communism to mean the same thing: a society where wage labour, commodity production and national frontiers have been overcome.

[17] Capital Vol 1, chapter 1

[18] Interestingly, in a letter to Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1953, Anton Pannekoek already noticed the French group’s restrictive conception of workers’ councils: “While you restrict the activity of these organisms to the organization of labour in the factories after the taking of social power by the workers, we consider them as also being the organisms by means of which the workers will conquer this power” https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1953/socialisme-ou-barbarisme.htm

[19] CSII

[21]  https://libcom.org/article/unions-against-revolution-g-munis. This text was also published in Internationalism 3 in the early 70s, with an introduction by Judith Allen, ‘Unions and Reformism’. Munis replied to this here; https://www.marxists.org/francais/munis/works/1973/00/munis_19730000.htm.

The ‘Second manifesto’ has not been translated into English. A French edition can be found here: https://www.matierevolution.org/spip.php?article3484

[22] See for example ‘The relations of production in Russia’ https://www.marxists.org/francais/general/castoriadis/works/1949/chaulie...

[23] La société bureaucratique 1: les rapports de production en Russie, editions 10:18, 1973

[24] Parti-Etat, Stalinisme, Révolution, ed Spartacus, 1975

[26]  52

[28] Alarme pamphlet, undated, ‘Fausse Trajectoire de Révolution Internationale’

[32] Curiously, he doesn’t include Marc Chirik in the list, or in the article as a whole, which somewhat deprives him of an important area of investigation. Not only did the discussions between Munis and the Gauche Communiste de France in the late 40s and early 50s play a part in Munis’ break with Trotskyism: we can see throughout the writings of Munis about the economic crisis a continued polemic against the conception of decadence defended by the GCF and later the ICC


 

 

Political currents and reference: 

Rubric: 

Communism on the agenda

2019 - International Review

International Review 162 - Spring-Summer 2019

Presenting the Review 162

Like the last two issues of the Review, this one continues the celebration of centenaries of the historic events of the world-wide revolutionary wave of 1917-23.

Thus, after the revolution in Russia in 1917 (International Review nº 160), the revolutionary attempts in Germany in 1918-19 (International Review nº 161), this issue celebrates the foundation of the Communist International. All these experiences are essential parts of the political heritage of the world proletariat, which the bourgeoisie does everything it can to disfigure (as in the case of the revolutions in Russia or Germany) or simply  to consign them to oblivion, as is the case with the foundation of the Communist International. The proletariat has to re-appropriate these experiences so that the next attempt at world revolution will be victorious.

This relates in particular to the following questions, some of which are dealt with in this Review:

  • The world-wide revolutionary wave of 1917-23 was the response of the international working class to the First World War, to four years of butchery and military confrontations between capitalist states with the aim of re-dividing the world.
  • The foundation of the Communist International (CI) in 1919 was the culminating point of this first revolutionary wave.
  • The foundation of the CI made concrete, first and foremost, the necessity for revolutionaries who remained loyal  to the principle of internationalism, which had been betrayed by the right wing of the Social Democratic parties (the majority in most of these parties), to work for the construction of a new International. At the forefront of this effort, this perspective, were the left currents in the Social Democratic parties, grouped around Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Pannekoek and Gorter in Holland, and of course the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian party around Lenin. It was on the initiative of the Communist Party of Russia (Bolshevik) and the Communist Party of Germany (the KPD, formerly the Spartacus League) that the First Congress of the International was called in Moscow on 2 March 1919.
  • The foundation of the new party, the world party of the revolution, was already late in that the majority of revolutionary uprisings by the proletariat in Europe had been violently suppressed. The mission of the CI was to provide a clear political orientation to the working class: the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the destruction of its state and the construction of a new world without war or exploitation.
  • The platform of the CI reflected the profound change in historical period opened by the First World War: “A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat" (Platform of the CI). The only alternative for society was now world proletarian revolution or the destruction of humanity; socialism or barbarism.

All these aspects of the foundation of the CI are developed in two articles in the present Review, the first in particular: “1919: the International of Revolutionary Action”. The second article, “Centenary of the foundation of the Communist International: what lessons can we draw for future combats?”, develops an idea already raised in the first article: because of the urgency of the situation, the main parties that founded the International, notably the Bolshevik party and the KPD, were not able to clarify their divergences and confusions in advance.

Moreover, the method employed in the foundation of the new party would not arm it for the future. A large part of the revolutionary vanguard put quantity, in terms of the number adhering to the new parties, above a prior clarification of programmatic and organisational principles. Such an approach turned its back on the very conceptions elaborated and developed by the Bolsheviks during their existence as a fraction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

This lack of clarification was an important factor, in the context of the reflux of the revolutionary wave, in the development of opportunism in the International. This was to be at the root of a process of degeneration which led to the eventual bankruptcy of the CI, just as had been the case with the IInd International. This new International was also to succumb through the abandonment of internationalism by the right wing of the Communist Parties. Following that, in the 1930s, in the name of defending the “Socialist Fatherland”, the Communist Parties in all countries trampled on the flag of the International by calling on workers to slaughter each other once again, on the battlefields of the Second World War.

Against this process of degeneration, the CI, like the IInd International, gave rise to left wing minorities which remained loyal to internationalism and to the slogan “The workers have no country, workers of the world unite!”. One of these fractions, the Italian Fraction of the Communist left, and then the French Fraction which subsequently became the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) carried out a whole balance sheet of the revolutionary wave. We are publishing two chapters from nº 7 (January-February 1946) of the review Internationalisme, dealing with the question of the role of the fractions which come out of a degenerating party (“The Left Fraction”) and their contribution to the formation of the future party, in particular the method that has to be applied to this task (“Method for forming the party”).

These revolutionary minorities, more and more reduced in size, had to work in the context of a deepening counter-revolution, illustrated in particular by the absence of revolutionary uprisings at the end of the Second World War – in contrast to what happened at the end of the previous war. Thus this new world conflict was a moment of truth for the weak forces which remained on a class terrain after the CPs had betrayed the case of the proletarian International. The Trotskyist current in turn betrayed, although its passage into the enemy camp engendered proletarian reactions from within it.

Internationalisme nº 43 (June-July 1949) contained an article “Welcome to Socialisme ou Barbarie” (republished in International Review nº 161 as part of the article “Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism”). The article by Internationalisme took a clear position on the nature of the Trotskyist movement, which had abandoned proletarian positions by participating in the Second World War. The article is a good example of the method used by the GCF in its relations with those who had escaped the shipwreck of Trotskyism in the wake of the war. In the second part of “Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism”, published in this issue of the Review, it is shown how difficult it was, for those who had grown up in the corrupted milieu of Trotskyism, to make a profound break with its basic ideas and attitudes. This reality is illustrated by the trajectory of two militants, Castoriadis and Munis, who, without doubt, at the end of the 40s and beginning of the 50s, were militants of the working class. Munis remained as such for his whole life, but this wasn’t the case with Castoriadis who deserted the workers’ movement.

With regard to Munis, our article demonstrates his difficulty in breaking with Trotskyism: “Underlying this refusal to analyse the economic dimension of capitalism’s decadence there lies an unresolved voluntarism, the theoretical foundations of which can be traced back to the letter announcing his break from the Trotskyist organisation in France, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste,  where he steadfastly maintains Trotsky’s notion, presented in the opening lines of the Transitional Programme, that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

On Castoriadis, it is underlined that “In reality, this ‘radicalism’ that makes highbrow journalists drool so much was a fig leaf covering the fact that Castoriadis' message was extremely useful to the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie. Thus, his declaration that marxism had been pulverised (The rise of Insignificance, 1996) gave its ‘radical’ backing to the whole campaign about the death of communism which developed after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of the eastern bloc in 1989”. He was, in a sense, one of the founding fathers of what we have called the “modernist” current

Also in this issue of the Review we continue the denunciation, begun in nº 160, of the union of all the national sectors and parties of the world bourgeoisie against the Russian revolution, to block the revolutionary wave and prevent its spread to the main industrial countries of Western Europe. Faced with the revolutionary attempts in Germany, the SPD played a key role in butchering these uprisings, and the campaigns of slander it used to justify this bloody repression, organised from the very summit of the state, were truly disgusting. Later on, Stalinism also took up its post as the butcher of the revolution, through the imposition of state terror and the liquidation of the Bolshevik Old Guard. From the moment that the USSR became a bourgeois imperialist state, the great democracies became its accomplice in the physical and ideological liquidation of October 1917. This ideological and political alliance was to last for many years and was to be re-launched, stronger than ever, when the collapse of the Eastern bloc and of Stalinism, a particular form of state capitalism, was falsely presented as the failure of communism.

This Review doesn’t contain an article on the burning questions of the current world situation. However our readers can find such articles on our website and the next issue of the Review will accord the necessary importance to these questions

14.5.19

1919: The International of Revolutionary Action

100 years ago, in March 1919, the first congress of the Communist International (CI) was held: the founding congress of the Third International.

If revolutionary organisations did not have the will to celebrate this event, the foundation of the International would be relegated to the oblivion of history. Indeed, the bourgeoisie is interested in keeping silent about this event, while it continues to shower us with celebrations of all kinds such as the centenary of the end of the First World War. The ruling class does not want the working class to remember its first great international revolutionary experience of 1917-1923. The bourgeoisie would like to be able to finally bury the spectre of the revolutionary wave which gave birth to the CI. This revolutionary wave was the international proletariat's response to the First World War, four years of slaughter and military clashes between the capitalist states to carve up the world.

The revolutionary wave began with the victory of the Russian revolution in October 1917. It manifested itself in the mutinies of soldiers in the trenches and the proletarian uprising in Germany in 1918.

The wave spread throughout Europe, it even reached the countries of the Asian continent (especially China in 1927). The countries of the Americas, such as Canada and the United States to Latin America, were also shaken by this global revolutionary upheaval.

We must not forget that it was fear of the international expansion of the Russian revolution that forced the bourgeoisie of the great European powers to sign the armistice to end the First World War.

In this context, the founding of the Communist International in 1919 represented the culmination of this first revolutionary wave.

The Communist International was founded to give a clear political orientation to the working masses. Its objective was to show the proletariat the way to overthrow the bourgeois state and build a new world without war and exploitation. We can recall here what the Statutes of the CI affirmed (adopted at its Second Congress in July 1920):

"The Communist International was formed after the conclusion of the imperialist war of 1914-18, in which the imperialist bourgeoisie of the different countries sacrificed 20 million men.

'Remember the imperialist war!' These are the first words addressed by the Communist International to every working man and woman; wherever they live and whatever language they speak. Remember that because of the existence of capitalist society a handful of imperialists were able to force the workers of the different countries for four long years to cut each other's throats. Remember that the war of the bourgeoisie conjured up in Europe and throughout the world the most frightful famine and the most appalling misery. Remember, that without the overthrow of capitalism the repetition of such robber wars is not only possible, but inevitable."

The foundation of the CI expressed first and foremost the need for revolutionaries to come together to defend the principle of proletarian internationalism. A basic principle of the workers' movement that the revolutionaries had to preserve and defend against wind and tide!

To understand the importance of the foundation of the CI, we must first recall that the Third International was in historical continuity with the First International (the IWMA) and the Second International (the International of social democratic parties). This is why the Manifesto of the CI stated:

“In rejecting the timidity, the lies, and the corruption of the obsolete official socialist parties, we communists, united in the Third International, consider that we are carrying on in direct succession the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. If the First International predicted the future course of development and indicated the roads it would take, if the Second International rallied and organised millions of proletarians, then the Third International is the International of open mass struggle, the International of revolutionary realisation, the International of action.”

It is therefore clear that the CI did not come from nowhere. Its principles and revolutionary programme were the emanation of the whole history of the workers' movement, especially since the Communist League and the publication of the Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. It was in the Communist Manifesto they put forward the famous slogan of the workers’ movement: "The proletarians have no country. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

To understand the historical significance of the founding of the CI, we must remember that the Second International died in 1914. Why? Because the main parties of this Second International, the Socialist parties, had betrayed proletarian internationalism. The leaders of these treacherous parties voted for war credits in parliament. In each country, they called the proletarians to join the "Union Sacrée" with their own exploiters. They called on them to kill each other in the world butchery in the name of defending the homeland, when the Communist Manifesto affirmed that "the proletarians have no country"!

Faced with the shameful collapse of the Second International, only a few social democratic parties were able to weather the storm, including the Italian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Russian parties. In other countries, only a small minority of militants, often isolated, remained faithful to proletarian internationalism. They denounced the bloody orgy of war and tried to regroup. In Europe, it was this minority of internationalist revolutionaries who would represent the left, especially around Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Pannekoek and Gorter in Holland and of course the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian party around Lenin.

From the death of the Second International in 1914 to the founding of the CI in 1919

Two years before the war, in 1912 the Basle congress of the Second International was held. With the threat of a world war in the heart of Europe looming, this congress adopted a resolution on the issue of war and proletarian revolution. This affirmed:

“Let the governments remember that with the present condition of Europe and the mood of the working class, they cannot unleash a war without danger to themselves. Let them remember that the Franco-German War was followed by the revolutionary outbreak of the Commune, that the Russo-Japanese War set into motion the revolutionary energies of the peoples of the Russian Empire (…) The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.”

It was also in the Second International that the most consistent marxist theorists, particularly Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, were able to analyse the change in the historic period in the life of capitalism. Luxemburg and Lenin had in fact clearly demonstrated that the capitalist mode of production had reached its peak in the early twentieth century.. They understood that the imperialist war in Europe could now have only one goal:  the division of the world between the main rival powers in the race for colonies. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg understood that the outbreak of the First World War marked the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence and historical decline. But already, well before the outbreak of war, the left wing of the Second International had to fight hard against the right, against the reformists, centrists and opportunists. These future renegades theorised that capitalism still had good days ahead of it and that, ultimately, the proletariat did not need to make the revolution or overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie.

The fight of the left for the construction of a new International

In September 1915, at the initiative of the Bolsheviks, the Zimmerwald International Socialist Conference was held in Switzerland. It was followed by a second conference in April 1916 in Kienthal, Switzerland. Despite the very difficult conditions of war and repression, delegates from eleven countries participated (Germany, Italy, Russia, France, etc.). But the majority of the delegates were pacifists and refused to break with the social chauvinists who had passed into the bourgeoisie's camp by voting for war credits in 1914.

So there was also at the Zimmerwald Conference a left wing united behind the delegates of the Bolshevik fraction, Lenin and Zinoviev. This "Zimmerwald left" defended the need to break with the social democratic party traitors. This left highlighted the need to build a new International. Against the pacifists, it argued, in Lenin's words, that "the struggle for peace without revolutionary action is a hollow and untrue phrase". The left of Zimmerwald had taken up Lenin's slogan: "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!" A watchword that was already contained in the resolutions of the Second International passed at the Stuttgart Congress in 1907 and especially the Basle Congress in 1912.

The Zimmerwald left would therefore constitute the "first nucleus of the Third International in formation" (as Lenin's companion, Zinoviev, would say in March 1918). The new parties that were created, breaking with social democracy, then began to take the name of "communist party". It was the revolutionary wave opened up by the Russian revolution of October 1917 that gave a vigorous impetus to the revolutionary militants for the founding of the CI. The revolutionaries had indeed understood that it was absolutely vital to found a world party of the proletariat for the victory of the revolution on a world scale.

It was at the initiative of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Russia and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD, formerly the Spartacus League) that the first congress of the International was convened in Moscow on 2 March 1919.

The political programme of the Communist International

The platform of the CI was based on the programme of the two main communist parties, the Bolshevik Party and the Communist Party of Germany (founded on 29 December 1918).

This CI platform began by stating clearly that “A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat". By taking up the speech on the founding programme of the German Communist Party by Rosa Luxemburg, the International made it clear that " the dilemma faced by humanity today is as follows: fall into barbarism, or salvation through socialism.” In other words, we had entered the "era of wars and revolutions". The only alternative for society was now: world proletarian revolution or destruction of humanity; socialism or barbarism. This position was strongly affirmed in the first point of the Letter of Invitation to the founding congress of the Communist International (written in January 1919 by Trotsky).

For the International, the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence meant that the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat took on a new form. This was the period in which the mass strike was developing, the period when the workers' councils were the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as announced by the appearance of the soviets in Russia in 1905 and 1917.

But one of the fundamental contributions of the International was the understanding that the proletariat must destroy the bourgeois state in order to build a new society. It is from this question that the First Congress of the International adopted its Theses on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship (drafted by Lenin). These theses began by denouncing the false opposition between democracy and dictatorship "because, in no civilized capitalist country, is there "democracy in general", but only a bourgeois democracy". The International thus affirmed that to defend "pure" democracy in capitalism was, in fact, to defend bourgeois democracy, the form par excellence of the dictatorship of capital. Against the dictatorship of capital, the International affirmed that only the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world scale could overthrow capitalism, abolish social classes, and offer a future to humanity.

The world party of the proletariat therefore had to give a clear orientation to the proletarian masses to enable them to achieve their ultimate goal. It had to defend everywhere the slogan of the Bolsheviks in 1917: "All power to the soviets". This was the "dictatorship" of the proletariat: the power of the soviets or workers' councils.

From the difficulties of the Third International to its bankruptcy

In March 1919, the International was unfortunately founded too late, at a time when most of the revolutionary uprisings of the proletariat in Europe had been violently repressed. In fact the CI was founded two months after the bloody repression of the German proletariat in Berlin. The Communist Party of Germany had just lost its principal leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, savagely murdered by the social democratic government during the bloody week in Berlin in January 1919. So at the moment when it was constituted the International had suffered its first defeat. With the crushing of the revolution in Germany, this defeat was also and above all a terrible defeat for the international proletariat.

It must be recognised that revolutionaries at the time were facing a terribly urgent situation when they founded the International. The Russian revolution was completely isolated, suffocated and encircled by the bourgeoisie of all countries (not to mention the counter-revolutionary exactions of the White Armies inside Russia). The revolutionaries were caught by the throat and it was necessary to act quickly to build the world party. It is because of this urgency that the main founding parties of the International, including the Bolshevik Party and the KPD, had not been able to clarify their differences and confusions. This lack of clarification was an important factor in the development of opportunism in the International with the reflux of the revolutionary wave.

Subsequently, because of the gangrene of opportunism, this new International died in its turn. It also succumbed to the betrayal of the principle of internationalism by the right wing of the Communist parties. In particular, the main party of the International, the Bolshevik Party, after the death of Lenin had begun to defend the theory of "building socialism in one country". Stalin, taking the head of the Bolshevik Party, was the mastermind of the repression of the proletariat which had made the revolution in Russia, imposing a ferocious dictatorship against Lenin's old comrades who fought against the degeneration of the International and denounced what they saw as the return of capitalism to Russia.

Subsequently, in the 1930s, it was in the name of defending the "Soviet Fatherland" that the Communist parties in all countries trampled the flag of the International in calling on proletarians, again, to kill each other on the battlefields of the Second World War. Just like the Second International in 1914, the CI had become bankrupt. Just like the International in 1914, the CI was also a victim of the gangrene of opportunism and a process of degeneration. But like the Second International, the CI also secreted a left minority, militants who remained loyal to internationalism and the slogan “The proletarians have no country. Proletarians of all countries unite!” These left-wing minorities (in Germany, France, Italy, Holland ...) waged a political fight within the degenerating International to try to save it. But Stalin eventually excluded these militants from the International. He hunted them, persecuted them and liquidated them physically (we recall the Moscow trials, the assassination of Trotsky by GPU agents and also the Stalinist Gulags).

The revolutionaries excluded from the Third International also sought to regroup, despite all the difficulties of war and repression. Despite their scattering in different countries, these tiny minorities of internationalist militants were able to make a balance sheet (bilan) of the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 in order to identify the main lessons for the future.

The revolutionaries who fought Stalinism did not seek to found a new International, before, during or after the Second World War. They understood that it was "midnight in the century": the proletariat had been physically crushed, massively mobilised behind the national flags of anti-fascism and the victim of the deepest counter-revolution in history. The historic situation was no longer favourable to the emergence of a new revolutionary wave against the World War.

Nevertheless, throughout this long period of counter-revolution, the revolutionary minorities continued to carry out an activity, often in hiding, to prepare for the future by maintaining confidence in the capacity of the proletariat to raise its head and one day overthrow capitalism. .

We want to recall that the ICC reclaims the contribution of the Communist International. Our organisation also considers itself in political continuity with the left fractions excluded from the International in the 1920s and 30s, especially the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. This centenary is therefore both an opportunity to salute the invaluable contribution of the CI in the history of the workers' movement, but also to learn from this experience in order to arm the proletariat for its future revolutionary struggles.

Once again, we must fully understand the importance of the founding of the Communist International as the first attempt to constitute the world party of the proletariat. Above all, we must emphasise the importance of the historical continuity, of the common thread which connects the revolutionaries of today and those of the past, of all those militants who, because of their fidelity to the principles of the proletariat, were persecuted and savagely murdered by the bourgeoisie, and especially by their old comrades who became traitors: Noske, Ebert, Scheidemann, Stalin. We must also pay tribute to all those exemplary militants  (Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches , Trotsky and many others) who paid with their lives for their loyalty to internationalism.

To be able to build the future world party of the proletariat, without which the overthrow of capitalism will be impossible, revolutionary minorities must regroup, today as in the past. They must clarify their differences through the confrontation of positions, collective reflection and the widest possible discussion. They must be able to learn from the past in order to understand the present historical situation and to allow new generations to open the doors of the future.

Faced with the decomposition of capitalist society, the barbarism of war, the exploitation and growing misery of proletarians, today the alternative remains the one that the Communist International clearly identified 100 years ago: socialism or barbarism, world proletarian revolution or destruction of humanity in an increasingly bloody chaos.

ICC

 

Rubric: 

History of the Working Class

Centenary of the foundation of the Communist International - What lessons can we draw for future combats?

A century ago a wind of hope blew for humanity: in Russia first of all the working class had just taken power. In Germany, Hungary and then in Italy it fought courageously to follow the Russian example with a single agenda: the abolition of the capitalist mode of production whose contradictions had plunged civilisation into four years of war. Four years of unprecedented barbarity that confirmed the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence.

In these conditions, acknowledging the bankruptcy of the Second International and basing itself on all the work of the reconstruction of international unity started at Zimmerwald in September 1915, then Kienthal in 1916, the Third, Communist International (CI) was founded on March 4 1919 in Moscow. In his April Thesis of 1917, Lenin had already called for the foundation of a new world party. For Lenin a decisive step was taken during the terrible days of January 1919 in Germany, during the course of which the German Communist Party (KPD) was founded.  In a "Letter to the workers of Europe and America" dated January 26, Lenin wrote: "When the Spartacus League became the German Communist Party, then the founding of the 3rd International became a fact. Formally this foundation hadn't yet been decided upon, but in reality the 3rd International exists from now". Leaving aside the excessive enthusiasm of such a judgment, as we will see later, revolutionaries at the time understood that it was now indispensable to forge the party for the victory of the revolution at the world level. After several weeks of preparation, 51 delegates met up from March 2 to March 6 1919, in order to lay out the organisational and programmatic markers which would allow the world proletariat to continue to advance the struggle against all the forces of the bourgeoisie.

The ICC lays claim to the contributions of the Communist International. This centenary is thus an occasion to salute and underline the inestimable work of the CI in the history of the revolutionary movement, but equally to draw the lessons of this experience and draw out its weaknesses in order to arm the proletariat of today for its future battles.

Defending the struggle of the working class in the heat of revolution

As Trotsky's "Letter of invitation to the congress" confirmed: "The undersigned parties and organisations consider that the convening of the first congress of the new revolutionary International is urgently necessary (...) The very rapid rise of the world revolution, which constantly poses new problems, the danger of strangulation of this revolution under the hypocritical banner of the ‘League of Nations’, the attempts of the social-traitor parties to join together and further help their governments and their bourgeoisies in order to betray the working class after granting each other a mutual ‘amnesty’, and finally, the extremely rich revolutionary experience already acquired and the world-wide character of the whole revolutionary movement – all these circumstances compel us to place on the agenda of the discussion the question of the convening of an international congress of proletarian-revolutionary parties".

In the image of the first appeal launched by the Bolsheviks, the foundation of the CI expressed the will for the regroupment of revolutionary forces throughout the world. But it equally expressed the defence of proletarian internationalism which had been trampled underfoot by the great majority of the social democratic parties who made up the 2nd International. After four years of atrocious war which had divided and decimated millions of proletarians on the field of battle, the emergence of a new world party was witness to the will to deepen the work begun by the organisations who remained faithful to internationalism. In this the CI was the expression of the political strength of the proletariat, which again manifested itself after the profound defeat caused by the war, and also of the responsibility of revolutionaries to continue to defend the interests of the working class and the world revolution.

During the course of the congress it was said many times that the CI was the party of revolutionary action. As it affirms in its Manifesto, the CI saw the light of day at the moment that capitalism had clearly demonstrated its obsolescence. From here on humanity entered "the era of wars and revolutions". In other words, the abolition of capitalism became an extreme necessity for the future of civilisation. It was with this new understanding of the historic evolution of capitalism that the CI tirelessly defended the workers' councils and the dictatorship of the proletariat: "The new apparatus of power must represent the dictatorship of the working class (...) it must, that is to say, be the instrument for the systematic overthrow of the exploiting class and its expropriation (...) The power of the workers' councils or the workers' organisations is its concrete form"  (Letter of invitation to the congress). These orientations were defended throughout the congress. Moreover, the "Theses on Bourgeois Democracy", written by Lenin and adopted by the congress, focussed on denouncing the mystification of democracy, on warning the proletariat about the danger that it posed in its struggle against bourgeois society.  From the outset the CI placed itself resolutely in the proletarian camp by defending the principles and methods of working class struggle, while energetically denouncing the call from the centrist current for an impossible unity between the social-aitors and the communists: "the unity of communist workers with the assassins of the leading communists Liebknecht and Luxemburg", according the terms of the "Resolution of the first congress of the CI on the position towards the socialist currents and the Berne Conference". This resolution was evidence of the intransigent defence of proletarian principles and was voted on unanimously by the congress. It was adopted in reaction to the recent meeting held by the majority of the social democratic parties of the 2nd International [1] which had taken up a certain number of orientations openly aimed against the revolutionary wave. The resolution ended with these words: "The congress invites the workers of every country to begin the most energetic struggle against the yellow international and to warn the widest numbers of the proletariat about this International of lies and betrayal".

The foundation of the CI turned out to be a vital stage for advancing the historical struggle of the proletariat. It took up the best contributions of the 2nd International while discarding those positions and analyses which no longer corresponded to the historic period which had just opened up[2]. Whereas the former world party had betrayed proletarian internationalism in the name of the Sacred Union on the eve of the First World War, the foundation of the new party strengthened the unity of the working class, arming it for the bitter struggle that it had to undertake across the planet for the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. Thus, despite the unfavourable circumstances and the errors committed - as we will see - we salute and support such an enterprise. Revolutionaries of that time took up their responsibilities; it had to be done and they did it!

A foundation in unfavourable circumstances 
Revolutionaries faced with a massive surge from the world proletariat

The year 1919 was the culminating point of the revolutionary wave. After the victory of the revolution in Russia in October 1917, the abdication of Wilhelm II and the precipitous signing of the armistice faced with mutinies and revolts of masses of workers in Germany, workers' insurrections broke out in numerous places, most notably with the setting up of republics of councils in Bavaria and Hungary. There were also mutinies in the fleets and among French troops, as well as in British military units, refusing to intervene against soviet Russia. In 1919 a wave of strikes hit Britain (Sheffield, the Clyde, South Wales and Kent). But in March 1919, at the moment the CI appeared in Moscow, the great majority of uprisings had been suppressed or were on course to be.

There is no doubt that revolutionaries of that time found themselves in a situation of urgency and they were obliged to act in the fire of revolutionary battle. As the French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFCL) underlined in 1948: "revolutionaries tried to fill the gap between the maturity of the objective situation and the immaturity of the subjective factor (the absence of the party) by a gathering in numbers of politically heterogeneous groups and currents and called this coming together the new Party".[3]

It's not a question here of discussing the validity or not of the foundation of the new party, of the International. It was an absolute necessity. On the other hand we want to point to a certain number of errors in the way in which it was realised.

An overestimation of the situation in which the party was founded

Even though the majority of reports submitted by the different delegates on the situation of the class struggle in each country took into account the reaction of the bourgeoisie faced with the advance of the revolution (a resolution the White Terror was voted on at the end of the congress), it's striking to see to what point this aspect was largely underestimated during these five days of work. Already, some days after the news of the foundation of the KPD, which followed the founding of the communist parties of Austria (November 1918) and Poland (December 1918), Lenin considered that the die was already cast: "When the German Spartacus League, led by its illustrious leaders known the world over, these loyal partisans of the class struggle such as Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Franz Mehring, definitively broke all links with socialists such as Scheidemann (...) when the Spartacus League became the German Communist Party, then the foundation of the 3rd International, the Communist International, truly proletarian, truly international, truly revolutionary, became a fact. This foundation wasn't formally sanctified, but, in reality, the 3rd International now exists" [4]. To add a significant anecdote here: this text was finished and drafted on January 21 1919, the date on which Lenin was told about the assassination of Karl Liebknecht. And yet an unwavering certainty ran through the congress and Lenin announced it with: "The bourgeoisie can unleash its terror, it may assassinate millions of workers, but victory is ours, the victory of the world communist revolution is assured". Consequently all the reporters of the situation overflowed with the same optimism; like comrade Albert, a young member of the KPD who on March 2 expressed himself to the congress in these words: "I'm not expressing an exaggerated optimism by affirming that the German and Russian communist parties continue the struggle, firmly hoping that the German proletariat will also lead the revolution to the final victory and the dictatorship of the proletariat will equally be established in Germany, despite all the national assemblies, despite all the Scheidemanns and despite the national bourgeoisie (...) It is this which motivated me to accept your invitation with joy, convinced that after a short delay we will struggle side by side with the proletariat of other countries, particularly France and Britain, for the world revolution in order to realise the objectives of the revolution in Germany". A few days later, between March 6 and 9, a terrible repression struck Berlin, killing 3000 workers including 28 sailors imprisoned and then executed by firing squad in the tradition of Versailles! On March 10, Leo Jogisches was assassinated and Heinrich Dorrenbach[5] met the same fate on May 19.

However, the last words of Lenin of the closing speech of the congress showed that it hadn't moved one iota on the relationship of force between the two classes. Without hesitation it affirmed: "The victory of the proletarian revolution is assured throughout the entire world. The foundation of the International Republic of Councils is underway."

But as Amedeo Bordiga noted a year later: "After the slogan ‘Soviet regimes’ was launched onto the world by the Russian and international proletariat we first of all saw the revolutionary wave resurface after the end of the war and the proletariat of the entire world move into action. In every country we saw the old socialist parties filtered out and the communist parties were born, engaging in the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. Unfortunately the period which followed has been a period of check because the German, Bavarian and Hungarian revolutions have all been wiped out by the bourgeoisie."

In fact, important weaknesses of consciousness in the working class constituted a major hindrance to a revolutionary development:

* the difficulties of these movements to overcome the struggle against war alone and go towards the higher level of proletarian revolution. This revolutionary wave was above all built up around the struggle against the war;

* the development of the mass strike through the unification of political and economic demands remained very fragile and thus did little to push it onto a higher level of consciousness;

* the revolutionary peak was on the point of being reached. The movement no longer had the same dynamic after the defeat of the struggles in Germany and Central Europe. Even if the wave continued it had lost the force it had from 1919-1920;

* the Soviet Republic in Russia remained cruelly isolated. It was the sole revolutionary bastion with all that this implied in favour of a regression in consciousness both within Russia and the rest of the world.

A foundation in an urgent situation which opened the door to opportunism 
The revolutionary milieu came out of the war in a weakened state

"The workers' movement on the eve of the first imperialist world war was in a state of extreme division. The imperialist war had broken the formal unity of the political organisations that claimed to be part of the proletariat. The crisis of the workers’ movement, which already existed beforehand, reached its culminating point because of the fact of the world war and the positions to take up in response to it. All the marxist, anarchist and trade union parties and organizations were violently shaken by it. Splits multiplied. New groups arose. A political delimitation was produced.  The revolutionary minority of the 2nd International represented by the Bolsheviks, the German left around Luxemburg and the Dutch Tribunists, who already were not very homogeneous, did not simply face a single opportunist bloc. Between them and the opportunists there was a whole rainbow of political groups and tendencies, more or less confused, more or less centrist, more or less revolutionary, representing the general shift of the masses who were breaking with the war, with the Sacred Union, with the treason of the old parties of social democracy. We see here a process of the liquidation of the old parties whose downfall gave rise to a multitude of groups. These groups expressed less the process of the constitution of the new party than the dislocation m the liquidation, the death of the old party. These groups certainly contained elements for the constitution of the new party but in no way formed the basis for it. These currents essentially expressed the negation of the past and not the positive affirmation of the future. The basis for the new class party can only reside in the former left, in its critical and constructive work, in the theoretical positions and programmatic principles which the left had been elaborating for the 20 years of ITS FRACTIONAL EXISTENCE AND STRUGGLE inside the old party." [6]

Thus the revolutionary milieu was broken apart, composed of groups lacking clarity and displaying a good deal of immaturity. Only the left fractions of the 2nd International, the Bolsheviks, the Tribunists, the Spartacists (in part only because they were also heterogeneous or even divided) were up to it and were based on solid ground for the foundation of the new party.

Moreover a good number of militants lacked political experience. Among the 43 delegates to the founding congress whose ages were known, five were in their twenties, 24 their thirties and only one was older than fifty[7]. Out of the 42 delegates whose political trajectory could be traced, 17 had joined social democratic parties before the Russian revolution of 1905, whereas 8 only became active socialists after 1914[8].

Despite their passion and enthusiasm, the indispensable experience in such circumstances was very much lacking amongst them.

Disagreements among the proletariat's avant-garde

As the FFCL already underlined in 1946, "It is undeniable that one of the historic causes of the victory of the revolution in Russia and its defeat in Germany, Hungary and Italy resides in the existence of the revolutionary Party at a decisive moment in the former and its absence or its incompletion in the latter." The foundation of the 3rd International was deferred for a long time by the various divisions inside the proletarian camp during the episode of revolution. In 1918-19, and quite conscious that the absence of the party was an irredeemable weakness for the victory of the world revolution, the avant-garde of the proletariat was unanimous on the imperious necessity to set up a new party. However, there was no agreement on when to do it and above all on the approach to adopt. While the great majority of communist organisations and groups were favorable to the briefest delay, the KPD and particularly Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches opted for an adjournment, considering that the situation was premature, that the communist consciousness of the masses remained weak and that the revolutionary milieu also lacked clarity[9]. The KPD delegate to the congress, comrade Albert, was thus mandated to defend this position and not to vote for the immediate foundation of the Communist International.

"When it was said to us that the proletariat needed a political centre in its struggle, we could say that this centre already existed and that all the elements which were found at the base of the system of councils had already broken with elements of the working class which went towards the democratic bourgeoisie: we noted that everywhere a rupture was being prepared and it is about to be realised. But a Third International must not only be a political centre, an institution in which the theoreticians discuss with one another with warm words, it must be the basis of an organisational power. If we want to make the Third International an efficient instrument of struggle, if we want to make it a means for combat, then the necessary conditions have to exist. Thus, in our opinion, the question mustn't be approached and discussed from an intellectual point of view; we have to ask if the basics of the organisation concretely exist. I've always had the feeling that the comrades who are pushing so strongly for its foundation have been greatly influenced by the evolution of the 2nd International and that they wanted, after the Berne Conference, to impose it on the current enterprise. That seems less important to us and when it's said that clarification is necessary, otherwise indecisive elements will rally to the Yellow International, I say that the founding of the 3rd International will not bring back the elements who are re-joining today's 2nd, and that if they go there despite everything, then that's their place."[10]

As we see, the German delegate warned of the danger of founding a party by compromising on principles and on programmatic and organisational clarification. Although the Bolsheviks took the concerns of the KPD very seriously, it was in no doubt that they were caught up in a race against time. From Lenin to Zinoviev, through to Trotsky and Rakovsky, all insisted on the importance of making all the parties, groups, organisations or individuals who claimed to be more or less close to communism and the soviets join the new International. As noted in a biography of Rosa Luxemburg: "Lenin saw in the International the means to help various communist parties to set themselves up and strengthen themselves"[11] through the decantation produced by the struggle against centrism and opportunism. For the KPD, it was first of all a question of forming "solid" communist parties which had the masses behind them before endorsing the creation of the new party.

A method of foundation which did not arm the new party

The composition of the congress is both the illustration of the precipitation and the difficulties that it imposed on revolutionary organisations at the time. Out of 51 delegates taking part in the work, taking account of lateness, early departures and brief absences, around forty were Bolshevik militants from the Russian party but also the Latvian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Armenian and eastern Russian parties. Outside of the Bolshevik Party, only the communist parties of Germany, Poland, Austria and Hungary had a real existence.

The other forces invited to the congress were a multitude of organisations, groups or elements that were not openly "communist" but products of a process of decantation within social democracy and the trade unions. The letter of invitation to the congress appealed to all the forces, near or far, which supported the Russian revolution and seemed to have the will to work for the victory of the world revolution:

"10. It is necessary to ally ourselves with these elements of the revolutionary movement which, although they did not belong to the socialist parties before, today placed themselves on the whole on the terrain of the dictatorship of the proletariat under the form of the power of the councils. In the first place we refer here to the syndicalist elements of the workers' movement.

* 11. Finally, it’s necessary to win over all the proletarian groups and organisations that, without openly rallying to the revolutionary current, show a tendency in this direction."[12]

This approach led to several anomalies which exposed a lack of representation of a part of the congress. For example, the American Boris Reinstein didn't have a mandate from his Socialist Labour Party. S. J. Rutgers from Holland represented a league for socialist propaganda. Christian Rakovsky [13] was supposed to represent the Balkan Federation, the Bulgarian “Narrows” and the Romanian CP. But he'd had no contact with these three organisations since 1915-16[14]. Consequently, despite appearances, this founding congress was at root perfectly representative of the lack of consciousness within the world working class.

All these elements show that a large part of the revolutionary avant-garde's objective was quantity to the detriment of a prior clarification on organisational principles. This approach turned on its head the conception which the Bolsheviks had developed over the last fifteen years. And this is what the FFCL had already noted in 1946: "As much as the "strict" method of selection on the most precise principled bases, without taking into account immediate numerical success, allowed the Bolsheviks to build a Party which, at a decisive moment, was able to integrate and assimilate into itself all the energies and revolutionary militants of other currents and finally lead the proletariat to victory, so the "loose" method, immediately concerned above all with bringing together the largest numbers at the expense of programmatic precision and principles, had to lead to the constitution of the mass party, a real colossus with feet of clay which fell to its defeat under the domination of opportunism. The formation of the class party turns out to be infinitely more difficult in the advanced capitalist countries - where the bourgeoisie possesses numerous means to corrupt the consciousness of the proletariat – than was the case in Russia."

Blinded by the certitude of the imminent victory of the proletariat, the revolutionary avant-garde enormously underestimated the objective difficulties which stood in front of them. This euphoria led them to compromise the "strict" method for the construction of the organisation that the Bolsheviks in Russia and in part the Spartacists in Germany had defended before everything. They considered that the priority of work had to be given to a great revolutionary coming-together, countering on the way the Yellow International which a few weeks before had re-formed in Berne. This "loose" method relegated the clarification of organisational principles to the status of an annex. Little importance was given to the confusions that could be brought in by groups integrated into the new party; the struggle would take place within it. For now, the priority was given to the regroupment of the greatest numbers.

This "loose" method turned out to be heavy with consequences since it weakened the CI in the organisational struggles to come. In fact the programmatic clarity of the first congress was circumvented by the opportunist push in the context of the weakening and the degeneration of the revolutionary wave. Within the CI fractions of the left emerged which criticised the insufficiencies of the rupture with the 2nd International. As we will see in a following piece, the positions defended and elaborated by these groups responded to the problems raised in the CI by the new period of the decadence of capitalism.

(to be continued)

Narek, March 4, 2019.

 

[1]  The Berne Conference of 1919 was "an attempt to resuscitate the corpse of the Second International", to which the "Centre" had sent representatives.

[2]   For a greater development see our article https://en.internationalism.org/content/3066/1919-foundation-communist-i... International Review, no. 57, spring 1989.

[3]  Internationalisme. "A propos du Premiere Congres du Parti Communiste Internationaliste d'Italie", no. 7, Jan-Feb 1946.

[4]  Lenin, Works, t.XXVIII, p. 451.

[5]  Dorrenbach was the commander of the People’s Naval Division in Berlin, 1918. After the January defeat, he took refuge in Brunswick and then Eisenach. He was arrested and executed in May 1919.

[6]  Internationalisme, "A propos du Premier Congres du Parti Communiste d'Italie", no. 7, Jan-Feb, 1946.

[7]  Founding of the Communist International: The Communist International in Lenin's Time. Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress: March 1919, Edited by John Riddell, New York, 1987. Introduction, page 19.

[8]  Ibidem.

[9]  It's this mandate that the KPD gave (in the first weeks of January) to their delegate to the founding congress. This is no way meant that Rosa Luxemburg for example was opposed to the foundation of an International - far from it.

[10]  Intervention of the German delegate March 4, 1919, in Premier Congres de l'Internationale Communiste, integral texts published under the direction of Pierre Broué, Etudes et Documentation Internationales, 1974.

[11]  Gilbert Badia, Rosa Luxemburg, Journalist, Polemicist, Revolutionary, Editions Sociales, 1975.

[12]  "Letter of invitation to the Congress", Op. Cit. First Congress of the International.

[13]  One of the most influential and determined delegates in favour of the immediate foundation of the CI.

[14]  Pierre Broué, History of the Communist International (1919-1943), Fayard, 1997, p. 79 (in French).

Rubric: 

History of the Working Class

Internationalisme nº 7, 1945: The left fraction - Method for forming the party

Introduction

To stimulate discussion around the formation of the future world party of the revolution, we are publishing two chapters of an article from Internationalisme no. 7 from January 1946, entitled “On the First Congress of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy”. The review Internationalisme was the theoretical organ of the French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFCL), the group that was politically the most clear in the period immediately after the Second World War. In 1945 the Fraction transformed itself into the Gauche Communiste de France in order to avoid confusion following a split by militants in France who took the same name for their group as the French Fraction

This article (which we will be publishing in full on our website), basing itself on the lessons of the degeneration of the Third International, develops on the criteria which have to apply to the constitution of a future world party. The two chapters published in this Review – the first, “The Left Fraction” and the sixth, “Method for forming the party” – look at the political questions posed since the foundation of the Third International and provide a coherent argument for understanding them. They build a bridge between the post World War One period and the period of the Second World War, on the basis of the balance sheet drawn up by the Italian Fraction in the 1930s, whereas the other chapters are more devoted to a polemic with specific currents of the 1940s, such as the RKD (Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands, a group of former Trotskyists from Austria) and Vercesi. These chapters are also very interesting but would not fit into a printed Review.

Summarised briefly, the criteria for the formation of the party are, on the one hand, a course open to the revival and offensive struggle of the proletariat, and, on the other hand, the existence of a solid programmatic basis for the new party.

At that moment, after the first congress of the Internationalist Communist Party, held at the end of December 1945 in Turin, the GCF considered that the first condition – a new favourable course – had been satisfied. Thus, on this basis, they saluted the transformation of the Italian Fraction “by giving birth to a new party of the proletariat” . It was only later, in 1946, that the GCF recognised that the period of counter-revolution was not over and that the objective conditions for the formation of the party were absent. Consequently it stopped publication of its agitational paper L’Etincelle, considering that the perspective for a historical resurgence of class struggle was not on the agenda. The last issue of L’Etincelle came out in November 1946.

At the same time, the GCF severely criticised the method used for the constitution of the Italian party, via “an addition of currents and tendencies” on a heterogeneous basis (“Method for forming the party”), in the same way as it criticised, in the same chapter, the method for forming the CI, an amalgamation around a programme that had deliberately been left incomplete”. And such a programme could only be an opportunist one[1], which turned its back on the method which had been applied to the construction of the Bolshevik Party.

The merit of this article in Internationalisme is that it insists on the rigour needed around the adoption of a programme, which did not exist in the party that had just been formed in Italy. This article – written about a quarter of a century after the foundation of the Comintern, and a few weeks after the congress of the Internationalist Communist Party – was certainly the most consistent critique of the way the foundation of the Communist International went against the methods of the Bolshevik Party. Internationalisme was also the only publication of the milieu of the communist left at that time to highlight the opportunist approach of the Internationalist CP.

In this sense, the GCF is an illustration of the continuity with the method of Marx and Engels in the foundation of the German Social Democratic Party at Gotha in 1875 (cf The Critique of the Gotha Programme), when they rejected the confused and opportunist basis on which the SAPD was founded. Continuity also with the attitude of Rosa Luxemburg faced with the opportunism of the revisionist Bernstein the German Social Democracy 25 years later, but also with that of Lenin on organisational principles against the Mensheviks. Continuity, finally, with the attitude of Bilan faced with the opportunism of the Trotskyist current in the 1930s. It was thanks to this intransigence in the defence of programmatic positions and organisational principles that elements coming out of the current around Trotsky (such as the RKD) were able to move towards the defence of internationalism during and after the Second World War. Holding high the banner of internationalism against the “partisans”, intransigently defending internationalism against opportunism was thus a condition for the internationalist forces to find a political compass.

In this presentation we should make more precise a formulation concerning the Spartakusbund during the First World War:

“The experience of the Spartakusbund is highly edifying on this point. The latter’s fusion with the Independents did not, as they hoped, lead to the creation of a strong class party but resulted in the Spartakusbund being swamped by the Independents and to the weakening of the German proletariat. Before her murder, Rosa Luxemburg and other Spartakusbund leaders recognized the error of fusing with the Independents and tried to correct it. But this error was not only maintained by the CI in Germany, but it became the practical method for forming Communist Parties in all countries, imposed by the CI”.  

It’s not quite right to talk about the fusion of the Spartakusbund with the USPD. The USPD was formed by the SAG (Sozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft – Socialist Working Group); the Internationale group (the Spartakusbund) was integrated into it. But this was not strictly speaking a fusion, which would imply the dissolution of the organisation that has fused with another. In fact the Spartakusbund maintained their organisational independence and their capacity for action while giving themselves the objective of drawing this formation towards their positions as a left wing inside it. Very different was the approach of the CI through the fusion of different groups within a single party, abandoning the necessary process of selection through an addition, with “principles sacrificed t numerical mass”.
We should also rectify a factual error in this article where it says “In Britain, the CI demanded that the communist groups join the Independent Labour Party to form a mass revolutionary opposition inside this reformist party”.

In fact, the CI called for integration of communists into the Labour Party itself! This error of detail in no way alters the basic argument of Internationalisme.

14.5.19

 

[1] See our article “Battaglia Comunista -On the origins of the Internationalist Communist Party”, IR 34

 

On the First Congress of Internationalist Communist Party of Italy

1. The left fraction

At the end of 1945, the first congress of the young, recently constituted Internationalist Communist Party of Italy took place.

This new Party of the proletariat didn't spring out of nothing. It was the fruit of a process which began with the degeneration of the old Communist Party and the Communist International. This opportunist degeneration brought about a historic response from the class within the old party: the Left Fraction.

As all the communist parties set up following World War I, the Communist Party of Italy, at the moment of its formation, contained both revolutionary and opportunist currents.

The revolutionary victory of the Russian proletariat and of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin in October 1917, through the decisive influence that it exercised on the international workers' movement, accelerated and precipitated the organisational political contrasts and delimitations between revolutionaries and the opportunists who cohabitated in the old Socialist parties of the IInd International. The 1914 war had broken this impossible unity between the old parties.

The October revolution sped up the constitution of new parties of the proletariat but, at the same time, the positive influence of the October revolution contained some negative elements.

By rushing the formation of new parties, it prevented a construction on the basis of clear, sharp principles and a revolutionary programme. This could only be elaborated following an open and intransigent political struggle which eliminated the opportunist currents and the residues of bourgeois ideology.

With the lack of a revolutionary programme, the Communist Parties were set up too hastily on the basis of a sentimental attachment to the October revolution, opening up too many fissures for the penetration of opportunism in the new proletarian parties.

Also, from their foundation, the CI and the communist parties of various countries were caught up in the struggle between revolutionaries and opportunists. The ideological struggle - which has to come before and be a precondition for the party, which is protected from the opportunist gangrene only through the enunciation of principles and the construction of the programme - only took place after the constitution of the parties. As a result, not only did the communist parties introduce the germ of opportunism from the beginning, but it also made the struggle more difficult for the revolutionary currents against the opportunism that survived and was hidden within the new party. Each defeat of the proletariat modified the balance of forces against the proletariat, inevitably producing the strengthening of opportunism within the party, which in its turn became a supplementary factor in further proletarian defeats.

If the development of the struggle between the currents in the party became so sharp so quickly it's because of the historical period. The proletarian revolution exited from the spheres of theoretical speculation. From the distant ideal that it was yesterday, it became a problem of immediate practical activity.

Opportunism was no longer manifested in bookish theoretical elaborations acting as a slow poison on the brains of the proletarians. At the time of intense class struggle it had immediate repercussions and was paid for with the lives of millions of proletarians and bloody defeats of the revolution. As opportunism strengthened itself in the CI and its parties it was the main card of and an auxiliary to capitalism against the revolution because it meant the strengthening of the enemy class within the most decisive organ of the proletariat: its party. Revolutionaries could only oppose opportunism by setting up their Fraction and proclaiming a fight to the death against it. The constitution of the Fraction meant that the party had become the theatre of confrontation between opposed and antagonistic class expressions.

It was the war-cry of revolutionaries to save the class party, against capitalism and its opportunist and centrist agents who were trying to take hold of the party and turn it into an instrument against the proletariat.

The struggle between the Fraction of the Communist Left and the centrist and right-wing fractions for the party isn't a struggle for "leadership" of the apparatus but is essentially programmatic; it is an aspect of the general struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, between capitalism and the proletariat.

This struggle follows the objective course of situations and the modifications of the rapport de force between the classes and is conditioned by the latter.

The outcome can only be the victory of the programme of the Fraction of the left and the elimination of opportunism, or the open betrayal of a party which has fallen into the hands of capitalism. But whatever the outcome of this alternative, the appearance of the Fraction means that the historical and political continuity has definitively passed from the party to the fraction and that it's the latter alone that henceforth expresses and represents the class.

Just as the old party can only be salvaged by the triumph of the fraction, the same goes for the alternative outcome of the betrayal of the old party, completing its ineluctable course under the leadership of centrism. Here the new party can only be formed on the programmatic basis provided by the fraction.

The historic continuity of the class through the process Party-Fraction-Party, is one of the fundamental ideas of the International Communist Left. This theory was a theoretical postulate for a long time. The formation of the PCI in Italy and its first congress provide the historic confirmation of this postulate.

The Italian Left Fraction, after a struggle of twenty years against centrism, achieved its historic function by transforming itself and giving birth to a new party of the proletariat.

Method for forming the party

While it is correct to say that the constitution of the party is determined by objective conditions and cannot be the emanation of individual will, the method employed in constituting the party is more directly subordinated to the “subjectivism” of the groups and militants who take part in it. It is they who feel the necessity for constituting the party and translate this into action. The subjective element thus becomes a decisive element in this process and in what follows; it marks the whole orientation for the ulterior development of the party. Without falling into a helpless fatalism, it would be extremely dangerous to ignore the grave consequences that result from the way in which human beings carry out the tasks whose objective necessity they have become aware of.

Experience teaches us the decisive importance of the method for the constitution of the party. Only the ignorant or the hare-brained, those for whom history only begins with their own activity, can have the luxury of ignoring the whole rich and painful experience of the 3rd International. And it’s no less serious to see very young militants, who have only just arrived in the workers’ movement and the communist left, not only being content in their ignorance but even making it the basis of their pretentious arrogance.

The workers’ movement on the eve of the first imperialist world war was in a state of extreme division. The imperialist war had broken the formal unity of the political organisations that claimed to be part of the proletariat. The crisis of the workers’ movement, which already existed beforehand, reached its culminating point because of the world war and the positions that were needed to take up in response to it. All the marxist, anarchist and trade union parties and organizations were violently shaken by it. Splits multiplied. New groups arose. A political delimitation was produced. The revolutionary minority of the 2nd International represented by the Bolsheviks, the German left around Luxemburg, and the Dutch Tribunists, who already were not very homogeneous, did not simply face a single opportunist bloc. Between them and the opportunists there was a whole rainbow of political groups and tendencies, more or less confused, more or less centrist, more or less revolutionary, representing the general shift of the masses who were breaking with the war, with the Sacred Union, with the treason of the old parties of social democracy. We see here a process of the liquidation of the old parties whose downfall gave rise to a multitude of groups. These groups expressed less the process of the constitution of the new party than the dislocation, the liquidation, the death of the old party. These groups certainly contained elements for the constitution of the new party but in no way formed the basis for it. These currents essentially expressed the negation of the past and not the positive affirmation of the future. The basis for the new class party could only reside in the former left, in its critical and constructive work, in the theoretical positions and programmatic principles which the left had been elaborating for the 20 years of its existence and struggle as a fraction inside the old party.

The October 1917 revolution in Russia provoked great enthusiasm in the masses and accelerated the process of the liquidation of the old parties who had betrayed the working class. At the same time, it posed very sharply the problem of the constitution of the new party and the new International. The old left, the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists, were submerged by the rapid development of the objective situation, by the revolutionary push of the masses. Their precipitation in building the new party corresponded to and was the product of the precipitation of revolutionary events around the world. It is undeniable that one of the historical causes of the victory of the revolution in Russia and of its defeat in Germany, Hungary and Italy lies in the existence of the revolutionary party at the decisive moment in the first country and its absence or incomplete character in the others. Thus the revolutionaries tried to overcome the gap between the maturation of the objective situation and the immaturity of the subjective factor (the absence of the party) through a broad gathering of politically heterogeneous groups and currents and proclaiming this gathering as the new party.

Just as the “narrow” method of selection on the most precise principled bases, without taking into account immediate numerical success, enabled the Bolsheviks to build a party which, at the decisive moment, was able to integrate and assimilate all the revolutionary energies and militants from other currents and ultimately lead the proletariat to victory, so the “broad” method, with its concern above all to rally the greatest possible numbers straight away at the expense of precise principles and programme, led to the formation of mass parties, real giants with feet of clay which were to fall under the sway of opportunism after the first defeat they went through. The formation of the class party proved to be infinitely more difficult in the advanced capitalist countries, where the bourgeoisie possesses a thousand means for corrupting the consciousness of the proletariat, than it was in Russia. 

Because of this, the CI thought it could get round the difficulties by resorting to other methods than those which had triumphed in Russia. The construction of the party is not a question of skill or savoir-faire but essentially a problem of programmatic solidity.

Faced with the enormous power of ideological corruption wielded by capitalism and its agents, the proletariat can only put forward its class programme with the greatest rigour and intransigence. However slow this path towards building the party might seem, revolutionaries can follow no other, as the experience of past failures has shown.

The experience of the Spartakusbund is highly edifying on this point. The latter’s fusion with the Independents did not, as they hoped, lead to the creation of a strong class party but resulted in the Spartakusbund being swamped by the Independents and to the weakening of the German proletariat. Before her murder, Rosa Luxemburg and other Spartakusbund leaders recognized the error of fusing with the Independents and tried to correct it. But this error was not only maintained by the CI in Germany, but it became the practical method for forming Communist Parties in all countries, imposed by the CI.  

In France, the CI “created” the Communist Party by imposing the amalgamation and unification of groups of revolutionary syndicalists, the internationalists of the Socialist Party and the rotten, corrupt centrist tendency of the parliamentarians, led by Frossard and Cachin.

In Italy, the CI obliged Bordiga’s abstentionist fraction to found a single organisation with the centrist and opportunist tendencies of Ordino Nuovo and Serrati.

In Britain, the CI demanded that the communist groups join the Independent Labour Party to form a mass revolutionary opposition inside this reformist party,.

In sum, the method used by the CI in the “construction” of Communist Parties was everywhere opposed to the method which proved effective in the building of the Bolshevik Party. It was no longer the ideological struggle around the programme, the progressive elimination of opportunist tendencies which, through the victory of the most consistently revolutionary fraction, served as the basis for the construction of the party.  Instead the basis was an addition of different tendencies, their amalgamation around a programme that had deliberately been left incomplete. Selection was replaced by addition, principles sacrificed for numerical mass.

How could the Bolsheviks and Lenin follow this path, which they had condemned and fought against in Russia for 20 years? How can we explain this change in method for forming the party by the Bolsheviks before and after 1917? Lenin did not harbour any illusions about the opportunist and centrist leaders, on the conversion to the revolution of the Frossards, the Lebedours, on the real value of these last-minute revolutionaries. Lenin could not have been unaware of the danger represented by admitting this whole mob into the Communist Parties. If he did decide to let them in, it was because he had been subjected to the pressure of events, because he believed that these elements would, by the very unfolding of events, be progressively and definitively eliminated from the Party. This allowed Lenin to inaugurate a new method, based on two new facts which, in his eyes, offered a sufficient guarantee: the political preponderance of the Bolshevik party in the CI and the objective development of the revolutionary course. Experience has since shown that Lenin made a colossal error in underestimating the danger of an opportunist degeneration which is always possible in a revolutionary party, and which is facilitated all the more if the formation of the party is done not on the basis of eliminating the opportunist elements but on camouflaging them, adding and incorporating them as elements constituting the new Party.

Against the “broad” method of addition which won out in the CI, the left vigorously recalled the method of selection, the method of Lenin before the October revolution. And it was one of the great merits of Bordiga and his fraction that they were the most energetic in combating the method of the CI, highlighting the error in the method for forming the Party and the grave consequences it contained for the later development of the Communist Parties. If Bordiga’s fraction in the end accepted forming the Communist Party of Italy with the Ordino Nuovo fraction, it did so out of submitting to the CI’s decisions, after formulating the most severe criticisms and maintaining its own positions, which it would seek to bring to victory in the inevitable crises within the Party and in the wake of living, concrete historical experience.

Today we can affirm that just as the absence of communist parties during the first wave of revolution between 1918 and 1920 was one of the causes of its defeat, so the method for the formation of the parties in 1920-21 was one of the main causes for the degeneration of the CPs and the CI.

One of the most astonishing things we are seeing today, 23 years after the discussion between Bordiga and Lenin at the time of the formation of the CP of Italy, is the repetition of the same error. The method of the CI, which was so violently combated by the left fraction of Bordiga, and whose consequences were catastrophic for the proletariat, is today being taken up by the Fraction itself in the construction of the PCI of Italy.

Many comrades of the International Communist left seem to be suffering from political amnesia. And, to the degree that they do recall the critical positions of the left on the constitution of the party, they think that today they have gone beyond them. They think that the danger of this method is being circumscribed if not completely removed because it’s the Left Fraction applying it, i.e. the organism which for 25 years was able to resist the opportunist degeneration of the CI. We are again falling into the arguments of Bolsheviks. Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that because it was them applying this method, the guarantee was given. History proves that there is no such thing as infallibility. No party, whatever its revolutionary past, is immunised against opportunist degeneration. The Bolsheviks had at least as many revolutionary credentials as the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. They had not only resisted the opportunism of the Second International, its betrayal in the face of imperialist war; they had not only formed the party but had led the proletariat to victory. But all this glorious past – which no other fraction can equal – immunised the Bolshevik party. Each error, each fault is a breach in the armour of the party through which the influence of the class enemy can infiltrate. Mistakes have their logical consequences.

The Internationalist Communist Party of Italy is being “constructed” through the fusion, the adhesion, of groups and tendencies which are no less opposed to each other than Bordiga’s Abstentionist Fraction was to Ordino Nuovo when the CP of Italy was formed in 1921. In the new Party we have, as equal partners, the Italian Fraction and the Vercesi Fraction excluded for participating in the Antifascist Coalition. This is not only a repetition of the error of method of 25 years ago but an aggravated repetition.

In formulating our critique of the method for constituting the PCI of Italy we are only taking up the position which used to be that of the Italian Fraction and which it is abandoning today. And just as Bordiga was the continuation of Lenin against the error of Lenin himself, we are only continuing the policy of Lenin and Bordiga against the abandonment by the Italian Fraction of its own positions.

The new party is not a political unity but a conglomeration, an addition of currents and tendencies which cannot fail to clash with each other. The present armistice can only be very provisional. The elimination of one or other of these currents is inevitable. Sooner or later a political and organisational demarcation will be imposed. Again, as it was 25 years ago, the problem that is posed is WHO WILL WIN OUT?

 

Rubric: 

History of Left Communism

The world bourgeoisie against the October Revolution (part two): Social democracy and Stalinism forever in the bourgeois camp

Introduction

In the first part of this article[1] we highlighted the response of all the great imperialist powers to stem the revolutionary wave and prevent it from spreading in the major industrialised countries of Western Europe. Having fought each other for four years the bourgeoisies of Europe now made common cause against their historic enemy: the world proletariat. Among the many forces that the ruling class committed to the preservation of its system was social democracy (whose leadership and right wing had voted for war credits in 1914, thus consecrating their long-standing opportunism and leading them to definitively pass into the camp of the bourgeoisie), which was to play a decisive role in the repression and the mystification of the world revolution. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) placed itself in the forefront of this offensive since it was the true executioner of the German revolution in January 1919. As Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg had foreseen,[2] the impossibility of the extension of the revolution in the great industrial centers of Western Europe led to the isolation and degeneration of the Soviet Republic and the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which still weighs heavily in the ranks of the world working class.

I - The treason of social democracy

A - The rejection of solidarity with the Russian proletariat

During the revolutionary wave that reached Germany in November 1918, social democracy played the role of the bridgehead of the bourgeoisie in order to isolate the working class of Russia.

When the revolution broke out in Germany, Soviet diplomats were expelled by Scheidemann (under-secretary of state without portfolio in the cabinet of Max Von Baden). At that time, the working masses had not really perceived the progressive abandonment of marxism by the SPD. On the eve of the First World War, hundreds of thousands of workers in Germany were still members. But its dissociation from the Russian revolution confirmed its betrayal and passage into the bourgeois camp.

After the mutiny of sailors in Kiel, Haase transmitted a teletype message to the People's Commissars of the Soviet government, thanking them for sending grain; but, after a pause, the message continued: "Knowing that Russia is oppressed by hunger, we ask you to distribute to the starving Russian people the grain that you intend to sacrifice for the German revolution. The President of the American Republic Wilson guarantees us the sending of flour and bacon necessary to the German population to get through the winter."

As Karl Radek later said, "the outstretched hand hung in the void"! The "socialist" government preferred the aid of a capitalist power rather than that of the Russian workers. Instead, the German government accepted American flour and bacon, huge quantities of luxury items, and other superfluous goods that drained the German Treasury dry. On 14 November, the government sent a telegram to US President Wilson: "The German Government asks the United States Government to telegraph the Chancellor of the Reich (Ebert) to say if it can count on the supply of foodstuffs. on the part of the United States Government, so that the German Government can guarantee domestic order and pay fairly for such supplies."

In Germany, the telegram was widely broadcast to convey the following message to the workers: "renounce the revolution and destroying capitalism, and you will have bread and bacon!" But no condition of this kind had been imposed by the Americans. So, social democracy not only blackmailed the workers but brazenly lied to them that these conditions had been imposed by Wilson himself.[3]

B - Social democracy at the forefront of the counter-revolution

In these conditions, there was no doubt that German social democracy was at the forefront of the counter-revolution. On 10 November 1918, the Berlin Workers' and Soldiers' Council, the supreme body recognised by the new government, decided to immediately re-establish diplomatic relations with the Russian government pending the arrival of its representatives in Berlin.

This resolution was an order that the Peoples’ Commissars should have respected but they did not do it. Although they had defended themselves from the charge in the publication of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), the betrayal and sale of the revolution to the imperialist powers was accepted by the Independents, as proved by the minutes of the meeting of the Council of the Peoples’ Commissars of 19 November 1918: "Following discussion on relations between Germany and the Republic of the Soviets, Haase advises adopting a delaying policy (...) Kautsky agrees with Haase: the decision must be deferred. The Soviet government cannot survive long; in a few weeks, it will not exist (...)"[4] However, while the right wing of this centrist party was gradually moving towards the counter-revolution, the left wing was moving more clearly towards the defence of proletarian interests.

But the zeal of the "socialist" government did not stop there. Faced with the irritation of the Entente with the slowness with which the German troops were withdrawing from the Eastern territories, the German government responded with a diplomatic dispatch which, although sent after the expulsion of the Independent Social Democrats from the government, had been developed with them. This is what was stated:

"The Entente's conviction that German troops would support Bolshevism, either on their own initiative or by higher order, directly or by obstructing anti-Bolshevik measures, does not correspond to reality. We Germans, and therefore our troops, remember that Bolshevism represents an extremely serious threat that must be contained by all means."[5]

If the SPD illustrates in the most extreme way the passage of social democracy into the camp of the bourgeoisie, especially in its open struggle against the revolution in Russia, most of the other major socialist parties in the world were not left out. The tactics of the Italian Socialist Party were, throughout the war, to curb the class struggle under the guise of a falsely neutral position in the world conflict, illustrated by the hypocritical slogan "neither sabotage nor participate", which amounted to trampling on the principle of proletarian internationalism. In France, alongside the fraction that passed bag and baggage into the camp of the bourgeoisie through the vote of the war credits, the socialist movement remained gangrenous with centrism, which only encouraged hostility towards the October revolution and the Bolshevik party.

Nevertheless, a left-wing current began to emerge at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919. Even as the bourgeoisie surfed the wave of victory to strengthen patriotic sentiment, the French proletariat paid mainly for the absence of a true marxist party. This is what Lenin pointed out very lucidly: “The transformation of the old type of European parliamentary party, reformist in its work and slightly coloured with a revolutionary tinge, into a truly communist party, is an extraordinarily difficult thing, and it is certainly in France that this difficulty appears most clearly."[6]

C - Social democracy sabotages and torpedoes the workers' councils[7]

In Russia, as in all countries in which soviets were hatching, the socialist parties played a double game. On the one hand, they gave the impression that they favoured the development of the emancipatory struggle of the workers through the soviets. On the other, they did everything possible to sterilise these organs of self-organisation of the class. It was in Germany that this enterprise took on the greatest importance. Apparently favourable to the workers' councils, the socialists proved to be fiercely hostile to them. In this way, their destructive action within the soviets shows that they behaved like true guard dogs of the bourgeoisie. The tactic was simple; it was to undermine the movement from within, to empty the councils of their revolutionary content. The intention was to sterilise the soviets by subordinating them to the bourgeois state and ensuring that they conceived themselves merely as transitional organs until the holding of elections to the National Assembly. The councils should also be open to all layers of the population. In Germany for example, the SPD created "Committees of Public Safety" welcoming all social strata with identical rights.

Moreover, the leaders of the SPD/USPD sabotaged the work of the soviets through the Council of People's Commissars[8] by imposing instructions other than those given by the Executive Council (EC), which was an emanation of the workers' councils, or by ensuring that the EC did not have its own press. Under an SPD majority, the EC even took a position against the strikes of November and December 1918. This demolition job on the self-organisation of the class also took place in Italy between 1919 and 1920 during the great strike wave, since the PSI did everything possible to turn the factory councils into vulgar works committees incorporated into the state and calling for the self-management of production. The left of the party led the fight against this illusion, which could only lock the struggle of the workers inside the narrow perimeters of the factory:

"We want to prevent the absorption by the working class of the idea that it is enough to develop the Councils solely to take hold of the factories and eliminate the capitalists. This would be an extremely dangerous illusion (...) If the conquest of political power has not taken place, the Royal Guard and the carabinieri will be in place to see to the dissipation of all such illusions, with all the mechanisms of oppression, all the forces which the bourgeoisie wields through its apparatus of political power." (Bordiga)[9]

But German social democracy showed its new, true face when it directly assumed the repression of the workers' strikes. The deployment of an intense ideological campaign in favour of the Republic, universal suffrage, the unity of the people, was not enough to destroy the fighting spirit and the consciousness of the proletariat. Thus, now in the service of the bourgeois state, the traitors of the SPD made an alliance with the army to suppress in blood the mass movement which was in continuity with the one born in Russia and which endangered one of the most developed imperialist powers of the world. The commander-in-chief of the army, General Groener, who had collaborated daily with the SPD and the unions during the war as head of armaments projects, explained:

“We allied ourselves to fight Bolshevism. It was impossible to restore the monarchy (...) I had advised the Feldmarschall not to combat the revolution by force, because given the state of mind of the troops, it was to be feared that such a method would end in failure. I proposed that the military high command should ally with the SPD, since there was no party with enough influence among the people, and the masses, to rebuild a governmental force with the military command. The parties of the right had completely disappeared, and it was out of the question to work with the radical extremists. In the first place, we had to snatch power from the hands of the Berlin workers' and soldiers' councils. An undertaking was planned with this aim in view. Ten divisions were to enter Berlin. Ebert agreed (...) We had worked out a program which planned, after the arrival of the troops, to clean up Berlin and disarm the Spartakists. This was also agreed with Ebert, to whom I was especially grateful for his absolute love for the fatherland (...) This alliance was sealed against the Bolshevik danger and the system of councils." (October-November 1925, Zeugenaussage)[10].

The social democratic government also did not hesitate to appeal to the Western European bourgeoisie in the operation to maintain order during the crucial days of January 1919. For all, it was a point of honour to occupy Berlin if the revolution emerged victorious.

On March 26 1919, the English Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote in a memorandum addressed to Clemenceau and Wilson: "The greatest danger in the current situation lies, in my opinion, in the fact that Germany could turn to Bolshevism. If we are wise, we will offer peace to Germany, which, because it is fair, will be better for all reasonable people to the alternative of Bolshevism."[11] Faced with the danger of the "Bolshevisation of Germany ", the main political leaders of the bourgeoisie did not show themselves eager to disarm the enemy of yesterday. During a debate in the Senate on the issue in October 1919, Clemenceau did not hide the reasons: “Because Germany needs to defend itself and we have no interest in having a second Bolshevik Russia in the centre of Europe; one is enough".[12]

While the armistice had just been signed, the Ebert-Noske-Scheidemann-Erzberger government sealed the peace with Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson by a military pact directed against the German proletariat. Subsequently, the violence with which the bloodhound Noske and his freikorps unleashed during the "bloody week " from January 6 to 13, 1919, was matched only by the terrible repression the Versaillese waged against the Communards during the bloody week of May 21 to 28, 1871. Like 38 years earlier, the proletariat was subjected to the "unmasked savagery and lawless revenge" (Karl Marx) of the bourgeoisie. But the bloodshed of January 1919 was only the prologue to a much more terrible punishment, which subsequently fell on the workers of the Ruhr, Central Germany, Bavaria ...

D- The democratic mystification in the "victor" countries

In the main allied countries, the victory over the forces of the Triple Alliance did not prevent the reaction of the working class to the barbarism experienced by Europe between 1914 and 1918. But despite the resounding echo of October 1917 in the proletariat of Western Europe, the Entente bourgeoisie used the outcome of the war to channel the development of the proletarian struggles between 1917 and 1927. While the imperialist war was the expression of the general crisis of capitalism, the bourgeoisie managed to push the lie that it was just an anomaly of history; that it was "the war to end wars", that society would recover stability and that the revolution had no place in it. In the most modern countries of capitalism, the bourgeoisie hammered home the argument that from now on all classes should participate in the construction of democracy. The time was for so-called reconciliation and not social confrontations. With this in mind, in February 1918 the British parliament adopted the Representation of the People Act, which enlarged the electoral population and granted the right to vote to women over thirty. In a context where social struggles were raging in Great Britain, the most experienced bourgeoisie in the world, with great skill, was trying to divert the working class from its class terrain. As Sylvia Pankhurst said at the time, this clever manoeuvre was motivated by the threat of the spread of the October Revolution to the western countries:

Those events in Russia evoked a response throughout the world not only amongst the minority who welcomed the idea of Soviet Communism, but also amongst the upholders of reaction. The latter were by no means oblivious to the growth of Sovietism when they decided to popularise the old Parliamentary machine by giving to some women both votes and the right to be elected.” (Workers’ Dreadnought, 15th December 1923)[13]

Moreover, the bourgeoisie was very good at using the outcome of the war by playing on the division between the ‘victorious’ and ‘vanquished’ nations in order to break the dynamic of generalisation of the struggles. For example, following the dislocation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the proletariat of the various territorial entities was subjected to the propaganda of national liberation struggles. In the same way, while in the vanquished countries the proletariat was steered towards gaining "revenge", in the conquering countries, where the proletariat aspired most for peace after four years of war, the news from Russia provoked a new wave of class militancy, particularly in France and Great Britain. This momentum was channelled into chauvinism and the hype of the victory of civilisation against the "dirty boches".

Faced with the deterioration of living conditions, following the worsening of the crisis from the 1920s, workers’ struggles erupted in England, France, Germany and Poland. But these movements, in many cases violently repressed, were in fact the last gasps of the revolutionary wave which reached its final convulsions during the terrible repression of workers in Shanghai and Canton in 1927.[14] The bourgeoisie had thus succeeded in coordinating its forces in order to finish stifling and repressing the last bastions of the revolutionary wave. Thus, as we have already shown, it must be recognised that war does not create the most favourable conditions for the generalisation of the revolution. In fact the global economic crisis as it has unfolded since the 1960s appears as a much more valid material base for the world revolution, since it affects all countries without exception and cannot be stopped unlike the imperialist war. The socialist parties had a central role in promoting democracy, and the republican and parliamentary system was presented as a step forward on the road to revolution. In Italy, as early as 1919, the PSI unambiguously advocated the recognition of the democratic system by pushing the masses to vote in the 1919 elections. An aggravating circumstance was that the electoral success that followed was approved by the Communist International. However, once in command, the socialists ran the state just like any bourgeois faction. In the following years, the antifascist theses propagated by Gramsci and the Ordinovists led the Italian working class no more and no less towards inter-classism. Arguing that fascism expressed a peculiarity of Italian history, Gramsci advocated the establishment of the Constituent Assembly as an intermediate step between Italian capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. According to him, "a class of an international character must, in a certain sense, become nationalised". It was therefore necessary that the proletariat make an alliance with the bourgeoisie in a constituent national assembly where the deputies of "all the democratic classes of the country", elected by universal vote, would elaborate the future Italian constitution. At the 5th world congress, Bordiga responded to these mistakes that led the proletariat to leave its class terrain in the name of democratic illusions:

"We must reject the illusion that a transitional government would be naive enough to allow a situation to occur in which, through legal means, parliamentary manoeuvres and more or less skilful expediency, we could lay siege to the bourgeoisie, ie legally deprive them of their whole technical and military apparatus, and quietly distribute arms to the workers. This is a truly infantile conception! Making' a revolution is not that simple!"[15]

II. Campaigns of slander accompany the bloody repression

 Propaganda organised at the highest levels of the state  

“Parallel to the military preparation of the civil war against the working class, they proceeded with the ideological preparation" (Paul Frölich). Indeed, very early on, in the weeks and months following the revolution in Russia, the bourgeoisie worked to reduce this event to the seizure of power by a minority who had hijacked the will of the masses and led society into disorder and chaos. But this intense anti-Bolshevik and anti-Spartacist propaganda campaign was not the product of a few zealous individuals determined to act as the guard dogs of the ruling class but a policy of all the main bourgeois factions directed from the highest levels of the state apparatus. As we developed in an article of International Review No. 155, the First World War was a defining moment in the state's massive takeover of control of information through propaganda and censorship. The goal was clear; to put ideological pressure on the population to ensure victory in this total war. With the opening of the revolutionary period, the goal of state propaganda was equally clear: to pressure the masses to ensure that they moved away from the organisations of the proletariat and ensure the victory of the counter-revolution. The great German industrialists were the most determined and broke their piggy banks for the "good cause" of the bourgeois order. Thanks to the donation of a few thousand marks from the banker Helfferich and the politician Friedrich Naumann, a "General Secretariat on the study of and fight against Bolshevism" was founded on 1 December 1918 in Berlin. On 10 January its founder, a certain Stadtler, brought together nearly 50 German industrialists to hear their views. Immediately after, Hugo Stinnes, one of the biggest magnates of German industry, rallied the top-hatted troops:

"I am of the opinion that after this presentation all discussion is superfluous, I fully share the speaker's point of view. If the world of industry, commerce and banking does not have the will and is not able to pay an insurance premium of 500 million marks to guard against the danger just revealed to us, we do not deserve to be considered as representatives of the German economy. I ask that we close this meeting and ask Messrs. Mankiewitz, Borsig, Siemens, Deutsch, etc., etc. (he quoted about eight names) to go with me to the next room for us to agree immediately on a method of apportioning this contribution."[16]

With these hundreds of millions of marks of subsidies, several offices could be created to carry out the anti-revolutionary campaign. The Anti-Bolshevik League (formerly the Reich Association against Social Democracy) was certainly the most active in spitting venom on the revolutionaries of Russia and Germany by distributing millions of leaflets, posters, leaflets and posters or organisation of meetings. This first office was part of one of the two counter-revolutionary centres with the Bürgerrat and the Hotel Eden, where the headquarters of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division were located.

The propaganda organisation "Building and becoming, society for the education of the people and the improvement of national labour forces", founded by Karl Erdmann, was directly financed by Ernst Von Borsig and Hugo Stinnes. The latter also subsidised the nationalist press and far-right parties to carry out propaganda against the Spartacists and Bolsheviks.

But in most cases, social democracy was the mastermind in manipulating opinion within the working class. As Paul Frölich relates:

It began with the dissemination of insipid speeches celebrating the victory of the November Revolution. Promises, lies, reprimands and threats followed. The Heimatdienst, an institution created during the war to manipulate public opinion, disseminated hundreds of millions of leaflets, pamphlets and posters, most often written by the Social Democrats, in support of the reaction. Shamelessly distorting the meaning of previous revolutions and the teachings of Marx, Kautsky proclaimed his indignation at theprolongation of the revolution. They made ‘Bolshevism’ a scarecrow for children. This concert was also led by the Social Democrats, the same gentlemen who during the war had acclaimed the Bolsheviks (described as faithful followers of Marx's thought) in the columns of their newspapers because they thought that the struggles of Russian revolutionaries would help Ludendorff and company to definitively defeat the Western powers. Now, on the contrary, they spread terrible stories about the Bolsheviks, going so far as to circulate fake ‘official documents’ according to which the Russian revolutionaries had made women common property.”[17]

Revolutionaries reduced to the level of bloody savages

From then on, the revolutionary forces defending proletarian internationalism were the main targets, especially after the Russian workers seized power in October 1917. Aware of the danger that the extension of the revolution posed to world capital, the most developed states carried out a veritable campaign of slander against the Bolsheviks in order to prevent any feeling of sympathy or attempt at fraternisation. During the 1919 elections, the French bourgeoisie took the opportunity to focus the campaign on the "red peril" by fuelling the demonisation of the revolution and the Bolsheviks. Georges Clemenceau, one of the great actors of the counter-revolution, was particularly active since he campaigned on the theme of "national unity" and the "threat of Bolshevism". A booklet and a famous poster titled "How to fight against Bolshevism?" even painted a portrait of the Bolshevik like a beast, with shaggy hair and a knife between his teeth. All this helped to portray the proletarian revolution as a barbaric and bloodthirsty enterprise. At the founding congress of the Communist International, George Sadoul reported on the extent of the slanders poured out by the French bourgeoisie:

When I left Paris in September of 1917, just a few weeks before the October revolution, public perception of Bolshevism in France was that of a hideous caricature of socialism. Bolshevik leaders were viewed as criminals or madmen; their army was depicted as a horde of several thousand fanatics or outlaws (…) I am ashamed to confess that nine-tenths of both the majority and the minority Socialists held the same view. In our defence we can only point to mitigating circumstances: we were not the least bit informed about the situation in Russia and, further, newspapers of every stripe printed fabrications and falsified documents to prove the corruption, cruelty, and unscrupulousness of the Bolsheviks. The theme of a seizure of power by this ‘gang of bandits’ had a major impact in France. The slanders hiding the true face of Russian communism became even more vicious with the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace. Anti-Bolshevik agitation reached a fever pitch.”[18]

Although the governments of the Triple Entente were able to play on the momentum of victory to calm discontent within the working class, they still had to divert all its revolutionary inclinations towards the ballot box. Here the bourgeoisie showed its true face; vile, manipulative, lying! The anti-Bolshevism spread by the press, the media and the academic world for several decades therefore took root very early, during the revolutionary wave, in the highest circles of the state apparatus. The military offensive on the Russian frontiers and the bloody repression of the German working class in January 1919 had to be accompanied by an intense propaganda campaign in order to deflect the growing sympathy for the proletarian revolution among exploited strata around the world. Among the many counterrevolutionary propaganda posters produced in France, England and Germany, the main targets remained the political organisations of the proletariat, who were made out to be responsible for unemployment, war and hunger, and regularly accused of sowing disorder and crime.[19] As Paul Frölich sums it up, "the posters in the street represented Bolshevism as a wild beast with a jaws wide open, ready to bite".

The call to kill the vanguard of the proletariat

By November 1918, the German bourgeoisie had made Spartacus the main target. To neutralise the influence of the organisation with the masses it tried to accuse it of all evils; Spartacus became the scapegoat, a real plague for social order and German capital, to be done away with. The picture portrayed by Frölich, ten years after the events, is edifying:

“Every crime committed in the big cities had only one culprit: Spartacus! The Spartacists were accused of all robberies. Delinquents in uniform, protected by official documents, true or false, rushed into houses, smashing and pillaging everything: it was Spartacus who sent them! All suffering, all menacing danger had only one origin: Spartacus! Spartacus, it’s anarchy, Spartacus, it’s famine, Spartacus, it’s terror!"[20]

The ignominy of social democracy and the entire German bourgeoisie went even further, as Vorwärts[21] organised a campaign of denigration and hatred against Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and other influential activists of the Spartacus League: "Karl Liebknecht, a certain Paul Levi and the impetuous Rosa Luxemburg, who have never worked at a vice or lathe, are ruining our dreams and those of our fathers (...) If the Spartacist clique wants to ban us, we and our future, then Karl Liebknecht and company are also banned!”

Hate speech succeeded in organising a real witch hunt for revolutionaries. The League for the Fight against Bolshevism promised to offer 10,000 marks for the capture of Karl Radek or for information that could lead to his arrest. But the main targets remained Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In December 1918, a manifesto placed on the walls of Berlin called for nothing less than their murder. Its contents set the tone of the degree of violence which social democracy unleashed on Spartacus: "Worker, citizen! The homeland is on the brink of ruin. Save it! The threat does not come from outside, but from within: the Spartacus group. Strike their leader! Kill Liebknecht! And you will have peace, work and bread! The soldiers of the front." A month before, the soldiers' council of Steglitz (a small town in Brandenburg) had threatened that soldiers would shoot Liebknecht and Luxemburg on sight if they went to a barracks to give "incendiary speeches". The bourgeois press was in reality spreading a real pogrom atmosphere, "it sang of walls splattered with the brains of those shot, transforming the entire bourgeoisie into a bloodthirsty horde, drunk with denunciations, dragging the suspects (revolutionaries and others, perfectly harmless) before the rifles of the firing squads, and all these howls culminated in a single murderous cry: Liebknecht, Luxemburg! "[22] The prize for ignominy can be awarded to Vorwärts which, on 13 January, published a poem that made the main members of Spartacus out to be deserters and cowards who had betrayed the German proletariat and deserved only death:

                                            “Many hundred corpses in a row—
                                             Proletarians!
                                             Karl, Radek, Rosa and Co —
                                             Not one of them is there, not one of them is there!
                                             Proletarians!”

We all know that these calumnies had tragic results since on 15 January 1919, Karl and Rosa, these two great militants of the revolutionary cause were murdered by the freikorps. The completely false account that Vorwärts gave of these crimes alone illustrated the mentality of the bourgeoisie, this "pitiful and cowardly" class as already emphasised by Karl Marx in the 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. According to the newspapers on the evening of 16 January, Liebknecht was killed during an escape attempt and Rosa Luxemburg lynched by the crowd. As reported by Paul Frölich, the commander of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division, whose members carried out the two murders, issued a statement completely falsifying the events which was repeated by the entire press, all this "giving vent to a web of lies, cover-ups and law-breaking that provided the backdrop for a shameful series of comedies as interpreted by the judiciary."[23]

After considerable labours, all these fabrications were exposed by Leo Jogiches who, in collaboration with a commission of inquiry created by the central council and the executive council of Berlin, restored the truth by bringing to light the unfolding of these crimes and publishing the photograph of the murderers’ feast after their crimes. He thus signed his own death warrant! On March 10, 1919, he was arrested and murdered in the prison of the Berlin Police Headquarters. As for the culprits, they escaped with acquittals or short prison sentences.

Yesterday, Rosa Luxemburg was this red witch devouring "good little Germans", today she is the "good democrat”, "the anti-Lenin" – who is still generally presented as a "dangerous revolutionary" and “inventor of totalitarianism". The ruling class is full of contradictions, but it must be said, the two sides of this treatment of Rosa Luxemburg are not strictly speaking in contradiction. They are a new illustration of what the bourgeoisie does with the memory of great people who dared to challenge their world "without heart and without spirit":

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the workers’ movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism.” (Lenin, The State and Revolution).

III - Stalinism, true executioner of the revolution

The failure of the revolutionary wave makes a bed for Stalin

The bloody crushing of the revolution in Germany was a terrible blow to the world proletariat. As Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg affirmed, the salvation of the revolution on a world scale depended on the ability of the workers of the great capitalist powers to seize power in their own countries. In other words, the future of humanity depended on the extension of the revolutionary wave that began in Russia. But this did not take place. The failure of the proletariat in Germany, Hungary and Italy sounded the death knell of the revolution in Russia, a death by asphyxiation because it no longer had sufficient breath within it to give impetus to the workers of the whole world. It was in this agony "precisely that Stalinism intervened, in total rupture with the revolution when after the death of Lenin, Stalin seized the reins of power and, from 1925, put forward his thesis of the construction of socialism in one country’, through which the counter-revolution was installed in all its horror".[24]

And now, for decades, historians, journalists and other commentators of all kinds falsify history by trying to find a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and feed the lie that communism is equal to Stalinism. In fact, there is an abyss between Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the one side and Stalinism on the other.

The state that emerged after the revolution more and more escaped from the working class and gradually absorbed the Bolshevik Party, where the weight of the bureaucrats had become preponderant. Stalin was the representative of this new layer of rulers whose interests were in total opposition to the salvation of the world revolution. The thesis of "socialism in one country" served precisely to justify the policy of this new bourgeois class in Russia to fall back on the national economy and the state as guarantor of the status quo and the capitalist mode of production. Lenin never defended such positions. On the contrary, he always defended proletarian internationalism, considering this principle as a compass preventing the proletariat from straying onto the bourgeoisie's terrain. Although he could not anticipate what Stalinism would do, in the last years of his life Lenin was aware of some of the dangers threatening the revolution and in particular struggled against the conservative attraction of the state for the revolutionary forces. Although he was unable to prevent this, he warned against the bureaucratic gangrene without finding a solution to the problem. Similarly, Lenin was very suspicious of Stalin and was opposed to him receiving any significant responsibilities. In his "testament" of 4 January 1923, he even tried to remove him from the post of secretary general of the party where Stalin was "concentrating a huge power which he abuses brutally". A vain attempt since Stalin already controlled the situation.[25]

As we highlighted in our pamphlet, The Collapse of Stalinism:

It was on the ruins of the 1917 revolution that Stalinism was able to establish its domination, thanks to the most radical negation of communism constituted by the monstrous doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, totally alien to the proletariat and to Lenin; that the USSR became again not only a capitalist state in its own right but also a state where the proletariat has been subjected more brutally and more ferociously than elsewhere to the interests of national capital renamed ‘the interests of the socialist fatherland’."

The USSR: an imperialist bourgeois state against the working class

Once in power, Stalin wanted to stay there. By the end of the 1920s he had in his hands all the control levers of the soviet state apparatus. We have shown, in one of the first texts we produced on the revolution in Russia, the process that led to the degeneration of the revolution and the emergence of a new ruling class making this country a capitalist state in its own right.[26]

Thus, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was "Soviet" only in name!

"Not only was the slogan of the entire revolutionary period – All power to the soviets’ - abandoned and banned, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, through which the power of the workers' councils had been the driving force and soul of the revolution and which so revolts and upsets our dear "democrats" today, (...) was totally destroyed and became an empty shell devoid of meaning, leaving room in its place for an implacable dictatorship of the party-state over the proletariat."[27]

Since Stalinism was the product of the degeneration of the revolution, it never belonged to any other camp than that of the counter-revolution. Moreover, it found its full and complete place in the great concert of bourgeois nations precisely for this reason. It was a masterful force for mystifying the working class and making it believe that communism did indeed exist in Eastern Europe, that its progress was momentarily slowed down, and that its total victory rested on the support of the workers of the whole world for the political line decided by Moscow. This great illusion was of course maintained by all the communist parties around the world. In order to spread the lie on a large scale, Moscow and the national CPs organised, among other things, the famous trips to the Soviet Union of workers' delegations, a stay during which all the "pomp" of the regime were shown to "political tourists" who were then mandated to preach the good word in their factories and cells on their return. Here is how Henri Guilbeaux described this masquerade:

"When the worker goes to Russia he is carefully selected, he can only go there in groups chosen from Party members but also elements known to be ‘sympathizers’ from the trade unions and the socialist party, who are very suggestible and easy to brainwash. Delegates thus ‘elected’ form a workers' delegation. Once arrived in Russia, these delegates are officially received, escorted, pampered, celebrated. Everywhere they are accompanied by guides and translators. They are given presents. (...) Wherever they go, they are told: "This belongs to the workers, and here it is the workers who direct". On their return, the workers' delegates who have been identified as being the most able to say good things about the USSR are put on a pedestal. They are then invited to come and give their impressions in public meetings.”[28]

These political brainwashing trips had as their sole objective to maintain the myth of "socialism in one country", a true falsification of the programme defended by the revolutionary movement which, since its origins, has been an international movement precisely because, as Engels wrote in 1847, the political offensive of the working class against the ruling class takes place from the outset at a world level: “The communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilised countries (…) It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace. It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range. [29]

Socialism in one country meant the defence of national capital and participation in the imperialist game. It also meant the dissipation of the revolutionary wave. Under these conditions, Stalin became a respectable man in the eyes of the Western democracies, now anxious to facilitate the insertion of the USSR into the capitalist world. While the world bourgeoisie had not hesitated to establish a military cordon around Russia at the time of the revolution, this policy changed radically once the danger had dissipated. Moreover, following the crisis of 1929, the USSR became a central issue and the whole Western bourgeoisie tried to attract the good graces of Stalin. Thus, the USSR joined the League of Nations in 1934 and a mutual security pact was signed between Stalin and Laval, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose communiqué the following day illustrated the anti-working class policy of the USSR: "Mr. Stalin understands and fully endorses the national defence policy made by France to maintain its armed force in terms of its security". As we showed in our pamphlet The collapse of Stalinism:

"It was this policy of alliance with the USSR that would allow, in the aftermath of the Laval-Stalin pact, the constitution of the ‘Popular Front’ in France, signalling the reconciliation of the PCF with social democracy for the needs of French capital in the imperialist arena: after Stalin decided in favour of the arming of France, suddenly the PCF in turn voted for military credits and signed an agreement with the radicals and the SFIO."

The Stalinist terror, or the liquidation of the old guard of the Bolshevik Party

The whole bourgeoisie understood that Stalin was the man of the situation, the one who was going to eradicate the last vestiges of the revolution of October 1917. Besides, the democracies were more benevolent towards him when he began to break up and exterminate the generation of proletarians and revolutionaries who had participated in the revolution of October 1917. The liquidation of the old guard of the Bolshevik Party expressed Stalin's determination to avoid any form of conspiracy around him in order to consolidate his power; but it also struck a blow to the consciousness of the proletariat of the whole world by pushing it to defend the USSR against so-called traitors to the revolutionary cause.

In these conditions, the European democracies did not hesitate to support and participate in this macabre enterprise. If they were very enthusiastic when it came to bleating beautiful hymns to Human Rights, they were much less willing to welcome and protect the main members of the workers' opposition, starting with Trotsky, its principal representative. After being expelled from Russia in 1928, the latter was greeted by a Turkey hostile to Bolshevism, who, in cahoots with Stalin, let him enter the territory without a passport at the mercy of the residue of white Russians determined to kill him. The former chief of the Red Army escaped several murder attempts. His Calvary continued after leaving Turkey when all the democracies of Western Europe, in agreement with Stalin, refused to grant him the right of asylum; "Chased by murderers in the pay of Stalin or the remains of white armies, Trotsky would be sentenced to wander from one country to another until by the mid-30s, the whole world became for the former head of the Red Army a ‘planet without a visa’".[30] Social democracy proved the most zealous to serve Stalin. Between 1928 and 1936, all Western governments collaborated with him and closed their borders to Trotsky or, as in Norway, put him under house arrest by prohibiting any political activity and any criticism of Stalin. In another example, in 1927 Christian Rakovsky, USSR ambassador in Paris, was recalled to Moscow following the request of the French government who considered him "persona non grata" after he signed the platform of the Left Opposition. The "homeland of the rights of man and of the citizen" delivered him ignobly to his executioners and added its stone to the building of the great Stalinist purges. And yet today these same democracies and their shoddy intellectuals denounce them loudly in order to make people forget that they themselves participated in these killings.

For all the oppositionists, the "great democracies" were nothing more than antechambers of the Stalinist death camps or the playgrounds of the GPU agents, authorised to penetrate their territories to silence the oppositionists. Similarly, the Western press relayed the smear campaign, designating the accused as Hitler's agents, justifying the purges and convictions by relying, without questioning them, on the minutes of the court sittings. Of course, the Communist parties, oozing with zeal, went the furthest in the slander and justification of such a mockery of justice. After the conviction of the sixteen defendants of the first Moscow Trial, the central committee of the PCF and the cells of several factories passed resolutions approving the execution of these "Trotskyist terrorists". The newspaper L'Humanité also distinguished itself by calling for the murder of the "Hitler-Trotskyists". But perhaps the most foul celebration of Stalinist terror is Hymn to the GPU, a so-called poem by Louis Aragon[31] in 1931, who, after being a poet in his youth, became a Stalinist preacher and never, till his last breath, stopped singing the praises of Stalin and the USSR!

Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Smirnov, Evdokimov, Sokolnikov, Piatakov, Bukharin, Radek ... to name only the best-known of the condemned. Although some were more or less compromised in the process of Stalinisation, all these fighters of the proletariat embodied the legacy of October 1917. By liquidating them, Stalin murdered the revolution a little more; for behind the farce of these trials was hidden the tragedy of the counter-revolution. These great purges, far from expressing the purification of society for the "construction of socialism", marked a new assault on the memory and transmission of the legacies of the revolutionary movement.

Cultivated or discredited, the myth of communism in the Soviet Union has always been utilised by the bourgeoisie against the consciousness of the proletariat. If it had been thought that the break-up of the Eastern bloc between 1989 and 1991 would bring about the fall of this great deception, it was not so. On the contrary, the equation of Stalinism with communism has only been reinforced during the last thirty years, although among the revolutionary minorities Stalinism is recognised as the worst product of the counter-revolution.

Conclusion

One hundred years after the events, the spectre of the October 1917 Revolution still haunts the bourgeoisie. And to try to guard against a new revolutionary episode that would shake its world, it is bent on burying the historical memory of the proletariat. For this, its intelligentsia tirelessly strives to rewrite history until the lie takes the appearance of a truth.

Therefore, faced with the propaganda of the ruling class, the proletariat must plunge back into its history and strive to learn from past episodes. It must also question, and we hope that this article will give food for thought, the reasons that push the bourgeoisie to denigrate in an ever more infamous way one of the most glorious events in the history of humanity, this moment where the working class demonstrated that it is possible to envisage a society where the exploitation of man by man will end.

Narek

January 27, 2019.

 

[1] International Review 160

[2] See in particular Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on the Russian Revolution.

[3] See P. Frölich, R. Lindau, A. Schreiner, J.Walter, Révolution et Contre-révolution en Allemagne (1918-1920), Editions Science Marxiste, 2013.

[4] Quoted in P. Frölich, Op. Cit., p.25.

[5] Quoted in P. Frölich, Op. Cit., p.26.

[6] Cited in Annie Kriegel, Aux origines du Communisme français, Flammarion, 1978.

[7] For a more complete approach see the article "Revolution in Germany: The Beginnings of the Revolution (II)", International Review n ° 82.

[8] The Council of People's Commissars was nothing more than the name taken by the new government on November 10 1918, composed of Ebert, Scheidemann and others. This appellation gave the impression that the SPD leaders were in favour of the workers' councils and the development of the class struggle in Germany.

[9] Quoted in "Revolution and counter-revolution in Italy (1919-1922), Part 1”, International Review n° 2.

[10] Quoted in "The German Revolution Part II: The start of the revolution", International Review n° 82.

[11] Cited in Gilbert Badia, Les Spartakistes. 1918: l’Allemagne en révolution, Editions Aden, 2008, p.296.

[12] Ibid, p.298.

[13] See the article in ICC Online: "Suffragism or communism?", February 2018.

[14] See the article "The first revolutionary wave of the world proletariat" in International Review n° 80.

[15] "Revolution and counter-revolution in Italy Part II: Facing fascism", International Review n° 3.

[16] Cited in G. Badia, Op. Cit., p.286.

[17] Quoted in . Frölich, R. Lindau, A. Schreiner, J. Walcher, Révolution et contre-révolution en Allemagne. 1918-1920. De la fondation du Parti communiste au putsch de Kapp, Editions Science marxiste, 2013.

[18] John Riddell (Ed.), Founding the Communist International, Pathfinder, 1987, p.101.

[19] See our article "The birth of totalitarian democracy", International Review n° 155.

[20] P. Frölich, R. Lindau, A. Schreiner, J. Walcher, Op. Cit., p.45.

[21] The main press organ of the SPD.

[22] P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, L'Harmattan, 1991, p 364.

[23] P. Frölich, R. Lindau, A. Schreiner, J. Walcher, Op. Cit., p 137.

[24] ICC pamphlet, The Collapse of Stalinism (in French).

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] H. Guilbeaux, La fin des soviets, Société française d’éditions littéraires et techniques, 1937, p 86.

[29] The Principles of Communism, 1847.

[30] ICC pamphlet, The collapse of Stalinism.

[31] Poet, novelist and journalist. He joined the PCF in 1927 and would not leave until his death. He remained faithful to Stalin and Stalinism all his life and approved of the Moscow Trials.

Development of proletarian consciousness and organisation: 

Rubric: 

Russian Revolution

International Review No 163 - Winter 2019

"Popular revolts" are no answer to world capitalism's dive into crisis and misery

Throughout the world attacks against the working class have widened and deepened[1]. And it's always on the backs of the working class that the dominant class tries to minimise the effects of the historic decline of its own mode of production. In the "rich" countries, planned job losses in the near future are piling up, particularly in Germany and Britain. Some so-called "emergent" countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, are already in recession with all that this implies for the aggravation of the living conditions of the proletariat. As to the countries that are neither "rich" nor "emergent", their situation is even worse. The non-exploiting elements in these places are plunged into an endless misery.

These latter countries particularly have recently been the theatre of popular movements against the endless sacrifices demanded by capitalism and implemented by governments which are often gangrened by corruption, discredited and hated by the population. Such movements have taken place in Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, Algeria and Lebanon. These frequently massive mobilisations are, in some countries, accompanied by the unleashing of violence and bloody repression. The widescale movement in Hong Kong, which has developed not in reaction to misery and corruption, but to the hardening of the state’s repressive arsenal - particularly regarding extraditions to mainland China - has recently witnessed a new level of repression: the police have started firing live ammunition at the demonstrators.

If the working class is present in these "popular revolts", it's never as an antagonistic class to capital but one drowned within the population. Far from favouring a future riposte from the working class and, with it, the only viable perspective of a struggle against the capitalist system, these popular, inter-classist revolts serve to reinforce the idea of "no future", which can only obscure such a perspective. They strengthen the difficulties experienced by the working class in mounting its own response to the more and more intolerable conditions that are the result of the bankruptcy of capitalism. Nevertheless, the contradictions of this system cannot be eliminated and will become ever deeper, pushing the world working class to confront all the difficulties that it is presently undergoing.

Exasperation faced with the plunge into yet more misery

After years of repeated attacks, it's often an innocuous price rise that "sparks off the explosion".

In Chile, it was the fare increase on the Metro which was the final straw: "The problem is not the 30 centimes" (increase), "it is the 30 years" (of attacks), according to a slogan from a demonstrator. Monthly wages are below 400 euros in this country; precarious working is very widespread; costs of basic necessities are disproportionally high and the health and education sectors are failing, while to retire is to be condemned to poverty.

In Ecuador, the movement was provoked by a sudden increase in fares. This follows a list of price increases in basic goods and services, the freezing of wages, massive redundancies, an obligation to give a day's work "free" to the state, the reduction of days off and other measures leading to precarious working and a deterioration of living conditions.

In Haiti, fuel shortages hit the population as a supplementary catastrophe, leading to a general state of paralysis in what has long been one of the poorest countries in the region.  

If the economic crisis in general is the main cause of the attacks against living conditions, they overlap in some countries such as Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, with the traumatising and dramatic consequences of imperialist tensions and the endless wars ravaging the Middle East.

In Lebanon, it was the imposition of a tax on WhatsApp calls which provoked the revolt in a country with the highest debt per person in the world. Each year the government imposes new taxes, a third of the population are unemployed and the infrastructure of the country is second-rate. In Iraq, where the movement broke out spontaneously following calls on social media, the protesters demanded jobs and functioning public services while expressing their rage against a ruling class that they accuse of being corrupt. In Iran, the hike in fuel prices comes on top of a situation of profound economic crisis, aggravated by US sanctions on the country.

The impotence of these movements; the repression and manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie

In Chile, attempts of struggle have been diverted onto the barren grounds of a nihilist violence which is characteristic of capitalist decomposition. Favoured by the state, we've also seen eruptions of lumpen elements in minority and irrational acts of violence. This climate of violence has been well-used by the state in order to justify its repression and intimidate the proletariat. The official figures are 19 dead but like official figures everywhere, they greatly underestimate the slaughter. As in the worst times of Pinochet, torture has made its reappearance. But the Chilean bourgeoisie realised that brutal repression wasn't enough to calm the growing discontent. So the Pinera government held its hands up, adopted a "humble" posture and said that it "understood" the "message of the people", that it would "provisionally" withdraw the increases and open the door to a "social consultation". That's to say that the attacks will be imposed by "negotiation" from a table of "dialogue" around which will sit the opposition parties, the unions, the bosses - all "representing the nation" together[2].

In Ecuador, transport associations have paralysed traffic and the indigenous movement, together with other diverse groups, have joined the demonstrations. The protests of self-employed drivers and small business people take place as expressions of the "citizens" and are dominated by nationalism. It's in this context that the initial mobilisation of workers against the attacks - in the south of Quito, Tulcan and in the Bolivar province - constitute a compass for action and reflection faced with the surge in the mobilisation of the petty bourgeoisie.

The Republic of Haiti is in a situation close to paralysis. Schools are closed, the main roads between the capital and the regions are cut off by roadblocks, and numerous businesses have closed. The movement is often accompanied by violence while criminal gangs (among the 76 armed gangs reported in the territory at least 3 are in the pay of the government, the rest are under the control of an old deputy and some opposition senators), engage in abuses, blocking roads and hi-jacking rare cars. On Sunday October 27, a vigilante opened fire on protesters, killing one; he was lynched and burnt alive. Official figures put the number of deaths at twenty over two months.

Algeria. A human tide has again taken to the streets of Algiers on the anniversary of the beginning of the war against French colonisation. The movement is similar to that recorded at the heights of the "Hirak", a protest movement which has been taking place in Algeria since February 22. It is massively opposed to the general election proposed by the government and organised for December 12 in order to elect a successor to Bouteflika, with the aim of "regenerating" the system.

Iraq. In several provinces of the south, protesters have attacked the institutions and buildings of the political parties and armed groups. Public workers, trade unionists, students and schoolchildren, have demonstrated and begun sit-ins. While, according to the latest official figures, the repression has caused the deaths of 239 people, the majority hit by live ammunition, mobilisations have continued in Baghdad and the south of the country. Since the beginnings of the outburst, protesters have maintained that they will refuse any political recuperation of their movement because they want to totally renew the political class. They also say that it's necessary to do away with the complicated system of awarding posts by faith or ethnicity, a process eaten away by clientism - and one steeped in corruption - that excludes the majority of the population and young people in particular. Just recently, there have been massive jubilant demonstrations and strike pickets have paralysed universities, schools and administration. Elsewhere, nocturnal violence has been directed at the headquarters of the political parties and the militias.

Lebanon. General popular anger has transcended communities, faiths and all the regions of the country. The withdrawal of the new tax on Whatsapp calls has not prevented the revolt from spreading to the whole of the country. The resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri was only a small part of the population's demands. They are demanding the departure of the whole of the political class who they judge as corrupt and incompetent while demanding a radical change of the system.

Iran. As soon as the price increases in fuel were announced, violent confrontations between protesters and the forces of order took place, leading to deaths on both sides but particularly numerous on the side of the former.

The trilogy of inter-classism, democratic demands, and blind violence

In all these inter-classist, popular revolts quoted above and according to the information that we have to hand, the proletariat has only shown itself as a class in a minority way here and there, including in a situation like Chile where the prime cause of the mobilisations was clearly the necessity for defence against the economic attacks.

Often, even exclusively, the "revolts" take their aim at the privileged, those in power who are judged responsible for all the ills overwhelming the populations. But in this way, they leave out the system of which the privileged are just the servants. To focus the struggle on the fight to replace corrupt politicians is obviously an impasse because, whatever the teams in power, whatever their levels of corruption, all of them can only defend the interests of the bourgeoisie and implement policies in the service of a capitalism in crisis. It is a much more dangerous impasse in that it's somewhat legitimised by democratic demands "for a clean system", whereas democracy is the privileged form of the power of the bourgeoisie for maintaining its class domination over society and the proletariat. It's significant in this regard that in Chile, after the ferocious repression and faced with an explosive situation that the bourgeoisie had underestimated, it then passed onto a new phase of its manoeuvres through a political attack by setting up classic democratic organisms of mystification and isolation, ending up in the plan for a "new constitution" which is presented as a victory for the protest movement.

Democratic demands dilute the proletariat into the whole of the population, blurring the consciousness of its historic combat, submitting it to the logic of capitalist domination and reducing it to political impotence.

Inter-classism and democracy are two methods which marry up and complement each other in a terribly efficient way against the autonomous struggle of the working class. This is much more the case over the last few decades, since with the collapse of the eastern bloc and the lying campaigns on the death of communism[3], the historic project of the proletariat has temporarily ceased to underlie its struggle. When the latter manages to impose itself, it will be against the current of the general phenomenon of the decomposition of society where each for themselves, the absence of perspectives, etc., acquire an accrued weight.

The rage and violence which often accompanies these popular revolts are far from expressing any sort of radicalism. That's very clear when it's carried out by lumpen elements, whether acting spontaneously or given the nod and wink by the bourgeoisie, and engaging in vandalism, pillages, arson, irrational and minority violence. But, more fundamentally, such violence is intrinsically contained in popular movements where the institutions of the state are not directly called into question. Having no perspective for the radical transformation of society, abolishing war, poverty, growing insecurity and the other calamities of a dying capitalism, movements that end up in this impasse can’t avoid spreading all the defects of a decomposing capitalist society.

The degenerating protest movement in Hong Kong constitutes a perfect example of this in the sense that, more and more deprived of any perspective - in fact it can't have any, confined as it is to the "democratic" terrain without calling capitalism into question - it has turned itself into a giant vendetta of the protesters faced with police violence, and then the cops reply, sometimes spontaneously, to the violence they face. This is so clear that some elements of the bourgeois press have commented on it: "nothing that Beijing has done has worked, not the withdrawal of the extradition law, or police repression, or the ban on wearing face-masks in public. Henceforth, the youth of Hong Kong are no longer moved by hope but by the desire to do battle in the absence of any other possible outcome"[4].

Some people imagine, or want us to think, that any violence in this society which is exercised against the forces of state repression should be supported because it's similar to the necessary class violence of the proletariat against capitalist oppression and exploitation[5]. This shows a real contempt for the working class and it's a gross lie. In fact the blind violence of these inter-classist movements has nothing to do with the class violence of the proletariat which is a liberating force for the suppression of exploitation of man by man. By contrast, the violence of capitalism is oppressive, and has the primary aim of defending class society. The violence the inter-classist movement carries with it, in the image of the petty-bourgeoisie, has no future of its own. This is a class that can only go nowhere by itself and must end up rallying behind either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.

In fact the trilogy of "inter-classism, democratic demands, blind violence" is the trademark of the popular revolts which are hatching out all over the planet in reaction to the accelerated degradation of all the living conditions which affect the working class, other non-exploitative layers and the pauperised petty-bourgeoisie. The movements of the "gilets jaunes" that started in France a year ago squarely falls into this category of popular revolts[6]. Such movements only contribute to obscuring the real nature of class struggle in the eyes of the proletariat, reinforcing its present difficulties in seeing itself as a class of society, distinct from other classes and with its specific combat against exploitation and its historic mission of overthrowing capitalism.

It's the reason why the responsibilities of revolutionaries and the most conscious minorities within the working class is to work for the re-appropriation of its own methods, at the heart of which figures the mass struggle; general assemblies as places of discussion and decisions while defending themselves against sabotage by the unions and open to all sectors of the working class; extension to other sectors imposed against the manoeuvres of division and control practised by the unions and the left of capital [7]. Even if today these perspectives seem far away, and that is the case in most parts of the world, particularly where the working class is in the minority with a limited historical experience, these methods nevertheless constitute the only way forward, the only means of allowing the proletariat to recover its class identity and not get lost along the way.

Silvio. (17.11.2019)

 

[1]  Read our article "New recession: capitalism demands more sacrifices from the working class", https://en.internationalism.org/content/16738/new-recession-capital-dema...

[2]  For more information and analysis on Chile, see our article: https://en.internationalism.org/content/16762/dictatorshipdemocracy-alte...

[3]  We will come back soon in our press on the considerable impact of these lying campaigns on the class struggle and show what the state of the world really is today, in contrast to all the announcements about a new era of "peace and prosperity" at the beginning of the 1990s.

[4]  "The Hong-Kong protesters aren't driven by hope". The Atlantic.

[5]  From this point of view, it is illuminating to compare the recent revolts in Chile with the struggles of workers of the Argentinean Cordobazo in 1969 and we recommend this article: https://en.internationalism.org/content/16757/argentinean-cordobazo-may-...

Rubric: 

Inter-classist unrest

Turkish invasion of northern Syria - the cynical barbarity of the ruling class

Syrian Kurds throw potatoes at departing US troops

 

Trump’s telephone call to Erdogan on October 6 gave the “green light” for a major Turkish invasion of Northern Syria and a brutal clean-up operation against the Kurdish forces who have up till now controlled the area with US backing. It provoked a storm of outrage both among the USA’s NATO “allies” in Europe and large parts of the military and political establishment in Washington, most notably from Trump’s own former defence secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis. The principal criticism of Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds has been that it will undermine all credibility in the US as an ally you can rely on: in short, that it’s a disaster on the diplomatic level. But there is also the concern that the retreat of the Kurds will result in a revival of the Islamic Forces whose containment has been almost solely the work of the Kurdish forces supported by US air power.  The Kurds have been holding thousands of IS prisoners, and more than a hundred of them have already broken out of gaol[1].

Trump’s action has set off alarm bells among significant parts of  the US bourgeoisie, multiplying worries that his unpredictable and self-serving style of presidency is becoming a real danger for the US, and even that he is losing what little mental stability he possesses under the pressure of the office and above all of the current impeachment campaign against him. Certainly his behaviour is becoming increasingly bizarre, showing himself not only as an ignoramus (the Kurds didn’t support us on the Normandy landings…) but as a common mobster (his letter to Erdogan warning him not to be a fool or a tough guy, which the Turkish leader promptly threw in the bin, his threats to destroy Turkey’s economy…). He governs by tweet, takes impulsive decisions, disregards advice from his staff and then has to back-track the next minute – as witness the letter and the hasty dispatch of Pence and Pompeo to Ankara to cobble together a cease-fire in Northern Syria

But let’s not dwell too much on the personality of Trump. In the first place, he is merely an expression of the advancing decomposition of his class, a process which is everywhere giving rise to “strong men” who incite the lowest passions and rejoice in their disregard for truth and the traditional rules of the political game, from Duterte to Oban and from Modi to Boris Johnson. And even if Trump jumped the gun in his dealings with Erdogan, the policy of troop withdrawal from the Middle East was not the invention of Trump, but goes back to the Obama administration which recognised the total failure of US Middle East policy since the early 90s and the necessity to create a “pivot” in the Far East in order to counter the growing threat of Chinese imperialism. 

The last time the US gave a green light in the Middle East was in 1990 when the US ambassador April Glaspie let it be known that the US would not interfere if Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait. It was a well-organised trap, laid with the idea of conducing a massive US operation in the area and compelling its western partners to join a grand crusade. This was a moment when, following the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989, the western bloc was already beginning to unravel and the US, as the only remaining super-power, needed to assert its authority by a spectacular demonstration of force. Guided by an almost messianic “Neo-Con” ideology, the first Gulf war was followed by further US military adventures, in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. But the waning support to these operations from its former allies, and above all the utter chaos they stirred up in the Middle East, trapping US forces in unwinnable conflicts against local insurgencies, has demonstrated the steep decline of the USA’s ability to police the world. In this sense, there is a logic behind Trump’s impulsive actions, supported by considerable sectors of the American bourgeoisie, who have recognised that the US cannot rule the Middle East through putting boots on the ground or even through its own air power. It will rely more and more on its most dependable allies in the region – Israel and Saudi Arabia – to defend its interests through military action, directed in particular against the rising power of Iran (and, in the longer term, against the potential presence of China as a serious contender in the region).

The “betrayal” of the Kurds

The ceasefire negotiated by Pence and Pompeo – which Trump claims will save “millions of lives” – does not seriously alter the policy of abandoning the Kurds, since its aim is merely to give Kurdish forces the opportunity to retreat while the Turkish army asserts its control of northern Syria.  And it should be said that this kind of “betrayal” is nothing new. In 1991, in the war against Saddam Hussein, the US under Bush Senior encouraged the Kurds of northern Iraq to rise up against Saddam’s regime – and then left Saddam in power, willing and able to crush the Kurdish uprising with the utmost savagery. Iran has also tried to use the Kurds of Iraq against Saddam. But all the powers of the region, and the global powers who stand behind them, have consistently opposed the formation of a unified state of Kurdistan, which would mean the break-up of the existing national arrangements in the Middle East.

The armed Kurdish forces, meanwhile, have never hesitated to sell themselves to the highest bidder. This is happening before our eyes: the Kurdish militia immediately turned to Russia and the Assad regime itself to protect them from the Turkish invasion.

Furthermore, this has been the fate of all “national liberation” struggles since at least the First World War: they have only been able to prosper under the wing of one or another imperialist power. The same grim necessity applies throughout the Middle East in particular: the Palestinian national movement sought the backing of Germany and Italy in the 1930s and 40s, of Russia during the Cold War, of various regional powers in the world disorder unleashed by the collapse of the bloc system. Meanwhile, the dependency of Zionism on imperialist support (mainly, but not only, from the US) needs no demonstration, but is no exception to the general rule. National liberation movements may adopt many ideological banners – Stalinism, Islamism, even, as in the case of the Kurdish forces in Rojava, a kind of anarchism – but they can only trap the exploited and the oppressed in the endless wars of capitalism in its epoch of imperialist decay[2].

A perspective of imperialist chaos and human misery

The most obvious beneficiary from the US retreat from the Middle East has been Russia. During the 1970s and 80s, the USSR had been forced to renounce most of its positions in the Middle East, particularly its influence in Egypt and above all its attempts to control Afghanistan. Its last outpost, and a vital point of access to the Mediterranean, was Syria and the Assad regime, which was threatened with collapse by the war which swept the country after 2011 and the advances made by the “democratic” rebels and above all by Islamic State. Russia’s massive intervention in Syria has saved the Assad regime and restored its control to most of the country, but it is doubtful whether this would have been possible if the US, desperate to avoid getting stuck in another quagmire after Afghanistan and Iraq, had not effectively ceded the country to the Russians. This has sown major divisions in the US bourgeoisie, with some of its more established factions in the military apparatus still deeply suspicious of anything the Russians might do, while Trump and those behind him have seen Putin as a man to do business with and above all a possible bulwark against the seemingly inexorable rise of China.

Part of Russia’s ascent to such a commanding position in Syria has involved developing a new relationship with Turkey, which has gradually been distancing itself from the US, not least over the latter’s support for the Kurds in its operation against IS in the north of Syria. But the Kurdish issue is already creating difficulties for the Russian-Turkish rapprochement: since a part of the Kurdish forces are now turning to Assad and the Russians for protection, and as the Syrian and Russian military move in to occupy the areas previously controlled by the Kurdish fighters, there is a looming risk of confrontation between Turkey on the one hand and Syria and its Russian backers on the other. For the moment this danger seems to have been averted by the deal made between Erdogan and Putin in Sochi on 22 October. The agreement gives Turkey control over a buffer zone in northern Syria at the expense of the Kurds, while confirming Russia’s role as the main power-broker in the region. Whether this arrangement will overcome the long-standing antagonisms between Turkey and Assad’s Syria remains to be seen. The war of each against all, a central feature of imperialist conflict since the demise of the bloc system, is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in Syria.

For the moment Erdogan’s Turkey can also congratulate itself on its rapid military progress in northern Syria and the cleaning out of the Kurdish “terrorist nests”. The incursion has also come as a godsend to Erdogan at the domestic level: following some severe set-backs for his AKP party in elections over the last year, the wave of nationalist hysteria stirred up by the military adventure has split the opposition, which is made up of Turkish “democrats” and the Kurdish HDP

Erdogan can, for the moment, go back to selling the dream of a new Ottoman empire, Turkey restored to its former glory as a global player before it became the “sick man of Europe” at the beginning of the 20th century. But marching into what is already a profoundly chaotic situation could easily be a dangerous trap for the Turks in the longer run. And above all, this new escalation of the Syrian conflict will add considerably to its already gigantic human cost. Well over 100,000 civilians have already been displaced, greatly increasing Syria’s internal refugee nightmare, while a secondary aim of the invasion is to dump around 3 million Syrian refugees, currently living in dire conditions in Turkish camps, in northern Syria, largely at the expense of the local Kurdish population.

The baseless cynicism of the ruling class is revealed not only in the mass murder its aircraft, artillery and terrorist bombs rain on the civil population of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza, but also by the way it uses those forced to flee from the killing zones. The EU, that paragon of democratic virtue, has long relied on Erdogan to act as a prison guard to the Syrian refugees under his “protection”, preventing them from adding to the waves heading towards Europe. Now Erdogan sees a solution to this burden in the ethnic cleansing of northern Syria, and threatens – if the EU criticises his actions – to channel a new refugee tide towards Europe.

Human beings are only of use to capital if they can be exploited or used as cannot fodder. And the open barbarism of the war in Syria is only a foretaste of what capitalism has in store for the whole of humanity if it is allowed to continue. But the principal victims of this system, all those whom it exploits and oppresses, are not passive objects, and in the past year or so we have glimpsed the possibility of mass reactions against poverty and ruling class corruption in social revolts in Jordan Iran, Iraq and most recently Lebanon. These movements tend to be very confused, infected by nationalist illusions, and cry out for a clear lead from the working class acting on its own class terrain. But this is a task not only for the workers in the Middle East, but for the workers of the world, and above all for the workers of the old centres of capital where the autonomous political tradition of the proletariat was born and has the deepest roots.  

Amos, 23.10.19

 


 

[1] It is of course possible that Trump is quite relaxed about Islamic state forces regaining a certain presence in Syria, now that the Russians and the Turks are the ones who will be forced to deal with them. Similarly he seemed quite happy for the Europeans to be saddled with the problem of former IS fighters returning to their European countries of origin. But such ideas will not go unopposed within the US ruling class.

[2] For further analysis of the history of Kurdish nationalism, see https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201712/14574/kurdish-nationalism-another-pawn-imperialist-conflicts

 

Rubric: 

Middle East

100 years after the foundation of the Communist International: What lessons can we draw for future combats? (part II)

In the first part of this article, we recalled the circumstances in which the Third International (Communist International) was founded. The existence of the world party depended above all on the extension of the revolution on a global scale, and its capacity to assume its responsibilities in the class depended on the way in which the regroupment of revolutionaries from which it arose was carried out. But, as we showed, the method adopted in the foundation of the Communist International (CI), favouring the largest number rather than the clarification of positions and political principles, had not armed the new world party. Worse, it made it vulnerable to rampant opportunism within the revolutionary movement. This second part aims to highlight the content of the fight waged by the left fractions against the political line of the CI to retain old tactics made obsolete by the opening of capitalism’s decadent phase.

This new phase in the life of capitalism demanded a redefinition of certain programmatic and organisational positions to enable the world party to orient the proletariat on its own class terrain.

1918-1919: revolutionary praxis challenges old tactics

As we pointed out in the first part of this article, the First Congress of the Communist International had highlighted that the destruction of bourgeois society was fully on the agenda of history. Indeed, the period 1918-1919 saw a real mobilisation of the whole world proletariat,[1] firstly in Europe:

  • March 1919: proclamation of the Republic of Councils in Hungary
  • April-May 1919: episode of the Republic of Councils in Bavaria
  • June 1919: attempts at insurrection in Switzerland and Austria.

The revolutionary wave then spread to the American continent:

  • January 1919: “bloody week” in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where workers are savagely repressed.
  • February 1919: strike in the shipyards in Seattle, USA, which eventually extends to the entire city in a few days. The workers manage to take control of supplies and defence against troops sent by the government.
  • May 1919: general strike in Winnipeg, Canada.

But also Africa and Asia:

  • In South Africa, in March 1919, the tramway strike spreads throughout Johannesburg, with assemblies and rallies in solidarity with the Russian Revolution.
  • In Japan, in 1918, the famous “rice meetings” take place against the shipment of rice to Japanese troops sent against the revolution in Russia.

Under these conditions, revolutionaries of the time had real reasons to say that “The victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale is assured. The founding of an international Soviet republic is underway”.[2]

So far, the extension of the revolutionary wave in Europe and elsewhere confirmed the theses of the First Congress:

1) The present epoch is the epoch of the disintegration and collapse of the entire capitalist world system, which will drag the whole of European civilization down with it if capitalism, with its insoluble contradictions, is not destroyed.

2) The task of the proletariat now is to seize state power immediately. The seizure of state power means the destruction of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and the organization of a new apparatus of proletarian power.[3]

The new period that was opening up, of wars and revolutions, confronted the world proletariat and its world party with new problems. The entry of capitalism into its decadent phase directly posed the necessity of the revolution and modified somewhat the form which the class struggle was to take.

The formation of left currents within the CI

The revolutionary wave had consecrated the finally found form of the dictatorship of the proletariat: the soviets. But it had also shown that the forms and methods of struggle inherited from the 19th century, such as trade unions or parliamentarism, were now over.

“In the new period it was the practice of the workers themselves that called into question the old parliamentary and unionist tactics. The Russian proletariat dissolved parliament after it had taken power and in Germany a significant mass of workers pronounced in favour of boycotting the elections in December 1918. In Russia as in Germany, the council form appeared as the only form for the revolutionary struggle, replacing the union structure. But the class struggle in Germany had also revealed an antagonism between the proletariat and the unions.”[4]

The rejection of parliamentarism

The left currents in the International organised themselves on a clear political basis: the entry of capitalism into its decadence phase imposed a single path; that of the proletarian revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois state with a view to abolishing social classes and constructing a communist society. From now on, the struggle for reform and revolutionary propaganda in bourgeois parliaments no longer made sense. In many countries, for the left currents the rejection of elections became the position of a true communist organisation:

  • In March 1918, the Polish Communist Party boycotts the elections.
  • On 22 December 1918 the organ of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), Il Soviet, is published in Naples under the leadership of Amedeo Bordiga. The Fraction sets out its goal as being to “eliminate the reformists from the party in order to ensure for it a more revolutionary attitude”. It also insists that “all contact must be broken with the democratic system”; a true communist party is possible only “if we renounce electoral and parliamentary action.”[5]
  • In September 1919, the Workers’ Socialist Federation speaks out against “revolutionary parliamentarism”.
  • The same is true in Belgium for De Internationale in Flanders and the Communist Group of Brussels. Antiparliamentarianism is also defended by a minority of the Bulgarian Communist Party, by part of the group of Hungarian Communists exiled in Vienna, by the Federation of Social Democratic Youth in Sweden and by a minority of the Partido Socialista Internacional of Argentina (the future Communist Party of Argentina).
  • The Dutch remain divided on the parliamentary question. A majority of the Tribunists are in favour of the elections; the minority like Gorter is indecisive, while Panekoek defends an antiparliamentary position.
  • The KAPD was also opposed to participation in elections.

For all these groups, the rejection of parliamentarism was now a matter of principle. This was actually putting into practice the analyses and conclusions adopted at the First Congress. But the majority of the CI did not see it that way, starting with the Bolsheviks; even if there was no ambiguity about the reactionary nature of trade unions and bourgeois democracy, the fight within them should not be abandoned. The circular of the Executive Committee of the CI of 1 September 1919 endorsed this backward step, returning to the old social democratic conception of making parliament a place of revolutionary conquest: “[militants] go into parliament in order to appropriate this machinery and to help the masses behind the Parliamentary walls to blow it up.”[6] 

The trade union question crystallises the debates

The first episodes of the revolutionary wave quoted above had clearly shown that the unions were obsolete organs of struggle; worse, they were now against the working class.[7] But more than anywhere else, it was in Germany that this problem was posed in the most crucial way and where revolutionaries managed to establish the clearest understanding of the need to break with trade unions and trade unionism. For Rosa Luxemburg, the unions were no longer “workers’ organisations, but the strongest protectors of the state and of bourgeois society. Therefore, it goes without saying that the struggle for socialisation cannot be carried out without involving the struggle for the liquidation of trade unions”.[8]

The leadership of the CI was not so far-sighted. Although it denounced the unions dominated by social democracy, it still retained the illusion of being able to reorient them on a proletarian path:

What is now to happen to the trade unions? Along what path will they travel? The old union leaders will again try to push the unions onto the bourgeois road [...] Will the unions continue along this old reformist road? [...] We are deeply convinced that the answer will be no. A fresh wind is blowing through the musty trade union offices. [...] It is our belief that a new trade union movement is being formed.”[9]

It was for this reason that in its earliest days the CI accepted into its ranks national and regional unions of trades or industries. In particular, there were revolutionary syndicalist elements such as the IWW. If the latter rejected both parliamentarism and activity in the old unions, it remained hostile to political activity and therefore to the need for a political party of the proletariat. This could only reinforce the confusion within the CI on the organizational question since it included groups that were already “anti-organisation”.

The most lucid group on the trade union question remained without doubt the left-wing majority of the KPD which was to be excluded from the party by the leadership of Levi and Brandler. It was not only against unions in the hands of the social democrats but hostile to any form of trade unionism such as anti-political revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. This majority was to found the KAPD in April 1920, whose programme clearly stated that:

Aside from bourgeois parliamentarism, the unions form the principal rampart against the further development of the proletarian revolution in Germany. Their attitude during the world war is well-known […] They have maintained their counter-revolutionary attitude up to today, throughout the whole period of the German revolution.

Faced with the centrist position of Lenin and the leadership of the CI, the KAPD retorted that:

The revolutionising of the unions is not a question of individuals: the counter-revolutionary character of these organisations is located in their structure and in their specific way of operating. From this it flows logically that only the destruction of the unions can clear the road for social revolution in Germany.”[10]

Admittedly, these two important questions could not be decided overnight. But the resistance to the rejection of parliamentarism and trade unionism demonstrated the difficulties of the CI in drawing all the implications of the decadence of capitalism for the communist program. The exclusion of the majority of the KPD and the rapprochement of the latter with the Independents (USPD) who controlled the opposition in the official unions was a further sign of the rise of programmatic and organisational opportunism within the world party.

The Second Congress backtracks

At the start of 1920 the CI began to advocate the formation of mass parties: either by the fusion of communist groups with centrist currents, as for example in Germany between the KPD and the USPD; or by the entry of communist groups into parties of the Second International, as for example in Britain where the CI advocated the entry of the Communist Party into the Labour Party. This new orientation completely turned its back on the work of the First Congress that had declared the bankruptcy of social democracy. This opportunist decision was justified by the conviction that the victory of the revolution would result inexorably from the greatest number of organised workers. This position was fought by the Amsterdam Bureau composed by the left of the CI.[11]

The Second Congress, which ran from 19 July to 7 August 1920, foreshadowed a fierce battle between the majority of the CI led by the Bolsheviks, and the left currents, on tactical issues but also on organisational principles. The congress was held during a full “revolutionary war”,[12] in which the Red Army marched on Poland in the belief that it could join with the revolution in Germany. While remaining aware of the danger of opportunism and acknowledging that the party was still threatened by “the danger of dilution by unstable and irresolute elements which have not yet completely discarded the ideology of the Second International”,[13] this Second Congress began to make concessions regarding the analyses of the first congress by accepting the partial integration of certain social democratic parties still strongly marked by the conceptions of the Second International.[14]

To guard against such a danger, the 21 conditions of admission to the CI had been written against the right and centrist elements, but also against the left. During the discussion of the 21 conditions, Bordiga distinguished himself by his determination to defend the communist programme and warned the entire party against any concession in the terms of membership: 

The foundation of the Communist International in Russia led us back to Marxism. The revolutionary movement that was saved from the ruins of the Second International made itself known with its programme, and the work that now began led to the formation of a new state organism on the basis of the official constitution. I believe that we find ourselves in a situation that is not created by accident but much rather determined by the course of history. I believe that we are threatened by the danger of right-wing and centrist elements penetrating into our midst.[15] […] We would therefore be in great danger if we made the mistake of accepting these people in our ranks. […] The right-wing elements accept our Theses, but in an unsatisfactory manner and with certain reservations. We communists must demand that this acceptance is complete and without restrictions for the future. […] I think that, after the Congress, the Executive Committee must be given time to find out whether all the obligations that have been laid upon the parties by the Communist International have been fulfilled. After this time, after the so-called organisation period, the door must he closed […] Opportunism must be fought everywhere. But we will find this task very difficult if, at the very moment that we are taking steps to purge the Communist International, the door is opened to let those who are standing outside come in. I have spoken on behalf of the Italian delegation. We undertake to fight the opportunists in Italy. We do not, however, wish them to go away from us merely to be accepted into the Communist International in some other way. We say to you, after we have worked with you we want to go back to our country and form a united front against all the enemies of the communist revolution.[16]

Admittedly, the 21 conditions served as a scarecrow against opportunistic elements likely to knock on the door of the party. But even if Lenin could say that the left current was “a thousand times less dangerous and less serious than the error represented by right-wing doctrinarism”, the many regressive steps on the question of tactics strongly weakened the International, especially in the period to come, which was characterised by retreat and isolation contrary to what the CI leadership thought. Inexorably, these safeguards did not allow the IC to resist the pressure of opportunism. In 1921 the Third Congress finally succumbed to the mirage of numbers by adopting Lenin’s “Theses on Tactics”, which advocated work in parliament and the unions as well as the formation of mass parties. With this 180° turn, the party was throwing out of the window the 1918 programme of the KPD, one of the two founding bases of the CI.

The CI - sickness of leftism[17] or opportunism?

It was in opposition to the KPD's opportunist policy that the KAPD was born in April 1920. Although its program was inspired more by the theses of the left in Holland than those of the CI, it requested to be attached immediately to the Third International.

When Jan Appel and Franz Jung[18] arrived in Moscow, Lenin handed them the manuscript of what would become Left-wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, written for the Second Congress to expose what he saw as the inconsistencies of the left currents.

The Dutch delegation had the opportunity to take note of Lenin's pamphlet during the Second Congress. Herman Gorter was commissioned to write a reply to Lenin, which appeared in July 1920 (Open Letter to Comrade Lenin). Gorter relied heavily on the text published by Pannekoek a few months earlier entitled World Revolution and Communist Tactics. It is not necessary to go back over the details of this polemic here.[19] However, it must be pointed out that the different issues raised echo perfectly the fundamental question: how did the entry into the era of wars and revolutions impose new principles in the revolutionary movement?? Were “compromises” still possible?

For Lenin, left-wing “doctrinairism” was a “childish sickness; “young communists”, still “inexperienced”, had given way to impatience and indulged in “intellectual childishness” instead of defending “the serious tactics of a revolutionary class” according to the “particularity of each country”, taking into account the general movement of the working class.

For Lenin, to reject work in the unions and parliaments, to oppose alliances between the communist parties and the social democratic parties, was a pure nonsense. The adherence of the masses to communism did not depend only on revolutionary propaganda; he considered that these masses had to go through “their own political experience”. For this, it was essential to enrol the greatest numbers in revolutionary organisations, whatever their level of political clarity. The objective conditions were ripe, the path of the revolution was all mapped out...

However, as Gorter pointed out in his reply, the victory of the world revolution depended above all on the subjective conditions, in other words on the ability of the world working class to extend and deepen its class consciousness. The weakness of this general class consciousness was illustrated by the virtual absence of a real vanguard of the proletariat in Western Europe, as Gorter pointed out. Therefore, the error of the Bolsheviks in the CI was “to try to make up for this delay through tactical recipes which expressed an opportunist approach where clarity and an organic process of development were sacrificed in favour of artificial numerical growth at any cost.”[20]

This tactic, based on the quest for instant success, was animated by the observation that the revolution was not developing fast enough, that the class was taking too long to extend its struggle and that, faced with this slowness, it was necessary to make “concessions” by accepting work in trade unions and parliaments.

While the CI saw the revolution as a somehow inevitable phenomenon, the left currents considered that “the revolution in Western Europe [would be] a long drawn out process” (Pannekoek), which would be strewn with setbacks and defeats, to use the words of Rosa Luxemburg. History has confirmed the positions developed by the left currents within the CI. Leftism was therefore not a “childish sickness” of the communist movement but, on the contrary, the treatment against the infection of opportunism that spread in the ranks of the world party.

Conclusion  

What lessons can we draw from the creation of the Communist International? If the First Congress had shown the capacity of the revolutionary movement to break with the Second International, the following congresses marked a real setback. Indeed, while the founding congress recognised the passage of social democracy in the camp of the bourgeoisie, the Third Congress rehabilitated it by advocating the tactic of allying with it in a “united front”. This change of course confirmed that the CI was unable to respond to the new questions posed by the period of decadence. The years following its founding were marked by the retreat and defeat of the international revolutionary wave and thus by the growing isolation of the proletariat in Russia. This isolation is the decisive reason for the degeneration of the revolution. Under these conditions, badly armed, the CI was unable to resist the development of opportunism. It too had to empty itself of its revolutionary content and become an organ of the counter-revolution solely defending the interests of the Soviet state.

It was in the very heart of the CI that left fractions appeared to fight against its degeneration. Excluded one after the other during the 1920s, they continued the political struggle to ensure the continuity between the degenerating CI and the party of tomorrow, by learning the lessons from the failure of the revolutionary wave. The positions defended and elaborated by these groups responded to the problems raised in the CI by the period of decadence. In addition to programmatic issues, the lefts agreed that the party must “remain as hard as steel, as clear as glass” (Gorter). This implied a rigorous selection of militants instead of grouping huge masses at the expense of diluting principles. This is exactly what the Bolsheviks had abandoned in 1919 when the Communist International was created. These compromises on the method of building the organisation would also be an active factor in the degeneration of the CI. As Internationalisme pointed out in 1946: “Today we can affirm that just as the absence of communist parties during the first wave of revolution between 1918 and 1920 was one of the causes of its defeat, so the method for the formation of the parties in 1920-21 was one of the main causes for the degeneration of the CPs and the CI”.[21] By favouring quantity at the expense of quality, the Bolsheviks threw into question the struggle they had fought in 1903 at the Second Congress of the RSDLP. For the lefts who were fighting for programmatic and organisational clarity as a prerequisite for CI membership, small numbers were not an eternal virtue but an indispensable step: “If ... we have the duty to confine ourselves for a time with small numbers, it is not because we feel for this situation a particular predilection, but because we have to go through it to become strong” (Gorter).

Alas, the CI had been born in the storms of revolutionary combat. In these conditions, it was impossible to clarify overnight all the questions it had to confront. Tomorrow's party must not fall into the same trap. It must be founded before the revolutionary wave breaks, relying on good programmatic bases but equally on principles of functioning reflected on and clarified beforehand. This was not the case for the CI at the time.

Narek

July 8, 2019.

 

[1] See our article “Lessons of the revolutionary wave 1917-1923”, International Review n° 80, 1995.

[2] Lenin, closing remarks at the First Congress of the Communist International, in J. Riddell (ed.), Founding the Communist International, Anchor, 1987, p. 257.

[3] “Invitation to the First Congress of the Communist International”, in J. Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919-1943, Documents, Cass, 1971, p.2.

[4] The Dutch and German Communist Left, ICC, p.136.

[5] The Italian Communist Left, ICC, p.18.

[6] The Dutch and German Communist Left, p.137.

[7] See “Lessons of the revolutionary wave 1917-1923”, International Review n° 80.

[8] Quoted by A. Prudhommeaux, Spartacus Et La Commune De Berlin 1918-1919, Ed. Spartacus, p.55 (in French).

[9] “Letter from the ECCI to the trade unions of all countries”, in Degras, op. cit. p.88.

[10] “1920: the programme of the KAPD”, International Review no 97, 1999.

[11] In autumn 1919 the CI set up a temporary secretariat based in Germany, composed of the right wing of the KPD, and a temporary bureau in Holland that brought together left-wing communists hostile to the KPD's rightward turn.

[12] This “revolutionary war” constituted a catastrophic political decision which the Polish bourgeoisie used to mobilise a part of the Polish working class against the Soviet Republic.

[13] Preamble to the “Conditions of Admission to the CI”. In Degras, Op. Cit., p.168.

[14] This is what Point 14 of the “Basic Tasks of the Communist International” stated: “The degree to which the proletariat in the countries most important from the standpoint of world economy and world politics is prepared for the realisation of its dictatorship is indicated with the greatest objectivity and precision by the breakaway of the most influential parties in the Second International – the French Socialist Party, the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany, the Independent Labour Party in England , the American Socialist Party of America – from the yellow International, and by their decision to adhere conditionally to the Communist International. […] The chief thing now is to know how to make this change complete and to consolidate what has been attained in lasting organisational form, so that progress can be made along the whole line without any hesitation.” (in Degras, Op. Cit., p. 124).

[15] Respectively the social patriots and the social democrats: “these supporters of the Second International who think it is possible to achieve the liberation of the proletariat without armed class struggle, without the necessity of introducing the dictatorship of the proletariat after the victory, at the time of the insurrection” (see note 16).)

[16] Speech of Bordiga on the conditions of admission to the CI, Second Congress of the Communist International, Volume One, 1977, pp.221-224.

[17] This term corresponds here to the left communist current which appeared in the CI in opposition to the centrism and opportunism that grew within the party. It has nothing to do with the term for the organisations that belong to the left of capital.

[18] These are the two delegates mandated by the KAPD at the 2nd CI Congress to outline the party's programme.

[19] For more details see The Dutch and German Communist Left, “Chapter 4: The Dutch Left in the Third International".

[20] Ibid.p.150.

[21] Internationalisme, "On the First Congress of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy", in International Review no 162, 2019.

Rubric: 

History of the Working Class

Fifty years ago, May 68: The difficult evolution of the proletarian political milieu (part 1)

Introduction

The 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Communist International reminds us that the October revolution in Russia had placed the world proletarian revolution on the immediate agenda. The German revolution in particular was already underway and was crucial both to the survival of soviet power in Russia and to the extension of the revolution to the main centres of capitalism. At this moment, all the different groups and tendencies which had remained loyal to revolutionary marxism were convinced that the formation and action of the class party were indispensable to the victory of the revolution. But with hindsight we can say that the late formation of the CI –almost two years after the seizure of power in Russia, and several months after the outbreak of the revolution in Germany- as well as its ambiguities and errors on vital programmatic and organisational questions, was also an element in the defeat of the international revolutionary upsurge.

We need to bear this in mind when we look back at another anniversary: May 68 in France and the ensuing wave of class movements. In the two previous articles in this series, we have looked at the historic significance of these movements, expressions of the reawakening of the class struggle after decades of counter-revolution - the counter-revolution ushered in by the dashing of the revolutionary hopes of 1917-23. We have tried to understand both the origins of the events of May 68 and the course of the class struggle over the next five decades, focusing in particular on the difficulties facing the class in re-appropriating the perspective of the communist revolution.

In this article we want to look specifically at the evolution of the proletarian political milieu since 1968, and to understand why, despite considerable advances at the theoretical and programmatic level since the first revolutionary wave, and despite the fact that the most advanced proletarian groups have understood that it is necessary to take the essential steps towards the formation of a new world party in advance of decisive confrontations with the capitalist system, this horizon still seems to be very far away and sometimes seems to have disappeared from sight altogether.

1968-80: The development of a new revolutionary milieu meets the problems of sectarianism and opportunism

The global revival of the class struggle at the end of the 1960s brought with it a global revival of the proletarian political movement, a blossoming of new groups seeking to re-learn what had been obliterated by the Stalinist counter-revolution, as well as a certain reanimation of the rare organisations which had survived this dark period.

We can get an idea of the components of this milieu if we look at the very diverse list of groups contacted by the comrades of Internationalism in the US with the aim of setting up an International Correspondence Network[1]:

  • USA: Internationalism and Philadelphia Solidarity
  • Britain: Workers Voice, Solidarity
  • France: Révolution Internationale, Groupe de Liaison Pour l’Action des Travailleurs, Le Mouvement Communiste
  • Spain: Fomento Obrero Revolucionario
  • Italy Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista)
  • Germany Gruppe Soziale Revolution; Arbeiterpolitik; Revolutionärer Kampf
  • Denmark: Proletarisk Socialistisk Arbejdsgruppe, Koministisk Program
  • Sweden: Komunismen
  • Netherlands: Spartacus; Daad en Gedachte
  • Belgium: Lutte de Classe, groupe “Bilan”
  • Venzuela; Internacionalismo

In their introduction Internationalism added that a number of other groups had contacted them asking to take part: World Revolution, which had meanwhile split from the Solidarity group in the UK; Pour le Pouvoir Internationale des Conseils Ouvrières and Les Amis de 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleurs (France); Internationell Arbetarkamp, (Sweden), and Rivoluzione Comunista and Iniziativa Comunista (Italy).

Not all of these currents were a direct product of the open struggles of the late 60s and early 70s: many of them had preceded them, as in the case of Battaglia Comunista in Italy and the Internacialismo group in Venezuela. Some other groups which had developed in advance of the struggles reached their pinnacle in 68 or thereabouts and afterwards declined rapidly – the most obvious example being the Situationists. Nevertheless the emergence of this new milieu of elements searching for communist positions was the expression of a deep process of “underground” growth, of a mounting disaffection with capitalist society which affected both the proletariat (and this also took the form of open struggles like the strike movements in Spain and France prior to 68) and wide layers of a petty bourgeoisie which was itself already in the process of being proletarianised. Indeed the rebellion of the latter strata in particular had already taken on an open form prior to 68 – notably the revolt in the universities and the closely linked protests against war and racism which reached the most spectacular levels in the USA and Germany, and of course in France where the student revolt played an evident role in the outbreak of the explicitly working class movement in May 68. The massive re-emergence of the working class after 68, however, gave a clear answer to those, like Marcuse, who had begun theorising about the integration of the working class into capitalist society and its replacement as a revolutionary vanguard by other layers such as the students. It reaffirmed that the keys to the future of humanity lay in the hands of the exploited class just as it had in 1919, and convinced many young rebels and seekers, whatever their sociological background, that their own political future lay in the workers’ struggle and in the organised political movement of the working class. 

The profound connection between the resurgence of the class struggle and this newly politicised layer was a confirmation of the materialist analysis developed in the 30s by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. The class party does not exist outside the life of the class. It is certainly a vital, active factor in the development of class consciousness, but it is also a product of that development, and it cannot exist in periods when the class has experienced a world-historic defeat as it had in the 20s and 30s. The comrades of the Italian left had experienced this truth in their own flesh and blood since they had lived through a period which had seen the degeneration of the Communist parties and their recuperation by the bourgeoisie, and the shrinking of genuine communist forces to small, beleaguered groups such as their own. They drew the conclusion that the party could only re-appear when the class as a whole had recovered from its defeat on an international scale and was once again posing the question of revolution: the principal task of the fraction was thus to defend the principles of communism, draw the lessons of past defeats, and to act as a bridge to the new party that would be formed when the course of the class struggle had profoundly altered.  And when a number of comrades of the Italian left forgot this essential lesson and rushed back to Italy to form a new party in 1943 when, despite certain important expressions of proletarian revolt against the war, above all in Italy, the counter-revolution still reigned supreme, the comrades of the French communist left took up the torch abandoned by an Italian Fraction which precipitously dissolved itself into the Italian party.

But since, at the end of 60s and the early 70s, the class was finally throwing off the shackles of the counter-revolution, since new proletarian groups were appearing around the world, and since there was a dynamic towards debate, confrontation, and regroupment among these new currents, the perspective of the formation of the party – not in the immediate, to be sure – was once again being posed on a serious basis.

The dynamic towards the unification of proletarian forces took various forms, from the initial travels of Mark Chirik and others from the Internacialismo group in Venezuela to revive discussion with the groups of the Italian left, the conferences organised by the French group Information et Correspondence Ouvrières, or the international correspondence network initiated by Internationalism. The latter was concretised by the Liverpool and London meetings of different groups in the UK (Workers Voice, World Revolution, Revolutionary Perspectives, which had also split from Solidarity and was the precursor of today’s Communist Workers Organisation), along with RI and the GLAT from France.

This process of confrontation and debate was not always smooth by any means: the existence of two groups of the communist left in Britain today – a situation which many searching for class politics find extremely confusing -  can be traced to the immature and failed process of regroupment following the conferences in the UK. Some of the divisions that took place at the time had little justification in that they were provoked by secondary differences – for example, the group that formed Pour une Intervention Communiste in France split from RI over exactly when to produce a leaflet about the military coup in Chile. Neverthleless, a real process of decantation and regroupment was taking place. The comrades of RI in France intervened energetically in the ICO conferences to insist on the necessity for a political organisation based on a clear platform in contrast to the workerist, councilist and “anti-Leninist” notions that were extremely influential at the time, and this activity accelerated their unification with groups in Marseille and Clermont Ferrand. The RI group was also extremely active at the international level and its growing convergence with WR, Internationalism, Internacialismo and new groups in Italy and Spain led to the formation of the ICC in 1975, showing the possibility of organising on a centralised international scale. The ICC saw itself, like the GCF in 40s, as one expression of a wider movement and didn’t see its formation as the end-point of the more general process of regroupment. The name “Current” expresses this approach: we were not a fraction of an old organisation, though carrying on much of the work of the old fractions, and were part of a broader stream heading towards the party of the future.

The prospects for the ICC seemed very optimistic: there was a successful unification of three groups in Belgium which drew lessons from the recent failure in the UK, and some ICC sections (especially France and UK) grew considerably in numbers. WR for example quadrupled in numbers from its original nucleus and RI at one point had sufficient members to set up separate local sections in the north and south of Paris.  Of course we are still talking about very small numbers but nevertheless this was a significant expression of a real development in class consciousness. Meanwhile the Bordigist International Communist Party established sections in a number of new countries and quickly became the largest organisation of the communist left.

 And of particular importance in this process was the development of the international conferences of the communist left, initially called by Battaglia and supported enthusiastically by the ICC even though we were critical of the original basis for the appeal for the conferences (to discuss the phenomenon of “Eurocommunism”, what Battaglia called the “social democratisation” of the Communist parties).

For three years or so, the conferences offered a pole of reference, an organised framework for debate which drew towards it a number of groups from diverse backgrounds[2]. The texts and proceedings of the meetings were published in a series of pamphlets; the criteria for participation in the conferences were more clearly defined than in the original invitation and the subjects under debate became more focused on crucial questions such as the capitalist crisis, the role of revolutionaries, the question of national struggles, and so on. The debates also allowed groups who shared common perspectives to move closer together (as in the case of the CWO and Battaglia and the ICC and För Kommunismen in Sweden). 

Despite these positive developments, however, the renascent revolutionary movement was burdened with many weaknesses inherited from the long period of counter-revolution.

For one thing, large numbers of those who could have been won to revolutionary politics were absorbed by the apparatus of leftism, which had also grown considerably in the wake of the class movements after 68. The Maoist and particularly the Trotskyist organizations were already formed and offered an apparently radical alternative to the ‘official’ Stalinist parties whose strike-breaking role in the Events of 68 and afterwards had been plain. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “Danny the Red”, the feted student leader of 68, had written a book attacking the Communist Party’s function and proposing a “left wing alternative” which referred approvingly to the communist left of the 1920s and to councilist groups like ICO in the present[3]. But like so many others Cohn-Bendit lost patience with remaining in the small world of genuine revolutionaries and went off in search of more immediate solutions that also conveniently offered the possibility of a career, and today is a member of the German Greens who has served his party at the heart of the bourgeois state. His trajectory – from potentially revolutionary ideas to the dead-end of leftism – was followed by many thousands.

But some of biggest problems faced by the emerging milieu were “internal”, even if they ultimately reflected the pressure of bourgeois ideology on the proletarian political vanguard.

The groups which had maintained an organised existence during the period of counter-revolution – largely the groups of the Italian left – had become more or less sclerotic. The Bordigists of the various International Communist Parties[4] in particular had protected themselves against the perpetual rain of new theories that “transcended marxism” by turning marxism itself into an dogma, incapable of responding to new developments, as shown in their reaction to the class movements after 68 - essentially the one which Marx already derided in his letter to Ruge in 1843: here is the truth (the party), down on your knees!  Inseparable from the Bordigist notion of the “invariance” of marxism was an extreme sectarianism[5] which rejected any notion of debate with other proletarian groups, an attitude concretised in the flat refusal of any of the Bordigist groups to engage with the international conferences of the communist left. But while the appeal by Battaglia was a small step away from the attitude of seeing your own small group as the sole guardian of revolutionary politics, it was by no means free of sectarianism itself: its invitation initially excluded the Bordigist groups and it was not sent to the ICC as a whole but to its section in France, betraying an unspoken idea that the revolutionary movement is made up of separate “franchises” in different countries (with Battaglia holding the Italian franchise of course).

Moreover sectarianism was not limited to the heirs of the Italian left. The discussions around regroupment in the UK were torpedoed by it. In particular, Workers Voice, frightened of losing its identity as a locally based group in Liverpool, broke off relations with the international tendency around RI and WR around the question of the state in the period of transition, which could only be an open question for revolutionaries who agreed on the essential class parameters of the debate. The same search for an excuse to break off discussions was subsequently adopted by RP and the CWO (product of a short-lived fusion of RP and WV) who declared the ICC to be counter-revolutionary because it did not accept that the Bolshevik party and the CI had lost all proletarian life from 1921 and not a moment later. The ICC was better armed against sectarianism because it traced its origins in the Italian Fraction and the GCF, who had always seen themselves as part of a wider proletarian political movement and not as the sole repository of truth. But the calling of the conferences had also exposed elements of sectarianism in its own ranks; some comrades initially responded to the appeal by declaring that the Bordigists and even Battaglia were not proletarian groups because of their ambiguities on the national question. Significantly, the subsequent debate about proletarian groups which led to a great deal of clarification in the ICC[6] was launched by a text by Marc Chirik who had been “trained” in the Italian and French left to understand that proletarian class consciousness is by no means homogeneous, even among the more politically advanced minorities, and that you could not determine the class nature of an organisation in isolation from its history and its response to major historical events, in particular world war and revolution.

With the new groups, these sect-like attitudes were less the product of a long process of sclerosis than of immaturity and the break in continuity with the traditions and organisations of the past.  These groups were faced with the need to define themselves against the prevailing atmosphere of leftism, so that a kind of rigidity of thought often appeared to be a means of defence against the danger of being sucked under by the much larger organisations of the bourgeois left. And yet, at the same time, the rejection of Stalinism and Trotskyism often took the form of a flight into anarchist and councilist attitudes – manifested not only the tendency to reject the whole Bolshevik experience but also in a widespread suspicion of any talk about forming a proletarian party. More concretely, such approaches favoured federalist conceptions of organising, the equation of centralized forms of organization with bureaucracy and even Stalinism. The fact that many adherents of the new groups had come out of a student movement much more marked by the petty bourgeoisie than the student milieu of today reinforced these democratist and individualist ideas, most clearly expressed in the neo-Situationist slogan “militantism: the highest stage of alienation”[7].  The result of all this is that the revolutionary movement has spent decades struggling to understand the organisation question, and this lack of understanding has been at the heart of many conflicts and splits in the movement. Of course, the organisation question has of necessity been a constant battleground within the workers’ movement (witness the split between Marxists and Bakuninists in the First International, or between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in Russia). But the problem in the re-emerging revolutionary movement at the end of the 60s was exacerbated by the long break in continuity with the organisations of the past, so that many of the lessons bequeathed by previous organisational struggles had to be re-learned almost from scratch.

It was essentially the inability of the milieu as a whole to overcome sectarianism that led to the blockage and eventual sabotage of the conferences[8]. From the beginning, the ICC had insisted that the conferences should not remain dumb but should, where possible, issue a minimum of joint statements, to make clear to the rest of the movement what points of agreement and disagreement had been reached, but also – faced with major international events like the class movement in Poland or the Russian invasion of Afghanistan – to make a common public statements around questions which were already essential criteria for the conferences, such as opposition to imperialist war. These proposals, supported by some, were rejected by Battaglia and the CWO on the grounds that it was “opportunist” to make joint statements when other differences remained. Similarly, when Munis and the FOR walked out of the second conference because they refused to discuss the question of the capitalist crisis, and in response to the ICC’s proposal to issue a joint criticism of the FOR’s sectarianism, BC simply rejected the idea that sectarianism was a problem: the FOR had left because it had different positions, so what’s the problem?

Clearly, underneath these divisions there were quite profound disagreements about what a proletarian culture of debate should be like, and matters reached a head when BC and the CWO suddenly introduced a new criterion for participation in the conferences – a formulation about the role of the party which contained ambiguities about its relationship to political power which they knew would not be acceptable to the ICC and which effectively excluded it.  This exclusion was itself a concentrated expression of sectarianism, but it also showed that the other side of the coin of sectarianism is opportunism: on the one hand, because the new “hard” definition of the party did not prevent BC and the CWO holding a farcical 4th conference attended only by themselves and the Iranian leftists of the Unity of  Communist Militants[9]; and on the other hand because, with the rapprochement between BC and the CWO, BC probably calculated that it had gained all it could from the conferences, a classic case of sacrificing  the future of the movement for immediate gain. And the consequences of the break-up of the conferences have indeed been heavy – the loss of any organised framework for debate, for mutual solidarity, and an eventual common practice between the organisations of the communist left, which has never been restored despite occasional efforts towards joint work in subsequent years

The 1980s: crises in the milieu

The collapse of the conferences was soon revealed to be one aspect of a wider crisis in the proletarian milieu, expressed most clearly by the implosion of the Bordigist ICP  and the “Chenier affair” in the ICC, which led to a number of members leaving the organisation, particularly in the UK.

The evolution of the main Bordigist organization, which published Programma Comunista in Italy and Le Proletaire in France (among others) confirmed the dangers of opportunism in the proletarian camp. The ICP had been growing steadily throughout the 70s and had probably become the largest left communist group in the world. And yet its growth had to a great extent been assured through the integration of a number of elements who had never really broken with leftism and nationalism. Certainly, the profound confusions of the ICP on the national question were not new: it claimed to defend the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International on solidarity with revolts and bourgeois revolutions in the colonial regions. The CI theses would soon reveal themselves to be fatally flawed in themselves, but they did contain certain stipulations aimed at preserving the independence of communists in the face of rebellions led by national bourgeoisies in the colonies. The ICP had already taken some dangerous steps away from such safeguards, for example when it hailed the Stalinist terror in Cambodia as an example of the necessary vigour of a bourgeois revolution[10]. But the sections in North Africa organised around the paper El Oumami went even further than this, since in the face of the military conflicts in the Middle East it openly called for defence of the Syrian state against Israel. This was the first time that any Bordigist group had brazenly called for participation in a war between capitalist states. It is significant that there were strong reactions within the ICP against these positions, testifying to the fact that the organisation retained its proletarian character, but the end result was further splits, the departure of whole sections and of many individual militants, reducing the survivors of the shipwreck to small nuclei who have never been able to draw all the lessons from these events.

But an opportunist tendency also appeared in the ICC at the time – a grouping which, in response to the class struggles of the late 70s and early 80s, began to make serious concessions to rank and file trade unionism. But the problem posed by this grouping was situated above all at the organisational level, since it began to question the centralised nature of the ICC and to argue that central organs should function mainly as letter boxes rather than as bodies elected to provide political orientation in between general meetings and congresses. This did not imply that the grouping was held together by a deep programmatic unity. In reality it was held together by affiliations based on personal relationships and common resentments against the organisation – in other words, it was a secretive “clan” rather than a real tendency, and in an immature organisation it gave rise to a “counter-clan” in the UK section, with disastrous results. And stirring up these resentments and conflicts was the dubious element Chenier, who had a past history of travelling through revolutionary organisations and fomenting crises, and who engaged in the most shameful manipulation of those around him. The crisis came to a head in the summer of 1981 when members of the “tendency” entered a comrade’s house when he was away and stole equipment from the organisation on the spurious grounds that they were only cashing in the investment they had made in the organisation. The tendency formed a new group which folded after a single issue, and Chenier “returned” to the Socialist Party and the CFDT, for whom he had probably been working all along, most likely in the “Secteur des Associations” which monitors the development of currents to the left of the PS. 

This split was met with a very uneven response from the ICC as a whole, especially after the organisation made a determined attempt to get its stolen equipment back by visiting the houses of those suspected of being involved in the thefts and demanding the equipment be returned. A number of comrades in the UK simply left the organisation, unable to cope with the realisation that a revolutionary organisation has to defend itself in this society, and that this can include physical action as well as political propaganda. The Aberdeen/Edinburgh sections not only quickly departed, but publicly denounced the ICC’s actions and threatened to call the police if they were subject to any visits themselves (since they also retained a certain amount of material belonging to the organisation, even though to our knowledge they had not been directly involved in the initial thefts). And when the ICC issued a very necessary public warning about the activities of Chenier, they rushed to defend his honour. This was the inglorious beginning of the Communist Bulletin group, whose publications were largely dedicated to attacks on the Stalinism and even the insanity of the ICC. In short, this was an early example of political parasitism which was to become a significant phenomenon in the subsequent decades[11]. Within the wider proletarian milieu, there were few if any expressions of solidarity with the ICC. On the contrary, the CBG’s version of the events is still circulating on the internet and has a strong influence, on the anarchist milieu in particular.

We can point to further expressions of crisis in the years that followed. The balance sheet of the groups who took part in the international conferences is mainly negative: disappearance of groups that had only recently broken with leftism (L’Eveil Internationaliste, the OCRIA, Marxist Workers Group in the USA)) Others were pulled in the opposite direction: the NCI, a split with the Bordigists which had shown a certain level of maturity on organisational questions during the conferences, fused with the Il Leninsta group and followed it to abandon internationalism and adopt a more or less open form of leftism (the OCI)[12]. The Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, which had come to the third conference merely to denounce it, already expressing its destructive and parasitic character, began to adopt openly reactionary positions (support for Peruvian Maoists and El Salvador guerillas, culminating in a grotesque justification for the actions of the “centrist” al Qaida and physical threats against the ICC in Mexico[13]). The GCI, whatever its motivations, is a group which essentially does the work of the police, not only by threatening violence against proletarian organisations, but also by giving the impression that there is a link between authentic communist groups and the shady milieu of terrorism.

In 1984 we also saw the formation of International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, a coming together of the CWO and Battaglia. The IBRP (now the ICT) has maintained itself on an internationalist terrain, but the regroupment was in our view achieved on an opportunist basis – a federalist conception of national groups, a lack of open debate about the differences between them, and series of hasty attempts to integrate new sections which would in most cases end in failure.[14]

1984-5 saw the split in the ICC which gave rise to the “External Fraction of the ICC”. The EFICC initially claimed to be the true defenders of the ICC’s platform against alleged deviations on class consciousness, the existence of opportunism in the workers’ movement, the alleged monolithism and even “Stalinism” of our central organs etc. In reality, the whole approach of the ICC was jettisoned very rapidly, showing that the EFICC was not what it thought it was: a real fraction fighting the degeneration of the original organisation. In our view, this was another clan formation which put personal links above the needs of the organisation, and whose activity once leaving the ICC provided another example of political parasitism[15].

 The proletariat, according to Marx, is a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society – part of capitalism and yet in a sense alien to it[16]. And the proletarian organisation, which above all embodies the communist future of the working class, is no less a foreign body for being part of the proletariat. Like the proletariat as a whole, it is subject to the constant pressure of bourgeois ideology, and it is this pressure, or rather the temptation to adapt to it, to conciliate with it, which is the source of opportunism. It is also the reason why revolutionary organisations cannot live a “peaceful” life within capitalist society and are inevitably doomed to go through crises and splits, as conflicts break out between the proletarian “soul” of the organization and those who have succumbed to the ideologies of other social classes. The history of Bolshevism, for example, is also a history of organisational struggles. Revolutionaries do not seek or advocate crises, but when they do break out, it is essential to mobilise its forces to defend its central principles if they are being undermined, and to fight for clarification of the divergences and their roots instead of running away from these obligations. And of course it is vital to learn the lessons that these crises inevitably bring with them, in order to make the organisation more resistant in the future.

For the ICC, crises have been frequent and sometimes very damaging, but they have not always been entirely negative. Thus the 1981 crisis, following an extraordinary conference in 1982, led to the elaboration of fundamental texts on both the function and the mode of functioning of revolutionary organisations in this epoch[17], and brought vital lessons on the permanent necessity for a revolutionary organisation to defend itself, not only against the direct repression of the bourgeois state, but also against dubious or hostile elements who pose as part of the revolutionary movement and may even infiltrate its organisations. 

Similarly the crisis that led to the departure of the EFICC saw a maturation of the ICC on a range of key issues: the real existence of opportunism and centrism as diseases of the workers’ movement; the rejection of councilist visions of class consciousness as being purely a product of the immediate struggle (and hence the necessity for the revolutionary organisation as the main expression of the historic, depth dimension of class consciousness); and, linked to this, the understanding of the revolutionary organisation as an organisation of combat, capable of intervening in the class at several levels: not only theoretical and propagandistic, but also agitational, providing orientations for the extension and self-organisation of the struggle, participating actively in general assemblies and struggle groups. 

Despite the clarifications that the ICC made by responding to its internal crises, they did not guarantee that the organisation problem, in particular, was now solved and that there would be no more cases of falling back into error. But at the very least, the ICC recognized that the question of organisation was a political question in its own right. On the other hand, the milieu in general didn’t see the importance of the organisational issue. “Anti-Leninists” of various stripes (anarchists, councilists, modernists, etc) saw the very attempt to maintain a centralised organization as inherently Stalinist, while the Bordigists made the fatal mistake of thinking that the last word had been said on the question and that there was nothing further to discuss. The IBRP was less dogmatic but tended to treat the organisation question as secondary. For example, in their response to the crisis which hit the ICC in the mid-90s, they did not deal with the organisational issues at all but argued that they were essentially a by-product of the ICC’s mistaken evaluation of the balance of class forces.

There is no doubt that an incorrect appreciation of the world situation can be an important  factor in organisational crises: in the history of the communist left, for example, we can point to the adoption, by a majority of the Italian Fraction, of Vercesi’s theory of the war economy, which considered that the accelerating march towards war in the late 30s was proof that the revolution was imminent.  The outbreak of the imperialist war thus saw a total disarray in the Fraction.

Similarly, the tendency of the groups coming out of the 68 upsurge to overestimate the class struggle, to see the revolution as “just around the corner”, meant that the growth of revolutionary forces in the 70s was extremely fragile: many of those who joined the ICC at that time did not have the patience and conviction to last the course when it became clear that the struggle for revolution was one posed in the long term and that the revolutionary organisation would be engaged in a permanent struggle for survival, even when the class struggle was globally following an upward course. But the difficulties resulting from this immediatist vision of world events also had a major organisational element: not only in the fact that during that period members were often integrated in a hasty, superficial manner, but above all in the fact that they were integrated into an organisation which did not yet have a clear vision of its function, which was not to act as if it was already a kind of mini-party but was above all to see itself as a bridge to the future communist party. The revolutionary organisation in the period that began in 1968 thus retained many features of a communist fraction even if it had no direct organic continuity with the parties or fractions of the past.  This does not at all mean that we should have renounced the task of direct intervention in the class struggle. On the contrary, we have already argued that one of the key components in the debate with the tendency that formed the “External Fraction” was precisely the insistence on the need for a communist intervention in the struggles of the class – a task which may vary in scope and intensity, but which never disappears, in different phases of the class struggle. But it does mean that the largest part of our energies have necessarily been focused on the defence and construction of the organisation, to analysing a rapidly evolving world situation and both preserving and elaborating our theoretical acquisitions. This focus would become even more important in the conditions of the phase of social decomposition from the 1990s onwards, which have powerfully increased the pressures and dangers confronting revolutionary organisations, We will examine the impact of this phase in the second part this article.

Amos

Annex

Introductory note to the pamphlets containing the texts and proceedings of the Second International Conference of Groups of the Communist Left, 1978, written by the international technical committee:

“With this first pamphlet we are beginning the publication of the texts of the Second International Conference of the groups of the Communist left, held in Paris on 11 and 12 November 1978 on the initiative of the Internationalist Communist Party, Battaglia Comunista. The texts of the First International Conference, held in Milan on 30 April and I May 1977, were published in Italian under the responsibility of the ICP/BC and in French and English under the responsibility of the ICC.

On 30 June, 1977, the ICP/BC, in accordance with what had been decided at the Milan Conference and subsequent contacts with the ICC and CWO, sent out a circular letter inviting the following groups to a new conference to be held in Paris:

International Communist Current (France, Belgium, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany. Holland, USA, Venezuela)

Communist Workers Organisation (Britain)

International Communist Party (Communist Programme: Italy, France, etc)

Il Leninista (Italy)

Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista (Italy)

Iniziativa Comunista (Italy)

Fomento Obrero Revolucionario (France, Spain)

Pour Une Intervention Communiste (France)

Forbundet Arbetarmakt (Sweden)

För Komunismen (Sweden)

Organisation Communiste Revolutionaire Internationalise d’Algerie

Kakamaru Ha (Japan)

Partito Comunista Internazionale/Il Partito Comunista (Italy)

Spartakusbond (Holland)

In volume II we will publish this letter

Of the groups invited, Spartakusbond and Kakamaru Ha didn’t reply

Communist Programme and Il Partito Comunista refused to participate in articles appearing in their respective publications. Both rejected the spirit of the initiative as well as the political content of the work itself (particularly on the party and national liberation wars)

The PIC refused with a letter-document to participate in a meeting based on a recognition of the first two congresses of the Third International, which they see as being essentially social democratic from the beginning (see Vol II).

Forbundet Arbetarmakt rejected the invitation since it doubted that it could recognize the criteria for participation (see Vol II)

Iniziativa Comunista gave no written response, and at the last minute – after having agreed to come to a joint meeting of Battaglia and Il Leninista – refused to participate in the conference, justifying its attitude in the issue of its bulletin which appeared after the Paris conference.

Il Leninista. Although it confirmed its agreement to participate, was unable to attend due to technical problems at the time they set off for the meeting

The OCRIA of the Algerian immigrants in France was unable to participate physically in the meeting for security reasons, but asked to be considered as a participating group

The FOR, although it had participated at the beginning of the conference – to which it presented itself as an observer at the sidelines – quickly dissociated itself from the conference, saying that its presence was incompatible with groups who recognize that there is now a structural crisis of capital (see vol II)……

In between the second and third conferences, the Swedish group För Komunismen had become the ICC section in Sweden and Il Nucleo and Il Leninista had fused to become a single organsiation, Il Nuclei Leninisti

The list of participating groups was:

ICC, Battaglia, CWO, Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, L’Éveil Internationaliste, Il Nuclei Leninisti OCRIA, which sent written contributions. The American Marxist Workers’ Group associated itself to the conference and would have sent a delegate, but was prevented from doing so at the last minute.


[1] Published in Internationalism 4, undated, but circa 1973

[2] For a list of the groups who attended or supported conferences, see the annex                     

[3]  Obsolete Communism, the Left wing Alternative, Penguin 1969

[4] These groups all had their origin in the 1952 split within the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy. The group around Damen retained the name Internationalist Communist Party; the “Bordigists” took the name International Communist Party, which after further splits now has several incarnations under the same name.

[5] Sectarianism was a problem already identified by Marx when he wrote: “The sect sees the justification for its existence and its point of honour not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from the movement.” Of course, such formulae can be mis-used if taken out of context. For the left wing of capital, the entire communist left is sectarian because it does not consider itself to be part of what they call the “labour movement” – organisations like the unions and social democratic parties whose class nature has changed since Marx’s day. From our point of view, sectarianism today is problem between proletarian organisations. It is not sectarian to reject premature fusions or adherence that cover over real disagreements. But is certainly sectarian to reject all discussion between proletarian groups or to dismiss the need for basic solidarity between them.

[6] This debate gave rise to a  resolution on proletarian political groups at the Second ICC Congress (see IR 11: https://en.internationalism.org/content/4091/resolution-proletarian-poli...)

[7] Ref:  https://libcom.org/library/militancy-ojtr     The early 70s also saw the rise of “modernist” groups who began to cast doubt on the revolutionary potential of the working class and who tended to see political organisations, even when they clearly stood for the communist revolution, as no more than rackets. Cf the writings of Jacques Camatte. These were the forebears of today’s “communisation” tendency. A number of the groups contacted by Internationalism in 1973 went off in this direction and were irretrievably lost: Mouvement Communiste in France (not the existing autonomist group, but the group around Barrot/ Dauvé which had initially made a written contribution to the Liverpool meeting), Komunisimen in Sweden, and in a certain sense Solidarity UK, which shared with these other groups the enormous conceit of having gone beyond marxism.

[9] An early expression of the “Hekmatist” tendency which today exists in the shape of the Worker Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq – a tendency which is still often described as left communist but is in fact a radical form of Stalinism. See our article “The Worker Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq: the dangers of radical Stalinism”. https://en.internationalism.org/wr/293_wpiran.html.

[10]  IR 28.’The present convulsions in the revolutionary milieu’, https://en.internationalism.org/node/3116; also IR 32https://en.internationalism.org/node/3123

[11]https://en.internationalism.org/content/3667/political-parasitism-cbg-do...                         We will return to the problem of political parasitism in the second part of the article

[12]Organizzazione Comunista Internazionalista                                             

[14] See IR 121: “IBRP: an opportunist policy of regroupment that leads to nothing but ‘abortions’” https://en.internationalism.org/ir/121_ibrp

[15] See “The ‘External Fraction’ of the ICC”, in IR 45: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/45_eficc

[16] In the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

[17] See the two reports on the organisation question from the 1982 Extraordinary Conference: on the function of the revolutionary organization (IR 29) and on its structure and method of functioning (IR 33)                                

Deepen: 

Rubric: 

May 68

From the election of president Nelson Mandela in 1994 to 2019

In the introduction to the previous article[1], we immediately drew the reader's attention to the importance of the issues dealt with in these terms:

"Although, in the face of new social movements, the South African bourgeoisie relied on its most barbaric traditional weapons, the police and military forces, the dynamic of class confrontation was unprecedented: the working class had never before shown such combativity and development of consciousness, faced with a bourgeoisie that had never had to develop such sophisticated manoeuvres, including extensive use of the weapon of rank and file unionism animated by the extreme left of capital. In this clash between the two real historic classes, the determination of the proletariat would go so far as to provoke the dismantling of the system of apartheid, resulting in the unification of all fractions of the bourgeoisie with the aim of confronting the surge in the struggle of the working class.”

And we then showed in detail the extent of the combativity and the development of class consciousness within the South African proletariat, expressed, for example, by placing its struggles in the hands of hundreds of struggle committees called “civics” (Community Based Organisations). We also showed how the bourgeoisie was finally able to overcome the magnificent combativity of the South African working class by relying on its main pillars, namely "white power" (under apartheid), the ANC and radical unionism. Indeed, the overall balance sheet of this battle between the working class and the bourgeoisie shows the leading role played by rank and file unionism in diverting genuine proletarian struggles onto a bourgeois terrain.

Speaking of radical unionism, we said:

“… its main contribution was undoubtedly the fact of having succeeded in knowingly constructing the “democratic/national unity” trap in which the bourgeoisie was able to imprison the working class. Moreover, taking advantage of this climate of “democratic euphoria”, largely as a result of the liberation of Mandela and company in 1990, the central power could rely on its “new union wall” consisting of COSATU and its “left wing” to systematically divert the struggle movements into demands for “democracy”, “civil rights”, “racial equality “, etc. (…) Indeed, between 1990 and 1993, when a transitional government of “national unity” was formed, strikes and demonstrations became scarce or had no effect on the new government. (…) Besides, this was the central objective of the bourgeoisie’s project when it decided the process which led to the dismantling of apartheid and to the “national reconciliation” of all the bourgeois factions that had been killing each other under apartheid. This project would be implemented faithfully by Mandela and the ANC between 1994 and 2014, including the massacre of workers resisting their exploitation and repression.”

In this article, we aim to show how the ANC’s project was implemented methodically by its successive leaders, in the first place by Nelson Mandela. We will show to what extent, having fought the old "white power", the South African working class was able to deal with the new “black power”. Indeed, the South African proletariat did not lose its combativity, as we will see later, but it faced many serious difficulties. In addition to its daily struggle for the improvement of its living conditions, it also had to confront diseases like AIDS with its terrible ravages, the corruption of the regime in power, and the many forms of social violence related to the decomposition of the capitalist system; murders, pogroms, etc. At the same time, as usual, it continued to face a repressive, bloodthirsty power, one that caused the deaths of many miners at Marikana in 2012. But the fact remains that the South African proletariat has already shown its capacity to play an important role as part of the world proletariat for the communist revolution.

The ANC in the exercise of power

In 1994, at the end of the period of the “transitional government”, general elections were held and won triumphantly by the ANC which took all the levers of power to govern the country according to the orientations of South African national capital, with the support, or goodwill, of the principal white South African leaders who had fought against it for so long.

Now for Mandela the serious business could begin, namely the recovery of a national economy severely battered not only by the economic crisis in this period but also the consequences of the workers' resistance to exploitation. So in its first year of office in 1995, the Mandela government decided on a series of austerity measures, including a 6% cut in civil servants' salaries and 10% in spending on health. From that moment on, the question posed was how the working class would react to the attacks of the new regime.

First strike movement of the era of President Mandela

Against all odds, the working class, though stunned by all the propaganda about the “national union" or "new democratic era", could not let such an aggressive attack go by without reacting. We saw the outbreak of the first strike movements under the Mandela government, particularly in transport and public services. For its part, as expected, the new bourgeoisie in power soon showed its true face as the dominant class by violently repressing the strikers, a thousand of whom were arrested, without counting the number of wounded by police dogs. Parallel to the government and police repression, the South African Communist Party and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions), both members of the government, being unable to prevent the outbreak of strikes, began to violently denounce the strikers, accusing them of sabotaging the policy of national “recovery” and "reconciliation". An important fact should be noted here: while COSATU trade union leaders along with the government denounced and repressed the strikers, the base unionists remained “bonded” with the workers, claiming to defend them against the repression descending on them. We must see here a certain power of the new regime because while associating COSATU with the management of the affairs of capital it did not forget the importance of relying on the sound instrument of recuperation of the workers' struggles constituted by base unionism, of which many of those in government had had practical experience. [2]

The ANC deploys a new ideological device to deflect workers' combativity

Pursuing the implementation of its austerity measures, the new governmental team launched ideological manoeuvres to get them accepted by creating structures claiming to give legitimacy to its economic and political orientation. So, under the guise of the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC), in 1996 the Mandela government introduced a programme called "Reconstruction, Negotiation and Reconciliation", then in the following year “Growth, Employment and Redistribution" (GEAR). In fact these gadgets hid the same initial economic orientation whose application could only aggravate the living conditions of the working class. From then on, for the new regime, the question was how to get the "pill” accepted by the masses of workers, some of whom had just violently demonstrated their refusal of such austerity measures. And in this context, with the fear of a workers' response in opposition to the government plan, we saw the first open expression of (tactical) divergences within the ANC:

(...) Is the ANC's political line still really at the service of its former supporters, serving the greatest number of people, especially the most deprived, as it claims? COSATU and the SACP (South African Communist Party) question it more and more, often, even if it is not frontally. They criticize the ANC for not representing the interests of the poorest, especially the workers, for losing interest in job creation and not paying enough attention to the access of all citizens to proper conditions of life. (...) This criticism has been abundantly relayed by intellectuals of the left and often virulently. (...) These divergent points of view nevertheless give rise to questions and debates. Is there a workers’ party to represent workers' interests in their own right? The SACP (South African Communist Party) has for a while evoked the prospect of an autonomous candidacy for elections and some within COSATU have even drafted a project for a workers' party.”[3]

As can be seen from this quote, the governmental team publicly displayed its divisions. But this was above all a manoeuvre or more classically a division of labour between the right and the left at the summit of power, whose main purpose was to deal with the eventual workers' reaction.[4] In other words, the threat of a split to create a "workers' party to represent workers' interests" was above all a cynical political trick aimed at diverting the combativeness of the working class.

The fact remains that the Mandela government decided to continue its austerity policy by taking all the necessary measures for the recovery of the South African economy. In other words, it was no longer a question of the “national liberation” struggle or “defending the interests of the poorest” preached hypocritically by the left of the ANC. And, at first, this policy of economic austerity, repression and intimidation on the part of the “new power of the people” had an impact on the working class, causing great disappointment and bitterness in its ranks. There then followed a period of relative paralysis of the working class in the face of persistent economic attacks by the ANC government. On the one hand, a good number of African workers, who had hoped for faster access to the same rights and benefits as their white comrades, were tired of waiting. On the other hand, the latter, with their racist unions (albeit very small) threatened to take up arms in defence of their “gains” (the various privileges accorded under apartheid).

This was a situation that could not objectively favour the struggle, let alone the unity of the working class. Fortunately, this period was only short-lived, because three years after its first reaction against the austerity measures of the ANC government under Mandela, the working class again reacted by resuming the fight, but much more massively than before.

1998: first massive struggles against the Mandela government

Encouraged no doubt by the way in which it had mastered the situation in the face of the first strike of its reign against its first austerity measures, the ANC government now made them even harder. But without realising, it created the conditions for a broader workers' response:

"(...) In 1998, it was estimated that 2,825,709 days of work were lost from the beginning of January to the end of October. The strikes were essentially for economic demands, but they also reflected the strikers’ political discontent with the government. Indeed, far from living better, many South African workers have seen their economic situation deteriorate, contrary to the commitments of the RDP (Reconstruction and Development Program). As for the unemployed, more and more numerous in the absence of new jobs and with many industries (especially in the textile and mining industries) closing or relocating, their situation was becoming more and more critical. It may be thought that, in addition to the financial demands made by the unions, the strikes also showed the first signs of the erosion of national enthusiasm for government policy.

The movement was widespread since strikes affected sectors as varied as textiles, chemicals, the automobile industry and even universities or security companies and commerce, often long, two to five weeks on average, and sometimes marked by police violence (a dozen strikers killed[5]) and serious incidents, almost all for demands for salary increases. (...) Faced with strikes, the employers initially adopted a hard line and threatened to reduce their workforce or replace the strikers with other workers, but in most cases they were forced to honour the strikers’ demands."[6]

As we can see, the South African working class did not wait long to resume its struggles against the ANC regime, just as it had opposed the attacks of the old apartheid regime. It is all the more remarkable that Mandela's government proceeded in the same way as its predecessor by firing on a great number of strikers, killing some, with the sole purpose (of course unacknowledged) of defending the interests of South African national capital. And without causing any public protest from the "humanist democrats". Indeed, it is significant to note that few media outlets (or field investigators) commented, or even described, the crimes committed by the Mandela government in the ranks of the striking demonstrators. Clearly, for the media and the bourgeois world in general, Mandela was still both an "icon" and an "untouchable prophet”, even when his government massacred workers.

For its part, the South African proletariat demonstrated in this way its reality as the exploited class by struggling courageously against its exploiter whatever the colour of their skin. And by its pugnacity it managed quite often to push back its enemy, as the bosses were forced to honour its claims. In short, there was here an expression of an internationalist class whose struggle constituted a clear unmasking of the lie that the interests of black workers merged with those of their own black bourgeoisie, namely the ANC clique.

Precisely, by uniting the ANC, the CP and the COSATU trade union in the same government, the South African bourgeoisie wanted, on the one hand, to convince the (black) workers that they had their own “representatives” in power to serve them, while also planning to leave the rank and file of COSATU in opposition in case it would be necessary to recuperate their struggles. Clearly, the ANC government thought it had done everything to guard against any consequent reactions from the working class. But in the end Mandela and his companions found the opposite.

In 1999 Mandela is replaced by his heir Mbeki but the struggles continue

In that year, following the presidential elections won by the ANC, Mandela gave way to his “foal” Thabo Mbeki who decided to continue and amplify the same austerity policy initiated by his predecessor. To begin with, he formed his government with the same factions as before, namely: the ANC, the CP and the COSATU central union. And immediately his government was formed, it imposed a wave of austerity measures hitting with full force the key economic sectors of the country, resulting in pay cuts and the deterioration of living conditions of the working class. But, also like Mandela, the next day, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike and descended en masse into the streets and, as in the apartheid era, the ANC government sent its police to violently repress the strikers, causing a large number of casualties.

But above all it was remarkable to see how quickly the South African workers realised the capitalist and anti-working class nature of these attacks that the ANC team in power had made it suffer. The most significant thing in the workers' response was that in several industrial sectors workers decided to take charge of their own struggles without waiting for, or even acting against, the unions: "(...) the Autofirst strike, which began outside of the union and despite it, is a good example; especially since far from being an isolated case this type of strike tended to become widespread after 1999, including in large factories where the workers went on strike in spite of the unfavourable advice of the union, and even its formal opposition to the conflict".[7]

This was a striking demonstration of the return of combativity accompanied by an attempt to take charge of the struggles that the working class had already experimented with under the apartheid regime. Consequently, the ANC had to react by readjusting its message and its method.

The ANC resorts to “racialist” ideology in the face of the new workers' combativity

To counteract the militancy of the workers which tended to outflank the unions, the Mbeki government and the ANC decided to resort to the ideological legacy of the " national liberation struggle", including (among other things) the "anti-white" rhetoric of this period:

"The return in a renewed form in the governmental political discourse of the question of colour, especially in a number of statements castigating Whites - a notion that must be examined if (and in this case how) it acts as a, racial, social, historical or other marker, and if it also operates in people's ways of thinking.

As a corollary of this new presidential policy, the tensions within the triple alliance (ANC, COSATU, SACP South African Communist Party), still in place after many threats of a split especially on the eve of the 2004 elections, were more and more obvious and more and more vivid. They show the difficulty of the ANC, the former national liberation party, to retain its popular legitimacy once in power and in charge of governing for the benefit, no longer only of the oppressed of yesteryear but for all the inhabitants of the country."[8]

But why was the "rainbow “government, the "guarantor of national unity", which held all the levers of power, suddenly forced to resort to one of the old facets of the ANC of yesteryear, namely denouncing the "white power" (which is presented as preventing the power of the blacks)? The author of the quotation seems to us very indulgent with the leaders of the ANC, when she seeks to know about this "notion that must be examined" to know "if it acts as a, racial, social, historical or other marker". In reality this "notion", behind which lurks the idea that “the whites still hold power at the expense of blacks", was used here by the ANC in yet another attempt to divide the working class. In other words, by doing so, the government hoped to deflect demands for improvements in living conditions into racial issues.

Part of the working class, notably the militant base of the ANC, could not help being "sensitized” by this devious anti-white or even "anti-foreigner” rhetoric. We also know that the current President Zuma, with his populist accents, frequently exploits the "racial question” especially when he finds himself in difficulty faced with social discontent.

Anti-globalisation ideology to the rescue of the ANC

To deal with social unrest and the erosion of its credibility, the ANC decided in 2002 to hold a World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (the "Durban Social Forum"). The whole galaxy of anti-globalisation organisations participated, including several South African ones characterised as "radical” like the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Landless People's Movement, very active in the strikes of the 2000s. In other words, in a context of radicalisation of workers' struggles the ANC apparatus sought the ideological contribution of the anti-globalisation movement:

"Furthermore, workers' strikes outside the trade unions broke out as in Volkswagen Port Elizabeth in 2002 or in Engen in Durban, in 2001. Some of these actions, like those of the TAC, regularly won victories over government policy. However, on the one hand, no opposition party really relayed these points of view in the parliamentary arena; on the other hand, the capacity of these organisations to influence sustainably, and on their own strengths (without becoming institutionalised or entering the government), the decisions of the state, remained fragile[9]

Here we see a double problem for the ANC government: on the one hand, to prevent or divert strikes tending to escape the control of the unions close to it, and on the other hand, how to find a “credible” parliamentary opposition  with an apparent capacity to "durably influence" the decisions of the state.  Regarding this last point we will see later that the problem has not been resolved at the time of writing this article. On the other hand, regarding the first, the ANC, was able to expertly rely on the anti-globalisation ideology well embodied by some of the groups pushing for the radicalisation of struggles, in particular the TAC and the Landless People's Movement.

Indeed, “anti-globalisation” ideology came at the right time for an ANC government in search of new "ideological breath", all the more so as this movement was on the rise at the global media level. We should note also that in this same context (in 2002) the ANC was campaigning for the re-election of its leaders, for whom it was then timely to show their closeness to the anti-globalisation movement. But this was not enough to restore the credibility of the ANC leaders with the South African masses. And for good reason…

A deeply corrupted ruling class coming from the "national liberation struggle"

Corruption, that other "supreme disease” of capitalism, is a characteristic widely shared among the ANC leaders. Certainly, the capitalist world is very rich in examples of corruption, so it may be useless to add this one. In fact, it is the opposite in that many are still those "believers" in "exemplary symbolic capital" and the "probity" of the old heroes of the national liberation struggle who are the leaders of the ANC.

By way of introduction we reproduce here a quote from an organ of the bourgeois press, namely Le Monde Diplomatique, one of the ANC’s greatest “old supporters”:

“The system of ‘legalised corruption’

Since the presidency of Mr. Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008), the collusion between the business world and the black ruling class is obvious. This mix of people finds its embodiment in the person of Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa, 60 years old, designated successor of Mr. Zuma, elected vice-president of the African National Congress in December 2012. On the eve of the massacre of Marikana (...), Mr. Ramaphosa sent an email message to Lonmin's management, advising it to resist the pressure of the strikers, who he called ‘criminals’.

A McDonald's South Africa owner and president of the MTN telecommunications company, among others, Mr. Ramaphosa is also the former secretary general of the ANC (1991-1997) and the National Union of Mineworkers (1982-1991). A central player in the negotiations for the democratic transition between 1991 and 1993, he was be ousted by Mr Mbeki from Nelson Mandela's succession race. In 1994, he returned to business, boss of New African Investment (NAIL), the first black company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and the first black billionaire of the ‘new’ South Africa. He now runs his own company, Shanduka, active in mining, agribusiness, insurance and real estate.

Among his brothers-in-law are Jeffrey Radebe, Minister of Justice, and Patrice Motsepe, mining tycoon, boss of African Rainbow Minerals (ARM). This had profited from Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) implemented by the ANC: supposed to profit the ‘historically disadvantaged’ masses, according to the ANC’s phraseology, this process of ‘the economic rise of the black people’ in fact favoured the consolidation of a bourgeoisie close to power. Mr. Moeletsi Mbeki, the youngest brother of the former head of state, academic and patron of the audiovisual production company Endemoi in South Africa, denounced a system of ‘widespread corruption’. It highlights the perverse effects of BEE: ‘cosmetic’ promotion of black directors fronting large white firms, huge salaries for limited competences, a sense of injustice among white professionals, some of whom prefer to emigrate.

If the adoption of a BEE charter in the mining sector, in 2002, put 26% in black hands, it also promoted a number of ANC barons to important leadership positions. Mr. Mann Dipico, former governor of North Cape Province, is vice-president of the De Beers diamond group's South African operations. BEE has also favoured the anti-apartheid elders, who have strengthened their position of influence in power. In 2009 Mr. Mosima (‘Tokyo’)) Sexwale, head of the Mvelaphanda mining group, took the leadership of the ministry of human settlements (slums).

As for Patrice Motsepe, he stands out in the 2012 Forbes List as the fourth richest man in South Africa ($2.7 billion). He did a great service to the ANC by announcing on January 30 the gift of half of his family assets (100 million euros) to a foundation that bears his name, to help the poor. Even if they do not emulate this, we cannot blame the black elite for not sharing its money".[10]

This is a ruthless description of the system of corruption instituted by the ANC leaders on their arrival at the South African post-apartheid summit of power. Clearly, like gangsters, it is a question of sharing the spoils that their former white rivals held exclusively under the old regime, distributing posts according to the balance of power and alliances within the ANC. As a result, the struggle for the "power of the black people" was very quickly forgotten in the race for posts that led to the "capitalist paradise", getting richer faster to become (symbolically) multimillionaires in a few short years. Like this former great trade union leader and prominent member of the ANC, Mister Ramaphosa:

"The black bourgeoisie lives far from townships, where it does not distribute its wealth, or very little. Its tastes for luxury and opulence came to the fore under the presidency of Mr. Mbeki (1999-2008), thanks to the growth of the 2000s. But since Mr. Zuma came to power in 2009, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the South African Council of Churches have not ceased to denounce a ‘moral decline’ much more serious than the exorbitant price of the sunglasses of those nicknamed the Gucci revolutionaries. ‘Relationships can be openly venal’, smiles a black business lawyer who prefers to remain anonymous. ‘We talk about sex at the table, and not just about our polygamous president! Corruption spreads ...’ So much so that when a former De Beer executive is accused of corruption by the press, he says: ‘You get nothing for mahala ... (You get nothing for nothing)”.[11]

It is amazing what this quote shows, notably the involvement of the successors to president Mandela, in the construction of the system of corruption under their respective reigns. But we also know that corruption in the ANC exists at all levels and in all places, giving rise to insidious and violent struggles, as in mafia gangs. Thus, Mbeki took advantage of his presidency of the state apparatus and the ANC to, by means of "low blows", oust his ex-rival Cyril Ramaphosa in 1990 and then sacked Zuma, his vice-president, sued for rape and corruption. Evidently these last two (while fighting each other) were able to reply by means as violent as they were obscure against their common rival. Zuma, who had the wit to pretend to be the victim of the umpteenth plot hatched by his predecessor Mbeki "known for his intrigues" (Le Monde Diplomatique). On the other hand, it is worth mentioning the characteristic act of violence that took place in December 2012 in Parliament, where, in the midst of preparations for their congress, ANC members came to blows to get their respective candidates passed by throwing chairs and exchanging punches.

And during all this time the "liberated people" of apartheid are immersed in misery and disease (for example one in four South Africans does not have enough to eat): “Meanwhile the level of despair is visible to the naked eye. In Khayelitsha, they drown their grief in gospel, a popular music that sounds everywhere, but also in dagga (cannabis), Mandrax or tik (methamphetamine), a drug that ravages the township.[12]

What a sad dive into the horror of a moribund economic system which plunges its people into the abyss with no way out!

AIDS comes in the midst of the misery and corruption of the ANC's power

Between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s the working class was not only battling against economic misery but also struggling against the AIDS epidemic. All the more so since the then head of government, Thabo Mbeki, had for a long time refused to recognize the reality of this disease, going so far as to cynically refuse to properly invest against its development.

“Another major element of the situation in South Africa since 2000 is precisely the proven and devastating spread, finally publicly recognized, of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. South Africa boasts the sad record as the most affected country in the world. In December 2006, the UNAIDS and WHO report indicated there were an estimated nearly 5.5 million HIV-positive people in South Africa, a rate of 18.8% among adults aged between 15 and 49 years and 35% among women - who are the most affected - seen in antenatal clinics. The total mortality in the country, from all causes, increased by 79% between 1997 and 2004, mainly because of the impact of the epidemic.

(...) Beyond this calamitous health check, AIDS has become one of the country's major problems. It decimates the population, leaves entire generations of children orphaned, but its impact is such that it also threatens the productivity and social equilibrium of the country. Indeed, the active population is the section most affected by the disease and the lack of income generated by the inability of an adult to work, even informally, sometimes plunges whole families into misery when survival depends sometimes only on these revenues. Social benefits are now granted by the state to families affected by the disease, but they remain insufficient(...) AIDS has indeed invaded all spheres of social life and the daily lives of everyone who is infected with the disease and/or affected by the death of a family member, a neighbour, a colleague...

(...) It seems to me that the closing of the negotiation sequence that was already taking shape in 1999, with the publication of the GEAR, was confirmed by Thabo Mbeki's denial of the link between HIV and AIDS in April 2000. Not so much because of the immense controversy that this statement has aroused in the country and around the world but for tackling the epidemic, which represented a major challenge for the construction of the country and its unity, marking that it was not, in his view, to be one of the main concerns of the state".[13]

As this quotation shows, on the one hand, the AIDS epidemic was (and continues to) wreak havoc in the ranks of the South African proletariat and in the (mostly poor) populations in general, and on the other, government officials did not care, or only partially, about the plight of the victims even though official reports (from the UN) amply illustrated the massive presence of the virus in the country. In fact, the Mbeki government was in denial in not even seeing that AIDS has now invaded all spheres of social life, including the daily life of the productive forces of the country, in this case the working class. But the most cynical in this case was the then health minister:

Faithful to then President Thabo Mbeki, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (...) has no intention of organizing the distribution of ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] in the public health sector. She argues that they are toxic, or that one can be healed by adopting a nutritious diet based on olive oil, garlic and lemon. The conflict ended in 2002 before the Constitutional Court: is the public hospital authorised to administer to HIV-positive mothers a nevirapine tablet that drastically reduces the risk of the child being infected during childbirth? The government is doomed. Other trials will follow, imposing in 2004 the start of a national treatment strategy."[14]

This is the abject attitude of an irresponsible government faced with the millions of AIDS victims left to their own devices, where it had to wait until the intervention of the Supreme Court to stop the criminal madness of the ANC and Mbeki government faced with the rapid development of AIDS, which has largely contributed to the fall in life expectancy from 48 in 2000 to 44 in 2008 (when infected patients died by the hundreds every day).

The decomposition of capitalism aggravates social violence

Readers of the ICC’s press know that our organization regularly deals with the effects of decomposition (the final phase of the decadence of capitalism) on all aspects of social life. These are manifested more bluntly in certain areas, especially the former "Third World" in which South Africa is located.

Despite its status as the continent's leading industrial power with relative economic development, South Africa is one of the countries in the world where you are more likely to die by homicide and where violent aggressions of all kinds are the daily lot of the populations and, of course, within the working class. For example, in 2008 South Africa experienced 18,148 murders, or a rate of 36.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, which puts the country in second place behind Honduras (with a rate of 61 per 100,000 inhabitants). In 2009, a study by the South African Council of Medical Research found that the rate of female homicides committed by male partners was five times higher than the global average.

The killings happen day and night in all places, at home, in the street, on transport, café terraces, sports grounds. Alongside the killings there is the explosion of other violence: incidents of sexual violence against women and children amounted to 50,265 in 2008.

The most sordid thing in this situation is undoubtedly the fact that the South African government turns out to be at best powerless and at worst indifferent or complicit when we know that members of its own police participate in this violence; in South Africa the police are as corrupt as the other institutions of the country and, as a result, many cops are implicated in the vicious killings. Indeed, when the police do not participate directly in the killings, they behave like gangs that racketeer and beat up people, so much so that the latter who suffer violence daily have little confidence in the police to protect them. As for the bourgeoisie meanwhile, many of its members prefer to be protected (in their well-barricaded houses) by heavily armed guards and other "security agents", whose numbers sources indicate today far exceed those of the national police.

The pogrom, epitome of violence

The pogrom, another barbaric aspect of social violence, has raised its head episodically in South Africa since 2008, and again very recently in 2019.

A wave of xenophobic violence has caused the deaths of ten immigrant workers in South Africa since September. A continental economic giant, the country is ravaged by inequality. Unemployment affects 40% of the working population and especially black people” (Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2019)

We know that the decomposition of the capitalist system encourages nihilism, undermines the spirit of human and class solidarity; and in these cases, we can consider that some victims of poverty can become the killers of their class brothers, thus becoming accomplices of their class enemy at the head of bourgeois power. The real responsibility for all this lies with the leaders of the ANC and their boss Cyril Ramaphosa, ex-president Zuma’s successor who was elected in February 2018 on the basis of untenable promises like “the fight against unemployment”, “a better life for all”, or “free schooling for poor families”. In fact, faced with the abominable murders of immigrants he first turned a blind eye and said nothing, before reacting hypocritically without accepting any responsibility for the massacres: “On Tuesday, the South African president, after an inexplicable silence, finally admitted that the attacks were an expression of what in current language in South Africa is termed ‘xenophobia’…but that according to him, South Africa ‘is not xenophobic’. Since the big upsurge in violence in 2008 (which accounted for 60 to 100 victims), an anti-foreign discourse, which seems to be a disturbing reflection of what comes out of the extreme right in Europe, with occasional borrowings from Donald Trump, has been circulating in the elite, and can’t fail to impregnate the poorest layers who are exposed to very difficult living conditions”(Le Monde, 5 September 2019)

And another press organ described more clearly the abject attitude of the “elites”, behind which lies the ANC: “The most widespread stereotypes about the migrants derive from official speeches which present them as criminals, as people who carry diseases and try to marry South Africans to get hold of immigration papers” (Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2018)

So we see very clearly that the ANC leaders in power describe black African immigrants in words very similar to those of the extreme right. The behaviour of the South African regime is all the more absurd when we know that the entire working class is the targeted here, because it has been drawn from many sources, including under apartheid. As in 2008, the pogromists are described by the media, randomly, as the "left-behind", "delinquents/traffickers", the "precarious/unemployed ...” In short, a mixture of the "declassed", "nihilists" and the simply frustrated, without hope and without proletarian consciousness. The pogroms of September 2019 inevitably draw comparisons with 2008. In June that year nearly one hundred immigrant workers died, victims of pogroms perpetrated by armed gangs in the slums of Johannesburg. Groups equipped with knives and firearms appeared at nightfall in dilapidated neighbourhoods looking for "foreigners" and began to beat, to kill, even burn alive the inhabitants and chase thousands more.

The first massacres took place in Alexandra, in a huge township (slum) located next to the business district of Johannesburg, the financial capital of South Africa. The xenophobic attacks spread gradually to the other localities of this region with the total indifference of the country’s authorities. Indeed, it took 15 days of killings for President Mbeki’s government to decide to react weakly (cynically in fact) by sending the police to intervene in certain areas while letting the massacres continue in others. Most of the victims were from neighbouring countries (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Congo, etc.). There are nearly 8 million immigrants of whom 5 million are Zimbabweans who work (or search for work) in South Africa, particularly in arduous jobs such as mining. Meanwhile others live precariously by starting businesses to survive. But what is more inhumanely terrible in this pogrom is the fact that many victims were there because they were starving in their countries of origin, as in the case of the Zimbabwean survivor quoted by the weekly Courrier international:

“We are starving and our neighbours are our only hope. (...) There is no point in working in Zimbabwe. You do not even earn enough to stay in the worst suburbs of Harare (the capital). (...) We are willing to take risks in South Africa; this is our life now (...) But if we don’t do it, we will still die. Bread today costs 400 million Zimbabwean dollars (0.44 euros) and one kilo of meat 2 billion (2.21 euros). There is nothing more than more than porridge in the shops, and the people who work cannot live on their wages". [15]

Faced with the horrible murders in 2008 and 2019, the ANC leaders use the same criminal methods against the working class

The importance of the imperialist factor in the situation

The other factor weighing on the budgets of these two states is their leaders’ search for imperialist influence. Moreover, if we talk about the "imperialist question” here, it is above all its effects on the relations between the classes, where the bourgeoisie subjects the working class to an economic war effort at home and to killings abroad. To be clear, the South African and Zimbabwean governments compete with the imperialist powers (large and small) who seek to control the regions of Southern Africa and the Great Lakes, by proclaiming themselves "local gendarmes". Thus, these two were massively involved in the wars that ravaged this area in 1990-2000 which caused more than 8 million deaths. It is with this in mind that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe embarked on a decade-long war in the DRC (ex- Zaire), where he dispatched some 15,000 men at an exorbitant economic cost estimated at 1 million dollars a day (representing over 5.5% of annual GDP). This disastrous military adventure was undoubtedly an accelerator of the total ruin of the economy of Zimbabwe, a country that until the 1990s was considered the "breadbasket" of Southern Africa. Moreover, among the causes of the deteriorating economic situation in Zimbabwe we must also emphasize the total embargo imposed by the western imperialist powers against the “dictatorial regime" of Robert Mugabe (who died in 2019). Indeed, he refused to comply with the Western "democratic governance model" by doing everything to cling to the power he had held between 1984 and 2017, when he was “deposed” and replaced by his former right-hand man Emmerson Mnangagwa. And the latter proved himself a worthy heir of Mugabe, wasting no time in carrying out the repressive role of his predecessor against recent movements of struggle against endemic poverty.  

Regarding the specific role of South Africa in the imperialist wars in Africa we refer readers to the International Review nos. 155 and 157. But let us point out that before they came to power, Mandela and his companions were already fully involved in imperialist struggles for influence and then continued, for example, going as far as to dispute with France, in 1990-2000, its influence in Central Africa in the Great Lakes region.

The return of strikes and other social movements

One of the major characteristics of South Africa since the apartheid era is that, when there are no strikes, social tensions give rise to protests, sometimes to other types of violent clashes. For example, according to police data, the country experienced three riots per day on average between 2009 and 2012. And according to a South African researcher quoted by Le Monde Diplomatique[16], this is an increase of 40% compared to the period 2004-2009.This situation is probably related to the violent relations that already existed between the colonial empires and the population of this country, well before the official establishment of apartheid, when successive leaders at the head of the South African state always resorted to violence to impose their order – bourgeois order of course[17]. This is amply proven throughout the history of the class struggle in South Africa, in the era of industrial capitalism. Indeed, the working class saw its first deaths (4 miners of British origin) when it launched its first strike at Kimberley, the "diamond capital", in 1884.

For its part, the population, in this case the black majority of the working class, has always been forced to use violence, especially during apartheid, where its human dignity was simply denied on the historical pretext that it belonged to an "inferior race". Thus, in the light of all these factors, we can speak of a "culture of violence" as a component of the relations between the bourgeoisie and the working class in South Africa. And the phenomenon persists and grows today, that is to say under the rule of the ANC.

Bloody repression of the strike at Marikana in 2012

This movement was preceded by more or less significant strikes, such as that of 2010, by the workers responsible for building the stadiums to host the World Cup that year. A strike was launched by the unions in that sector threatening not to complete the work before the official start of the competition. With this "union blackmail", the striking workers were able to obtain substantial salary increases of 13% to 16%. There was strong discontent throughout the country over the deteriorating living conditions of the population and it is in this context, two years after the final whistle of the World Cup, that the strike erupted in Marikana. From August 10, 2012, the employees of the Marikana pits went on strike to support the lowest paid workers by demanding that the minimum wage be raised to 1250 euros, a demand rejected by the mining employers and the NUM (the largest of the unions affiliated to COSATU).

"The social tension was palpable since, on August 16, 2012, police killed thirty-four miners (and wounded seventy-eight) on strike in Marikana, a platinum mine near Johannesburg. For the population, what a symbol! The forces of a democratic and multiracial state, led since 1994 by the African National Congress (ANC), fired on demonstrators, as in the days of apartheid; on these workers who constitute its electoral base, the overwhelming black and poor majority of South Africa. In this industrialised country, the only emerging market south of the Sahara, poor households, 62% black and 33% Métis, represent more than twenty-five million people, or half of the country's population, according to figures published at the end of November by the national institutions.

The shock wave is comparable to that of the Sharpeville Massacre, whose memory events in Marikana have awakened. On 21 March 1960, the apartheid regime's police (1948-1991) killed sixty-nine protesters protesting in a township against the pass imposed on "non-whites" to go to the city. When the news of the tragedy arrived in Cape Town, the people of Langa, a black township, reduced the public buildings to ashes.

The same chain reactions occur today. In the wake of Marikana, employees in the mining, transport and agriculture sectors are multiplying wildcat strikes. (...) Result: vineyards burned, shops looted and showdowns with the police. All against a background of the strikers’ dismissal. (...) At Lonmin, the miners won, after six weeks of action, an increase of 22% and a premium of 190 euros.

(...) Today, the black unions, with more than two million members, demand from the government a real social policy and better working conditions for all. But – a South African peculiarity here - they are ... in power. With the South African Communist Party and the ANC, since 1990 they have constituted a "revolutionary" tripartite alliance that is supposed to work for the transformation of society. Communists and trade unionists represent the left wing of the ANC, which the party is trying to restrain by distributing power. Communist leaders regularly hold ministerial positions, while those of Cosatu sit on the National Executive Committee of the ANC. Their challenge to the ANC’s liberal management of the economy ANC loses credibility.

(...) For the first time, in Marikana, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), affiliated to Cosatu and among the largest in the country, has been overwhelmed by social conflict. (For a contractor), ‘The politicization of social conflicts, which involve the questioning of the ANC or its leaders, scares the big mining groups.’" [18]

In the tragic events of Marikana we once again witnessed a real class confrontation between the new bourgeoisie in power and the South African working class. Already, without causing much noise, during a strike in 1998-99 the government of Mandela himself had massacred a dozen workers. But the tragedy of Marikana is unprecedented and rich in lessons that we will probably not be able to draw within the framework of this article. But we can say from the outset that the miners who died or were wounded in rising up against the misery imposed by their class enemy deserve a great tribute and salute from their class brothers and sisters everywhere. Especially since at the end of the day none of the perpetrators of this slaughter were sentenced and the ANC president, Jacob Zuma, simply appointed a commission of inquiry that waited two years to make its report that (cynically) simply advocated: "A criminal investigation under the direction of the prosecution against the police" which "points out the responsibilities of Lonmin. On the other hand, it exempts the political leaders of the time".[19]

This conflict shows us the profound and definitive anchoring of the ANC in the camp of the South African national capital, not only at the level of the state apparatus, but also its individual members. Thus, it has previously been shown (see above) that many ANC leaders are at the head of large fortunes or successful businesses. In the course of the Marikana movement, the miners had to face the interests of big bosses including Doduzane Zuma (son of the current South African head of state), the head of "JLC Mining Services", which is very active in this sector. From then on we can understand better why this boss and company categorically rejected accepting the merits of the strikers’ demands by counting first on the police repression and the sabotaging work of unions close to the ANC to overcome the strike.In this conflict we could see the abject and totally hypocritical behaviour of COSATU and the Communist Party, pretending to "support" the strike movement, even as the government of which they are decisive members launched its bloodthirsty dogs on the strikers. In reality, the government's left was preoccupied above all by the eruption into the movement of a radicalised minority of its union base tending to escape its control:

"President Jacob Zuma did not move until a few days after the events. And he did not meet the miners, but the leadership of Lonmin. His political foe, 31-year-old Julius Malema, former president of the ANC Youth League, who was expelled from the party in April for ‘indiscipline’, took the opportunity to occupy the field. Becoming the spokesman of the disappointed base, he sided with the strikers. He accompanied them to court, where they were initially themselves charged with murder under a former apartheid riot law. This law allowed it to return a charge of murder against simple protesters, accusing them of having provoked the security forces. In the face of the outcry, the charge against two hundred and seventy miners was finally lifted and a commission of inquiry appointed. Mr Malema took this opportunity to call yet again for the nationalisation of mines and to denounce collusion between the regime, the black bourgeoisie, unions and ‘big capital’".[20]

Clearly, on one side, we see President Zuma acting without mercy against the strikers, even avoiding meeting them; on the other side, we see this young Malema take advantage of his exclusion from the ANC to present an ultra-radical image with the sole purpose of recuperating the workers outraged and revolted by the attitude of the government forces in this conflict. To do this he pushed for the creation of a new miners' union in radical opposition to the NUM (which is linked to the regime). This explains the highly manoeuvrable and acrobatic attitude of the left wing of the ANC, which simultaneously wanted to assume its governmental responsibilities and preserve its credibility with unionised strikers, particularly its militant base. Fundamentally, this was a division of labour between the leaders of the ANC in order to break the movement in case the deaths would not be enough.

What about the symbolic aspect of this slaughter? Indeed, as noted in the quote above, what a symbol for the population! The forces of a democratic and multiracial state fired on protesters just like in the time of apartheid! As this witness (obviously a survivor of the carnage) describes:

"I remember one of our guys told us: ‘Let’s go’ by raising his arms in the air, says a witness. A bullet hit him in two fingers. He was hurt. Then he got up and said, ‘Men, let's go’. A second time, the cops hit him in the chest, and he fell to his knees. He tried to get up again, and a third bullet hit him in the side. Then, he collapsed, but he was still trying to move ... The man just behind him, who wanted to surrender too, then took a bullet in the head, and collapsed next to the other guy."[21]

Here it is, the ANC police, facing the working class in struggle, adopting the same method, the same cruelty, as the apartheid regime. Of course, the gangster Zuma has now been replaced by his rival Ramaphosa, but the same anti-working class policies of the ANC continue.

For us, marxist revolutionaries, what the behaviour of the present-day South African leaders in this butchery ultimately shows is that before being black-white-yellow ... the oppressors of the strikers are above all capitalist barbarians defending the interests of the dominant class, and this is why Mandela and his companions were put at the head of the South African state by all the representatives of big capital in the country. One can equally see in this tragic event for the working class another far more symbolic aspect in the former apartheid country: the fact that the police chief who led the bloody operations against the strikers was a black woman. This shows us, once again, that the real divide is not race or gender but class, between the working class (of all colours) and the bourgeois class. And this is true despite all those who claimed (or still believe!) that the leaders of the ANC (Mandela included) would defend the same interests as the (black) South African working class.

As for the latter, it must know that before and after the tragedy of Marikana, it always faces the same enemy, namely the bourgeois class which exploits, beats it and does not hesitate to assassinate it. That's what the current leaders of the ANC do, and that's what Nelson Mandela did when he governed the country himself. Although the latter died in 2014, his legacy is assured and assumed by his successors. Until his death, Mandela was the reference point and the political and "moral" authority of the ANC leaders; likewise he was the icon of all the capitalist regimes on the planet who, moreover, honoured him by awarding him the "Nobel Peace Prize", in addition to other titles like "hero of the anti-apartheid struggle and man of peace and reconciliation of the peoples of South Africa". Consequently, it was this capitalist world (from the representative of North Korea to the President of the United States through the representative of the Vatican) which was present at his funeral to pay him a final tribute for "services rendered".

We now come to the end not only of this article, but also of the series of four articles. It is now necessary to conclude what we wanted to be a "contribution to a history of the workers’ movement".

What balance sheet to draw?

Given the breadth of the questions posed, at least one additional article would be needed to draw all the necessary lessons. We will limit ourselves here to succinctly expounding only a few elements of a balance sheet by trying to highlight the most important.

The starting question was: is there a history of class struggles in South Africa? We think we have highlighted this by delving into the history of capitalism in general and that of South African capitalism in particular. To do this, we immediately sought enlightenment from the revolutionary marxist Rosa Luxemburg on the conditions for the birth of South African capitalism (see The Accumulation of Capital), and for the rest we relied for sources on various researchers whose work seems consistent and credible. Capitalism did indeed exist in South Africa as early as the 19th century, and it engendered two historical classes, namely the bourgeoisie and the working class, which have never ceased to clash for more than a century. The problem is that since then we never heard of class struggles, especially because of the monstrous system of apartheid against which Nelson Mandela and his companions fought in the name of the "struggle for national liberation". As we wrote in the first article in the series: "Mandela’s media image veils everything else to the point where the history and struggles of the South African working class before and during apartheid are either completely ignored or distorted by being systematically categorised under the rubric of ‘anti-apartheid struggles’ or ‘national liberation struggles’".[22]

Readers who have read this entire contribution can see the glaring reality of real class struggles and of many victorious or glorious struggles of the working class in South Africa. In this sense we want to focus more particularly on two highlights of the class struggle led by the South African proletariat: on the one hand, during and against the First World War and, on the other, its decisive struggles at the time of the international recovery of the class struggle in the 1960s-70s, after the long period of counter-revolution.

In the first case, as soon as the 1914-18 war broke out, a minority of the working class showed its internationalist spirit by agitating and calling for opposition to this slaughter:

“(...) In 1917, a poster appears on the walls of Johannesburg, convening a meeting for July 19: ‘Come and discuss issues of common interest between white and indigenous workers.’ This text is published by the International Socialist League (ISL), a revolutionary syndicalist organization influenced by the American IWW (...) and formed in 1915 in opposition to the First World War and the racist and conservative policies of the South African Labour Party and craft unions.”[23]

This was an exemplary act of class solidarity in the face of the world's first butchery. This proletarian and internationalist gesture is all the stronger when we also know that this same minority was at the origin of the creation of the truly internationalist Communist Party of South Africa before it was definitively "Stalinised" at the end of the 1920s.

In the second case, the massive struggles in the 1970s and 80s undermined the apartheid system, culminating in the Soweto movement of 1976: “The events of Soweto in June 1976 were to confirm the political change underway in the country. The youth revolt in the Transvaal combined with the rebirth of the black workers’ movement to unleash the major social and political movements of the 1980s. After the strikes of 1973, the clashes of 1976 ended the period of defeat.[24]

At a given moment, the level of combativeness and working class consciousness had "tipped the scales" of the balance of forces between the two historical classes. And the bourgeoisie took note of this when it decided to dismantle the system of apartheid, resulting in the reunification of all factions of capital in order to cope with the resurgence of working class struggle. Very concretely, to reach this stage of development of its combativity and class consciousness, the working class had to take control of its struggles by, for example, setting up hundreds of struggle committees (the “civics”) to express its unity and its class solidarity during the struggle, to a large extent going beyond the "racial question". These civics, a high-level expression of the Soweto movement, were the culmination of a process of maturation begun in the wake of the massive struggles of the years 1973-74.

To cope with this magnificent workers’ struggle, the bourgeoisie, was able to rely in particular on the formidable weapon of "base unionism", without ever forgetting for a moment its repressive arsenal.

Although geographically removed from the most experienced and concentrated battalions of the world proletariat in the old capitalist countries, the South African proletariat has demonstrated, in practice, its ability to assume a very important role in the path to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism. Certainly, we know that the path will be long and chaotic, and with enormous difficulties. But there is no other.

Lassou (October 2019)

 

1. See "From the Soweto Movement of 1976 to the coming to power of the ANC in 1993” in International Review No. 158.

2. These were in particular members of COSATU, which came out of the Federation of South African Trade Unions, as we can see in IR 158: “FOSATU made use of its ‘genius’ for organising, to the point of being simultaneously heard by both the exploited and the exploiter in order to astutely ‘manage’ the conflicts between the two antagonists – which meant, in the final analysis, serving the bourgeoisie…At the beginning of the 80s, the union current developed an original union project, with the idea of being explicitly independent from the main political forces; it was formed around networks of intellectuals and students…presenting itself as a ‘union left’ and ‘political left’, and a number of its leaders were influenced by the ideology of Trotskyism and critical Stalinism”

3. Judith Hayem, La figure ouvrière en Afrique du Sud, Editions Karthala, 2008, Paris. According to her editor, Judith Hayem "is an anthropologist, lecturer at the University of Lille 1 and a member of CLERSE-CNRS. Specializing in labor issues, she carried out factory surveys in South Africa, but also in England, the United States and France. Since 2001, she has continued her research in South Africa around mobilisations for access to HIV/ IDS care in the mines”.

4. Moreover, 10 years after this episode the various components of the ANC are still together at the head of the South African government, at least as we write these lines in autumn 2017.

5. Our emphasis. In a footnote the cited author specifies the number of victims in these terms: “it is estimated that 11 to 12 people lost their lives, and that many others, strikers or non-strikers, and replacement workers were wounded". And all without any comment, as if the author sought to downplay the importance of the massacre or to preserve the image of Chief Officer Mandela, "the icon of the Democrats".

6. Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

7. Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

8. Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

9. Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

10. Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2013.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

14. Manière de voir, supplement to Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2015.

15. Courrier International, May 29, 2008.

16. Ibid

17. See the article “A history of class struggle in South Africa” in International Review, No. 154, which shows (among other examples) that in order to overcome a miners' strike in 1922 the South African government decreed martial law and brought together some 60,000,000 men equipped with machine guns, cannons, tanks and even aircraft. In the end, 200 workers were killed and thousands more wounded or imprisoned.

18. Le Monde Diplomatique, Ibid.

19. Manière de voir, Ibid.

20. Le Monde Diplomatique, Ibid.

21. Manière de voir, Ibid.

22. See International Review, No. 154

23. Ibid.

24. See International Review No. 158.

 

Rubric: 

Contribution to a history of the workers’ movement in South Africa (iv)

International Review 163 - Winter 2019

Nuevo Curso and the “Spanish Communist Left”: What are the origins of the Communist Left?

Introduction

The communist revolution can only be victorious if the proletariat arms itself with a political party of the vanguard able to take up its responsibilities, as the Bolshevik party was able to do in the first revolutionary attempt in 1917. History has shown how difficult it is to construct such a party. It is a task which demands numerous and diverse efforts. It demands, above all, considerable clarity around programmatic questions and the principles of organisational functioning, a clarity which is necessarily based on the entirety of the past experience of the workers’ movement and its political organisations.

At each step in the history of this movement, certain currents have stood out as the best expressions of this clarity, as the ones which have been able to make a decisive contribution to the future of the struggle. This has been the case with the marxist current ever since 1848, a time when large sectors of the proletariat were still heavily influenced by the petty bourgeoisie conceptions that were vigorously combated in chapter three of the Communist Manifesto, “Socialist and Communist Literature”. It was even more the case within the International Workingmen’s Association founded in 1864:

“But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans in Germany.

Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion… And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864... In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all countries” (Engels, Preface to the 1888 English edition of the Manifesto).

It was finally within the Second International, founded in 1889, that the marxist current became hegemonic thanks in particular to the influence of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. And it was in the name of marxism that Rosa Luxemburg in particular engaged in the fight against the opportunism which, from the end of the 19th century, was gaining ground in this party and the whole of the International. It was equally in the name of marxism that the internationalists during the First World War waged the struggle against the betrayal of the majority of the Socialist parties, and that, under the impulsion of the Bolsheviks, they founded the Third, Communist International in 1919. And when the latter, following the failure of the world revolution and the isolation of the revolution in Russia, in turn followed a path of opportunist degeneration, it was once again the marxist current of the communist left – represented notably by the Italian and Dutch-German lefts - which led the battle against this degeneration. Like the majority of the parties of the Second International those of the Third ended up, with the triumph of Stalinism, going over to the camp of the capitalist enemy. This treason, this submission of the Communist parties to the imperialist diplomacy of the USSR, provoked many reactions alongside those of the communist left. Some of them were led to a “critical” return into the fold of social democracy. Others tried to remain in the camp of the proletariat and the communist revolution, as was the case, after 1926, with the Left Opposition animated by Trotsky, one of the great names of the October 1917 revolution and the foundation of the Communist International.

The world communist party which will be at the head of the proletarian revolution of the future will have to base itself on the experience and reflection of the left currents which detached themselves from the degenerating Communist International. Each of these different currents drew their own lessons from this historic experience. And these lessons are not all equivalent. Thus there are profound differences between the analyses and politics of the left communist currents which were formed right at the beginning of the 1920s and the “Trotskyist” current which appeared much later and which, while situating itself on a proletarian terrain, was from the start strongly marked by opportunism. It is obviously not by chance that the Trotskyist current joined the bourgeois camp faced with the test of the Second World War whereas the currents of the communist left remained loyal to internationalism.

Thus the future world party, if it is to make a real contribution to the communist revolution, can’t take up the heritage of the Left Opposition. It will have to base its programme and its methods of action on the experience of the communist left. There are disagreements among the existing groups who have come out of this tradition, and it is their responsibility to continue confronting these political disagreements so that the new generations can better understand their origins and significance. This is the sense of the polemics which we have already published with the Internationalist Communist Tendency and the Bordigist groups. That said, beyond these divergences, there exists a common heritage of the communist left which distinguishes it from other left currents which came out of the Communist International. Because of this, anyone who claims to belong to the communist left has the responsibility to know and to make known the history of this component of the workers’ movement, its origins in reaction to the degeneration of the parties of the Communist International, and the different branches which compose it (the Italian left, the German-Dutch left etc). It is above all important to draw out very precisely the historic contours of the communist left and the differences which separate it from other left currents of the past, notably the Trotskyist current. This is the object of the present article.

******

On the blog Nuevo Curso we can read an article that tries to explain the origins of the Communist Left[1]: "We call the Communist Left the internationalist movement that began fighting against the degeneration of the Third International, seeking to correct the errors inherited from the past reflected in its programme, starting from 1928 faced with the triumph of Thermidor[2] in Russia and the counter-revolutionary role of the International and the Stalinist parties"[3].

What does this mean, exactly? That the Communist Left began its struggle in 1928? If that is what New Course thinks, it is wrong since the Communist Left arose in response to the degeneration of the Communist International as early as 1920-21, at the Second and Third Congresses of the International. In that agitated period where the last possibilities of the world proletarian revolution were being played out, groups, nuclei, of the Communist Left in Italy, Holland, Germany, Russia itself and later in France and other countries, carried out a fight against the opportunism that was corroding the revolutionary body of the Third International to its very roots [4]. Two of the expressions of this Communist Left expressed themselves very clearly at the Third Congress of the CI (1921), carrying out a severe but fraternal criticism of the positions adopted by the International:

 "It was in the 3rd Congress of the CI those that Lenin called ‘leftists’, regrouped in the KAPD, stood up against the return to parliamentarism, to trade unionism, and showed how these positions went against those adopted in the First Congress, which had tried to draw out the implications for the struggle of the proletariat of the new period opened by the First World War.

It was also in this Congress that the Italian Left, which led the Communist Party of Italy, reacted vigorously - although in deep disagreement with the KAPD - against the unprincipled policy of alliance with the ‘centrists’ and the disfiguring of the CPs by the mass entry of fractions exiting social democracy”[5].

In the Bolshevik Party itself "from 1918, the ‘Left Communists’ Bukharin and Ossinsky, had begun to warn the party against the danger of carrying out a policy of state capitalism. Three years later, after having been excluded from the Bolshevik party, Miasnikov's ‘Workers’ Group’ continued the struggle underground in close relationship with the KAPD and the Bulgarian Communist Workers’ Party until 1924 when it disappeared under the repeated blows of state repression. This group criticised the Bolshevik party for sacrificing the interests of the world revolution for the sake of defending the Russian state, reaffirming that only the world revolution could allow the revolution to survive in Russia” (ibid).

Thus the different currents of what became the Communist Left had been seeking a profound programmatic alternative - even though still in the process of elaboration - to the degeneration of the International in 1920-21. They made mistakes, as they were often groping in the dark in the face of major historical problems. However, for Nuevo Curso "it can be said that the historical time of the Communist Left ended in the decade between 1943 and 1953 when the main currents that had maintained an internationalist praxis within the Fourth International denounced the betrayal of internationalism and elaborated a new platform that started with the denunciation of Stalinist Russia as a capitalist, imperialist state".

This passage tells us, on the one hand, that the Fourth International was the home of groups with "an internationalist praxis", and, on the other hand, that after 1953 "the historical time of the Communist Left ended in the decade between 1943 and 1953". Let us examine these assertions.

What was the IVth International and what was the contribution of its nucleus, the Left Opposition?

The Fourth International was constituted in 1938 on the basis of the Left Opposition whose initial origins lie in Russia with the Manifesto of the 46 in October 1923, to which Trotsky adhered and, at an international level, in the appearance of groups, individuals and tendencies that from 1925-26 tried to oppose the increasingly overwhelming triumph of Stalinism in the Communist Parties.

These oppositions expressed an undoubted proletarian reaction. However, this reaction was confused, weak and contradictory. It expressed a superficial rejection of the rise of Stalinism. The Opposition in the USSR, despite its heroic battles, "showed itself incapable of understanding the real nature of the phenomena of Stalinism and bureaucratisation, a prisoner of its illusions about the nature of the Russian state. It also became the champion of state capitalism, which it wanted to promote through an accelerated industrialisation. When it fought against the theory of socialism in one country, it did not manage to break with the ambiguities of the Bolshevik party on the defence of the ‘Soviet fatherland’. And its members, Trotsky at the head, presented themselves as the best supporters of the ‘revolutionary’ defence of the ‘Soviet fatherland’. It conceived itself not as a revolutionary fraction seeking to safeguard theoretically and organisationally the great lessons of the October Revolution, but only as a loyal opposition to the Russian Communist Party”. This led it towards all kinds of ‘unprincipled alliances’ (thus Trotsky sought the support of Zinoviev and Kamenev who hadn't stopped slandering him since 1923)”[6] (ibid.).

As for the International Left Opposition, “it laid claim to the first four congresses of the CI. At the same time, it perpetuated the practice of maneuvres that already characterised the Left Opposition in Russia. To a large extent this opposition was an unprincipled regroupment that was limited to making a ‘left’ critique of Stalinism. All true political clarification was forbidden in its ranks and it was left to Trotsky, regarded as the very symbol of the October Revolution, to act as the spokesman and ‘theoretician’" (ibid).

With these fragile foundations, the Left Opposition founded in 1938 was a "Fourth International" born dead to the working class. Already in the 1930s, the Opposition had been unable to "resist the effects of the counterrevolution that was developing on a world scale on the basis of the defeat of the international proletariat" (ibid) because throughout the different localised wars that were preparing the holocaust of the Second World War, the Opposition developed a "tactical perspective" “of supporting one imperialist camp against another (without openly admitting it).” This tactic “was put into practice by Trotskyism under multiple guises in the 1930s: support for ‘colonial resistance’ in Ethiopia, China and Mexico, support for republican Spain, etc. Trotskyism's support for Russian imperialism's war preparations was equally clear throughout this period (Poland, Finland 1939), concealed behind the slogan ‘defence of the Soviet fatherland’[7]. This, together with the tactic of entryism in the Socialist parties (decided in 1934), ensured that "the political programme adopted in the founding congress of the IVth International, written by Trotsky himself, took up and aggravated the orientations that preceded that congress (defense of the USSR, workers’ united front, erroneous analysis of the period ...) but also had as its axis a repetition of the minimum program of a social democratic type (‘transitional’ demands), a programme rendered obsolete by the impossibility of reforms since the entry of capitalism in its phase of decadence, of historical decline" (op cit note 4). The IVth International defended "participation in the trade unions, critical support for the so-called ‘workers’’ parties, ‘united fronts’ and ‘anti-fascist fronts’, ‘workers’ and peasants’ governments’ and, prisoner of the experience in the USSR, state capitalist measures: the expropriation of private banks, the nationalisation of the credit system, the expropriation of certain branches of industry (...) and the defence of the degenerated Russian workers’ state. And at the political level, it envisaged the democratic and bourgeois revolution in the oppressed nations taking place through the struggle for national liberation". This nakedly opportunist programme prepared the way for the betrayal of the Trotskyist parties through the defence of their respective nation states in 1939-41.[8]  Only a few individuals, and in no way "currents with an internationalist praxis" as Nuevo Curso claims, tried to resist this reactionary course! Among them Natalia Sedova, Trotsky's widow, who broke in 1951, and especially Munis, whom we will talk about below.

The continuity of the Communist Left, a programmatic and organisational continuity

It is therefore necessary to understand that the struggle to elaborate a programmatic framework that serves the development of proletarian consciousness and prepares the premises for the formation of the world party is not the task of unconnected personalities and circles, but the fruit of an organised, collective struggle that forms part of the critical historical continuity of communist organisations. That continuity passes, as we affirm in our Basic Positions, through “the successive contributions of the Communist League of Marx and Engels (1847-52), the three Internationals (the International Workingmen’s Association, 1864-72, the Socialist International, 1889-1914, the Communist International, 1919-28), the left fractions which detached themselves from the degenerating Third International in the years 1920-30, in particular the German, Dutch and Italian Lefts”[9].

We have already seen that this continuity could not pass down either from the Left Opposition or from the Fourth International[10] Only the Communist Left could do it. But according to Nuevo Curso, "the historical time of the Communist Left ended in the decade between 1943 and 1953”. They give no explanation for this, but in their article they add another sentence: "The Communist Left who were left out of the international regroupment – the Italians and their French derivatives – would arrive, although not all of them, not completely and not always on coherent positions, at a similar picture in the same period".

This passage contains numerous "enigmas". To begin with, which are the groups of the Communist Left that were left out of the "international regroupment"? What international regroupment is meant here? Of course, Bilan and the other currents of the Communist Left rejected the illusion of "going towards a Fourth International"[11]. However, from 1929 they did everything possible to argue with the Left Opposition, recognising that it was a proletarian current, albeit gangrened by opportunism. However, Trotsky obstinately rejected any debate[12]; only some currents such as the League of Internationalist Communists of Belgium or the Marxist Group of Mexico accepted the debate and this brought an evolution that led them to break with Trotskyism[13]

Nuevo Curso tells us that those groups that remained "on the margin of the international regroupment "would arrive, although not all of them, not completely and not always on coherent positions, at a similar picture in the same period". What did they "lack"? Where were they "incoherent"? Nuevo Curso does not clarify anything. We are going to demonstrate, using a table that we put together in an article entitled What are the differences between the Communist Left and the Fourth International[14]In the same way, these groups had positions consistent with the programme of the proletariat and were in no way "similar" to the opportunist mire of the Opposition and the groups who had a so-called "internationalist praxis" in the Fourth International:

COMMUNIST LEFT

LEFT OPPOSITION

Based on the First Congress of the CI and critically considers the contributions of the Second. Rejects most of the positions of the Third and Fourth Congresses

Based on the first 4 Congresses without critical analysis

Looks critically at what is happening in Russia and comes to the conclusion that the USSR should not be supported as it has fallen into the hands of world capitalism.

Views Russia as a degenerated workers’ state that must be supported in spite of everything

Refuses to work in the trade unions (German-Dutch Communist Left) and will end up coming to the conclusion that they have become organs of the state.

Recommends trade unions as workers' bodies and considers it necessary to work within them

Denounces national liberation

Supports national liberation

Denounces parliamentarism and participation in elections

Supports participation in elections and "revolutionary parliamentarism."

Undertakes the work of a Fraction to draw lessons from the defeat and lay the foundations for a future reconstitution of the World Party of the proletariat.

 Undertakes "opposition" work that could even lead to entryism in the social democratic parties.

During the 1930s, and especially through Bilan, considers that the world was on course for the Second World War; that the party could not be formed under such conditions, but that lessons had to be learnt and the future prepared. That is why Bilan proclaims: "The watchword of the hour is not to betray".

 

In the midst of the counterrevolution, Trotsky believes that the conditions for forming the party have been met and in 1938 the Fourth International is constituted.

Denounces World War II; condemns both sides in the conflict and advocates world proletarian revolution

Calls on workers to choose sides among the World War II contenders, thus abandoning internationalism

We add to the above table a point that seems to us to be very important in order to really contribute to the proletarian struggle and to advance towards the world party of revolution: While the Communist Left carried out an organised, collective and centralised work, based on loyalty to the organisational principles of the proletariat and on the historical continuity of its class positions, the Left Opposition was an agglomeration of heterogeneous personalities, circles and groups, united only by the charisma of Trotsky who was entrusted with the work of "political elaboration".

To top it all off, Nuevo Curso puts the Communist Left and the communisers (a modernist movement radically alien to marxism) in the same bag: "So-called ‘left communism’ is a concept that encompasses the Communist Left -especially the Italian and German-Dutch currents-, the groups and tendencies that give it continuity, from ‘Councilism’ to ‘Bordigism’ and the thinkers of ‘communisation’”. And because an image is worth a thousand words, they place a photo of Amadeo Bordiga[15] in the middle of the denunciation of the "communisers," which implies that the Communist Left is linked to them or shares positions with them.

Munis and a so-called "Spanish Communist Left"

Thus, according to Nuevo Curso, revolutionaries today don’t have to look for the bases of their activity in the groups of the Communist Left (the ICT, the ICC, etc.) but in what might have come out of the programme of capitulation to capitalism elaborated by the Fourth International and concretely, as we will see below, of the work of the revolutionary Munis. However, in a confusing and convoluted way, Nuevo Curso implies, without stating it clearly, that Munis is the most important link in a supposed "Spanish Communist Left", a current that according to Nuevo Curso "founded the Spanish Communist Party in 1920 and created the Spanish group of the Left Opposition to Stalinism in 1930, then the Communist Left of Spain, participating in the foundation of the International Opposition and also serving as a seed and reference point for the communist lefts in Argentina (1933-43) and Uruguay (1937-43). It took up a revolutionary position on the workers' insurrection of July 19, 1936 and was the only marxist tendency to take part in the revolutionary insurrection of 1937 in Barcelona. It denounced the betrayal of internationalism and the consequent departure from the class terrain in the Second Congress of the Fourth International (1948), leading a split by the remaining internationalist elements and the formation of the ‘International Workers Union’.”

Before going on to analyse Munis' contribution, let’s analyse the supposed "continuity" between 1920 and 1948.

We cannot now enter into an analysis of the origins of the Communist Party in Spain (PCE). From 1918 on, there were some small nuclei interested in the positions of Gorter and Pannekoek, who ended up discussing with the Amsterdam Bureau of the Third International which grouped together the Left groups within the Third International. From these nuclei the first Communist Party of Spain was born, but they were forced by the CI to merge with the centrist wing of the PSOE, which was in favour of adhering to the Third International. As soon as possible we will make a study of the origins of the PCE, but what is clear is that, beyond some ideas and an unquestionable combativity, these nuclei did not constitute a real organ of the Communist Left and did not have any continuity. Later, Left Opposition groups emerged and indeed took the name "Communist Left of Spain," led by Nin. This group was divided between supporters of merging with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (a Catalan nationalist group linked to the right opposition against Stalinism, a tendency which in Russia was headed by Bukharin) and those who advocated entryism in the PSOE, seduced by the radicalisation of Largo Caballero (former state adviser to the dictator Primo de Rivera) who had begun posing as the "Spanish Lenin". Munis was among the latter, while the majority, led by Nin, would merge with the Bloc to form the POUM in 1935. Thus of the "Communist Left" they had nothing more than the name they gave themselves to be "original", but the content of their positions and of their actions was indistinguishable from the prevailing opportunist tendency in the Left Opposition.

As for the existence of a Communist Left in Uruguay and Argentina, we have studied the articles published by Nuevo Curso to prove its existence. As far as Uruguay is concerned, it was the Bolshevik Leninists that was one of the rare groups that, within Trotskyism, took an internationalist position against World War II. This has much merit and we salute it warmly as the expression of a proletarian effort, but reading the Nuevo Curso article shows that this group could barely carry out an organised activity and moved in a political environment dominated by the Peruvian APRA, a bourgeois party from head to toe that flirted with the already degenerated Communist International: "We know that the League met with the ‘antidefensistas’ in Lima in 1942 at the home of the founder of the APRA, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, only to verify the profound differences that separated them.  (…) After the failure of their ‘anti-defence’ contact they were subjected to the witch-hunt organised against the ‘Trotskyists’ by the government and the Communist Party. Without international references - the IVth International only gave them the option of giving up their criticism of the ‘unconditional defence of the USSR’ - the group was disbanded"[16].

What Nuevo Curso calls the Argentine Communist Left are two groups that merged to form the Internationalist Communist League and remained active until 1937 to be finally destroyed by the action of Trotsky's supporters in Argentina. It is true that the League rejected socialism in one country and called for socialist revolution in the face of "national liberation," but while we recognise the merit of its struggle, its arguments are very flimsy. In Nuevo Curso we find quotes from one of the most important members of the group, Gallo, affirming:

“What does the struggle for national liberation mean? Doesn't the proletariat as such represent the historical interests of the Nation in the sense that it tends to liberate all social classes by its action and to overcome them by its disappearance? But in order to do so, it needs precisely not to be confused with national interests (which are those of the bourgeoisie, since this is the ruling class), which on the internal and external terrain contradict each other sharply. So that slogan is categorically false (...) affirming our criterion that only socialist revolution can be the stage that corresponds to colonial and semi-colonial countries”. Prisoner of the dogmas of the Opposition on national liberation and incapable of breaking from them, the group affirms ‘The IV International does not admit any slogan of ‘national liberation’ that tends to subordinate the proletariat to the ruling classes and, on the contrary, assures that the first step of proletarian national liberation is the struggle against them"[17]The confusion is terrible: the proletariat should undertake a proletarian "national liberation", that is, the proletariat should carry out a task that really belongs to the bourgeoisie.

Critical review of Munis' Contribution

Very late on, (in 1948!), there emerged from the rotten trunk of the IVth International some promising tendencies (the last in the Trotskyist movement[18]): those around Munis and Castoriadis. In the article “Castoriadis, Munis, and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism”[19] we make a very clear distinction between Castoriadis who ended up as a staunch propagandist for Western capitalism and Munis who always remained loyal to the proletariat[20].

This loyalty is admirable and is part of the many efforts to advance toward a communist consciousness. However, this is one thing; quite another is that the work of Munis was more an example of individual activity than something linked to an authentic, organised proletarian current, something that could provide the theoretical, programmatic and organisational basis for continuing the work of a communist organisation today. We have shown in a number of articles that Munis, because of his origins in Trotskyism, was not able to carry out this task[21]

Ambiguities about Trotskyism

In an article written in 1958, Munis makes a very clear analysis denouncing the American and English leaders of the Fourth International who shamefully reneged on internationalism, correctly concluding that "the Fourth International has no historical reason for existence; it is superfluous, its very foundation must be considered an error, and its only task is to trail after Stalinism, more or less critically”[22]. However, he believes that it can be of some use to the proletariat, as it would appear that "it has a possible role left to play in countries dominated by Stalinism, mainly in Russia. There the prestige of Trotskyism still feels enormous. The Moscow trials, the gigantic propaganda carried out for almost fifteen years in the name of the struggle against Trotskyism, the incessant slander to which it was subjected under Stalin and which his successors maintain, all contribute to making Trotskyism a latent tendency of millions of men. If tomorrow – and this is a very possible event - the counter-revolution were to yield to a frontal attack by the proletariat, the Fourth International could quickly emerge in Russia as a very powerful organisation".

Munís repeats, with respect to Trotskyism, the same argument that he uses against Stalinism and Social Democracy: that EVERYTHING CAN SERVE THE PROLETARIAT. Why? Because Stalinism has designated it "public enemy number one," just as right-wing parties present social democrats and Stalinists as dangerous revolutionaries. He adds another argument, equally typical of Trotskyism regarding social democrats and Stalinists: "There are many workers who are followers of these parties”.

That the parties of the left are rivals of the right and are vilified by it does not make them "favorable to the proletariat", and in the same way their influence among the workers does not justify supporting them. On the contrary, they must be denounced for the role they play in the service of capitalism. To say that Trotskyism abandoned internationalism and to immediately add that "it might still have a possible role to play in favour of the proletariat" is a very dangerous incoherence that hinders the necessary work of distinguishing between genuine revolutionaries and capitalist wolves who wear the skin of a "communist" or "socialist" lamb. In the Communist Manifesto, the third chapter entitled "Socialist and Communist Literature" clearly establishes the border between "reactionary socialism" and "bourgeois socialism" that it sees as enemies and the currents of "critical utopian socialism" that it recognises as part of the proletarian camp.

The "transitional demands"

The Trotskyist imprint is also found in Munís when he proposes "transitional demands" along the lines of the famous Transitional Programme that Trotsky put forward in 1938. This is something we criticised in our article “Where is the FOR going?”:

“In its 'For a Second Communist Manifesto' the FOR considered it correct to put forward all kinds of transitional demands in the absence of revolutionary movements of the proletariat. These go from the 30 hours week, the suppression of piece work and of time and motion studies in the factories to the ‘demand for work for all, unemployed and youth’ on the economic terrain. On the political level the FOR demands democratic 'rights' and 'freedoms' from the bourgeoisie: freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly; the right of workers to elect permanent workshop, factory or professional delegates ‘without any judicial or trade union formalities’.

“This is all within the Trotskyist logic, according to which it is enough to pose the right demands to gradually arrive at the revolution. For the Trotskyists, the whole trick is to know how to be a pedagogue for the workers, who don't understand anything about their demands, to brandish in front of them the most appetising carrots in order to push the workers towards their 'party'”.

“We see here a gradualist vision where "the leading party" administers its miraculous potions to lead the masses to "final victory," which is done at the price of sowing dangerous reformist illusions in the workers and embellishing the capitalist state by hiding the truth that its "democratic liberties" are a means of dividing, deceiving and diverting workers' struggles. Communists are not a force outside the proletariat, armed with the skills of revolutionary leadership and thus able to point the workers in the right direction. As early as 1843, Marx criticised this idea of prophets bringing redemption: ‘we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to’”[23].

Voluntarism

The work as a fraction that the Left Opposition was incapable of conceiving allows revolutionaries to understand at what moment we are in the relationship of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, to know if we are in a dynamic that allows us to advance towards the formation of the world party or, on the contrary, if we are in a situation where the bourgeoisie can impose its trajectory on society, leading it to war and barbarism.

Deprived of that compass, Trotsky believed that everything was reduced to the ability to gather a large mass of affiliates that could serve as a "revolutionary leadership”. Thus, as world society moved toward the massacres of World War II punctuated by the massacres of Abyssinia, the Spanish war, the Russian-Japanese war, etc., Trotsky believed he saw the beginning of the revolution in the July 1936 French strikes and the Spanish workers' brave initial response to Franco's coup.

Unable to break with this voluntarism, Munís repeats the same mistake. As we wrote in part two of our article on Munis and Castoriadis,

“Underlying this refusal to analyse the economic dimension of capitalism’s decadence there lies an unresolved voluntarism, the theoretical foundations of which can be traced back to the letter announcing his break from the Trotskyist organisation in France, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste,  where he steadfastly maintains Trotsky’s notion, presented in the opening lines of the Transitional Programme, that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership”.

Thus Munis wrote: ‘The crisis of humanity – we repeat this a thousand times along with L.D. Trotsky – is a crisis of revolutionary leadership. All the explanations which try to lay the responsibility for the failure of the revolution on the objective conditions, the ideological gap or the illusions of the masses, on the power of Stalinism or the illusory attraction of the ‘degenerated workers’ state’, are wrong and only serve to excuse those responsible, to distract attention from the real problem and obstruct its solution. An authentic revolutionary leadership, given the present level of the objective conditions for the taking of power, must overcome all obstacles, surmount all difficulties, triumph over all its adversaries’” [24]

Thus, a "real revolutionary leadership" would suffice to sweep away all the obstacles, all the adversaries. The proletariat would not have to rely on its unity, solidarity and class consciousness but entrust itself to the goodness of a "revolutionary leadership”. This messianism leads Munis to a delirious conclusion: "The last war offered more revolutionary opportunities than that of 1914-18. For months, all European states, including Russia, appeared battered and discredited, liable to be defeated by a proletarian offensive. Millions of armed men confusedly aspired to a revolutionary solution (...) the proletariat, organised on a revolutionary basis, could have launched an insurrection across several countries and spread it throughout the continent.. The Bolsheviks in 1917 did not, by a long shot, enjoy such vast possibilities[25]

Unlike World War I, the bourgeoisie had conscientiously prepared for the defeat of the proletariat before World War II: massacred in Germany and Russia, enlisted under the banner of "anti-fascism" in the democratic powers, the proletariat could only put up a weak resistance to the massacre. There was the great proletarian shock in northern Italy in 1943 that the democratic allies let the Nazis bloodily crush[26], some strikes and desertions in Germany (1943-44) that the allies nipped in the bud with the terrible bombings of Hamburg, Dresden etc., bombings without any military objective but aimed only at terrorising the civilian population. Also the Commune of Warsaw (1944) that the Russian army let the Nazis suppress.

Only by abandoning oneself to the most suicidal illusions could one think that at the end of the Second World War “the proletariat, organised on a revolutionary basis, could have launched an insurrection across several countries”. With these fantasies little can be contributed to the formation of a proletarian organisation.

Sectarianism

A fundamental pillar of the revolutionary organisation is its openness and willingness to discuss with the other proletarian currents. We have already seen how the Communist Manifesto regarded with respect and a spirit of debate the contributions of Babeuf, Blanqui and utopian socialism. Therefore, in the Resolution on proletarian political groups adopted by our 2nd International Congress, we pointed out that “the characterization of the various organisations who claim to defend socialism and the working class is extremely important for the ICC. This is by no means a purely theoretical or abstract question; on the contrary, it is directly relevant to the attitude the Current has towards these organisations, and thus to its intervention towards them: on whether it denounces them as organs and products of capital; or whether it polemicizes and discusses with them in order to help them evolve towards greater clarity and programmatic rigour; or to assist in the appearance of tendencies within them who are looking for such clarity."[27].

Contrary to this position, Trotsky, as we saw before, rejected debate with Bilan and, instead, opened the door wide to a so-called "left wing of social democracy".

Munis was also affected by sectarianism. Our article in homage to Munis[28] acknowledges with appreciation that “in 1967, along with comrades from the Venezuelan group Internacialismo, he participated in efforts to restore contacts with the revolutionary milieu in Italy. Thus, at the end of the ‘60s, with the resurgence of the working class onto the scene of history, he took his place alongside the weak revolutionary forces existing at that time, including those who were to form Révolution Internationale in France. But at the beginning of the ‘70s, he unfortunately remained outside the discussions and attempts at regroupment which resulted in particular in the constitution of the ICC in 1975.”. This effort had no continuity and as we say in the above-mentioned article (“Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism, second part”) "the group suffered from a tendency towards sectarianism which further weakened its capacity to survive.

The example of this attitude referred to in the tribute is the rather showy departure of Munis and his group from the second conference of the communist left, citing his disagreement with the other groups on the problem of the economic crisis”. 

However important, a disagreement over the analysis of the economic crisis cannot lead to the abandonment of debate among revolutionaries. This must be done with the utmost tenacity, with the attitude of "convincing or being convinced", but never slamming the door on the first few exchanges without having exhausted all possibilities of discussion. Our article rightly points out that such an attitude affects something vital: the construction of a solid organisation capable of maintaining continuity. The FOR did not survive the death of Munís and disappeared definitively in 1993, as indicated in the article

“Today the FOR no longer exists. It was always highly dependent on the personal charisma of Munis, who was not able to pass on a solid tradition of organisation to the new generation of militants who rallied round him, and which could have served as a basis for the continued functioning of the group after Munis’ death”.

Just as the negative weight of the Trotskyist heritage prevented Munís from contributing to the construction of the organisation, so the activity of the revolutionaries is not that of a sum of individuals, even less that of charismatic leaders: it is based on an organised collective effort. As we say in our “Report on the function of the revolutionary organisation” from 1982, "The period of illustrious leaders and great theoreticians is over. Theoretical elaboration has become a truly collective task. In the image of millions of 'anonymous' proletarian fighters, the consciousness of the organisation develops through the integration and surpassing of individual consciousness in a single, collective consciousness”[29]. More profoundly, “The working class doesn't give rise to revolutionary militants but to revolutionary organisations: there is no direct relationship between the militants and the class. The militants participate in the class struggle in so far as they become members and carry out the tasks of the organisation"[30].

Conclusion

As we stated in the article we published at his death in 1989: "However, despite the serious errors he may have made, Munis remained to the end a militant who was deeply loyal to the combat of the working class. He was one of those very rare militants who stood up to the pressures of the most terrible counter­revolution the proletariat has ever known, when many deserted or even betrayed the militant fight; and he was once again there alongside the class with the historical resurgence of its struggles at the end of the ‘60s.

Lenin said that, for revolutionaries, "after their death they are turned into harmless icons, canonised, their names consecrated for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes, in order to deceive them”. Why does Nuevo Curso fill its blog with photos of Munis, publish some of his texts without the slightest critical eye? Why do they elevate him to the icon of a "new school"?

Perhaps we are looking at a sentimental cult of a former proletarian combatant. If that is the case, we must say that it is an enterprise destined to create more confusion because its theses, turned into dogmas, will only distill the worst of his errors. Let us remember the accurate analysis of the Communist Manifesto with respect to the utopian socialists and those who later tried to vindicate them

“Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat”.

Another possible explanation is that the authentic Communist Left is being attacked with a spam "doctrine" built overnight using the materials of that great revolutionary. If such is the case, it is the obligation of revolutionaries to fight such an imposture with the maximum energy.

C.Mir 4-7-19

 

[1]  es.communia.blog/la-izquierda-comunista-no-fue-comunista-de-izquierda Available in English here: www.workersoffensive.org/single-post/2019/05/23/The-Communist-Left-Was-N....

[2]  In an article on the series on communism (“1924-28: the triumph of Stalinist State capitalism”) we criticised the use of the term "Thermidor", very typical of Trotskyism, to characterise the rise and development of Stalinism. The Thermidor of the French Revolution (July 28, 1794) was not properly speaking a "counter-revolution" but a necessary step in the consolidation of bourgeois power that, beyond a series of concessions, would never return to the feudal order. On the other hand, the rise of Stalinism since 1924 meant the definitive restoration of capitalist order, and Stalin’s USSR did not represent, as Trotsky always erroneously thought, a "socialist terrain" where "some conquests of October" would remain. This is a fundamental difference that Marx already noted in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ”Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly”. "(the Thermidor was precisely one of those moments of "assimilation" of the political conquests of the bourgeoisie, giving room to the more moderate factions of this class and more inclined to make a pact with the feudal forces, who remained powerful.

[3]  Readers can find a great deal of material on the historical communist left on our website: https://en.internationalism.org/go_deeper

[4]  “Trotskyism, child of the counter-revolution” in World Revolution 11; online in Spanish as: https://es.internationalism.org/cci/200605/914/el-trotskismo-hijo-de-la-contrarrevolucion

[5]   In 1926 the United Opposition was formed, bringing together the previous groups from the Manifesto of the 46 with Zinoviev and Kamenev – the latter two being experts in manoeuvering and bureaucracy

[6]  “Trotskyism, defender of imperialist war” https://es.internationalism.org/cci/200605/917/el-trotskismo-defensor-de-la-guerra-imperialista

[7]   All this is amply documented in “Trotskyism, defender of imperialist war”

[8]   Among the individuals and small groups that opposed the betrayal of the organizations of the Fourth International, we should also add the RKD of Austria (see below) and the Greek revolutionary Stinas who remained faithful to the proletariat and denounced nationalism and the barbarism of war. See International Review 72 “Memoirs of a revolutionary (A. Stinas, Greece): Nationalism and antifascism”, https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR072_stinas.htm

[9]   See for example “The communist left and the continuity of marxism”, https://en.internationalism.org/the-communist-leftInternational Review 9, “Notes towards a history of the Communist Left (Italian Fraction 1926-1939)” https://en.internationalism.org/content/2555/notes-towards-history-communist-left-italian-fractions-1926-1939

[10]  As the Gauche Communiste de France wrote in its journal Internationalisme: “Trotskyism, far from favouring the development of revolutionary thought and of the organisms (fractions and tendencies) which express it, is an organised milieu for undermining it. This is a general rule valid for any political organisation alien to the proletariat, and experience has demonstrated that it applies to Stalinism and Trotskyism. We have known Trotskyism over 15 years of perpetual crisis, through splits and unifications, followed by further splits and crises, but we don’t know examples which have given rise to real, viable revolutionary tendencies. Trotskyism does not secrete within itself a revolutionary ferment. On the contrary, it annihilates it. The condition for the existence and development of a revolutionary ferment is to be outside the organisational and ideological framework of Trotskyism”.

[11]  See for example Bilan number 1, 1933, organ of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, the article “Towards a Two and Three Quarters international?”, which criticises Trotsky’s perspective of moving towards the formation of a Fourth International

[12]  See for example, Trotsky y la Izquierda italiana (Textos de la Izquierda comunista de los años 30 sobre el trotskismo) https://es.internationalism.org/cci/200605/919/anexo-trotsky-y-la-izquierda-italiana-textos-de-la-izquierda-comunista-de-los-anos-30

[13]  See for example “The Mexican Communist Left”, https://en.internationalism.org/series/1250

[14]  https://es.internationalism.org/cci-online/200706/1935/cuales-son-las-diferencias-entre-la-izquierda-comunista-y-la-iv-internacional .

[15]  Born in 1889 and died in 1970, he was a founder of the Communist Party of Italy and made an important contribution to the positions of the Communist Left, especially up until 1926

[16]  es.communia.blog/hubo-izquierda-comunista-en-uruguay-y-chile

[17]  es.communia.blog/la-izquierda-comunista-argentina-y-el-internacionalismo

[18]  A third tendency should be added: the Austrian RKD, which detached itself from Trotskyism in 1945. Internationalisme discussed seriously with them, although they eventually drifted into anarchism.

[19]  “Castoriadis, Munis, and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism” in International Reviews 161 and 162; https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201711/14445/communism-agenda-history-castoriadis-munis-and-problem-breaking-tr, and https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201808/16490/castoriadis-munis-and-problem-breaking-trotskyism-second-part-cont

[20]  In 1948-49, Munis discussed a great deal with comrade MC, a member of the GCF; and in this period his definitive break with Trotskyism came to fruition.

[21] See “Farewell to Munis, a revolutionary militant” https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200908/3077/farewell-munis-revolutionary-militant; “Polemic: Where is the FOR going”,  International Review 52, https://en.internationalism.org/content/2937/polemic-where-going “The confusions of Fomento Obrera Revolucionario (FOR): Russia 1917 and Spain 1936”, International Review 25, https://en.internationalism.org/content/3100/confusions-fomento-obrero-revolucionario-russia-1917-and-spain-193 Book review:  JALONES DE DERROTA PROMESAS DE VICTORIAhttps://es.internationalism.org/cci/200602/753/1critica-del-libro-jalones-de-derrota-promesas-de-victoria ,

[22] marxismo.school/ICE/1959%20La%20IV%C2%AA%20Internacional.html.

[23]  Letter to Arnold Ruge,  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm

[24]  https://www.marxists.org/francais/4int/postwar/1947/06/nt_19470600.htm We should add, as an example of this blind voluntarism and against a background of defeat, the tragic experience of Munis himself. In 1951 a boycott of trams exploded in Barcelona. It was a very combative reaction by the workers in the black night of the Franco dictatorship. Munis moved there in the hope of "promoting the revolution", without understanding the relationship of forces between the classes. Internationalisme and MC advised him against this adventure. However, he insisted on it and was arrested, spending 7 years in Franco's prisons. We appreciate the militant's combativity and we are in solidarity with him; however, the revolutionary struggle requires a conscious analysis and not a simple voluntarism or, even worse, a messianism, believing that by being "present" among them, the masses will be able to reach the "New Jerusalem".

[25]  From an article by Munis “La IV Internacional marxismo.school/archivo/1959%20La%20IV%c2%aa%20Internacional.ht.

 [26] See “1943, The Italian proletariat opposes the sacrifices demanded for the war”, International Review 75, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/075_1943.html

[27]  Resolution on proletarian political groups, International Review 11, https://en.internationalism.org/content/4091/resolution-proletarian-political-groups

[28]  “Farewell to Munis…”

[29]  “Report on the function of the revolutionary organisation”, International Review 29 https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR029_function.htm

[30]  Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organization”, International Review 33, https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR033_functioning.htm“( see note 21)

Rubric: 

Polemic